This time of year brings out all the pundits and so-called experts who espouse their insights and ideas in the form of blogs, articles, podcasts, and other assorted media, predicting the future and providing business leaders with prophesies to base their decision-making on during the coming year. Among the many things you will read and hear about are the painfully obvious including the continued emergence of artificial intelligence, the endless expansion of ecommerce, and of course the ever-present geopolitical issues that lead the news headlines every day, yet seem to have very little impact on the health of the global economy in 2017.
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As we come to the end of 2016 and start the business planning process for 2017 and beyond, business leaders around the world are going through a multitude of a strategic planning meetings where they are assessing where there are now, where are they going, and how they are they going to get there. Reviewing learnings from other successful and not-so-successful organizations should be part of every business planning review process. There are many organizations feeling strong and secure in their market positions and this blog is written for you with a warning; don’t get too secure! For organizations that currently maintain strong market positions, there are very good business lessons to be learned from the fall of Nokia’s smartphone marketplace dominance. As the graphic below illustrates in the second quarter of 2007, Nokia owned more than 50% of the global market share of smartphones. Today, it is a number that is hard to comprehend. By the end of the second quarter of 2013 - just 6 years later - Nokia’s market share declined to almost zero. It is shocking data which should be recognized and absorbed by business leaders so they can avoid the same mistakes Nokia did.
Last week, I started a six part series of blog posts called Practical Leadership Insights about Leading during a Transition. This series is focused on presenting real-world ideas and tools to leaders operating in the VUCA world of the “new normal.” It has provided tips and thoughts on how to understand and execute business strategy through people when a business ecosystem is in transition. I discussed how I believe this is different than Change Management because Change Management is an evolving process that teaches leaders to build resilience to forces outside of the organization, whereas transition is a finite event that is controllable and usually initiated as a logical business decision.
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Supercool, SuperSaas, and Going to Jail
The interconnected business ecosystem worlds of venture capital, cloud computing, software as a service (Saas), and Human Capital Management (HCM) were shocked last week when Zenefits – one of the hottest and fastest growing companies on the planet – made an unprecedented business announcements that caused the rocket ship to crash back to earth.
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Leadership is really hard even when things are going great. It’s even harder when things are not going so great. And unfortunately it is inevitable that there will be a technological disruption, a downturn in the economy, a natural disaster or something else unexpected. Great leaders lead through the good, the bad, and sometimes the ugly.
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