Prahalad, whose much-revered thinking has already engendered a new language of strategy. Management Gurus. About: Gary Hamel, C. Business Plan - PicAd. Competing for the future 1. Imagining new technologies is easy, figuring out how to bring them into the real world is much harder. If you're trying to design something futuristic, challenges are, you're waiting on the materials available to catch up with your idea.
There's also live online events, interactive content, certification prep materials, and more. Explore a preview version of Competing for the Future right now. An innovation classic. Keith Simerson, Aaron K. They analyzed threats and opportunities created by the digital revolution. Though this process consumed nearly 30, person hours, EDS now had a broader, more prescient view of its industry and its role—and a view shared by every senior manager. Look around your company. Look at the high-profile initiatives that have recently been launched, the issues preoccupying senior management, the criteria and benchmarks by which progress is measured, your track record of new-business creation.
Look into the faces of your colleagues, and consider their ambitions and fears. Now ask yourself: Do senior managers in my company have a clear and shared understanding of how the industry may be different ten years from now?
If your scores fall somewhere in the middle or off to the left, your company may be devoting too much energy to preserving the past and not enough to creating the future. When we talk to senior managers about competing for the future, we ask them three questions. First, what percentage of your time is spent on external rather than internal issues—on understanding, for example, the implications of a particular new technology instead of debating corporate overhead allocations?
Third, of the time devoted to looking outward and forward, how much do you spend working with colleagues to build a deeply shared, well-tested perspective on the future as opposed to a personal and idiosyncratic view?
Our experience suggests that to develop a distinctive point of view about the future, senior managers must be willing to devote considerably more of their time. And after the initial burst of energy that they must expend to develop a distinct view of the future, managers must be willing to adjust that perspective as the future unfolds.
Such commitment as well as substantial and sustained intellectual energy is required to answer such questions as: What new core competencies will we need to build? What new product concepts should we pioneer? What alliances will we need to form? What nascent development programs should we protect?
What long-term regulatory initiatives should we pursue? Senior managers are often unwilling to confront these illusions. So the urgent drives out the important; the future is left largely unexplored; and the capacity to act, rather than to think and imagine, becomes the sole measure of leadership. The painful upheavals in so many companies in recent years reflect the failure of one-time industry leaders to keep up with the accelerating pace of industry change.
For decades, the changes undertaken at Sears, General Motors, IBM, Westinghouse, Volkswagen, and other incumbents were, if not exactly glacial in speed, more or less linear extrapolations of the past. Those companies were run by managers, not leaders, by maintenance engineers, not architects. If the future is not occupying senior managers, what is? Restructuring and reengineering.
Any company that is a bystander on the road to the future will watch its structure, values, and skills become progressively less attuned to industry realities. Such a discrepancy between the pace of industrial change and the pace of company change gives rise to the need for organizational transformation.
When a competitiveness problem stagnant growth, declining margins, and falling market share, for example can no longer be ignored, most executives pick up a knife and begin the painful work of restructuring. The goal is to carve away layers of corporate fat and amputate underperforming businesses. In , large U. While European companies have long tried to put off their own day of reckoning, bloated payrolls and out-of-control employment costs have made downsizing as inevitable in the old world as it is in the new.
Despite excuses about global competition and the impact of productivity-enhancing technology, most layoffs at large U. Most layoffs at large U. Although perhaps inescapable and in many cases commendable, restructuring has destroyed lives, homes, and communities in the name of efficiency and productivity. While it is impossible to argue with such objectives, pursuing them single-mindedly does the cause of competitiveness as much harm as good. Let us explain.
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