Your Business Is Doing Great! But Are You on The Brink?

Here is a guest blog from Andrea Simon. It’s a great follow-up to my blog on learning from Chipotle’s Crisis. How could something called corporate anthology, help Chipotle and other businesses change proactively? Read on, and Andrea explains. 

I always enjoy my workshops with CEOs. They teach me a lot about the trends happening in the world of business growth across the U.S. and Canada. This week as we move into 2017, I am working with a group of company leaders representing a wide range of industries, all of whom had a record year (or pretty close) last year in revenues and profits. In one of our sessions, they were all applauding each other and celebrating their accomplishments.

For a moment, I thought I had the wrong group since I speak on change and these executives and I were going to spend the next three hours searching for new market space, re-inventing their strategies and focusing their attention on unmet needs, non-users and how to add value in innovative ways. Next, I was going to ask them to look at the big trends that are taking place in the U.S. and globally right now, and determine if they and their organizations are ready to capitalize on them. So, what was up?

Almost every business today is in danger of being replaced by entirely new solutions.

These CEOs were quite an amazing group, accepting today’s economic challenges with great enthusiasm. No wonder they were having record years. But as we began our workshop (yes, I did have the right group), I couldn’t help but wonder if these companies were indeed at the top of their game or on the brink of being disrupted and replaced by (take your pick):

1. Blockchain technologies replacing banks, credit cards, accountants and others in the financial services industries.
2. Robots upending business models and challenging employees and the traditional jobs they have always done.
3. Digital inbound marketing transforming the relationship between sales and marketing into “smarketing.”
4. The Millennial generation, having grown up digital, becoming most of the labor force.
5. Artificial Intelligence requiring intelligent human assistants to make it useful.
6. Amazon Echo and other Internet of Things connecting people in new ways.
7. 3D printing is enabling us to build everything from houses to pizza.

So, what do CEOs, entrepreneurs, and established businesses need do to stay vibrant?

At Simon Associates Management Consultants, our experience and expertise as corporate anthropologists enable us to help business leaders stop, step out of their comfort zones and see, feel and think about their businesses with fresh eyes. We also help them develop a willingness to stop saying “This is the way we do things here” or “No, we don’t sell that.”

This week’s group did just that. Together, we explored a range of new opportunities that ironically, they already saw in their lenses. They just weren’t sure how to respond to them.

Click here to see a brief video of Andrea describing how corporate anthology can help your business grow and respond to new opportunities.

What do you see as an emerging trend that could disrupt your business?