long term view

The most common complaint among senior executives is that the short-termism of capital markets and the board, along with the need to meet or beat quarterly earnings, is limiting a company to invest in riskier innovation – but many supposedly game-changing innovation projects that align with long-term business strategies are not getting board level approval. 

This post started when I saw a tweet about this article on Econsultancy on being customer centric and how important it is for companies today. I thought that article was well done, so my issue is not with their content or the position it takes. 

It’s surprising how often CEOs and their boards make decisions that defy the three most important inputs that drive strategy creation:  

It has been a while since the last conversation. First, I took time out for a month of holidays. And then in September I was asked to lend a hand in a CX centred next generation CRM and omnichannel programme. Given the demands on my time I will be keeping this conversation short – at least shorter.

These days, the future comes at us faster than ever before. We live in an age of accelerating returns, in which technological advancement moves at an exponential rate. In ten years, no industry will look like it does now. In twenty years many, if not most, of today’s jobs will be completely obsolete.

All companies go through some kind of crisis at some point but what does it take to get out of it? There aren’t many successful turnarounds in large companies and the bigger the company and the longer the history, the more difficult it is for any turnaround and its success rate is lower. 

So you are ready to transform your organization? You want your organization to leapfrog the industry? You want to deliver above industry average growth? And do you know what are the most common mistakes that leaders and even very smart and experienced leaders make? The most common one is sticking with the usual way, the easy way and the proven way.

I originally wrote today's post for The DiJulius Group; it was posted on their blog on May 15, 2014.

Is your company short-sighted when it comes to the customer?

At the turn of the last century, AOL was the household name when it came to Internet access (not to mention a reliable source for spam CDs in everyone’s snailmail boxes). It was a portal...no, the portal to Internet experience through which people passed in order to access the content there.

What is value creation? Something commonly used in strategic discussions but not well understood among managers as well as business or design school students. If a company needs to reinvent itself, they need to put value creation first. If a disrupter wants to attack an industry leader, it needs to put value creation first.