As leaders of organisations or divisions, our minds are often consumed with thoughts, concerns and worries over our company, what the future holds for the organization, for our teams and for ourselves.

Are these worries keeping you up at night?

Everything is moving faster:

• you struggle to keep up with your customer demands,
• you are being outpaced by your competitors,
• you are losing talent or not attracting the right people,
• your products are slow to market, organizational responsiveness to threats, and
• you are losing market-share

Everything is changing:

• technology is changing,
• cyber threats are changing,
• customer expectations are changing,
• staff expectations are changing,
• competitors are changing,
• the rules are changing,
• around every corner, someone can take a small portion of your business and do it better.

And just when you think you have a grip on something… it changes!  So how are we even meant to keep up?

Are you trying to solve this with point solutions?

Some leaders are under the impression that technology shifts like “moving to the cloud” is enough, and that the company safety and survival is guaranteed…

These leaders seek comfort from a baby step of change, while the floor beneath their feet is changing in leaps and bounds. We need to always bear in mind that technology doesn’t solve your problems, it is just an enabler in doing so, and more dangerous yet, these help treat the symptom but not the reason behind your challenges – giving a false sense of security.

You need a ‘Reboot’

Leadership and Strategy Reboot:

You need to transform and modernise your strategies. You need to relook your business and operational models.  Your products – yes, all of them – need to be put under a spotlight and checked for future validity.  You need to look at your whole value chain, and checking how you can strengthen your partnerships.  Mostly – you need to start asking the right questions.  Simply tweaking and massaging the status quo is no longer going to be good enough .

People Reboot:

The Career-for-life concept is in the past!  We cannot assume that we will hold on to talent for any length of time, unless we ensure that the work environment is exciting, dynamic, agile, flexible, resilient and adaptable.

You need to not only have useful – technologies supporting your business, you need to facilitate a world where innovation and fast-failure is encouraged, where your people get into a realm of life-long learning.  A behavioral shift is thus an integral part of the needed transformation

Customer-Focus Reboot:

Henry Ford said that if he had to ask his customers what their needs and requirements were, they would have asked for a faster horse.  Sometimes, you need to be ahead of your customer and pre-empt their requirements.  Do you know what your customers really want?  What do they want today, and what will they want tomorrow?  Are you available to them when and how they need you?  We can no longer rely on customer brand loyalty.  Customers will go where they get the best bang for their buck, or where the quality or service is superior.

Process Reboot:

Do you know how much of your team’s time is being taken up by mundane, repetitive and manual processes? Does your team critically evaluate every task and seek opportunities for improvement and automation? Do your processes allow you to change direction, respond to market stimuli, or take a product to market quickly?

Let’s look at the predicted numbers:

1. More than 75 % of businesses expect to be competing in a new segment of business in the next three years – Accenture
2. Digital Transformation is expected to boost the bottom line of companies by 50 % over the next 5 years – McKinsey
3. 74 % of CEOs are concerned about new entrants disrupting business models – KPMG
4. Over 50 % of executives and 10 out of 13 industries anticipate massive digital disruption in their industry over the next 12 months – HBR
5. 54 % of executives believes that their biggest future competition will be from other industries. Only 29 % believe it will be from their same industry – IBM
6. 86 % of organisations say that digital business has prompted them to enter or consider entering a new market – Accenture
7. According to the CIO Report, the number 1 challenge of digital transformation is developing new business models to cope with increased connectivity and engagement.
8. 67 % of executives believe that digital transformation is a matter of survival for their business – CapGemini
9. “Digital” is the main reason why half the companies have disappeared from the Fortune 500 since 2000 – Accenture
10. 44 % of executives say know how digital technologies can impact current business processes/models is the biggest missing organizational skill – MIT Sloan

Want to sleep better at night?

We recommend you speak to a Metatrans expert, who will help you gain a holistic view on how to best take your company forward.  Change must start with you, at the top, and permeate structure, culture and strategy.  Once you have these clarified, we can help you with process improvement and robotic process automation to help free up your valuable resources.