Being Future Ready: Leading Continuous Change

This is my third post in a series that looks at how the pace of change is pressuring enterprises to reinvent their operations, restructure their products and services and perhaps most importantly, rethink the way they create value for their clients. Adapting in these and other ways is what it means to a “future-ready” business.

Technological transformation, along with demographic and cultural shifts, are requiring organizational leadership to evolve in unprecedented ways. On the technology side, leaders must design strategies to deal with changes to their operational environment. One prerequisite for meeting this challenge is data visibility: a business asset that is currently underutilized. Regarding demographic and cultural shifts, in order to attract the best talent, leaders need to recognize how today’s workforce is different. Raised in the digital age, many employees have different expectations of companies, leaders, quality of life issues and career paths.

With this in mind, I will spotlight five key findings based on our report, “Leading a Future Ready Business: Vision 2025, Leading Continuous Change.” We recently released the report in association with Hanover Research. The findings include:

• Leaders will learn how to leverage new technologies to build organizations that react more quickly to serve customers, simplify bureaucratic process and work with more partners.
• Boundaries between firms are the result of tradeoffs between unavoidable inefficiencies and the cost of transacting with outside parties. Modern business trends both allow greater internal efficiency and lower the cost of integrating operations with other firms. The first effect will give firms greater capacity to expand; the second will enmesh them ever more closely with the organizations around them. What was once a distinct business activity known as “outsourcing” will be incorporated into the very nature of business.
• Employees from age 20 to 60 prefer to work for “digitally enabled organizations.” As a result, business leaders will see increased challenges to retain and attract employees.
• Leaders employing autocratic approaches or focusing excessively on financial results will risk losing the support of the millennial generation.
• Executives of 2025 will not be lone decision makers. They will be collaborators who will learn to blend the capabilities of the organization with that of many more external parties, such as business process outsourcing (BPO) partners, and will cooperate via contractual relationships rather than hierarchical control. BPO providers will no longer be viewed as partners of convenience, but partners of necessity.

Topics covered in our report include: leading continuous change; leading the new generation; from chain to ecosystem; the business landscape of 2025; and leadership for the future-ready business. To learn more, visit the Insights section of our website to download the report.

Additionally, feel free to visit the Business Process Outsourcing Services page of our website to find out more about the comprehensive range of managed services and technology that we can deliver in order to help organizations contain costs, mitigate risk, achieve operational excellence and meet other business goals.