What Will Your Company Look Like In The Future?

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(BY Buzz Knight) That’s the number one question coming up within companies of all types in the midst of this crisis? More importantly what SHOULD your company look like in the future? At a time of incredible stress is there a way to manage this thought process into decisive and effective action?

Here are some thoughts on how you can approach these crucial questions in a deliberate and strategic manner.

Step One
Learn. Your first step in the process should be to learn and gather as much information as possible that enables you to develop insights that help guide you towards the most informed strategic decision.

Take a fresh start, beginners mindset approach.

In thinking about your station, cluster or company ask yourself what do you specifically need to learn about regarding what your customers or listeners are feeling and thinking today.

Most importantly what are the specific qualities of your future customers and how can you be poised to identify and capture them?

Don’t go into this process thinking your current customer hasn’t changed as a result of this crisis because that will produce failure mode.

What industry dynamics do you need to be factoring in? What dynamics of your competitors do you need to learn about and consider in your process as well? By putting learning as your first step you:

Gather information.
Understand implications and develop insights
Identify strategic alternatives for consideration

Focus
Your second step on your roadmap to strategic choices and a winning proposition is focus.
Identify what priorities that need consideration for your competitive focus.
Spend time making sure you aren’t tempted by shiny objects that can distract your mission. More importantly to form your “winning proposition” ask yourself “what will we do differently or better than our competitors?”

As a part of your focus process your key priorities should be:
Perform a financial analysis of all options and alternatives.
Make strategic choices and develop your “winning proposition”
Document your strategy

Coordination
Next in your process is the task of alignment with your people, your internal structure and your culture.

How can you effectively and efficiently coordinate all of your efforts? How can you identify and prioritize any operational gaps?

What are the financial plans that should be documented so you can evaluate losses and potential gains after investment?

Execution
Now that you have gone through the roadmap process it’s time to put your plan into place and execute.

Time to implement the strategy . The necessity exists to create a time bound action plan and maximize participation within your organization

What is working? You’ll need to track progress so you can modify if needed.
In a nutshell your execution plan is to:
Implement operational plans
Track initiative performance
Manage the portfolio

Hopefully this thought process increases your company’s ability to adapt and respond to an environment that now more than ever includes rapid change.

By taking a step by step approach, rather than looking at the challenge from an overwhelmed perspective you stand a better chance to have an organization built for the future.

Buzz Knight is the CEO of Buzz Knight Media and can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]

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