In this blog series, Fitness Training for Businesses, I emphasize the need to focus on the whole model of your business to ensure long-term success. Read Part I, Part II, and Part III.
In this post, I want to explore the third concern: developing a future-ready business model.
How do you describe intangible results, such as the refinement of certain processes? Or the documentation and re-evaluation of your existing business model?
We are told constantly about the fast-paced evolution of the world as we know it, especially because of technological advancement. This should be a loud message to CEOs and C-Suite managers that a new approach is required to make their business future-ready. Not “future-proof” – that is a defensive strategy. Rather, take a different approach and develop a preferred future of your own choosing that ensures that your business model is, at all times, future-ready. The difference is that you are focusing on the items that will need to be in place in the future, before the future arrives. In the next 10 to 15 years every business process and every corresponding piece of process documentation will have to change.
I challenge you to:
- Develop a questioning culture. Allow all team members to challenge the status quo.
- Consider what your short-term-focused meetings will discuss in the future. Will it be more of the same?
- Help individuals understand where the future will take your company.
- Encourage critical thinkers to speak up and do not allow people who hate change to shut them down. Critical thinkers are a rare breed. They will always cause uncertainty and anxiety in the minds of people who dislike change. But they will also best help equip you for the new future.
- Challenge the individuals on your team who hate change. Those individuals who criticize the ideas of the outside-the-box thinkers and who consistently try to force ideas back into existing boxes.
- Start building an evolutionary business model that is in a constant state of change. Even though there are short-term tasks that also require focus now.
If you are a leader, or are leading leaders, you need to lean into some uncomfortable conversations. It will cause anxiety, and you may lose some team members.
But be honest, do you want to arrive in the future with the wrong people?
In Part V we’ll look at the fourth concern about measuring your business performance: balancing the qualitative and quantitative elements of your business.
