CONDUIT

All sources of competitive advantage are temporary

    All sources of competitive advantage are temporary and companies that fail to adapt to new technology, fickle customer preferences, or shifting competitive influences can easily lose market traction. While many companies enjoy short term bursts of high performance over their lifetime, only a few sustain momentum over the long run. 

     So what’s the answer? How do you sustain competitive advantage? There is no easy answer of course, but the key may be in promoting innovative use of tools throughout the organization through recognition.  

    In our rapidly changing global economy where market conditions, buying expectations of customers, competitive forces, new product offerings and supporting business technologies are constantly changing, executive leaders must continuously find ways to improve their company’s effectiveness and efficiency.

    Organizations must ensure optimum economic performance, rapidly incorporate new systems or technologies, maximize dwindling resources, reduce fix and variable expenses, improve customer service, and strengthen the bottom line, while finding new and more innovative ways of gaining competitive advantage.

    Many firms rely upon technology to give them a leg up in the market. And while it is the primary role of an information system is to collect data and sort that data into useful information, it is the users or people that convert that information into knowledge which can then be exploited into competitive advantage. 

    In the end competitive advantage derives not from the technology, but on how businesses (and their people) use the technology.

Middle Managements Role in Managing Change

Peter Adebi gets it right in his recent article, Middle Managements Role in Managing Change. There is no doubt that corporate America is asking a lot of its field, branch and middle-level managers. For starters there are less of them. Thanks to various right sizing initiatives the ratio of manager to employee has dwindled. Factor in changes in technology, product offerings, competitive threats, customer expectations, and regulations and its easy to see why the amount of face time that managers have to guide and develop the attitudes and abilities of those that work for them has declined severely. 

So how does this impact change and change adoption?  I’ll be doing a presentation at The Motivation Show in Chicago later this month entitled Keep the Change! The Role Employee Engagement Plays in Driving Adoption and Utilization of New Business Practices. While that’s not a very sexy title, I think this topic is more relevant today than at any other point in our society.

We live in a hyper- competitive, global market where changing business conditions can shift suddenly triggering swift transforms in strategy and operations.  And while the imperative to change has never been greater and with all that energy and resources focused on change the sad fact is that most change initiatives under perform.

Why is the change track record so uniformly disappointing? Hint; It’s not because the strategic or technical aspects haven’t been thought through. It’s because planners fail to provide the targeted employee constituency with enough personal motivation to make the transition. Change planners fail to consider the human dynamic in the change equation and as a result may also be missing a golden opportunity to create leaders and strengthen employee commitment.

Yes, mangers must play a critical role in communicating the rational for change in a context that employees can relate and buy into. But more importantly organizations need a high level of engaged employees to help adopt the change and provide the role models that are so critical in rapid change assimilation.

I’ll be talking more about this in the next couple of weeks as we get closer to the show.

Constant Change

Change is one of the constant occurrences in companies today. Change programs can be overwhelming; making relentless demands of personnel and distracting key resources from core business pursuits.  Please take two minutes to tell us a little about change initiatives in your company and how you implement and communicate initiatives.  Click here to take the survey.  We will post the results shortly.