Strategies for Companies to Thrive in an Accelerating Business Environment

In a survey by Alix Partners, 72% of CEO’s felt that the disruptions their organizations are experiencing are so great that their jobs are at risk, up from 52% just the previous year. While stark, these results are not surprising based on how quickly the world is accelerating around us and how that is impacting every organization. From the industrial revolution to the digital revolution the pace of technological innovation has been accelerating dramatically and has enabled increasingly sophisticated, powerful, and expansive business models.​ Every sector of the economy is evolving resulting in new industry models, frequent changes in the ranks of industry leaders, and even entirely new industries emerging on a regular basis. Every incumbent player is challenged with finding ways to evolve more quickly or risk quickly becoming obsolete. 

At the same time, even as technology has become more powerful, the sheer scope and pace of these new technologies have made them increasingly harder to incorporate, particularly for incumbents who cannot afford to lose focus on delivering the business.​ While technological innovation is driving complexity, a host of other external factors such as pandemics, geopolitics, and rapidly evolving consumer preferences are driving even more change.​ All of these forces have combined to push companies to a tipping point, as even the most successful and fastest adapters have had to increase internal complexity in order to stay ahead of the curve, at the same time increasing the risk of fragmentation and inefficiency.​ 

As businesses have become more complex to scale and compete, so have their approaches to deal with the greatly increased complexity. The traditional way of addressing myriad new processes and increased organizational complexity has often been to create organizational units that assigned smaller spans of control.​  The downside of this is that few people have a comprehensive view of how the business works in terms of the end-to-end value chain and even their own role in it. Changes made in individual spans of control are often done with minimal understanding of the broader impact. Often barriers are built between these organizational units unknowingly resulting in debilitating fragmentation. Since few have a comprehensive view of how the business operates, the ability to significantly evolve the model in aggregate is often lost, making the business susceptible to disruptors with new models. 

In order to survive and thrive, there needs to be an asset - a living business engine - at the center of the business that encapsulates and guides how it is intended to operate, creating a cohesive framework that provides the flexibility to evolve without breaking the cohesion needed to deliver the business. The science behind that asset – a digital operating model – has now been developed making an almost immediate major impact anywhere it has been deployed.