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Brain Circuits
Four principles for flourishing amid disruption Â
When the world is constantly changing, do you know how to successfully leap from one core competency to another?
In a world of constant disruption, the difference between companies that thrive and those that are left behind is their ability to leap. That is to say, successful companies are capable of jumping from one core competency to another. Here are four main principles to follow:
Look beyond your peer group:
Organizations need to embrace all kinds of industry logics. If you are looking only at your current direct competition, it will be very difficult to see the next level of core competencies you need to be striving to achieve. You must be externally curious, looking at what players outside your industry are doing and how you might leverage that for your business.
Experiment:
To reinvent yourself, you must try things out. Allocate resources to experimentation. Some things will work out and some won’t, but you must figure out which things have the most potential for success.
Articulate and measure new KPIs as you commit to choices:
In this phase, move away from experimentation to something much more tangible – exploiting new capabilities. Many companies undergoing change get trapped by historic metrics. Organizations that can successfully leap change their KPIs along the way.
Push forward to focus:
Another trap you want to avoid is keeping too many options open for too long and not moving past the exploratory stage. Companies that make this error get left behind.
To put these four principles to work, the top management team must have a shared viewpoint about the future. Top teams should delegate the experimentation phase, but at some point they need to recognize which bets are gaining traction and allocate more resources in that direction to scale up.
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