Roadmap or compass?

Remember the days when consumers like you and me had no or had very little, if any, choice in the brand of products we can use? Detergents, toothpaste, sodas, photo films and more would come in just one brand, at most, two.

Doing business then was easy; all you needed was a roadmap. Focused-group discussions were conducted. Executives decide what’s good for the consumers and prophesied what the consumers want. Yearly business strategic plans were conducted. And there were two-year and five-year business strategic plans. The term in vogue then was “long-term planning”.

Things are extremely different now. This is a time of great upheavals. Walmart enters a town, and all the mom-and-pop stores close. The same situation is happening here in our country – the big malls enter the small cities and force small shops to close because the latter could no longer compete.

But with the new malls come foreign brands and imported goods that feature prices close to those of locally-made goods. If you happen to be in manufacturing, you’d know how difficult it is to compete against the big guns. Consumers are then given many options.

There’s great upheaval in business today. You don’t have to be a business guru to see that. Perhaps for the first time in the history of business, consumers are fundamentally ahead of the brands that serve them. Materials I used to pay good money for and have cost me a fortune – like audio CD’s, books and seminars – are now offered for free. Consumers are more connected and more informed. They’re now armed with tools for creative invention, and they’re sharing more. In other words, they’re getting smarter.

Doing business in the olden days was a lot easier. All you needed was a roadmap. But a roadmap is useful only when the terrain is familiar and the geography is static. How do you use a roadmap today when the terrain is constantly unfamiliar and the geography changes from time to time?

A roadmap is very important, but you need another instrument to help you and your people navigate your way into the future. You also need a compass.

You need to train your people in leadership skills. You need to offer opportunities for creative and innovative exercises. You need to inspire young people to stay with your organization and curb high attrition. You need to offer life-enrichment skills training. You need to articulate your corporate values and build your company culture. You need to make sure that every member of the organization is synced with the business organization’s ethical behavioral DNA. These are all needed in order to provide a perennial north that works together with the roadmap in navigating into the future.

Progressive companies know this already, and they’ve included the compass in their business plans. The sad fact is that many business organizations still don’t get this. They don’t know how to adapt. Most of the old folks (based on psychographics, not demographics) who are working for these companies don’t know how to change their old ways.

Technology doesn’t only transform how we buy or sell our widgets in the market, or how we connect socially. But technology has propelled many businesses into rapid and successive mutations. And the evolution has barely started.

An old respected name in business, Harold Geneen, said many years ago:

“You read a book from beginning to end. You run a business the opposite way. You start with the end, and then you do everything you must to reach it.” The problem with this is that, today, we have no idea what the beginning or the end of business is supposed to look like. This is why I prefer the words of management icon Peter Drucker: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Are you creating your own business and career future? Do you have both a roadmap and a compass that would help you navigate in these uncertain times? We need to.

God holds the future, but we need to be able to read the signs.

(Develop your leadership and life skills by spending two whole days with Francis Kong on September 12-13 at the EDSA Shangri-La Hotel. Call Inspire at 09158055910 or 632-6310912 for details. Connect with him via his Facebook page – www.facebook.com/franciskong2.)