Where do you lead? How to make your mission and vision your most profitable investment! – PART 2
Using four examples, I will show you how Vision creates opportunities & security!
01. Fewer threats – more future opportunities (Opportunities & Security)
Problem
Why are you no longer really looking forward to your future successes?
- You are not sure that your current business will still exist in five or ten years?
- Are you watching digitalization and new competitors threaten to uproot your industry?
- Some in the team have their ideas about future markets, but there is no solid decision about which opportunities you want to take advantage of and which you don’t?
- Your intuitive vision has motivated and sustained you for years, but lately it has lost steam?
Solution
What will you live on tomorrow?
- Expose your current company to simulated attacks from real, potential and imaginary competitors, including massively disruptive start-ups, using the method of wargaming. This will give you a picture of how your business could radically change.
- Use this knowledge to develop as many alternative business models as possible for your business areas.
- The constants in it are the effects really bought by the customers.
- Every other element of the business model is variable: the products, the distribution channels, the pricing models, the production, the procurement, everything. Include anticipated techno-logical advances over the next ten years.
Benefit
You take advantage of your opportunities in future markets!
- After careful evaluation, you will have a clear picture of the business areas and business models that will sustain your company’s existence in five or ten years.
- They ensure that your mission, positioning and vision align you with promising future markets.
- By simulating potential attacks by competitors, your strategic alignment is future-proof.
- They literally lead with an eye to the future. You no longer feel like a driven person, but an active creator.
02. Less short-sightedness – more foresight and intelligence for the future (Opportunities & Security)
Problem
Why do your employees keep falling into the short-term trap?
- Are your employees too often more concerned with their personal well-being in the here and now than with the future of the company?
- Everyone knows the goals, but in case of doubt, isn’t the short-term advantage decisive?
- What is right in the long run, but exhausting now, is simply not done?
- But what is pleasant now is done, even if it is harmful in the long run?
Solution
How important is the “future we” to your team?
- Neurologists and psychologists agree: The reward circuit in people’s heads, which is geared to short-term rewards, can only be overcome and brought to a future orientation if the “future ego” of the person and the “future we” of the team are made emotionally important.
- The “future we” of your company is your mission and vision. The usual mission and vision statements are almost always ineffective. Rarely do they have any real meaning for the day-to-day activities of managers and employees.
- Base your mission and vision on strong emotional needs and motives. Only in this way does the future we become emotionally important enough to stand a better chance in the conflict with the short-term pleasure and displeasure motives.
Benefit
Your team is doing the right thing for the future, even when it’s hard!
- Man’s present orientation is one of the basic evils of mankind, as can be seen in diet, employee behavior, and even government finances.
- With a future-we that is emotionally significant for your employees, they have good reasons to do something difficult, strenuous and unfamiliar in the here and now to be useful to their own future.
- And they have a reason not to do what is seductively pleasant in the here and now, such as staying in old harmful habits and thus resisting necessary change.
03. Less blind flying – more foresight (opportunities & safety)
Problem
Why are you still surprised by customers, competitors and technologies?
- Do you observe moves by your competitors whose meaning and purpose you only recognize when it is almost too late?
- Do you sometimes get annoyed that you don’t realize the impact of new technologies on your industry until the biggest opportunities have already been exploited by others?
- Do you notice changes in customer behavior quickly, but what it means for your business model often only becomes clear when it costs a lot of money?
Solution
What does your business model look like that will work successfully in five to ten years?
- Without a picture of the future, you can only mirror what is happening in your market today against your business today. In the process, existential threats as well as great opportunities can go unrecognized.
- Create a future image of your company from mission, positioning and vision that acts like a mental probe sent into the future.
- Mirror your picture of the future against ongoing news about changes in technologies, customer behavior, and competitive landscape.
Benefit
You think and act with more foresight and strategic advantage!
- You will recognize threats and opportunities earlier than if you only check developments in technologies, customer behavior and the competitive situation against your current company.
- You will receive a valuable and free future radar. You improve your employees’ ability to anticipate threats and opportunities when they know and understand the common picture of the future.
- You are much better able to act and shape in a targeted manner, and you are less likely to have to react defensively to the moves of others.
04. Less risk – more future robustness (opportunities & security)
Problem
Why take unnecessarily large risks, known and unknown?
- You are aware that a good part of your strategy is based on the hope factor?
- Do you and your employees feel stressed by the uncertainty in the environment?
- You know that a little more calm and systematic approach to risks, threats and surprises would make you feel safer?
- Are you unable to present enough compelling contingency strategies to your colleagues, employees and investors to protect against strategic surprises?
Solution
What threats and potential surprises have you built into your future strategy?
- Your mission, positioning, and vision are practically just dreams if you don’t hedge them against scenarios of your market’s future.
- Develop an expectation scenario, several alternative scenarios, and some surprise scenarios.
- Develop your robust future strategy based on solid future assumptions.
- Expose your expectation scenario to all conceivable counterarguments through a wargame to make your strategy more robust.
- Hedge against the most potentially impactful alternative and surprise scenarios with contingency strategies.
Benefit
You know and accept the risks and can trust in your robust future strategy!
- You can confidently present a motivating, but also future-robust strategic direction to your employees and investors.
- Contingency strategies protect you against potential surprises to the extent possible.
- They have a convincing answer to every critical question about risks, threats and critical future assumptions.
- They deal consciously with the risks and threats and have created the best conditions for turning them into opportunities through early detection.
Follow these links as well:
► The Future Strategy Program for SMEs
► Free video crash course THE FUTURE OF YOUR BUSINESS
► BUSINESS WARGAMING for robust business and future opportunities
► KEYNOTES by Pero Mićić for your employees and customers
Have a bright future!
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