The world is shrinking. The world is changing. The rate of change is increasing.

You have less time to adapt to yesterday’s developments before you’re scrambling to change again.

What’s even worse? The simple truth that you have more time to adapt to changes today than you ever will again.

The pace of change in the business world is relentless.

Customers expect more. Competitors are changing the rules.

New technologies are creating changes that don’t just build on current capabilities, but which fundamentally alter how companies compete, introducing paradigm-shifting developments throughout markets.

At the same time, many companies are so internally focused and self-referent that they’re vulnerable to being blind-sided by events.

There are a number of implications that follow from these new realities. One significant implication is that companies need to be much more externally focused than ever before.

We can’t just measure ourselves solely against ourselves.

We can’t simply expect to continue business-as-usual, with only occasional tweaks to how we’re working.

This is a particular challenge for privately held and family businesses that tend to be more focused on tradition and historical practices than companies less tied to the personality and vision of a particular individual.

There are companies actively tuning in to their environments in an effort to anticipate change and gain competitive advantage. A successful external focus requires several specific elements. These elements include:

• A disciplined practice of looking beyond what’s worked in the past and understanding the game today.

• Using all of the eyes and ears available to intentionally collect intelligence.

• Paying deliberate attention to what your competitors are doing.

• An ongoing dialogue with your markets in general, and your customers in particular:
  • Seeking input about your performance

  • To Understand evolving customer needs

• Maintaining a proactive, rather than reactive, posture by using a disciplined approach to anticipating the future.

Think of these elements as strategic touchstones rather than rigid ingredients to be applied in some exacting ratio.

Looking Beyond What’s Worked In The Past:

Human beings and their organizations are naturally inclined to seek a comfortable status quo with their environments.

People are most comfortable when they have things figured out, and know how to get what they need with the skills and knowledge they already possess. They want their stress to come in manageable dollops.

To a large extent, organizations seek to operate on automatic pilot --- except for those variations that interest or intrigue them. This mind-set works best when the environment is stable and change is slow to come. Under those circumstances, they can take time to adjust comfortably.

In the business world today people don’t have that luxury.

Rule of Thumb: You can inoculate your company against constant crises by developing the ability to anticipate environmental demands, and by having confidence, based on successful past experience, that your capabilities are sufficient to handle those demands.

Many people say, and more think it without expressing it, that, “We know what works,” or, “What we’ve been doing has worked well until now,” or they ask, “Why change a winning formula?”

These comments are appropriate when things are unchanging. Today, the most that we can say is that we know what used to work and we believe that we understand how to use that knowledge as a basis for moving forward

28. Creating A Powerful Family Business History (Part 1): A Guide for Gathering Information

Tool Preview (Part 1): Helps you do three things well: -Create a history of your business idea to build the story of your value proposition. -Generate a frame of reference for interpreting and understanding implications of market intelligence. -Build a common identity and shared understanding across all people in your business. [Read Now]

29. Creating A Powerful Family Business History (Part 2): A Guide for Organizing Your History

Tool Preview (Part 2): Part 1 guided you in collecting the information you will need to create a more powerful family business history. Part 2 helps you organize your history as it has evolved, so that you have all the information you need to craft your new story. [Read Now]