Pursuit of Sustainable Business Excellence

Pursuit of Sustainable Business Excellence

Key Point: Businesses face continuous environmental pressures. Some of these pressures are gradual and require small continuous adjustments in modus operandi. But some changes are drastic and require fundamental changes in the way a firm conducts its business in order to survive. This article stresses the need to recognize inflection point and make necessary changes in suitable amount of time.

Summary: a successful organization has the seeds of downfall built into its framework. This is so because what made it successful in the first place is ingrained in the culture of the organization and is very resistant to change even in the face of drastic environmental changes. Only firms recognizing this potential downfall and reacting proactively to business environment evolution stand a chance for long term survival and growth.

Take aways: Businesses face both stable environmental periods as well as turbulent environmental changes. The strategies that work in stable environments do not work in turbulent times. The objective of a firm facing turbulent environmental changes is survival that means normal performance measures might not be applicable.

To achieve the key objectives in both stable and turbulent periods, an organization needs to develop the capability for sustainable business excellence. This implies firms should posses capability to apply familiar success criteria in stable times and survival criteria during times of drastic changes.

The author compares businesses facing turbulent time to living organism facing evolutionary forces. Like in nature only the fittest will survive these drastic environmental changes. This means ability to gauge the changes in a timely manner (inflection point) and willingness to adapt to these changes and survive are paramount.

The difficult thing is to relinquish the proverbial top of the mountain position and start a new journey. This has to be done while a major decline in current business has not occurred.

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