Change is impartial. It cares not a whit about corporate reputation, size, successes, legacy, or prestige. It rewards only those who meet it head on. All change is about movement both individual and organizational. As individuals, we must move away from danger and toward opportunity, and we must do so consistently and quickly. The organization, in turn, must be filled with people doing the same – moving quickly and consistently toward opportunity, toward the customer, toward the marketplace. It is critical that businesses continually move forward. The jaws of change will bite you if you keep running but if you stand still they will eat you alive.
Technologies have always had a disruptive impact on society. The primary change driver in the current environment has been technology. In this digital age, this impact has become wider reaching as the cycle of change becomes shorter. Regardless of geography, consumers can order and expect home delivery of goods and services by using a device held in hand from with little or no human intervention. Observation presents evidence of the reduction in extreme poverty, increase in labour standards, greater access to consumer goods, and the facilitation of cultural exchange.
Technology has impacted seamless communication, enabled an increase in international trade, promoted the optimal use of natural resources, and allows focus on the production of goods for which best suit the resources. Production and connectivity have optimized the work force that is not limited to physical and geographical boundaries. This has driven stability of pricing products and services around the world as well as the egalitarian effects of globalization. It facilitates the exchange of technical know-how and enables the formation of new industries in underdeveloped countries by opening access to machinery and equipment as well as technical know-how that can be imported.
However, these dramatic changes in markets and economies have a deleterious effect on old business models. Just as technology spawned the traditional business model it is also now its major disrupter. the playing field has changed by reducing the cost of entry, increasing the speed of access to customers and suppliers, and the scope of the market from local to global.
Businesses today have a very different set of problems. they need to recognize that today's world is different and old strategies don’t apply. The new way to manage the business is not a smaller version of a large corporation. It is a lean, flexible, open to a change, and an ease with which access is available to global technology and reach to customers. Leaders must always be learning, unlearning, and relearning inside of the constancy of change.
Business leads have to change the way they reach customers and suppliers, realise that the skills that we have taken for granted no longer exists, and that jobs like call centre workers, receptionists, air travel check-in, boarding passes, security checks are or have disappeared. They must understand that competition is not confined to any specific market or geography and that developments in automation and finance made the legacy business model obsolete. The disruption sends its waves crashing into all sectors.
We are at the very beginning of this technological world and those things we talk of today as the cutting edge of global business will be accepted principles and even be thought of as yesterday’s news. The next “blinding flash of the obvious” will be the egalitarian nature of this change. The effect of technology on globalization for multinationals and on local businesses is changing everything. Change cares not a whit about how it has been done. Leaders, global and local, must begin to think differently about everything they do.