Think – Pandemic Advantages
Beyond the survival of this pandemic is mounting evidence of a spring of renewal, forecasting sustainability.
Three key steps, survey the future and adopt advantages to move forward
Who we are
How do we operate
How will we grow
Leaders are pruning organizations into sustainable circular business strategies to renew and grow. The new season includes four key trends: greater connectivity, lower transaction costs, digitization/automation and societal impacts, all pollinating new growth.
Renew: Redefine purpose, create enduring value to endear talent and audience.
Grow: At the speed of a weed, adapt your ecosystem to agile, data rich, curiosity, and continued experimentation.
Seed learning journeys in adaptation to optimize employee growth and germination of new business.
The Dawning of Clear Sustainability Evaluation.
Return on Sustainability Investment (ROSI) uses 9 factors defining how organizations can improve their sustainability.
- Innovation
- Operational efficiency
- Sales and Marketing
- Customer Loyalty
- Risk Management
- Employee Relations
- Supplier Relations
- Stakeholder Engagement
“How to talk to your CFO about Sustainability” article, outlines evidence, translates facts to debunk costs as the dominant outcome associated with Sustainability. ROSI Methodology, defines sustainability risks, opportunities, and performance that dawns a new era of value over cost. Organizations can quantify Sustainability Values through non-monetary and monetary decisions that will resonate positively with ALL stakeholders to fuel post pandemic recovery.
Post Covid Strategy, to Grow On.
You have reset your targets, refined offerings, renewed your commitment to yourself/employees/clients. Your adaption to change has become an asset how do you best use it to fuel growth?
Massive disruption has generated resources you did not previously have. Use these to overcome the hardest growth strategy, market penetration. What key influences from COVID is your buyer is demonstrating – what changes in decision making have your user groups made? To be effective where is the new intersection of, Value and Need?
Speak “user”, to create quality in your relationship, know and apply keys to their faster and better decision making, and eliminate friction. In this way you can accelerate your sales cycle while converting insights and results into superior new iterations.
Take Flight, Use Turbulence to Your Advantage
The jetpack thrust of Purpose and Value combined with a Pandemic crisis's turbulence can build lift for individuals and in our businesses. Learn how to strap those two engines on, and gain altitude and control.
An organization's navigational prowess through this one of many crises to come is enhanced by articulating its value and purpose, then creating alignment with employees, building energy toward common goals. That alignment becomes reinforcing and benefits both, by creating resiliency for future uncertainty.
Moving forward through dynamically changing circumstances requires teamwork. Fluency is needed in the language of empathy, purpose, and values to activate resiliency and your recovery. Success is fueled by trust, in leaders piloting toward common goals.
Tools + Transparency, a Tipping Point for Sustainability
Businesses can create a better return, being managed in a more responsible and sustainable way. Clear markers exist to measure any size organization in any industry.
WSJ Rankings defined performance in four categories Human Capital, Business Model & Innovation, Environment, and Social Capital. Using the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board framework many companies in this article stay ahead of the regulatory requirements in environmental and social impacts, to gain a competitive advantage.
Heightened focus + tools are developed to measure the exact environmental impact in sourcing and manufacturing and, therefore, a product’s overall TRUE COST. Stakeholders are setting new expectations for businesses of the future. Will your company thrive?
Globalization Has a Predictable End Point
Is the 2020 Covid chaos, isolation, disruption going to shift the course of globalization?
Reaction to a global pandemic has been disjointed, and those that have access to a vaccine or those that must wait will cause a rethink on a massive scale toward shared values. As country’s perspectives evolve a mounting reset will advance common values, beyond commodities and proximity.
What does this mean for business? Evidence mounts, that alliances driven by shared values and sustainable strategies will thrive.
That collaboration and cooperation will build resilience in countries and businesses alike. As the world churns or your business earns, adoption in aspects of the Well-Being and Progress Framework defined by OECD and others, is a bright light to guide us with positive change.
Business Hybrid, New Species for the Future.
Key learnings from nature, are in themselves a fundamental reason to solve, Climate Change. Resiliency in business or nature is inherent on gathering diverse points of view, creating tightly knit organizational sub-sets that can adjust quickly to change with the freedom to experiment and apply proven adaptations rapidly, to survive.
Alarmed, that we organisms all interact with one another in a global location?
The Age of Covid Enlightenment compels focus on fresh growth programs and allocation of resources invested in the business as well as the environmental community.
Spur success as a Hybrid, combining two distinct elements; ambitious business transformations while begetting strategies that will replenish resources.
Sustainability will drive resilience in an effectual new, Business Species.
Flinching as a Futurist?
Struck by universal change, successful future solutions need shaping by broad engagement. Female Futurists predicting the future, while balancing experiences shared uniquely by the majority of the human population, have more value than simply ballast.
The vastness of possibilities is expanded by diverse points of view.
Female Futurist platforms in business planning add valuable dimensions to better chart the future. These resources on many topics are evolving rapidly in technology, education, healthcare, and more to help sharpen sustainable business strategies. Applying priorities influenced by broader, more inclusive expertise, serves leadership and stakeholders alike. Facing challenges with new communities of qualified voices will articulate, better solutions.
Healthy Management Lessons Learned from, Medical Teams Response to Covid.
1: In a big crisis, power moves to the periphery. Lower level staff will step in to fill critical gaps if you empower them.
2: Productivity goals are the overriding focus with the need to innovate.
3: Acute response leadership, and creativity are key to today’s business future.
Effective leadership empowered, communicated uncertainty and priorities, propelled learnings and inclusive decision making, accelerated assessments, modify when justified, tolerance for productive failures, culled insights from end-users, focused on employees health and didn’t shrink into the shadows.
If the Pandemic were in a Petri Dish it would show us that Leaders who don’t adapt to these lessons won’t grow a healthy culture and are a hazard.
Magic Formula to Increase Your Profit Margin, X’s TEN Revealed in London
UK, FTSE 350 companies surveyed, those that included 33% female executives on leadership committees generated a net profit margin of over 10 times greater than those with no women at this level. Results, if applied to the total group, would have generated €47Billion more in pre-tax profit.
It is hard to imagine a more significant justification to diversify from an all-male executive team. Money talks very clearly that gender diversity positively impacts business profits—no females 1.2% but with 33% females 15.5% profit margin.
In Fortune 500, the number of female CEO’s moved from 33% in 2019 to 37% in 2020, but only 3 are racially diverse. In the USA, upon a female CEO appointment, the 2-year stock prices outperformed a male appointment by 20%.
Presto!
Turning Decision Making Upside-Down to Get Out of Your Muddle
Getting ahead of uncertainty requires many different decisions in the mastery of chaos, beginning with clear awareness. Forging a path forward requires a different combination of rational thinking than the past.
For one, inversion is focusing on the known unknowns – what don’t you need to know to make a quality decision. Likely, this is less scary than buying disinfectant and just as helpful.
Whether you are a Millennial caught in the Covid conundrum trying to find a job or successful Mogul, this article outlines a process to get going while buffeted by change. Successful decision-making now needs to characterize data, shake out the bias, and articulate better questions to move through the morass.
As a synopsis, the read is an organized forward march through the bog.
Futurists & Recontextualisation
As a futurist, you think, my customers tomorrow’s or tomorrow’s customer, paved by key markers on horizons, new access, and operational modeling. Uncertainty fuels your creative mind to test and take actions, and urgency drives you.
The article frames recovery as strategy, productivity, digital channels, and chartable customer experience. Today, futurists carve new opportunities at start-up speed, apply creative decisions, and prioritize actions to capture growth.
Recontextualize. Disruption affords many opportunities prompted by a convergence of change. The new NORMAL is the agility to capture new business while continuously iterating improvements.
Futurists convert implications into successful business sustainability by adapting while creating resilience.
Boost your Business Health
Isolation as a symptom of the Pandemic, changed the health of companies, people and networks. Now, building a resilient employee population is even more fundamental to business success. To reform a company, leadership needs to boost employee health first.
Organizations can be faster and driven further by understanding the internal gaps grown in the past 6 months. Then build solutions to improve the overall health of employees to shape internal resiliency that will guide the most nimble, creative, and effective reform. One without the other has less chance for success.
Focus on sustainable capabilities, for the long term. Strategic investments should be focused within first, then emanate to external factors, I.e. supply chains, partners, etc. for optimum business success.
Stale Date on High Principles - Just Extended
During a crisis, the Forces of Attraction render push into pull, with influences ricocheting across cultures, and interconnectivity to everything is the new ground zero.
If your strategic plan is in a time warp of previous future predictions while juggling these substantial changes, it is flawed.
Future patterns of success will be strategic, not tactical; profitability will be articulated based on purpose guided by high principles. Focus has shifted from short term, with massive companies to Mom and Pop’s deciding “just do what is right, it will benefit our customers and us, in the end.”
Stellar leadership is defined by the best decisions based on fluctuating facts, applying dynamic flexibility, and high morale foundations to win internal and external converts.
Accelerate Through Change with Two Oars, Purpose & Value.
The leadership role for the future is required to merge three dimensions as this article articulates. 3-D Change is perpetual, pervasive, and exponential. No more flat thinking or hero leadership.
Effectiveness has crystalized as industry captains successfully navigate focused on transparency, empowerment, and continuous learning. The importance of Purpose and Values are the oars that produce community cohesion and acceleration, through crisis.
Change as it is pointed out, is not a solo sport.
Emphasis should be on building strong relationships, continued communications from the helm driving team spirit via trust to improve performance whether two or two hundred thousand. Velocity in the future will be propelled by two oars, Purpose and Value.
Upsize Thinking, to Lead Through Change
Leadership has become distance learning at lightspeed with digital fluency as the new global language.
Virtual is generating new energy to address multi-disciplinary issues. Leaders must persevere to redefine process bastions and bring people together to address a shared change.
How? Up-size your strategic thinking.
The pandemic has taught us that the in-person role, is changing, and organizations need the ability to make holistic decisions. Shred the bias, improve listening, question habits, and upsize your vision.
Weakened competitors may open new markets and,
New digital engagements free resources for better use elsewhere.
Strategic thinking today needs many internal/external creditable influencers to accelerate innovative problem-solving.
Sustainability, as the “Gift Wrap” for Consumer Packaging. Tis the Season!
Global consumers ranked hygiene and food safety as the most important aspect of product packaging.
Gift Wrap: 71% of US respondents to a recent survey are even more concerned about these two points since COVID. Interest is also growing for better sustainability packaging profiles.
Health and hygiene are influencing consumer actions in response to a broad range of environmental impacts. Water, climate change, marine litter rank as the highest concerns. 43% cite environmental impact as an issue and look for sustainable packaging options such as more compostable, recyclable, or fiber based.
Safety, hygiene, and sustainability concerns are driving a message up the corporate ladder to, reshape product packaging.
How Will Work Get Done. Be an Ant
Ants, these guys explore, experiment, deploy measures to optimize continuously in changing conditions.
In this Pandemic we are seeing amazing revitalizations of climate elements and species; nature is teaching us successful adaptions to thrive.
Flatten the organizational structure into nimble decision-making teams.
Unleash and, empowered teams. Build with a, get it done mindset, that supports the team effort, and continuously creates reserves, by being intrepid and organized toward a defined goal.
Making work hybrids, work. Colonize diverse multi-skilled members that thrive on being highly flexible and productive. Through collaboration, foster faster adoption to new ways of working with the purpose of building a stronger more resilient business culture.
SCORE your Strategy
Recently I highlighted the launch of “Earthshots” by Prince William, David Attenborough.
My purpose in doing so is, to fan the flame of interest in, Sustainability – Caught me!
Professionally, my goal is to grow engagement of ESG issues in profitable, sustainable strategies. Strategies that value all stakeholders.
SCORE Framework defines principles for profitable agendas, combining business directives with pertinent environmental, governance and social issues.
While you evaluate your business, align new supply chains, automate, digitalize and forecast the future … this is truly a golden time to find/define, Corporate Purpose, no matter the size of your organization.
Enacting Corporate Purpose enhances a business’ resilience and long-term growth.
“Clean” as a Start-Up, Hopes for an Indomitable Force
Earthshots has launched, to galvanize universal action plans focused on repairing the environment in this decade.
Building a Successful Startup, to help Mother Earth.
Recognize the need, have an ambitious agenda
Gain stakeholders / influencers to drive ambition
Find the talent - prize money vs stock options
Be open to ALL innovative ideas
Extremely customer centric, and engage a wide audience
Abhor hierarchy, be intense, adapt and innovate, go long for organic growth
Flip attitudes or old habits on their head with inspired holistic thinking
This project has the makings of exponential potential as to how environmental and organizational capital combined with diversity will model sustainability for lifetimes to come.
Its, All or Nothing!