Disruptions are happening quickly in all industries, the future of work belongs to companies and people in the companies who are the most agile, and innovative. The problems of today and the future will not be solved with past solutions.
What is required is a new way of thinking, being and doing and this means looking at challenges as opportunities. For example is your business challenged with finding and keeping good talent the challenge needs to be looked at from new angles- one angle is solving the education to employment issue – setting up your own schools/mentoring to create your employees. However we need to look at the disruption that is causing the challenge of finding good people – the biggest disruption is the mindset of the Millenial and Gen Z generations.
These two generations want to work when THEY want to work, the don’t want to be tied down by a set schedule, they want freedom and autonomy – simply they want to be entrepreneurs or if they work within an organization they want to be treated as an entrepreneur or to be an (I)ntrepreneur (an internal employee that has freedom of being an entrepreneur in the job).
If you are seeing the disruption of Millenial and Gen Z’s work habits as frustrating you might be missing the ‘gems’ of the disruption – every disruption is a clue to what we need to look at in our business. In 2012 Kodak went bankrupt and in the same year Instagram was 2 billion dollar market cap. Kodak is a classic example of being attached to tradition and missing the signs of disruption ie/ digital and online content sharing.
Another example is Blockbuster – it was attached to its DVD rental model and had an opportunity to buy or participate in Netflix – we all know the outcome of that one.
So is your business future-proof? Answer the following questions to find out:
- Does your company culture celebrate and encourage innovation and real time creative solutions with everyone in the company?
- Do you easily attract and keep top performing talent?
- Does your strategic plan include a look at future trends and build contingencies for the potential disruptions ahead?
- Does your company have a culture of ‘change leaders’ driving transformation consistently?
- Do you have people in your company that are constantly looking at what’s next and how to capitalize on shifts in the market?
If you answered ‘yes’ to all of the above questions you definitely future ready now! If you answered ‘no’ to any of the questions these are the areas to focus on in order to build resilience and agility for the future of your business.
Future proofing your business starts with the leadership – ensuring that all leaders have upgraded mindsets that are open, flexible and willing to make changes needed now rather than delay or rely on past success to dictate future decisions.
The trend of freelancing and entrepreneurship is not going away – it does mean that leaders and teams need to be far more willing to work together in new and different ways than in the past.
Find out more in Cheryl’s session at the ISBN conference on May 8th – her session is titled, “NextMapping – The Best Way to Create Your Future Salon is to Map It” find out more at http://www.cherylcran.com
