MANAGEMENT SPEAKER: HOW TO GROW AND TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS

As management keynote speakers, we often advise executive teams: It’s not enough to be effective managers in such a fast-changing business climate – you also have to become adept futurists, and work harder to establish yourselves as anticipatory leaders. After all, learning to discern what’s coming next, and transform and adapt an enterprise to greet them, will only become an increasingly important skill in coming years and decades. Naturally, if you want to become more of an anticipatory leader, this means learning to have to think like a futurist does more often. And that not only means having to teach yourself to get better at weighing different scenarios. It also means having to craft more adaptable business plans in case the future takes a sudden, unexpected turn as you go. Happily, you can get started down this path by asking yourself three simple questions:

• Financial gains aside, how can you always ensure you’re finding ways to win with each new initiative – i.e. by gaining new capabilities, insights, and resources that can be applied to OTHER business efforts?
• What level of flexibility do these projects allow – and just how readily can you repurpose tools, technologies, and insights from them in new and novel ways if needed… or to quickly pivot to new opportunities?
• Where and to what extent can the results of your efforts most rapidly translate to other contexts, industries, or areas of business opportunity?

In effect, the secret to success going forward will be to look beyond immediate financial opportunities alone and always consider – how well does this strategic effort supplement our overall business strategy? And if sudden, unexpected developments call even the best-laid plans into question, how much room to maneuver does it really afford me?

The more you make a point to consider these subjects, and ask yourself these key questions, the more readily you’ll be able to find success going forward, and adapt to change, whatever new unexpected events or disruptions that the future may bring.