Insurmountable problems & limitless opportunity – living and leading in today’s economy

My value proposition to you in writing this blog is to begin a dialogue on how we can better lead and manage ourselves and our organisations in an environment where “dynamic equilibrium” is replaced by disruptive innovation and change.

Today, nations, businesses and individuals are faced with monumental challenges and boundless opportunities. We are living in a shrinking and expanding world.

Shrinking World? The natural barriers that have separated us in the past have been significantly reduced:

• The Internet has provided us with a medium to instantaneously transact in a low-cost and seamless manner. We are connected with the global village with an intimacy that is unprecedented in human history, it comes into our homes, it touches our lives, it frightens us, it informs us.
• The internet revolution is only paralleled by our new-found, mass global mobility. Geographical obstacles have been smoothed through low-cost effective logistics that move people and goods from port to port. Intimacy, increased information and better education have led to far higher individual expectations. We expect our governments, organisations and suppliers to know us. We expect service and we expect quality. We don’t want to be “mass-consumers.” Rather, we expect tailored products and services that suit our particular requirements.

Expanding World? Bringing us together has created enormous complexity:

• We have unprecedented access to new customers and unprecedented threats from new competition.
• Our once-protected markets are now impacted by an incredible array of events and variables. Volatility is high.
• Our customer bases are highly segmented and our products and services have grown in complexity to fill each of these market niches. This segmentation is taken to new levels of complexity when we start seeing various cultural and regional requirements for our products and services.
• While we wish to transcend our cultural differences, the diversity between people is so great that it threatens the very fabric of our global society.
• Increased complexity has led to an increased likelihood of corporate failure and thus an ever-increasing level of regulatory compliance being imposed.
• Our government and legal systems are jurisdictionally bound through lines on a map. National sovereignty leads to a highly ambiguous and contentious “patchwork quilt” of laws, loopholes and regulatory compliance requirements that are inconsistent from state to state and country to country. This creates enormous complexity in international dealings.

The paradoxes of the age abound.

The question is – how can we survive and thrive in this environment?

The answer lies in ourselves:

• Our personal success or failure is based on what we know and how we apply what we know to predict, compensate and adapt to new environmental, social and economic requirements.
• At the organisational level, agility to pre-empt and drive change will be the ability to sense, translate, communicate, share, coordinate and integrate innovation.

To ensure these processes occur in a timely and well-integrated fashion requires the development of a firm foundation of information and knowledge systems, which sustain and enhance our strategic dynamic capabilities.

Creating, leading and managing these systems effectively is essential for our future individual, organisational, national and global success.

We will discuss and provide evidence to support this claim in the coming weeks.