Isn’t something wrong with the
title? Sounds like oxymoron, right??
Allow me to explain…
You could be having any kind of
business, may it be a Fortune-100 organization or a sole-entrepreneur working
out of a garage, you would certainly be striving for YoY (year on year) growth
of your top line, bottom line, market share , delivery fulfillment (reduced
cycle time), customer satisfaction and so on and so forth. In fact, you would
like to predict the revenue, profit margin, market share, fund-flow customer
satisfaction, headcount, attrition & want to achieve it. Basically, you
want a ‘Predictability’ in the business, something which should be run on
auto-pilot mode. Right?
But this predictability doesn’t
come on its own. To make it happen in the medium term (and or long term), you
may have to do some lateral thinking, unbox the innovation, disrupt/challenge
the established thought-process, challenge the current system, may it be in the
form of changing your product mix/BoM/recipe, changing your distribution
channels, dropping some laggard products (or even winding up some businesses)
or going for aggressive acquisitions. On the other hand, ‘Love thy customer’
& ‘love the technology’, will never go out of fashion. Rather than loving
technology purely from technology per se, if you love technology as an enabler
of change (read, opportunity for new business), you’re bound to increase your
business exponentially. And more importantly, we cannot sit on our laurels for
long but we have to view the process of innovation/change on a continuous
basis. The oft-quoted cliché ‘Change is the only constant’ is valid very much!
In short, be ready to initiate,
accept, assimilate, embrace and propagate the change internally (& continually)
to ensure PREDICTABILITY, which will sound like music to the ears of your most
important external stakeholders, i.e. customers, analysts & investors!
