Fail fast or suffer slow

Telstra recently released its Connecting Countries thought leadership report, which was based on a survey of some 4,100 executives across Asia capturing their views on best practices, challenges and overall business performance in the region. It was exciting to read that there were a number of management lessons that businesses can take with them as they seek to invest into Asia as well as an insight into the profile of an Asia Business Champion – one who doesn't only recognize best practices but also lives and breathes them.  While there were a number of takeaways from the report,  there was one which jumps out at me particularly as it relates to driving success in an Asia market place. One of the key management lessons for success in Asia was looking at the need to move forward with multiple growth strategies concurrently.

Now I have always believed that a person cannot multi-task (despite my numerous attempts to try!) hence this strategy could only ever exist for a large size business and not an individual or SMB. But the need to look at multiple strategies is important for international businesses to consider in order to balance the potential risk of one failing due to internal or market challenges. I must make clear though there are limits to running multiple strategies. A couple of years ago for example, one vendor shared with me their plans to run 25 new initiatives in parallel. Now I don’t care how big you think you are or how mature your strategy execution process is, but when you talk about multiple strategies to this degree it is simply a death warrant for the strategy itself and puts the business at risk of losing its way. I am glad to see that San Francisco based vendor has since realized this and re-evaluated how many initiatives it takes on at the one time.

Now when a business is looking at multiple strategies it needs to understand the levers it can use, for example how quickly a strategy decision can be moved into action and equally, how quickly it can be shut down. These days it is increasingly common place that a strategy is dependent on people, systems and communication. Now, we know we have the ability to redeploy people to other projects and – as hard as it can be at times – sometimes people choose or must move on , however for Systems and communication platforms we often have to make investments that tend to have a pay back only after 3-5 years,. This can cause a challenge as businesses then need to assess how they can mitigate risks to drive a strategy to a positive outcome. For this reason it is important for businesses to adopt what is increasingly being known as a “Fail Fast” principle. The Fail Fast principle looks at prioritizing initiatives that need an investment based on requiring limited capex and leveraging platforms that can be turned up quickly and equally turned off with very little delay post a decision, if it is not working.

Take for example the idea of replicating a solution into a new vertical, which  might require assigning people temporarily, adding  system capacity for marketing campaigns, tracking opportunities and managing customer deployed solutions. But what if all of this could be set up within weeks and taken down even quicker? Would that make you rethink your prioritization of business strategies and equally consider additional initiatives, knowing your investment risk is significantly reduced and not committing the business to years of investment? Well hopefully the answers to both are yes, if not then perhaps a multi path strategy is not for you (either that or you have money and resource to burn).

Historically this would have been a challenge; however the virtualization of IT and communications means that businesses are now more empowered than ever to introduce the Fail Fast principle into their strategy decisions. Now considering the feedback from the Connected Countries survey that businesses need to consider multiple strategies in order to achieve success – at the beginning of this article it would be perfectly normal to think this is only achievable by either very large businesses or for those who have learned through expensive or painful experiences of what strategies work and equally which don’t. However hopefully now you are thinking about how your business could introduce a multiple path strategy by leveraging the advancements of technology that exist today, combined with the key principle in defining which strategies to go after based on their ability to align to a fail fast approach.

We are not talking about transformation or changing the way your business operates. This is very much about understanding how a business can be successful in a market like Asia where the only constant is change. But there are clearly multiple market opportunities and with the right approach –  as demonstrated by the Asia Business Champions – combined with the right principles, businesses can create the environment needed to succeed by failing fast, which ultimately has to be a better approach than suffering slow and not reaping the rewards of a multi path strategy.

You can find the Connected Countries report at the attached link - http://www.telstraglobal.com/connectingcountries/?concountries=tgbanner

Transform, Transition and Augmentation – Bingo

The other day I was cleaning out some of my old presentations which I have delivered through the years and something occurred to me, our business models have truly evolved! Yes I know, that is such a surprise and like welcome back to reality Nathan! However stay with me for a little longer, historically people would talk about transformation in order to achieve the results the business was looking for so as to adapt to long term business or market changes. Then we saw a growing trend to look at transition as businesses realized that transformation could lead to either greater costs or significant business disruption especially during increasing periods of change. Now we have entered into a new era as businesses seek to maximize their existing assets and avoid expensive rip and replace strategies in the current market environment where the only constant seems to be change, an era which I have defined as “Augmentation”.

When we talked about Transformation we would traditionally jump to outsourcing as a means of execution, I mean transforming your business on your own seemed near impossible, but by outsourcing key functions that were not core to your business allowed you to focus on managing the change with the outsourcing partner providing the people and systems support. outsourcing is still an option that people consider but increasingly less as they look to alternative options providing greater controls on costs.

Over time though we realized that transformation became more complicated and less likely to succeed due to rapid globalization, market changes and increasingly complex supply chain and customer engagements. As such it seemed a “partner” providing managed services was best suited, providing a degree of flexibility to increase predictability in your operational cost and target certain synergies in IT and communications platforms. Managed services saw a rapid growth in demand and similar to outsourcing, managed services continue to be in demand albeit reduced as businesses again look to new options for supporting fluctuating business change.

The current era of augmentation has been driven by the advent of cloud computing an opportunity for businesses to find services which are more flexible with their business needs but equally helps to maximize their existing investments.  cloud computing has not realized its full potential as yet, but new providers are helping business to realize the benefits of cloud computing through services which augment with existing platforms providing greater flexibility and scalability than previously seen.

What makes this whole evolution exciting is the waves of change are shortening, to clarify the window of opportunity for outsourcing companies has clearly passed, as has the peak of opportunity for managed service providers and now the question is how long will cloud based service providers last for. I am not saying that outsourcing and managed services will cease to exist, however they are no longer the only solution(s), but merely a part of, or provide a supporting role to the challenge businesses are looking for a solution to.

So we are no longer looking to transform, nor transition, but today it is about augmentation to maximize existing assets - which in the current environment no major surprises there. However before you nod your head feeling comfortable you are on the right track, we are awaiting the next wave which will be focused on Business Process Evolution or BPE. This will be achieved through the traditional two pillars of IT and communications finally merging through the common element of virtualization. Hence the title ... Bingo! Although this sounds like a technology puzzle game there is so much change that the key is to be able to adapt to change, anticipate it and recognize that traditional ways of working will no longer suffice. The resulting change however, will provide businesses an opportunity to redefine their business objectives first and foremost with a choice of partners to deliver on the ICT execution of those objectives.

I know many managers will read this and consider this a visionary story … however consider for a moment the diversity of software and next gen providers leveraging standard interfaces to bridge these two pillars of IT and Comm’s together. Their lack of legacy is allowing the acceleration of these types of solutions which will result in businesses focusing on business outcomes with an integrated IT and Comm’s platform that will scale with their changing business needs, no outsourcing or long term managed service required.

So what should you take away from this article? This is a message to all those feeling comfortable bobbing on those legacy waves, now is the time to start thinking about what is required to adapt to the next set of waves, because these waves of change are coming faster and if you don’t anticipate the coming changes someone else may end up deciding the future of your business for you. With that get your bingo cards ready because the next 12 months you are going to hear a lot about these accelerating waves of change and you will need to have the right attitude to survive and hopefully even succeed.