Innovation & Survival: Two Sides of the Same Coin

                                                 CHALLENGE THE STATUS QUO FOR INNOVATION                      Photo CreditDabra Larson

Business is a Two Way Street, Either Innovate or Perish

Any business organization is a highly complex system that is comparable to advanced machinery. Like a machine it has multiple components, interacts with the environment in which it operates, needs to be operated by skilled people, exists for a specific purpose and consists of intertwined internal processes culminating into intricate input-output cycles. It must be observed here that any machine needs to be upgraded to an improved version over a period of time. This is necessitated by a variety of factors including but not limited to emergence of a better technology, enhanced ease of operation, wider service objectives, increased competition, changes in the user tastes & preferences, etc. This up-gradation is necessary for the machine to remain relevant to the users it is designed to serve or there is a clearly defined path to oblivion by being labelled as obsolete. And the business world is no different, as we have numerous examples of huge businesses with highly successful product categories which were doing very well at one point in time but they failed to adapt themselves to the dynamic environmental changes over a period of time. Today these businesses stand relegated to the annals of business history as their glory has diminished with time.

“One Best Way” Becomes Ineffective with Onslaught of Time

The businesses must take a cue from this point that if they have been successful during the past years or decades the credit goes to their struggle which led to the winning innovation responsible for their success during their start-up phase, where they could come out with an effective strategy which worked very well for them in addressing the specific set of environmental forces prevailing at that point in time. As the time passes by, changes happen in the market, competition, technology, customer preferences, etc, which render the erstwhile success strategy redundant, it ceases to add any value in the changed circumstances, on the contrary it gets in the way of the progress of the business, because the executive team is overtly obsessed by the "one best way" of doing the things as that had always worked in the past. The real problem is the obsession of the executive team with the "one best way" of doing things. But they miss out on re-validating their set of assumptions which were deeply embedded into the development of that "one best way". The “one best way” which earlier worked for the business loses its relevance in the context of the changing business realities where the earlier assumptions do not hold any ground, as these assumptions need to be questioned on a continuous basis to successfully address the challenges posed by the dynamic environmental uncertainties.

Businesses Must Innovate to Safeguard against Extinction

As there is a continuous need to carry out maintenance of a machine, similarly an organization must also be continuously monitored for any ailing divisions that may be requiring surgery or some other treatment. The emphasis must be laid on innovation, as the executive team needs to conduct in depth research to decipher the prevailing business trends and generate improved solutions to create value for their business organization. A very critical point to be noted here is the concept of preventive maintenance, where the catch is to proactively maintain the machine through continuous inspection and ensuring that the machine is kept in an efficient working state by carrying out proactive repairs before any actual work loss or breakdown occurs. Here if any complacency sets into the approach chosen by the executive team of the business organization, it necessarily overlooks the highly critical innovation through preventive maintenance resulting in guaranteed inefficiencies in conducting its business leading towards the impending organizational failure. As compared to the proactive preventive maintenance adopted for up-keeping the machines, the business organizations must also prevent the organizational break down by converting the challenges faced by them into opportunities through proactive preventive maintenance leading towards effective innovation. If the proactive preventive maintenance is not adopted by the business organizations then sooner or later an epidemic or a catastrophe hits them, putting them in a distressful situation, where getting into the fire-fighting mode is the only option left with them. In such a state of distress, it is quite natural for the business organization to shift its complete focus & energy from its core business objectives towards the fight against extinction, but with little chances of survival.

Innovative Mind Set: Key to Business Survival

Innovation is not necessarily a paradigm shift bringing about business disruption as it may come in multiple forms. For a marketing division it may be an act of identifying new uses its products can serve with an entirely untouched market segment, for the production team it may be an equivalent of a more efficient production process capable of delivering better quality in lesser time & cost, for a chip design organization it may be introduction of a more compact sophisticated design capable of delivering better value, reliability & speed as compared to the previous versions, etc. So a progressive organization needs to continuously challenge the status quo. Its executive team must be intelligently obsessed with the idea of innovation by identifying organizational challenges and converting them into opportunities. This innovative approach needs to be an organization wide culture for an exponential impact on the overall functioning and well being of the organization under consideration. It is a very widely known fact that the organizations which were considered very successful for a series of decades eventually became obsolete because they could not adapt themselves to their changing realities. The real challenge for the progressive businesses lies in continuously reinventing themselves through an innovative mindset to ensure that they remain relevant to the changing business landscape by re-validating their assumptions and redefining their new set of values, beliefs & assumptions on which their complete organizational competencies, strategies, effectiveness, success and long term survival are based.

Sanjay Sharma

CORRECT VALUE SYSTEM, PREREQUISITE TO ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS

Is Incorrect Value System Affecting Your Business Performance?

Many a times the problems and difficulties faced by an organization are on account of not living its correct values. This anomaly could emanate from any of these causes

• ·           There are no clearly spelt-out organizational values.· 
•          The values are clearly written down but the behavior of your organization is not consistent with these values.·         
•      Value statement is flawed as it doesn’t reflect the correct values of the organization, thereby rendering all further implementation or evaluation efforts, an exercise in futility

All  Successful Businesses Live Their Correct Values 

Let’s look at the proactive solution to facilitate accomplishment of optimum organizational effectiveness, through identification, crystallization and implementation of the correct values by your organization. Being aware of the correct values of your organization is a very critical component and a key driver of the strategic, tactical or operational decisions made in your organization. Which means every worker on the shop floor, every field sales officer, every manager, every board member is aware of the organizational priorities. This facilitates uniformity in organization wide responses across different geographies, departments, hierarchies, business conditions, etc, leading towards the predictable service or product quality delivered to the vendors, suppliers and the internal as well as the external customers.

This clearly explains why the best of the organizations across the globe have a consistent track of the way in which they conduct their business. Implementation of clearly defined values lies at the heart of all successful organizations, whether local or global.

Check-list to Evaluate Whether Your Business Is Suffering From This Anomaly

1.     Do you receive frequent customer complaints regarding quality of the product/ service   delivered?
2.    Do you find that motivating your employees towards higher productivity levels is a big challenge?
3.    Have you noticed a lack of coordination between different departments/ teams in your organization      for even simplest activities?
4.        Despite your continued efforts you are not able to build a healthy brand image in the eyes of your customers?

If the answer to one or more of these questions is yes, then your organization needs to revise its value statement by identifying its correct values and ensuring that its behavior is consistent with these values for accomplishing organizational effectiveness.

For any assistance, you may write to us at  admin@successnsynergy.com  or visit our website  www.successnsynergy.com . It shall be our pleasure to assist you..

Sanjay Sharma

7 Tips for Setting-Up Successful Retail Business

1. Know the Buying Preferences of your Target Segment

The customers are continuously looking at the innovative ways, best suited to them, for satisfying their needs. The real test lies in finding out what are they looking for. The next step is to see whether you are already doing it or not. If you are already following that practice you just need to go deeper into it to find the new depth of that practice, if this is not already happening in your organization try conducting a pilot test to learn if it really has the promise to warrant an organization wide initiative. If the pilot runs well, this is the time to see if it can either open a new insight for the marketers or it can be used to strengthen the existing offer to the market.  

2. Ensure Competitive Positioning of  Your Brand

Let the customers know what they can expect from your brand. It is not always a good idea to take competition head on, either in terms of the features or the pricing. A better option could be to work a little extra to highlight a niche feature where sufficient market exists for it and price it at a reasonable level so as to match the buying capacity of the target market, as well as leave substantial surplus on the table, for the business to fuel its motivation to carry out the project in the long run.

3. Use Footfalls Criteria to Choose your Retail Location

Where to locate your retail outlet? This is a very import and complex question. The answer to this question can be obtained either by finding a location where your target customers flock in large numbers, numbers large enough to be a true representative of the sample size capable of replicating the major characteristics of your target segment or by analyzing the presence of other retail businesses, focusing on similar target segment, indicative of successfully verifying the footfall criteria. The latter approach can prove to be a glittering death trap for your business, if such outlets are struggling to achieve their vital numbers including requisite footfall & profitability. Thus conducting first hand primary research, which may seem to be a time consuming-painstaking affair, is always a better option because it can provide you the extra dose of much needed confidence, in case the business goes through a rough patch during the initial phase.       

4. Deploy Attractive Promotion Strategy & EffectiveCommunication Tools

The customers are actively searching for special deals, promotions, clearance sales & bundled offers. This aspect of consumer behavior offers a great opportunity for retail businesses to proactively design promotions, capable of creating a favorable perception in the minds of the customers, thereby grabbing the attention of customers with a fair possibility of getting a share of their wallet.

It is seen that many a great promotions fail to create the desired customer response due to the ineffective communication tools deployed by the retailers. It is important to note that to create a promotion that can work is only one part of the story whereas to deploy the right communication tools for effectively delivering the message to the customers is a totally different ball game. For a promotion to be effective it needs to simultaneously address both these concern areas.    

5.Train your Sales Staff for Achieving  Customer Satisfaction

Customers are very demanding and they expect correct & timely resolution of their queries by the attending retail staff. The focus should not be just on closing the sales but on closing the sales through customer satisfaction because the statistics reveal that in the long run a satisfied customer would good mouth your retail business to at least three people whereas a dissatisfied customer would bad mouth your retail business to at least nine people. So decide for yourself if you can possibly afford to take the risk of creating dissatisfied customers by not having adequately trained sales staff.

Most retail organizations confuse employee training with the tons of organizational processes & product knowledge provided to their sales staff in the garb of training, resulting in information overload to which the retail employees are generally subjected. Whereas training here refers to   building the capability of the retail employees to take informed decisions in the light of the organizational process & the product manuals, in conjunction with a judicious mix of correct ettiquettes, respectful communication & customer friendly attitude ,creating a magnetic effect on the customer, resulting in repeated purchases & good mouthing to others thereby building healthy brand perception, customer loyalty & last but not the least ,the long term profitability of your retail business.  

6. Proactively Look for Customer Feedback

Customer is the most important link in the entire retail chain. If you have any doubts please review any piece of available marketing literature which keeps referring that it all starts (with identifying customer needs) and ends (with taking post consumption/usage customer feedback) with listening to the customer.

The success of most retail organizations hinges on their capability of engaging with their customers in the complete decision making cycle of the customers to foster a greater understanding of the needs and buying preferences of the customers and to know how well your retail business is succeeding in matching these needs & preferences. So if you have not yet designed  a strong customer engagement & feedback mechanism , ensure it is up & working at the lightening speed lest should you lose your hard earned customers to the other retailers , who have already put their effective customer engagement & feedback systems in place.    

7. Use Cost Effectiveness as a Measure to Evaluate Business Success.

When looking at their massive advertising spends and the mammoth customer pulls created by them, it seemed that most businesses were doing exceptionally well. In the end they came down as huge loss making businesses of all times, the magnitude of their losses defying all the justifiable proportions. It all happens when the key decision makers are overtly possessed with only any one single parameter such as market share, top line growth, geographical presence or unit sales volume at the cost of considering the whole business as a large system comprising smaller interdependent subsystems.

Before your project goes off the mark and even at all times thereafter prudence in financial management is one of the best ways towards building and sustaining a robust retail business through the crests & troughs of the business cycle.

For more information please visit our website www.successnsynergy.com. You may also contact us at admin@successnsynergy.com. The services offered by us include entrepreneurship development, project feasibility study, systems & process design, organization development, investment options and business partnerships. It shall be our pleasure to be assisting you.

Sanjay Sharma