Different Thinking for Different Results is our constant theme. It is the essence of Changeability, the key to survival in these turbulent economic conditions.
We are so grateful when it is vividly highlighted as in the excerpts below: -
From November 12, 2008 - David Wighton: Business editor's commentary
Gordon Brown should take note of Vodafone's strategy for the recession as the telecoms giant battens down the hatches
Vittorio Colao and Gordon Brown are adopting rather different strategies for piloting their vessels through the economic storm. At the good ship Vodafone, Mr Colao is battening down the hatches and reefing the sails.
At HMS UK, Mr Brown has thrown away the charts and is going full steam ahead.
The market reaction has also been different. Mr Colao's promise to cut costs, focus on cash and forget about acquisitions was rewarded with a 6 per cent jump in the share price yesterday.
Mr Brown's promise to cut taxes, focus on spending and forget about government borrowing saw sterling sink to a new 12-year low.
Mr Colao's call for the company to make better use of what it already has rather than chasing new markets looks eminently sensible.
After years of fast growth and acquisitions, there should also be plenty of efficiencies to be squeezed out. The aim to build a leaner and more nimble organisation plays to the strengths of Mr Colao, a fanatical competitive cyclist.
And there was clear evidence of the new cost regime yesterday. Rather than the lavish spread previously provided at press conferences, journalists had to make do with a few stale buns left from the analysts' presentation.
The new focus on “giving customers what they want” is a bit of an indictment of what it was doing before.
But it also reflects the reality that in rapidly deteriorating conditions businesses need to be very sensitive to the changing needs of customers and tailor products and pricing accordingly.
Vodafone’s leadership is demonstrating Different Thinking – and because it looks likely to contain downside risks in the current economic turmoil – it will deliver Different Results. This behaviour is characteristic of an organisation with the level of comparative Competitive Strength that we call Excellent. This is the flexibility, adaptability and readiness to ask itself the tough questions that takes such companies into leading their marketplace, rather than playing catch-up.
These are courageous decisions for an organisation that, like its peers in the mobile communications marketplace, has been hell bent on growth, customer head count, volumes and headline revenues and fuelled by truly cosmic levels of leveraged debt. Swinging the internal culture into a focus on operational excellence, on outstanding competence, on extraordinary effectiveness in all matters, is going to be a big challenge.
Never is this more true than when a business culture has been Sales led. We have seen this demonstrated massively, and disastrously for us all, by so many of the Banking sector. This is where our assessment last year of their comparative Competitive Strength condition as Comfortable turned out to be far too true – so Comfortable that within a few weeks of a changed environment they found themselves flailing about in the Constrained condition – and we found ourselves , with them, peering into The Abyss.
Mr Colau is too smart to let this happen. But, he will have to get his battleship sized organisation to move rapidly and convincingly into the new way of acting that he has identified. And that will require a New Way of Thinking. That can be done but has not been easy, as other large corporations have found. We wish him well, and will watch with interest.
On the other hand, Mr Brown is not too smart, as we all know. He is going to keep on doing what he has always done – and we are going to keep on getting what we have always got. God Help Us All.
There is no organisation that is more totally “Sales” led than this Government. There has been such a consistent pattern of the same behaviours repeated over and over again, the delusion that giving something a different name actually causes it to change, that shuffling data to show different results means that change has been achieved, the constant changing of organisational structures for “Sales” purposes – I better stop here, my frustration is all so non-productive – as is its subject. This is, in our terms, more like what we would describe in a corporate comparison as a Constrained condition – but down at the lowest level of that, next to what we call, in a deeply technical phrase “Basket Case”. Beyond the sort of remedial transformation that businesses might be able to achieve.
So, we are all in the same boat. And, as the article suggests, we are sailing at full speed into the ice fields with our Mad Captain on the bridge - with his charts torn up, his radar switched off and listening to none. Moving the deckchairs is not going to make any difference. Like Mr Colau, we all need to apply Different Thinking to make sure that we too get Different Results, that we too are as prepared as we can be for the nasty surprises that lie ahead, that we too are focused on What Matters and not on what we might have been up to now. We must all have our life rafts ready and survival kits prepared. It is time for Different Thinking.
We developed our Competitive Strength Report to help business leaderships start their Different Thinking better, faster and cheaper, than any other tool before. The Competitive Strength Report Process is the only tool available from anyone, anywhere that provides an objective measure of Competitive Strength compared to the very best in the world. It is based on extensive and rock solid research into what it takes to create and sustain an organisation that can exceed expectations in every respect - the demonstrated doorway to increased resilience and survivability.
The Competitive Strength Report enables a company leadership to understand where they are positioned, in comparison to the very best, where their main threats lie, what the implications are and helps them decide very clearly, collectively and speedily what they need to do.
If you would like to know more about this, or ask us any questions, please have a look at our Competitive Strength web page with video - and our Different Thinking web page
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