Do you remember the days when you could execute your growth strategy using annual planning cycles?
That was when the world and business environment was relatively stable and predictable.
Which it most definitely isn’t now.
New technology and AI is giving birth to new predator competitors that can come out of nowhere to disrupt the status quo of whole industries.
(No business is safe, but if you’re an accountant or CPA then you should definitely ‘grab a spear’.)
As CEO, your entire team is looking to you for certainty. But seeing a 12-month plan become obsolete in the first quarter creates nothing but uncertainty and fearfulness.
So planning cycles need to be shorter. Execution more aggressive. And uncertainty embraced.
In short, businesses need to become more agile.
The CEO needs to set the pace and become an agile leader – someone who is seen to be enthusiastically embracing change.
And one way to do that, could be to get ahead of the game and create some internal change.
Because if you want your team to be more adaptable to external change, then shaking things up a little by creating some internal change will give you a finger on the pulse of how agile your business really is (and give them a bit of practice!).
You’re looking for meaningful opportunities to get people out of their comfort zone.
Like identifying a decent sized problem that you would normally go to work on and solve yourself, but instead, you create a new cross functional team and trust them to get the problem solved.
Of course, this would mean you to giving up some control, but that’s good, right? Because as the racing driver Mario Andretti once so famously said …
‘If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.’
How apt.
