Agility Update March 2011

Agility Update March offers two articles which summarise the massive change around us. The first focuses on Generation C’s growing economic power, while the second examines the impact of spreading people eating-technology on guidelines for investors, businesses and individuals. A sound game plan is clearly needed to ensure success, and we offer McKinsey’s 10 timeless questions to test your strategy. Rounding off this issue, we suggest you ask four important questions prior to allowing employees social media access; and consider hopping onto the web conferencing wagon.  

Are you ready for Generation C?
The arrival of Generation C – where C stands for ‘Connected’ – will have an impact comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution, according to Strategy + Business magazine. In the developed world, Generation C encompasses everyone born after 1990; in the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), they are primarily urban and suburban. By 2020, they will make up 40% of the population in the U.S., Europe, and the BRIC countries, and 10% of the rest of the world – the largest single cohort of consumers worldwide. Companies that aren’t willing to determine their strategies for the next 10 to 15 years to service this connected, communicating, content-centric, computerised, community-oriented, always clicking generation are putting their business models and value chains at risk. Changes in the workplace will accelerate with increasing virtualisation of the organisation and further erosion of the work-life divide; and continuing ‘consumerisation of corporate IT’ with employees bringing and connecting their personal IT devices to the corporate network. For example, more than half of the CIOs in a recent Booz & Company survey said that in the next three to five years, most employees will bring their personal computers to work rather than use corporate resources.

Read more at: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11110?gko=64e54

Eat People
Eat People is the title of a controversial new book by former hedge-fund manager Andy Kessler. Sub-titled And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing, the book warns of further technology-driven job destruction and offers guidelines to identify ‘the next big thing’ for investors, businesses and individuals. Kessler says the service economy has been under attack by people-eating technology for the last 15 years – for example technology and the web have displaced many bank tellers, travel agents and stock brokers – and the trend will not only continue but will start eliminating higher paying service jobs. His examples include paralegals, sales and marketing, and real estate agents. To identify ‘the next big thing’, Kessler’s advice is to look for these signs:

• Scale: Entrepreneurs and companies that are doing something that is not one-off and constantly goes down in price. His classic examples from the past include Rockefeller and oil 140 years ago, Carnegie and the then ‘new’ Bessemer process of making steel and today’s Apple Computer. 
• Horizontal Slice: Kessler gives Intel as an example of a company that owns a horizontal slice. By concentrating on microprocessors, it ended up owning approximately 90% of the market selling microprocessors into PCs.
• Zero Marginal Cost: Despite spending a heap on R&D, Google gives away ‘stuff’ like the Android operating system for free. “Of course the way that Google makes up for that is they’re giving something away at a horizontal layer below them either upstream or downstream…They’re going to make money by having that operating system direct more search queries to the horizontal layer on the Internet that they do own, which is search,” says Kessler.

Read an interview with Andy Kessler here:
http://contraryinvesting.com

Read Is your job an endangered species here:
http://online..wsj.com

Strategy Test: Most could ‘Do Better’
Based on years of work with clients and academic research, global management consultants McKinsey believes a good strategy must pass 10 tests. However, in a global online survey, nearly two-thirds of more than 2000 executives around the world indicate that their companies pass three or fewer of the 10. And only 2% of respondents say their companies pass nine or all ten tests. McKinsey’s 10 timeless tests are:

1. Will your strategy beat the market?
2. Does your strategy tap a true source of advantage?
3. Is your strategy granular about where to compete?
4. Does your strategy put you ahead of trends?
5. Does your strategy rest on privileged insights?
6. Does your strategy embrace uncertainty?
7. Does your strategy balance commitment and flexibility?
8. Is your strategy contaminated by bias?
9. Is there conviction to act on your strategy?
10. Have you translated your strategy into an action plan?

Read more (free, registration required) about the McKinsey survey here:  https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com 

and the 10 timeless tests here:
https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com

Four Things to Consider When Opening Social Media Access

If you are opening your company gates to social media, make sure you don’t overlook these four areas. A Workforce Management article lists these as:

• Purpose: Is this a staff benefit or is there a business opportunity in the decision? What activity is allowed? Personal only, totally corporate or a mix?
• Portability: Who owns the account, content and the networks built over time?
• Naming: Almost all companies enforce email naming conventions. Do you have similar naming guidelines for social media?
• Personality: Have you decided on your company’s social media ‘personality’? This is as important as, and should reflect, your brand personality and web presence.

Workforce Management warns: “Unless you plan on doing all company business through a fully corporately-branded social media presence, there’s always some probability the social media equity that’s built belongs more to the employee than to you.”

Read more (free, registration required) at:
http://www.workforce.com

For a view from the employee’s side of the fence, read Leaving a job with your personal tech intact here:
http://www.computerworld.com

Global Businesses Switch to Web Conferencing

The growing global move towards web conferencing is set to have serious implications for businesses operating in or supplying to, the area of corporate travel. It is also set to drive a radically different way of working for businesses and may accelerate the trend for employees to be even more geographically spread. Independent telecoms analyst Ovum, forecasts that spending on web conferencing will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 18% over the next five years. The report shows that, globally, business spending on web conferencing will hit $2..7 billion by 2015, more than double the $1.2 billion reached in 2010. Asia Pacific will see demand growing faster than the global average because of greater economic development and a higher base of potential new corporate business customers, particularly in developing markets. Ovum predicts that Asia-Pacific web conferencing will reach $534 million in 2015 – a CAGR of 23.5% since 2010.

http://www.rustreport.com.au