We believe the following article demonstrates one of the ways personalized research adds value. We hope this helps you understand how knowledge can become a real competitive advantage.

The Power of Corporate Agility

In a study recently conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton, next to top line revenue growth, corporate CEOs identified “improving corporate agility” as their most important goal. These CEOs understand that they are in a race to keep up with their rapidly changing markets. They realize that knowing their customers best and responding to them fastest is a real competitive advantage. Unfortunately, many companies don’t have a good way to keep their finger on the pulse” of their customer base.

Adapting quickly to or even anticipating changing market conditions is becoming increasingly important in the race for market share. The pace of change is quickening. Any competitive advantage based only on product or service features is almost impossible to maintain. Features can be easily copied. Faced with more and more options, customer’s expectations are increasing. Shareholders and investors only have two demands; “Pay me more now!” and “Pay me more later!” Faced with these circumstances, how does a company thrive?

Companies can thrive by staying agile, by always providing their customers with what they want and need.

Corporate agility starts and ends with the customer. If you understand what customers really need, and give it to them before your competition does, you will retain your competitive advantage. By knowing customers better, companies will understand the innovations they crave. If companies know their customers really well, they can anticipate their needs and satisfy them before their competitors. They can be there first with the most, get better margins and create more loyal and more profitable customers. Companies can get one step ahead and, with consistent effort, they can stay there.

Nothing is more tragic in business than seeing companies lose profits and market share just by not paying attention. Many companies don’t have any plan to keep up with their customers other than measurements of customer satisfaction. By the time customer satisfaction numbers have gone down, the company is already behind the curve. Wayne Gretzky and Larry Bird, two highly successful athletes, both said that the key to their success was their ability to anticipate what was going to happen, not their ability to react to what had happened.

So, how does a company become more agile? By formulating a corporate agility plan that helps them understand the world through the eyes of their customers. This plan should consist of four main components:

1. A mechanism to sense and define changes in the market
2. A system for rapidly formulating and testing responses to those changes.
3. A plan for quickly communicating the response to the market
4. A way to rapidly and accurately understand how the market’s reaction

By nature, smaller companies can make decisions faster than larger companies. It’s a huge advantage, but it’s not all they need. The first step is recognizing that a decision needs to be made. Without the ability to sense that change is occurring, a small company may never know a decision is required or understand the question they should consider.

Larger companies might have the sensing mechanism in place, but they can take far too long to decide what to do. The key to corporate agility is running through the cycle from sensing to responding to understanding, faster than competitors.

How agile are you? How long does it take you to sense and define a change, decide what to do about it, communicate with the market and understand their reaction? If you don’t know, and don’t have a plan to do it faster, that noise you hear behind you could well be a more agile competitor stealing your market share.

If you would like to learn more about how Litchfield Research can help you become more agile, please contact us. We would love to make knowledge one of your competitive advantages.