How to make your business successful: top tips
Each company's recipe for success is unique. There are no repetitions. Business, like our lives, is an extremely complex system with dozens or even hundreds of factors simultaneously affecting the result. Now it is impossible to guarantee the effectiveness of any recommendations and ways of development from the point of view of either a top manager or a consultant.
It comes to be understood that the business sciences - marketing, HR, management, and others - work with uncertainty, which they are designed to minimize. Not to remove it altogether, but to reduce it. It is becoming obvious that in business the mechanism works better and better: development of a hypothesis - its verification in reality with small efforts - analysis and conclusions - decision-making on the application of positive experience in the company. Therefore, nowadays any developing business is a "factory" for the development and testing of hypotheses.
Analyzing the results of many companies and studying current trends, I have tried to gather together the key elements of the strategy that will help make the business more successful in the next 3-5 years. The more items on the list are implemented, the better your chances for growth.
The list starts with a zero item. This is not a mistake. This point is zero because this is the point from which any business owner or top manager should start his way to success - otherwise all the other recommendations will be useless. And I do not get tired of reminding my listeners of the Incubator project about this.
So, in order for any business to be successful, it is necessary:
0. The chief executive has a clear vision of the company's development vector. His proactive position on the implementation of this vision by all, including the daily personal example. In addition, strong support and a "green corridor" for key people who implement this strategy.
1. Understanding the speed and quality of innovation and trends. The world is accelerating. Often we see changes where they were not expected. And we are only at the beginning of the acceleration, further will only be "more fun". Linear predictions, which are made on the basis of past experience and dynamics, work worse and worse, or no longer work.
2. Understanding of the "snowball" principle in the company, when the effect of systemic changes does not come immediately and not quickly, but on an incremental basis. Management is required to be willing to bide their time and be firm in their intention to let the dynamics unfold and give tangible results.
The need and opportunity for key leaders to use both sets of tools, the "carrot and stick. The necessary behavior is encouraged, the unnecessary - punished. Often companies tend to use only one type of influence - the "carrot".
4. Clear definition of the boundaries of responsibility and authority between lines of business, departments and people. One project - one manager.
5. The primacy in the company of those business functions that bring customers and money. All others - finances, HR, lawyers, security, etc. - should not restrict them by prohibitions, but look for solutions how to make the business work to its full potential. It is important to compromise and understand the hierarchy of functions.
6. Discipline, not chaos (one extreme) or bureaucracy (the other extreme). The dividing line is in the usefulness/harmfulness of processes for business and real affairs. Discipline - consciously doing what you don't want to do in order to get the results you want to get.
7. The inevitable change in the concept of interaction with employees: flexible schedule, remote work, new technologies of information exchange and project management control, freedom and autonomy, education and development (soft/hard skills), projects on involvement (encouraging proactivity, "banks of ideas", etc.). We already have in Ukraine "market employee", when the lack of qualified personnel in the market, companies must actively compete for the best. And the best employees are interested to work in the best companies.
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