All change (again)
Did you know ” may you live in interesting times” is an English translation of a Chinese curse? We are all living in “interesting times”. Sometimes it feels like a curse , other times it feels like a huge opportunity.
Take last week…
Global change
In a meeting with Be the Business, Jacqui heard from another business that Chinese manufacturers are now working every other day. We will let you think about how that will effect the global supply chain.
Conversations with businesses across the country highlight the shortfall in applicants for all sorts of jobs. It’s not just HGV drivers. Then we hear other businesses are reporting shortages in everything from sugar to wood.
And on Wednesday, listening to Jezz Fanzo speaking at the City University we heard the delicate balance of change required to achieve future human and planetary health.
Businesses dealing with change
There are three groups of people that make business work: customers, people in our business and suppliers. Businesses develop their strategies to ensure they get the most from these groups. As Albert Einstein said ” We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”.
At the moment it is not enough just to solve the problems you may have created. The last three months have seen dramatic changes in the circumstances and attitudes of all three groups (customers, people and suppliers). This means business have to find solutions for all parts of their business. In normal times we only had to fix problems for customers or suppliers or our team NOW it is everyone.
At an IFB event we saw how established family businesses are identifying the right type of NED into their business to help navigate change. Increasingly family firms are looking for NED Expertise in specialisms that didn’t exist twenty years ago.
Our first peer group of this season focused a lot of time on managing and leading change. This was the same for our mentoring sessions that all saw the speed of change businesses are currently facing.
Are we keeping up?
How do we keep up with change? Where are the credible sources?
In previous times of change official statistics and academic journals quickly appeared to fall behind current business reality. This is because their very nature is to capture what is happening NOT guide the future. Trade events were always a great way to see the barometer for your sector, but were expensive and with travel could be time consuming.
BUT times have changed, the virtual world is now speeding up communications between business and ‘credible’ information sources. Last week we ‘attended’ a virtual session on the food supply chain with the City University in London. We also attended the Institute for Family Businesses launch of its new guide for recruiting Non-Executive Directors And Jacqui attended her virtual meeting of Lancaster University’s Leaders in Residence
We got our weekly updates from the Office for National Statistics keeping us up to date with national trends.
At the same time we attended local face to face meetings with Carlisle Food City at the Civic Centre and virtual local meetings with Carlisle Culture.
Keeping up is now a hybrid mix of virtual and real meetings. The world is literally coming towards your laptop/smart phone and post COVID we can now also meet up in person again.
Times have changed
We are now in a new world. Let’s not try to grab old world opportunities. Embrace change but don’t get buried by it.
If you want to talk (face to face, on the phone or via zoom) about the changes you want to make then give us a call.
