Douglas Mellor is an Associate Consultant of GDP Global and a business leader with 35 years’ experience in technology dependent industries, including turnaround and post acquisition...
Large organisations are notoriously risk adverse yet they need to grow. Also, people do not change unless there is a very good (usually economic) argument for them to do so that has ‘urgency’ writ large right through it.
In a growing market, it is possible to make a mistake, be secretly embarrassed and change; recovering by working harder to make up the time, income or even reputation lost by the error, comforted by the existing cash flow. A company can recover by accelerating market share acquisition in the confidence that there is sufficient opportunity coming down the ‘pike to realise the strategy. With the stream of indicators coming from the economy showing likelihood of little or no growth for the coming months, mistakes will be more visible and costly. What will this mean for the risk taking abilities of large organisations and the people who lead them?
The days of re-forecasting the re-forecast you forecast last week are re-emerging so will the focus switch to internal navel gazing and governance favouring the bureaucrat or will the entrepreneurs have enough social capital in the company to cast around for new markets? Could this be a good time for IPAs to approach entrepreneurial leaders in large companies to offer them a way to address a new market and new business model and live to fight another day?
