I recently wrote about issues experienced by companies that focus on halves strategies. The obvious conclusion was that preparing the future is very hard when one’s only purpose is to maintain the pas.
By the way, why do we have to prepare for the future since everything is doing right now and doing things the same way we’ve always done guarantiees the foreseeable nature of things and security ? Because one day it’s not the past that catches you up but the future that becomes present. And this day seems to have come.
That’s not about changing everything but about learning from the past while preparing the future. Today most companies stop after the first step, neglect its intangible assets and put itself at risk.
When one tries to maintain what exists, he tries to endlessly replicate what he has been doing for ages. It’s cartesian, it’s about numbers, concrete and tangible things. The exact opposite of networks, knowledge, human capital, which are nice concepts that don’t feed the bottom line ( but are you really sure ? ).
As Mary Adams noticed, financial analysis is about the past. People, innovation and whatever is about intagible assets is about the future. It’s even the future. Focusing on one without taking the most of the other is like believing any business variable may evolve. A contrario, if we dare suppose that future is neither present nor past, we have to accept that we won’t do things in the future the same way we used to do in the past. In order to ancitipate the future and adapt to it, companies have to use their intangible assets. Let me also add that this immaterial capital is already used in order to support business processes and few people reallly take it into account, as if it was transparent.
So I come back to my “still theory” : it’s essential to create and organize the link between intangible and formal processes in order to improve the current performance and prepare he future on the flow. As a matter effet things don’t happen just by luck and having a very valuable intangible capital without having it used for business purposes is useless.
You may say it implies that companies are involved not in a change process but in a permanent evloution provess (whatever…improvement is most of times the politically correct word used for change), what is not comfortable. It’s the contrary. Moving permanently forward step by step may not be a part of many corporate DNAs but the comfort of the status quo has an high and painful price : when the gap beteween the preserved past and the refused future becomes too big, it’s like when an elastic breaks. With dramatic conequences.
Companies that will learn from what’s happening today instead of believing it was only an accident will change deeply.
