Ahead of the Game: Training Routes to Competitive Advantage ...

Most businesses fear strategic surprise.

A competitor, a new start-up, or even your own disengaged employees are always looking for ways to reinvent your industry?s processes and patterns.?Every major university trains these skills. Every intrapreneurial thinker or entrepreneurship incubator welcomes and nurtures ways to turn your business on its head.

You never know what the disruption may be, or whether you will have the necessary resources to respond effectively.

The work of being ready for change or disruption is ?important but not urgent.?? It?s like dental check-ups, exercise and spending more time with our families: we often delay the work until a crisis strikes.

In ?good economic times,? most of this work is part of normal good business practice:

• Never be complacent.
• Keep learning and training.
• Make time for strategic leadership work (and strategic leadership training).
• Build diverse and inclusive teams (grow them, use them, listen to them).
• Monitor your company culture. Keep building engagement, collaboration and innovation.
• Embrace disruption from within, and seek out those who can challenge your comfort zone.

In recent years, prolonged economic change has tended to make this work look like a luxury, not basic strategic readiness.

Solutions

1.? Blackberry knew an iPhone was in the works.? Intelligence agencies had data that the 9/11 attacks were being planned. History shows that Pearl Harbor was not a complete surprise. All businesses know that thousands of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are currently working (hard) to disrupt their industries.? The game is on ? join in or leave the field.

2. In the face of change, you need an agile, engaged and innovative culture.? This is not build overnight.? It is not difficult to build (it?s what CPS helps people do) and it?s not expensive, but you need to do the work proactively. Start now.

Such a culture also increases the chances that you will be the company disrupting your industry, but that can be a whole lot of fun? ? and very profitable.

3. Train as an on-going defense against strategic surprise. Our workforce is lagging in ?new economy thinking? skills ? critical and creative thinking, innovation, intrapreneurial skills, collaborative, communication and team skills.

Pile on the leadership training too. Together, thinking and leadership skills create beautiful results.

Look at a company like TurboTax, which created its own mobile competitor, SnapTax, through a well-managed intrapreneurial project. Maybe you?ll choose TurboTax ? or SnapTax. Intuit doesn?t mind. You?re still their customer!

4. A diverse and inclusive company is powerfully? defended from strategic surprises because diversity and inclusion, themselves, create innovation.

Forbes Magazine recently discussed the many ways in which the CIA was repeatedly caught out by unexpected events, owing to their lack of diversity.

Real diversity needs preemptive action. It takes time to recruit, retain, integrate, develop and promote talent from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. Diversity brings its full value to an organization when people know the statistics behind that value: the ratio of immigrants in successful start-ups, the rate of innovation in diverse teams, the heightened quality of decision-making in diverse teams etc.

Recommended Competency & Performance Solutions Modules (final program will be highly customized according to needs):

• Making Culture Visible
• Sales and Marketing: Growing a Diverse Customer Base (Hunting or Farming versions)
• Strategic Leadership
• Building a Diverse & Inclusive Team
• Innovation
• Accountable Intrapreneurial Project Teams (includes coaching)

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