Series Introduction
This is the fifth in the series of highlighting contributions from 1072 Business Leaders and Consultants from 80 countries in 19 Industry Sectors detailed in our book Focusing Change to Win. Each blog gives some of the key findings and a sample of useful tips. In this blog we are focusing on How Can Change Gain Competitive Advantage? Here are the other book sections we are highlighting:
- Why is this book important?
- How is your “What” connected to your “Why”?
- Why do people resist change?
- Why bother measuring change?
- How can implementing change gain competitive advantage?
- Is your organization thriving or surviving?
- How effectively are you communicating change?
- How can you lead to thrive?
5. How Can Change Gain Competitive Advantage?
Even after 30 years, the connections between change management and gaining competitive advantage are not well articulated. The disconnects between commitments to change and actual competitive behavior are a major factor in change failure. Getting beyond imitators relies on understanding and measuring behavior that distinguishes competitive behavior from other activities.
As one contributor said
Learning keeps us ahead of the competition by getting us closer to selected customers
to gather competitive intelligence
The seriousness of these ratings is underlined by the fact that, many studies show that it costs six times more to get a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Acquiring new customers is costly, and in many cases, the money earned on the first sale doesn’t even cover the acquisition costs.
For example in the table to the right, only 70% of contributors say they measure customer satisfaction effectively. Worst still are the low percentages for the benefits of measuring change related to customers (3%) and their feedback when it comes to change success (12%)
These findings have uncomfortable resonance with the lack of customer focus we see in other parts of this report. Change drives these leaders, while customers and competitive advantage are apparent afterthoughts.
We conclude that there are practical ways to avoid these pitfalls. Overall, contributors comment that managing change for competitive success is a continuous, systemic, repetitive and uncertain process. They recommend five areas to improve competitive advantage through change.
Action Points 4: Implementing Change to Gain Competitive Advantage
- Market and Competitive Sensing
- What do managers do at present to maintain awareness of your competitive environment?
- How well do managers use this information to make more competitive decisions?
- What should managers do to improve awareness and agility to the competition?
- Leading Competitive Change
- What changes should managers make to develop a competitive culture?
- How are you going to build more leadership capability to bring about successful change?
- Integrating Change into Operations
- Building Competitive Human Capital
- What should managers be doing to link competitive change to day-to-day operations?
- What performance metrics are needed to track this integration?
- What performance management measures should you be using?
- How do you see learning being managed both individually and collectively at present?
- What should managers be doing to improve both individual and collective learning?
- Developing Competitive Agility
- What do managers do to reshape and adjust strategies?
- What should be done to manage strategic change and the emergence of threats and opportunities?
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