Companies in the future will need to adapt more rapidly. Competitive advantage will no longer be a matter of understanding your market, creating the right product or service, marketing it effectively and ensuring that you keep your cost base low. New market opportunities will be much more diverse and the window of opportunity much smaller. Market geography will change rapidly and competitors will emerge, almost literally, overnight. With access to knowledge as universal and as easy as access to electricity in any industrialised society of today, those entrepreneurial management teams capable of envisioning and then rapidly creating new and effective business responses will provide the key differentiator between sustainable success and commercial decline.
These core management teams will need adaptable organisations around them. Skill sets, resources and routes to market will be subject to frequent shifts. Traditional business hierarchies and ownership of assets will become barriers to success. This is not something beyond 2010, it is already taking shape and is almost certain to become commonplace well within that time horizon.
Two closely related features of these highly adaptable organisations are a capacity to develop effective alliances and an ability to operate, in part at least, as virtual companies. It is these features that give organisations the necessary chameleon characteristics that enable them to stay tuned-in to the business environment. Procurement has to move towards this model, no longer engaging suppliers in fixed contractual frameworks but providing a dynamic link between the core business and its many, continually changing, allies and partners.
Copyright Partnership Sourcing Ltd 2001. All rights reserved.