Companies Beware – Adapt or Die

As a medium sized company that has offices across Canada and literally thousands of clients, we have many opportunities to engage in dialogue with companies from different market segments. Whether a burgeoning IT company located in Ottawa or a multi-national with a head office in Toronto, all companies are facing similar challenges. The primary challenge rests around how to adapt to a market that is changing at rapid pace. At The Portables we are not immune to the market changes and have found the last two years to be ones of rapid change.

As managers you would agree that you have a full-time job just dealing with existing issues; having to also change the organization is a burden you are not really equipped for. Rest assured that you are not alone. The percentage of the population that are early adopters is quite small, based on my rudimentary Google search, somewhere between 5-10% of the population. So how do we fight our inherent nature to avoid change, yet still stay ahead of the competition? Based on my observations and actions with The Portables, and in my discussions with our clients here is my two cents (after all what kind of a blog does not have a list of takeaways).

1. Just do it – yes you will make mistakes but if you wait for the 100 page research document, that will only prompt further questions, the market would have moved again. Now if you are making a $20 million investment in a new plant or new technology, ignore this adage and do a lot of research.
   

   
    

2. Obsess about it – watch what happens in the marketplace once your initiative has launched. Watch it like a hawk and talk to everyone about it. You will see what is working well and what needs to be tweaked.
   

   
    

3. Do it again – fix the shortcomings from the initial launch and put it out there again.
   

   
    

Now one caveat – before you do it, please make sure that your head and gut are saying it is the right thing to do. We recently launched an online ordering system for our company www.theportables.com/online, but prior to doing so I thought out the pros and cons for a period of time. My head and gut were in total congruence when I launched it. Could I have executed the launch better? Absolutely. Did I make a mistake by launching it when I did? Absolutely not. We learned a huge amount from the launch and have fixed a number of bugs that we could not have envisioned in our beta testing. There are too many variables in the world to actually beta test them all.

Really good article on change management http://www.edistalearning.com/KnowledgePapers/PM_001-arup_infosys.pdf