With 700 million individual users on Tencent’s WeChat app, they have now turned to corporate clients: they launched Enterprise WeChat in April 2016, a cloud-based collaboration tool for companies that also track leave days and expense reports.
How will the above piece of news impact our business world?
Nowadays, in order to stay ahead of competitors or even just to survive, organisations across all industries need to adapt quickly to the rapid change in today’s market. Businesses, which did not transform their modus operandi, did not see the need to change or take sufficient actions to transform, no longer exist. There are too many examples.
Almost 88 per cent of companies have disappeared from the Fortune 500 ranking (by total revenue) in the last 59 years. That’s a lot of creative destruction. The Economist has predicted that today’s Fortune 500 companies will be replaced by new companies in new industries over the next 20 years. The average life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 used to be around 75 years. Today, it’s less than 15 years and continues to decline.
How could this happen to your company?
Typical transformation examples in our experience are change of business model and processes, mergers and acquisitions, cross-function organisational restructuring. These are not only within the companies but also across the entire value chain. Transformation will change the way of doing business, relationship of a company and its customers and suppliers, economic and social environment.
What makes one company succeed in transformation while others fail?
Our recent project experience shows a “holistic approach” to business transformation management is the key to success.
Critical Success Factors:
l Strong belief in “why now” in all levels of an organization.
l Flexibility and competence to react fast to changing business environment.
l Innovative in all aspects, to customers, suppliers and organisation.
l Leadership and execution of change management.
l Sustain “Constant Change and win-win” organisational culture.
Matter of How
Your next question could be: How do we achieve that? Well, it can be an integration of the business strategy, business process and organisational change, risk and sustainability. Forming an integrated management framework with holistic management can reduce complexity.
It’s ONE ecosystem
A successful business transformation influences all of its group companies, customers, competitors, economic environment, government and regulations and investors. Our world is never linear nor silo, it’s a multilevel and integrated ecosystem that keeps changing!
Manfred Lau is CEO of Gravel,A business consultancy firm based in Hong Kong
A business consultancy firm based in Hong Kong
