Business Flexibility For Corporate Growth

By M. Isi Eromosele

Flexibility within a corporate culture can be very significant in making sure that business opportunities are not missed. A flexible company would be primed and prepared to reduce unfavorable effects on it due to market events by taking immediate action. The objective is to build an adaptable, flexible organization that expects change events rather than one that is stunned and bewildered by unanticipated internal or global developments.

Change events are a constant fact of life in global business. This includes advances in globalization, communications, marketing processes, customer relations management and customer needs and demands. These developments are opening new global business opportunities, but they are also creating multiple challenges for national and global companies. These challenges may be simple to speak about, but are difficult to deal with.

Flexibility and adaptability must be made key components of any company’s growth strategy, enabling it to discover new global opportunities and respond efficiently. Failure to build these components into your company’s corporate culture will effectively hamper your company’s future growth. Companies need to make a shift to what is called "adaptive enterprise" corporate culture, crucial to the future growth capabilities of any company, regardless of size.

Adaptive enterprise calls for fostering a corporate environment that support recurring adjustments of policies and business processes in order to engender sustained competitive advantage. Technology will play an underpinning key role in making this happen. Robust resources for communications and development will certainly help your company as a whole positively react in response to change.

Even more importantly, these resources will help prepare you for a quick response to any type of changes that may occur. Additionally, they will help your company create changes in the business and market environments that will have your competition struggling to respond.

The ability to capitalize on global business opportunities and the ability to quickly respond to market threats are very important to the long-term growth of any company. As such, companies need to think of business flexibility as a key attribute in the formulation of their market and growth strategies.

Corporate entities tend to focus on developing business strength, comprising of issues such as financial lines of credit, smooth succession plans and business continuity plans, among others. However, since business flexibility is hard to measure, it is usually disregarded. This mindset has to change.

A good starting point for assessing your company’s flexibility is the articulation of what your business represents. A focus on your business mission will return you to changing ways of doing business within your industry as well as in your marketplace. An industry or market segment leader would already have the required systems in place to identify new opportunities. For other companies, additional resources would be needed for them to modify their operations and processes to anticipate changes in an increasingly competitive business and market environment.

Companies that are able to anticipate and react quickly to market developments are able to produce products and change marketing approaches that benefit them. The key is to leverage your competencies and resources in fostering an innovative and flexible corporate environment, while strengthening business processes and structures that would support profitable business growth.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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