Читать книгу Change - Gaurav Gupta - Страница 9

On January 16, 2020, Volkswagen Group CEO Herbert Diess told VW's senior managers, “If we continue at our current speed, it is going to be tough.…The storm is just beginning. The era of classic car making is over.”

We would only add that both our formal research and our advisory work suggest that the long-term change trend has reached a point where the era of classical business and government may be over or may soon be over.

Whether dealing with threats from low-cost competitors or opportunities for growth from innovative products or acquisitions, organizations today need greater speed and flexibility, sometimes much greater, not just to deal with extraordinary events like COVID-19, but to deal with the shifting reality of our present and future. More broadly, the need to adapt rapidly is equally important for society to resolve threats like climate change or food security, as well as to continue capitalizing on opportunities for progress toward a more equitable and prosperous world.

A few enterprises have become adept at facing these challenges by identifying trends early, changing quickly, and successfully maneuvering at speeds that feel like 100 miles per hour. We will share some of these stories in the pages that follow. We're confident in their integrity because, in most of these cases, we watched these events unfold up close in our advisory work. These leading enterprises are outliers from which you can learn much. And learn we must, because the vast majority of organizations are struggling to adapt at a remotely adequate pace.

The need to adapt is nothing new; after all, Benjamin Franklin said, “When you are finished changing, you are finished.” What is new is how often we need to change, the pace at which we need to move, and the complexity and volatility of the context in which we are operating.