Just finished reading the December 21, 05 edition of BusinessWeek.  Some interesting looks at the future as it is happening today (huh?).

 

The big companies are going GREEN without current regulatory mandates.  Is your practice/business/organization GREEN?  At the small-midsized business (SMB) size, this can range from recycling programs for paper, cardboard, glass/metals to buying renewable energy to specifying materials in construction that help save energy to constructing a green roof.  Got any other ideas about how the SMB can be green?  Why do it? Better for the planet? More profits? A competitive advantage in attracting staff or clients?

 

New generations: More people are working remotely with great results and lower costs to their organizations and those younguns are "online" in so many ways...what will these trends hold for your organization over the coming decade?  If you're a service-based business, can you deliver it with folks that want to work remotely?  Will only certain portions of your staff be able to choose this as an option?  Will internet use policies at work have to change to allow anyone to IM/Email/Text Message as long as their production doesn't suffer?  If you read the MySpace article on p. 86, you read about the enormous amount of multitasking and input that goes on with these kids.  Will you be able to provide them with enough input to satisfy them at work?

 

Competition:  In the review of the book Competition Demystified, the reviews and the book authors discuss a couple of interesting comments.  One of which is that "the urge to hammer rivals" can diminish growth.  For a long time, I've felt that many organizations spend too much time focusing on external competition instead of focusing on areas of improvement internally.  Instead of worrying about what the business down the road is doing, spend the time and energy worrying about how to improve your own operations.  For businesses serving other businesses, a variant would be to worry about obtaining new clients only AFTER you've asked your current clients if there is more work that you could do for them.

 

Per the review, the authors also contend that, in some business fields (retailing, banking, health care and telecom), being regional might be a better strategy than being national (or more).  A phrase in the review reads "Growth outside one's backyard, they contend, can be deadly."  This resonates with the theme of an article in the December 05 HBR titled "Strategy and Your Stronger Hand".  The theme this has in common with the regional strategy concept in the review is simply that organizations prosper if they have a clear grasp on what they do, who they are, how they deliver value and stay within this scope and/or play to their strengths.  It's good to know that resisting that seductive temptation to tackle a new area, whether it is geographic or operational, is hard for the bigger organizations as well as the smaller ones.