“The key to success is often the ability to adapt” Anonymous

Our world is in a constant state of flux. We are living through a time where we need to become adept at forecasting as also adapting to changes taking place. This principle applies to all aspects of our lives, in the business sense, it has far reaching implications. This story has been heard time and time again, companies become complacent and rigid about rapid changes taking place and soon find themselves compromised. A story, very much in the news these days is, Yahoo!. This company once dominated web search. Today, it finds itself in a messy situation involving corporate raiders and hostile takeovers. What went wrong?

Yahoo! pioneers and leaders of web search throughout the 90’s became complacent about changes taking place in their domain space. A new entry startup called google started to develop traction. Before you knew it, they became a formidable player in the search market. Yahoo! failed to adapt to this change and continued diversifying their business model into new markets. They failed to defend their primary revenue stream, including a missed opportunity to buy-out google for $3b. This is an example of how the pace of change can turn positions in a matter of years, even for such a large firm. However, this is not the first story of its kind, nor the last, these mistakes take place on a daily basis.

If your organization has developed revenue streams which have potential of exponentially increasing over the years, it is your foremost responsibility to protect fiercely. This is done by continuous improvement of the processes, as well as developing complementary assets as barriers around that stream. If done diligently, you will be able to protect yourself from inevitable complacency, which could lead to an unfortunate outcome. On the flip side if you are struggling with your current revenue streams and not being able to develop them further, pay close attention to changes occurring around you. If you are promoting a product/service which has no place in the current market, you need to rethink strategy, and, as soon as possible.

Incorporating systems to account for changes in domain, industry, economics climate and external factors is critical to success. Make sure you have them in place to avoid trouble !