For years, businesses have been competitive thanks to stable and well-aligned strategic structures built around dry-run, successful value propositions, with models of incremental improvement and innovation in markets that were fairly homogeneous and evolutionary. The cultural behaviours of companies have provided an effective and efficient response to the reality described and have been crucial to competing successfully in increasingly globalised markets.

In recent times, this proven model for success is no longer sufficient; it has fallen short, is no longer enough to lead a market or sector, and it has also become clear that this is not a passing temporary situation but rather a deeply systemic one. The situation has changed, and not only has it changed, but it is constantly changing, so that it seems the rules of the game are being improvised as we go, and it is no longer clear in which sector we are competing, who our customers actually are, or who the competition is.

New players have appeared who surprise us by applying business models that ride the wave of disruptive technology and rewrite established business and sector logic. The competitive environment currently faced by companies of all sectors and sizes is characterised by high levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. We are immersed in a society full of liquid values that render obsolete the solid values on which most business leaders have consolidated their companies in the markets.

FACED WITH THIS NEW SCENARIO, HOW SHOULD THE ORGANISATION RESPOND?

At RocaSalvatella, we work under the premise that a company's competitiveness depends on its ability to properly triangulate strategy, business model, and organisational culture.

Many organisations focus on strategy and the impact on business, but forget that culture facilitates or hinders what we have set out in our strategy. Culture is precisely what makes things happen. And some things or others happen depending on which set of values or characteristics predominate in an organisation, and the main drivers of corporate culture are the management teams of companies. Their behaviours and attitudes exemplify what should be and what should not, what is accepted and what is not. The pairing of culture and management style is inseparable.

WHAT ARE THE CULTURAL ATTRIBUTES THAT WILL MAKE OUR ORGANISATION MORE COMPETITIVE IN THIS NEW SCENARIO?

Based on our experience in daily work with companies and organisations of different types, sizes, and sectors in their processes of evolution/digital transformation, we have identified 6 cultural attributes which in our opinion are essential for any company to successfully develop in this new environment.

AGILITY: SPEED IS THE NEW SIZE

The environment is not only changing but doing so at an accelerated pace, and this inevitably affects companies. The speed with which an organisation is able to launch products, services, and solutions to the markets, the agility with which it reacts to new situations, and its speed of experimentation, will define the competitive capacity of that organisation.

In all sectors, we can find companies founded from nothing that reach, in less than 6 years from launch, valuations in excess of a billion dollars (unicorns). Some even in such a short space of time achieve valuations that exceed by several multiples those of century-old and widely-recognised companies in their sector, such as the cases of Uber or Airbnb.

And these types of companies usually launch new value propositions to the market that reach, in short periods of time, hundreds of millions of users, as has recently been the case of Epic Games with Fortnite or Uber with Uber Eats.

If we translate the concept of agility into behaviors or characteristics that should define an organisation, the main ones would be:

1. Reduce hierarchies and bureaucracy. Be capable of simplifying processes.

2. Break down silos and work in a cross-cutting manner.

3. Design, test, and evaluate.

4. Make mistakes quickly so we can try again.

5. Allow room for error.

6. Be constantly asking the market for feedback.

7. Rethink the concept of leadership. The leader as a facilitator to make things happen.

DIGITAL INTELLIGENCE: COMPANIES WILL BE DIGITAL OR THEY WILL NOT BE

Disruption, technology, data, uses... Adaptation to the new digital environment is and will be the key to the success of any business. Companies will be digital or they will not be.

In 2013 there were about 10 billion connected devices. In 2020, the forecast is that the number of connected objects will multiply by 5, reaching about 50 billion connected devices.

The ability to connect any object with the potential to provide real-time responses is one of the main challenges organisations will face. They must be able to understand technology to meet their business challenges.

If we translate the concept of Digital Intelligence into behaviors or characteristics that should define an organisation, the main ones would be:

1. Incorporate new key capabilities to respond to the digital challenge.

2. Understand the disruption of jobs and the necessary skills.

3. Incorporate a culture that facilitates the implementation of the strategy.

4. Be able to detect new players as well as new business models.

5. Understand and apply new disruptive technologies.

6. Maintain a constant radar of what is happening outside.

LIQUID: ADAPTATION TO THE ENVIRONMENT 

We are in constant adaptation, permanent beta, and it seems this is going to be the usual environment in which we must operate in the coming years. An unstable, complex environment where not only is change constant, but the speed at which it occurs makes it more uncertain. Having liquid organisations helps us adapt.

The market forces the organisation to go at different speeds to respond to the market as a whole. We must address innovation across its different horizons (incremental, disruptive, and radical). It is no longer enough to work on it considering the time horizon; we must work on it based on the diversity of audiences that the market dictates to us. This obliges the organisation not to have a single structure and to be able to adapt according to the moment and the audience.