Business growth in the next 5 years will be determined on a lot of ambiguity. From political volatility to technology adoption to serving a larger mix of consumers - business leaders will make agility their core focus for growth.

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There’s no debating that business growth is in an interesting place. On one hand, we can see the economic stability in certain sectors and regions. While on the other, we can see the volatility and transformation happening that puts our best strategies and plans at risk daily. One thing is clear, being agile and proactive is the new trait for successful business leaders.

As the marketplace continues to become more ambiguous, business leaders need to understand the challenges facing their company, market and themselves in order to lead to success.

Managing the Political & Market Risk 

The world is shaky at best. That is reflective in the world of business. With political shifts towards nationalism, using economic factors as political pawns, business leaders have to have a larger focus on how these shifts effect their business plan and model. As industry works on a global scale, the political world is starting to shift more towards a national scale. This puts supply chains, distribution and business models all at risk for market and political volatility. Business leaders will work to build strategy scenarios that allow them to understand the decisions and levers needed to make in different situations.

The Changing Consumer

As the workforce and consumers expand to include more generations, the shifts of behaviors, spending power and preferences will start to splinter, causing a challenge for businesses to create, build and distribute products at scale. These shifts will require product and service creation and differentiation like we’ve never seen before. The combination of personalization, distribution models, supply chain operations and communication opportunities create an endless need for new. Business leaders will have to first understand the amount of combination and identify, through intelligence, which combinations will be the most beneficial for their consumer and their business. 

Stagnating Organizations and Industries

There is a battle brewing in the business world. It’s one of traditional, incumbent market leaders versus their more nimble insurgent counterparts. As once disruptive startups continue to scale and hit mass levels, they will begin to erase the leverage incumbent organizations power over market share, opening more opportunities for disruption. To combat this, traditional organizations are faced with overcoming the obstacles of legacy (technology, thinking, processes), traditional mindsets, a bloated employee base and digitalization (which we’ll discuss next). Business leaders will adopt a mindset of being lean and agile and adapt their organizations accordingly.

Technology

There is no doubting that technology will become a major conduit for business growth of the future. While the application and integration of technologies seemed to have stalled in the past couple years, the abilities and opportunities new technologies like AI, data and tracking have on business is non-negotiable. Business leaders will have to adopt digital and technology as a core component and driver for the entirety of their business in order to find growth. The need to find ways to not only service their consumer better, but streamline their operations and craft new business models.

Mergers & Acquisitions

While mergers and acquisitions have been extremely hot over the last couple years, we’ll see this start to cool. One great outcome for the M&A activity is that larger organizations can ultimately purchase their way to innovation, allowing them to quickly do things they weren’t able to do. In the coming years, as we see this activity start to wane in certain industries, we’ll see companies with past acquisitions integrate them within the complexity of the larger organization to create the ultimate value needed to succeed in the future. Business leaders will focus the next couple years around execution and integration of their acquisitions.

What trends are effecting your growth? 

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