A Time for Strategic Convergence
No doubt, these are certainly strategic times for all business with new challenges and new opportunities. Existing business practices are being reassessed for their value today. New platforms are being prepared to address technology changes and improvements. Hotspots are popping up all over that require attention. And, a new form of strategic thinking is emerging, known as Strategic Convergence.
The concept embraces innovation while challenging organizational status quo. It allows a company to find the sweet spot between focus and operation – the areas where we can ensure market leadership as well as product and service differentiation.
Nearly every business today is lean, centered, right-sized and metrics-driven. The past four years have essentially required it. That has meant there is little room for working at the margins — the white space of a business plan — to identify and build out new and better business models. With the U.S. consumer confidence on the upswing for the first time since 2008, the timing is good to reassess strategy and decisions.
Strategic convergence focuses on those areas and addresses the need to build alliances, partnerships, and off-core relationships in order to pursue what may be opportunities for true strategic transformation for a business.
It’s what Franklin Covey refers to as the Maturity Continuum®, a progression from dependence to independence to interdependence. At SA, our entire staff has undergone Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People/Organizations”. We’ve learned that when we think win/win, we develop a mindset for strategic convergence, i.e. seeing opportunities that may not be possible without the help and active engagement of others.
Interdependence builds synergy and connects in ways that form new organizational ecosystems. New public victories. And, with that comes opportunity. Innovation is made possible by collaborating with others. And new and better systems, processes and outcomes.
At SA, we’ve found that some of the best, new ideas come from our developing strong relationships with our supplier partners. We both win. And so do our clients.
Strategic convergence means being able to operate with more flexibility, more communications, more interdependence, and more innovation … for more opportunity than each could create on our own.
Interested? Let’s talk.
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