Successful companies, while they may differ in terms of the products and services they offer, often share characteristics that help make them successful. Small business owners can emulate these characteristics to help them build a strong foundation for their company and ensure future success. Just as athletes share common characteristics, the same is true of entrepreneurs. In many cases, these characteristics are what set apart the dreamers from those who are living their actual dreams.
Drive and Ambition
In order to succeed, one must have first the drive to succeed, as well as the ambition to see an effort through. The world is full of entrepreneurs who never make it past the initial stages of their ideas. They have the drive, but when it comes to the ambition part of seeing their idea come to fruition, they come up lacking. Drive and ambition, when paired together, can help a small business owner through the rough periods when starting and running a company. These two key ingredients are vital to success in any industry and quite often, these are the two ingredients that separate innovative and successful companies from the rest of the pack.
Customer Focus
The old adage “the customer is always right” is a key of innovative and successful companies. Not only do these companies do their best to make sure their customers are satisfied — they also listen to their customers. They find out what they want, what they need, and they innovate to provide their customers with these solutions. In order to be innovative, you have to have ideas and quite often, your customer base will be the source for this inspiration. At the end of the day, the customer and their needs should be the focus of your company, not the sale.
Diversity and the Ability to Spot Trends
Innovative companies are always changing, always trying out new ideas and offering new services and products. Every product may not be a success, but they keep adapting to their marketplace and learning how best to serve it. Trend spotting and diversity are important characteristics of an innovative company. Once again, customer focus comes into play with this characteristic. By understanding their marketplace, listening to what they want, and being confident enough to take that leap to diversify or change, a company can stay on top.
In addition to the top three characteristics of innovative companies, others should not be forgotten. Having a strong workforce that feels as though it is a true part of the company is an essential part of running a healthy business. Other important characteristics include being confident enough to take risks, knowing when to pull the plug on areas that may not be performing up to expectations and staying informed on all of the latest variables that affect their marketplace.
A Word on Cultivating Vital Organisations
Organizational7 development is by nature a challenge with regard to simplicity and coherence, vitality and human dignity.
It is not about intellectual models and concepts of high complexity. It is more about saying farewell to expert paternalism! It is about pragmatic and respectful dealings with the diversity of challenges of a postmodern world. At the end of the day, it is always about creating shared spaces for living and flourishing together!
Providing safe space becomes essential.
The digital era demands a vital approach to inconsistencies, information overload and constantly changing requirements. More than ever, we need social spaces that provide stability to make flexibility and innovation energy possible – Vital learning spaces, which can serve as professional homelands, are needed to regain strength and energy, to face complex and diverse challenges, to interact and to support each other.
In the future, we will more often ask ourselves:
What makes a living- and working space inviting, productive, creative, lively, hospitable and inspiring?
How should we set up cooperation spaces so that they can work as professional homelands in digital worlds?
How do we set up cooperation spaces so that they can generate vibrancy?
The concept of “homeland” or “homebase” becomes relevant again.
Not in a traditional sense of stagnancy and constriction but as a way of fostering roots and interconnection. “You are not just at home where your homeland is, but everywhere you feel accepted and understood.” Christian Morgenstern already anticipated this modern feeling of “homeland” and “homebase”.
Coherence is the source.
As human beings we are capable of finding appropriate answers to the questions we repeatedly ask ourselves. We are able to develop awareness for the contexts that surround us. We have a highly developed sense of coherence and can form new interconnections.
Human beings have the synergetic power to act together within shared spaces and to use their potentials. It seems necessary to find and establish new forms of cooperation and interconnection and to develop a shared “professional homeland”.
Its currency could be cooperation based on trust and shared justice – an economics of trust in human potential and capabilities. Vital culture spaces unfold their strength by allowing persistence and community spirit – primarily because the focus is shifted from plain profit to quality of space and community interest.
An understanding of management as social physics, predominant in the industrial times, is outdated for the digital era.
We need alternative concepts that can challenge the traditional understandings of the corporate world and organization’s.
As we see it, it is about renewing our vision of the old economic machine and reclaiming human autonomy and vitality. It is about taking care of our living habitats – how we actively define our needs in a self-determined way – how we say farewell to the fundamentalism of efficiency, productivity and blind consumerism – how we not let ourselves get patronised by the modern “monocultures of the mind”. It is about raising ourselves from being servants of the old economic machine, to become creative architects of social spaces – cultural entrepreneurs and gardeners of our living habitats.
A Word on Change
Disruptive Innovation is a good thing because it usually brings context-creating change to the organisation. Context-creating change is associated with thinking and building, and these are central routes to vitality. Striving for innovation and delivering value to the customer are therefore capacities of a genuinely vital organisation.
Daniel Kahneman describes in his book “Thinking fast and slow” two essential states that influence the place where we are thinking and acting from: In the state of the so called “Cognitive stain”, we try to avoid pain and threats, and therefore we are able to work with great focus and make fewer mistakes. But in this mode we can mostly only use what we already know, and reproduce problem-solving actions that we are already used to.
If we want to access ultimate creativity, we need us and our people to be in the state of “Cognitive ease” and think in a mode where we actually enjoy what we do and our brain is capable of enormous creativity. “Cognitive ease” is associated with good feeling
A good and inspiring “groove” in the organisation helps and this positive feeling will make people be more receptive to their intuitive thinking.
Vital Leadership strives to provide the maximum potential by avoiding the trap and the temptation to put the people into a ‘strain’ mode that would leverage their focus, but at the same time would not allow for real innovation and co-creation. Most of the big change programmes only work with a case for change that is based on arguments like ‘survival’, ‘dissatisfaction’ and ‘cost reduction’, and these programmes do not really take account of the impact that this might have on the capacity to innovate and the performance of the organization.
One should never underestimate the value of a good organization culture.
Modern leadership should strive to establish a constant learning process in the organization to avoid context-adapting changes. We could view major context-adapting change in most cases as a failure to learn, which means a failure to adapt. With a vital attitude and vitalising moves we can make the organisation not only more capable of innovation, but also a better place.
We are not saying that major change programmes can be avoided at all times. Sometimes changes in the context require these programmes. We are saying that we should stop this “every year a new change programme” pattern, and that we should start exercising a better way of leading our people, our organisations and society.
Sales And Business Development
We See Sales And Business Development In The Industrial Environment Not Just As The Starting Point, But As Spearheads In The Value Chain.
Success in sales means facing the customer’s question of faith and trust. Professionalism on the one hand, authenticity and an inner attitude on the other are the pillars of successful sales.
Our range of services is based precisely on the knowledge and our own experience out of these criteria. It’s about finding solutions that fit customers, developing business models that work, and building relationships that enable sustainable development. We work on questions of the sales organization as well as on sales methods and tools up to the personal development fields of each individual sales employee.
We put the benefits before the product question and help our customers to create a value-adding sales understanding – it’s about working with the customer to find what they really want and need.
We are convinced that in order to be successful at the end of every new idea, work on the interfaces between man, technology and organization is needed. Gaining people, preparing organizations and being competent in the subject are the guarantors of truly successful innovation.