How much value have you created today?
Entrepreneurship could not be hotter as entrepreneurial activity bursts out all over including in some of the most unlikely places. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2003 Uganda has the highest degree of entrepreneurial activity. The Maori people of New Zealand are not that far behind. Yale University, a paragon of the ivory tower, helps professors spin out companies, wants to institutionalize of entrepreneurship at the university, and believes it should be even more involved in entrepreneurship. Since the year 2000 Junior Achievement has trained over 1000 students in entrepreneurship in Azerbaijan. It seems that the desire to create value through innovative action knows no boundaries. And finally in Cuba where surgeons and other professionals earn less than $1 a day, there is a new entrepreneur class that is serving the tourist market and earning hundreds and even thousands of dollars a month.
But while all of this positive activity is taking place, there is yet a problem out there in the business community, a sickness. Businesses are failing to create value on a regular basis. They are ceasing to produce wealth consistently. Others attempting to save themselves are seemingly changing strategy almost weekly. Some lie flailing on the ground, gasping for air with their hands out seeking help, while perhaps the sickest of all firms resort to shady and illegal tricks in attempt to shield their own inadequacies.
These ailing companies are having difficulties seeing opportunities, having difficulties hearing customer needs and having difficulty acting to exploit opportunities. In short, they have problems in the opportunity development process, which has a direct and painful link to their value poor creating abilities. These problems are in fact a much deeper and widespread ailment that affects the organization’s ability to produce value by properly creating, assessing, and exploiting business opportunities. These problems paradoxically are more often found in the very organizations that you would expect to have success in these areas.
Fortunately, the doctor is on the way with cure, the:
The Opportunistic Organization.
This blog addresses how managers are overcoming and avoiding these hindrances. It is about how top managers today are recreating and reshaping their organizations so that the opportunity development process is a fundamental driver of organizational activities for all stakeholders.
Most of what has been written about opportunity has focused on how to detect opportunity and as a result has primarily focused on the start-up phase. This blog focuses on a new type of organization that is designed to ensure continuous opportunity creation and exploitation.
Some strategists write about so called opportunistic strategies, which are typically random and incremental. That is not what this blog is about. It is about how to successful companies have constructed and managed themselves in order to create extraordinary value by following business opportunities in a purposeful way.
This blog is based on research that not only builds on previous findings, but it also stretches beyond theory to create new knowledge specifically designed to provide practical applications for managers.
For many businesses today it is important to have well defined PR images. Their CEO’s have become celebrities. But how does that translate into value for the owners? Or for the customers? For the opportunistic organization, the reason for existence is to create value – short term, medium term and long term. If this seems cold and calculated . . . it is.
Terrence Brown Creates Value.