Repowering Your Business to Thrive: The Eight Steps of Strategic Approach to Repowering Your Core and Rebuilding Your New Business for Profitable Growth Through Adaptive Strategic Management and Connected Supply Chain for Successful Execution

By Suan See Tan

The world is resetting, business growth is shifting. How do you reinvent yourselves to seize the new opportunities? Have you got what it takes to create new sources of advantage to grow profitably in this new era?

The purpose of this book, “Repowering your Business to Thrive” is to equip business leaders to re-power your business by shaping a new path through making the strategic choices for your organization; rebuilding the new strategies; translating the new strategies to scalable business models; fueling by smart supply chain operations for successful execution. The key moves will be positioning your organization to create purposeful and measurable value for your customers, employees, stakeholders, and society with profitable growth.

This book is the blueprint every business leader needs to repower the legacy business and rebuild the business successfully to thrive in this great reset.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore
• Release date: Feb 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781543763096

Suan See Tan

Suan See Tan, founder of an innovative business and supply chain transformation consulting firm. She helps business leaders to wisely transform their legacy and scale business for profitable growth. Before devoting to consulting, she served as the corporate prominent leader, Vice President in Global Supply Chains, Group Executive General Manager at the renowned MNCs She influences how organization think, shapes business through systematic approach and create value to thrive. Her significant impacts were highly recognized and awarded “Women at Work Leadership in 2017”. She trains and coaches women at management. A regular presenter at conferences and universities.

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Copyright © 2021 by Tan Suan See.

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CONTENTS

Preface

1.0. Taking a Leap of Faith—from Survive to Thrive

2.0. Setting Stage—Harnessing New Realities to Fuel Your Future

2.1. Understand Your Business Landscape Today

2.2. The New Economy Requires a New Mindset

2.3. New Normal, New Leadership Approach

2.4. Redefining Business Growth versus Business Scaling

2.5. To Scale a Business, First Scale the Culture

2.6. Making Business Growth as Everyone’s Agenda

3.0. Mastering Adaptive Strategic Management Process

3.1. Putting Leadership in Adaptive Strategic Management System

3.2. The Five Steps of Dynamic Strategic Management Process

3.3. Conducting a Strategic Analysis on Your Current Business Capabilities

3.4. Draw Out Your Distinctive Capabilities

3.5. New Strategic Alignment Direction

4.0. Rebuild Best-Fit Strategy—New Way of Doing Business

4.1. What Is a Business Strategy?

4.2. How a Business Leader Rebuilds a Strategy

4.3. Rebuild Your New, Best-Fit Business Strategy in this New Era

4.4. The Essence of the New, Best-Fit Business Strategies

4.5. A Nutshell of Why Business Strategy Is Important

5.0. Translate New Strategy into New Business Models and Measurements

5.1. Translating and Measuring the Aligned Strategic Objectives

5.2. Translate Strategy to Scalable Business Models

5.3. Relation—Business Strategy versus Business Model

5.4. Business Model Canvas (BMC)

5.5. Types of Business Models

5.6. Attributes of A Successful Business Models

6.0. Keys to Successful Strategy Execution

6.1. Why Execution Is Crucial to Determine Success or Failure

6.2. Make Your Business Strategy and Models Come Alive

-   Eight Essential Elements for Success Execution

6.3. Best Practices in Strategy Execution

6.4. Leverage Supply Chain Management as a System for Strategic Execution

7.0. Supply Chains—Your Core Business Frontier

7.1. Arm Supply Chain as a Competitive Weapon to Your Core Business

7.2. Is Your Supply Chain an Enabler for Your Core Business Strategy?

7.3. Supply Chain Operations, Leverage the Backbone of Your Core Business

7.4. Six Core Supply Chain Capabilities That Integrate Business Network

7.5. The Importance of Supply Chain to Your Core Business Transformation

7.6. Are You Ready to Make Your Right Move to Transform the Legacy?

7.7. Supply Chain Connects Your Strategies to the Outcomes

8.0. Release Economic Value By Powering Your Core Business

8.1. Purpose-Driven Profitable Growth

8.2. Seven Ways How Supply Chain Powered Business Growth

8.3. How Do Supply Chain Releases Economic Values?

-   Inextricable Linking Between Supply Chain Capabilities and Economic Profit

9.0. Make a Wise Pivot—Intelligent Supply Chain to Scaling Future Business

9.1. Vision for the Future Organization

9.2. The Future Belongs to Companies with Intelligent Supply Chain Operations

9.3. The Imperative Challenges and Changes

10.0. Journey to THRIVE in the New Economy

10.1. T—Technology-Autonomous, Digitalized Organization

10.2. H—Human at the Core, Fit for the Future

10.3. R—Rethink of a Purpose-Driven Business Model

10.4. I—Innovative for New Revenue Opportunities

10.5. V—Value, Agile and Resilient Operations Model

10.6. E—Embrace Business Ecosystem in a Sharing Economy

This book is first and foremost dedicated to the glory of God

PREFACE

We are in the midst of the Great Reset when growth is shifting, innovation is relentless, digital-economy is rising and consumer expectations are increasing. You have a window of opportunity to reset and reshape the future you want. You can ride on these mega forces of change to make better strategic choices, seize the new opportunities and shape markets to your advantage to create the brighter future.

Companies need to reinvent, repower the core business and build a new business within a business to scale which are vital to a company’s longevity.

To do it successfully, this book is to provide you a holistic view of how a business renew the mindset in light of the mega shifts. Its objective is to equip business leaders the eight steps of practical strategic approach for rebuilding and preparing your organization to thrive now and future. It unfolds the success case studies, tools, proven and practical methodology to help you shape the path of transforming your legacy, reinventing your business, and pivoting to power your new businesses. It is destined to become your handbook, your road map to thrive your business now and in the future.

The content within this book examines human value, growth culture, strategic management, breakthrough strategy, business blue-print, organization capabilities, supply chain operation excellence, connected network that are necessary to scale the business and generate the ecosystem value on shared economy platform. It is a broad exploration of complete repowering the business to building the new business within a business from reconstructing the new strategies to success execution.

It is designed for business owners, chief executive officers, corporate leaders and managers, entrepreneurs, supply chain leaders, senior managers, executives, and students.

Suan See Tan has served as senior corporate leadership role with well-known multinational companies for 29 years across industries globally. She influenced how organizations think, positioned business to scale, wisely pivot and transformed their business through intelligent supply chain that span, connect and collaborate ecosystem network to create the new value with sustainable and profitable growth.

To live her passion, she quitted the high earning corporate job in 2018 and formed an innovative business and supply chain transformation consulting firm in 2018. Since then, she has helped many local business owners and CEOs to build, rebuild, reinvent or transforming their business successfully.

It is not unusual for business owners to feel stuck as conventional business growth is shifting at this defining time as the world is going through a great reset. She has been successfully hand holding many business leaders walking out of the valleys of shadow; from constraints to strengths; from disruptive to opportunities; from start-up to turn-around and harnessing the new realities to fuel their future.

Her passion and enthusiasm to help more business owners, business leaders and CEOs to flourish their business, drove her to put her 3-decade experience across many industries and senior leadership roles into good use. She remodels and reengineers her rich experience that she acquired and achieved over years of many successful business and supply chain transformation cases in this book.

1.0. TAKING A LEAP OF FAITH—

FROM SURVIVE TO THRIVE

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

—Anaïs Nin

We live in interesting times with the Great Reset of the world. We are standing in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is known as the Digital Revolution. We are encircled by the exciting spectacles of smart devices, phones, televisions, smart homes, cities, autonomous vehicles, and many other emerging technologies. We see the world around us have reshaped itself faster than we can reshape ourselves.

Digitization and autonomous enterprise, machine learning cum artificial intelligence, life sciences, and many others are advancing, merging, and linking with one another to redefine new business models do and push industry boundaries. We’re are indeed going through a combinatorial technology explosion. Customers are happily reaping some of the benefits, and our concepts of value delivery are changing. According to Alibaba’s Jack Ma, B2C is becoming C2B, with marketing tools relying on consumer interaction and customers enjoying free goods and services, personalization, and variety through online buzz and so on. And there is obvious change of the terms of competition driven by increasingly interconnected networks effect of partners, platforms, customers, and suppliers, we are experiencing a business ecosystem revolution.

Clearly, we witness that conventional business growth is shifting, innovation is relentless, customer behavior is changing, technology disruption is accelerating, stakeholders’ expectations are increasing, and political and social tensions are rising. Change is the only constant, and we are inured to it. As technologies and social economy shift in new ways, new challenges and opportunities will emerge to reframe the future.

Confronting these dynamics and forging a brighter future requires businesses to continuously reinvent themselves using new management and adaptive, continually evolving, and innovative strategies.

However, many companies are struggling as a new wave of competition has increased, emerging from new and unexpected areas, making it more difficult for companies to maintain the performance of profitable growth. Large, medium, or small companies face increasing performance pressure amid sinking return on assets, intense competition, and changing workforce dynamics. We hear about the business challenges every day in our conversations.

There are obviously examples of companies that fall because they miss that ideal point of transformation and are forced to exit. The complexity and speed of these influences make it increasingly difficult for companies to master the challenges of transformation in order to grow their business in a sustainably profitable manner. Solving these dynamic problems, creating right solutions, and meeting the demanding needs timely are what separates those who excel from those who are struggling to survive.

There are also many businesses having a hard time adapting to recent digital economy and societal changes or new demands on the market. They feel like they will lose control of business when an unprecedented change happens. They continue to work hard but are not getting anywhere or significant improvement. The top- and bottom-line income statement numbers have been staying the same or slipping for a few months or years, and the customer bases are stagnant or shrinking for quite some time.

Are you at your personal breakeven point? Do you have a steady, consistent cash flow? These are signs that the business is in a plateau.

While some organizations may still be in denial about how Industry 4.0 and megatrends can impact their business or are struggling to find the talent or knowledge to know how to best adopt it for their unique business cases, several others choose to ride the wave and are implementing changes today and preparing for a future where smart machines improve their business. Leading companies have transformed their businesses to thrive within the disruptive scenarios and operate on different business models with different sets of value drivers. However, some business leaders still struggle to visualize and gauge the potential impact of the trend scenarios that may disrupt the entire industry, market needs, customer expectations, or even company relevance to stay in the game. So how do you ensure you don’t miss and you capture the next growth shift opportunities? How do you identify the uncertainties or trends you’re afraid to confront?

We recently spoke to thirty business owners or CEOs across different industries about their experiences of business impacts that resulted from the current megatrends and aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic: financial, customers, employees, supply chain dimensions. The top challenges are financial issues, including operations cash flow, liquidity, delays in receivables, and obvious declines in revenue. Nearly half of them indicated that cost cutting measures are a priority for them to keep their operation afloat as sales and demand shrink by 30 to 50 percent. The supply chain poised a huge challenge for large- to midsize companies in delay of receiving supplies, while SMEs cited delays in order fulfillment as their major challenge as both large and SME companies have faced downtime in their daily operations and delays in completing tasks and projects.

Significant tension runs through each of them when the direction of the company in responding to the trends coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic underway is unclear. The most frequent answer that appeared is, We are indeed struggling to keep and strive, let alone grow and scale our business. They are pledging change to walk out from the valleys of the shadow.

Growth has been shifted. Eighty percent of businesses is in plateau. No doubt, a savvy business owner or CEO wants to consistently push to maximize growth, profitability, and increase the value of the company.

However, the fact is, most organizations aren’t built for change. They spend a lot of time talking, discussing about it but do not know how and when to take the first move. In the meantime, they found that they are left behind. Sounds familiar?

Megatrends will continue to change the industry, the businesses, and the world we live and work in, bringing huge business opportunities. While the trends come with full opportunities, this era of business is deeply unsettling. Many of these opportunities will be seized by new entrants, some of which will grow into unicorns as we already see today. Hence, the incumbents, regardless of your size, need to strategize in a new way in order to participate and lead in the new markets to overcome the business plateau. The growth policy and mechanism may have reached their limits.

I summarize below the outcomes of the conversation with the thirty incumbent business owners or CEOs (midsize market companies) on their strategic direction for their business amid the megatrends and the Covid-19 pandemic:

1.jpg

Now more than ever, as business leaders, you constantly think about how to orient yourselves and make decisions to steer your new business direction to respond to changing times. Whether it’s to adjust to the requirements of the market, new technologies, or regulations, companies have always needed to check all directions to ensure their long-term success. Figure 1.0(i). suggests the intended business strategic directions from the survey and interview with the business leaders. I will elaborate in chapter 3.

Figure 1.0(i). Five New Possibilities of Strategic Direction amid the New Reality

2.jpg

In business, yesterday’s success and winning once is not enough. Even if you have scored big, you can’t rest on your successes. Technologies and business ecosystem have blurred the line. You have to rack up repeated victories; otherwise, you become a has-been. This has been the fate of many once-successful companies that got to the top but couldn’t stay there. Yet some organizations do thrive at the top for decades and even longer. They launch one successful business after another and routinely outperform their rivals through both good times and bad. What’s their secret?

There is an urgent imperative need to adjust to these new realities. There is a normal human tendency to want the business future to look much like the recent past. Hence, revisiting your assumptions about the business landscape is essential today. Doing nothing today will leave your business highly vulnerable under the fierce wave of changes. Gaining a clear-eyed perspective and right preparation on how to navigate the changing landscape will help you prepare and soar to succeed.

In a nutshell, growth shifts. Technological disruption, revolution of business ecosystem, and powerful forces demand thoughtful responses and contain the seeds of extraordinary opportunity. Business leaders who wish to reach for these opportunities will need to question their own assumptions and imagine new possibilities as figure 1.0. And for the business leaders who get out of their comfort zone to explore new possibilities, they will compete more effectively; they also will be able to better contribute to broader solutions and ultimately to scale a new and more inclusive narrative of business growth.

To begin, a successful business must have the right foundation in place—the building blocks of high performance of today’s core business. Fail to create these bulwarks of success, and your performance will be on shaky ground. Develop them properly, and you’ll have the solid base you need to succeed with a new or scaling business.

This book provides the systematic framework and clear guided step for business leaders to power their business growth strategically with inside-out and outside-in approach, seizing the tide of trends and forcing opportunities within and outside your usual scope of business. Building your transformation and scaling your journey in the future, not current state, has never been more crucial today (figure 1.0 [i]).

This growth model connects dynamic strategic management to seamless, successful execution with underlying business capabilities that executes the strategy. Business capabilities are the link between these two sides of an organization. Business capabilities can be thought of as the resources, processes, and values that ultimately execute the strategy, delivering the value proposition at a profitable level to the intended customer segments. Understanding this link enables companies to align resources, people, and processes to transform themselves in response to market dynamics and further scale to new business in this competitive edge.

The key imperative for you is to transform first your legacy business to be efficient, agile, and adaptive to constantly respond rightly to market and industry dynamics.

• How do you connect a company’s high-level strategic objectives and priorities to the core business capabilities manifested through resources, processes, and system landscape that execute the core strategy?

• How do we align the company’s core strategy with a scalable business model?

• How does a business architecture that sits on top of a system architecture enable the business model to deliver value to its intended customers? And most important, how do we align all the components after one of them has been changed to cope with demanding new marketing conditions?

Here is the complete eight-step agile, adaptive, and aligned approach to transform your legacy business and pivot it to scale your new business framework, all in one place. This book will help you reinvent, synergize, transform and scale your business profitably, and set your scalable business model up for success with a winning competitive strategy. Test and change your assumptions about markets and customers, spot trends that could transform your business, and exploit disruptive technologies. Give traditional offerings a shot in the arm. Produce game changers for your industry or market.

Figure 1.0 (ii)

3.jpg

We are in the midst of the most transformational time in business.

2.0. SETTING STAGE—HARNESSING

NEW REALITIES TO FUEL YOUR FUTURE

Create Synergies between the Old and the New, Walk Out of the Shadow of Valleys

I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust