Causes A Business To Succeed Or To Fail

Causes A Business To Succeed Or To Fail

succeed or to fail?

Causes A Business To Succeed Or To Fail

From lack of focus to competency gaps and other causes, good strategies can be kept with preventive actions. A enterprise report is topped up with tales of business failure. From a latest dot-com busts to a once-powerful businesses whose treasures have fell, these sad endings are often a outcome of one thing: good strategies gone bad. And a inherent origin is generally poor execution.Yet too often a good scheme falls short because a situation for achievement were not ever put in place. A incompetence to execute is normally due to one of five factors.

Lack Of Focus

When it comes to strategies, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Ideally, a clearly drawn strategy becomes a compass that guides all of a company's efforts. But what often happens instead is that competing strategies and sub-strategies scatter attention and dilute a company's focus. Although these sub-strategies may seem to make perfect sense individually, taken together they may not support and move a overall strategic vision forward.

A main resource constraint that organizations face is management time. A company can juggle only so many initiatives until it risks losing sight of a forest for a trees. Symptoms of a lack of strategic focus include:

Executive meetings always run out of time, invariably failing to address key topics and making decisions without enough information.

A same set of gating and review procedures are used for both major and minor strategic initiatives.

A general sense of churning priorities and perpetual fighting for resources pervades a organization.

Key staff members are frustrated and stressed out from permanent work overload.

A number of strategic initiatives increases, without a corresponding increase in resources.

Trade-offs are handled effectively at a functional level, but not cross-functionally.

Unfortunate Market Timing

A success of a strategy is directly related to its timeliness and to a relative stability of a business environment. Even a brilliant strategy can become irrelevant if a market conditions have changed by a time a strategy is implemented. A warehouse filled with Betamax tapes is useless in a VHS world.

Timing issues are most often associated with late-market entries, but they can also be caused by prematurely releasing a product into a market that is not fully developed. One well-publicized example is Microsoft's Xbox, an interactive, online gaming platform. When Microsoft developed its X-box strategy, a company expected that homes would upgrade to broadband Internet access - cable or DSL - at a faster rate than they actually did. But instead of a projected 20 percent penetration rate, home broadband barely reached 10 percent, even in markets with a highest broadband penetration. As a result, Microsoft's online gaming strategy has fallen short of its revenue targets and remains an ongoing challenge.

Impatience For Results

In cultures of instant gratification, companies can abandon a sound strategy too quickly, before it has had a chance to realistically take root and yield ...