Consult And Gain Resilience

Call it the resilience gap. The world is becoming turbulent faster than organizations are becoming resilient. Strategic resilience is not about responding to a one-time crisis. It’s not about rebounding from a setback. It’s about continuously anticipating and adjusting to deep, secular trends that can permanently impair the earning capacity of a core business. It’s about having the capacity to change before the case for change becomes desperately obvious.

In this context, emerging technologies pose both a threat and a tool for success. The fast changing technology scenario makes it imperative for companies to constantly revolutionize, otherwise face the consequences of obsolescence. On the other hand, one can ride the wave of emerging technology to gain competitive capability.

A process of integrating India with the global economy is underway. This process will not be complete unless acquisition of indigenous or multi-national technologies is integrated with the market. In order to achieve global competitiveness, the levels of innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship will have to be enhanced significantly.

Business is changing all the time. Sometimes the rate of change and the need for it are heightened. At those times, organizations often seek the services of outside consultants. The consultants bring to the organization specialized skills, experience and know how that the organization needs and cannot afford the cost or the time needed to develop them internally. Consultants also act as boundary spanners bringing to the organization both technical and administrative innovations.

There are several reasons why introducing a consulting firm ought to increase an organization’s chances of successfully implementing a project. First, consulting firms can bring their wealth of experience in implementing similar projects in other organizations. Consultants can direct the re-engineering effort to areas where it can have the most beneficial results. At the same time, by being outsiders to the organization, consulting firms can take a fresh look at existing processes and uncover unnecessary steps and conditions that become an integral part of existing processes without serving a specific purpose. Finally, as consultants’ allegiances are to the project at hand, they can bring an objective vision to the project and thus act as facilitators of the change process by mediating the inevitable conflicts that arise with the changes introduced.

The role of consultants helps in enhancing competitive capabilities through emerging technologies in various areas. Knowledge management and innovation today forms an essential component of value creation of firms. Knowledge industries are expected to dominate tomorrow’s world.

Since consultants exploit their resources and capabilities for serving multinational clients across boundaries, the tacit knowledge acquired by them from their geographical dispersion and experiences of working for varied clients, can be leveraged to provide customized solutions to each client to provide unique competitive advantages.

In technology management, consultants play a major role in creating and managing collaborative efforts that accelerate the commercial use of new technologies and in designing and implementing strategic initiatives to help emerging technologies move from the R&D environment to profitable and sustainable businesses. Consultants facilitate technology integration and absorption in the enterprise.

IT has enhanced/intensified the migration of knowledge across firm and national boundaries. Consultants are assisting clients in re-engineering and redesigning their core processes to make them compatible with the emerging technologies. Consultants help in leveraging IT to create and sustain competitive advantage in the marketplace.

HR is critical to the success of any organization. HR as a concept focuses heavily on self-learning and employee learning. Today technology is being deployed quite heavily as a learning mechanism and is no longer a luxury. Consultants play a major role in bringing this technology to the organization for development of its human resource.

A clear sense of direction is critical to organizational success and survival. Consultants help to assess organizational SWOT, gather market intelligence, evaluate competitors and competitive scenarios, identify, structure and negotiate strategic acquisitions, mergers or divestitures etc.

Achieving strategic resilience isn’t easy. Any company that can make sense of its environment, generate strategic options and realign its resources faster than its rivals will enjoy a decisive advantage. This is the essence of resilience. Consultants act as catalysts in building resilient organizations.