The following information reflects 400 NXTmove design assessments conducted on businesses. These businesses range in size from 20 employees to multi-nationals employing thousands of people.

The design areas assessed include the following: people energy, information communication technology, workplace, leadership, communication, quality assurance, customer service, business intelligence, innovation, strategy, business processes, business value growth potential, marketing, sales, change, corporate governance, risk, customer relationship management, precision business and branding.

Key business drivers per industry 

On a high level, it is important to highlight the most important business driver per industry, consuming the most energy as well as the business area in which the least energy is spent.

Industry	Key business driver	Area in which the least energy is spent
Agriculture	Business Value Growth Potential	Quality Assurance
Art	Communication	Quality Assurance
Charity / NGO	Marketing	Corporate Governance
Communication	Business Processes	Change Management
Construction	Strategy	Corporate Governance
Consulting	Workplace	Corporate Governance
Education	Marketing	Corporate Governance
Farming	Change Management	Corporate Governance
Financial Services	Business Value Growth Potential	Innovation
Hospital / Emergency	Business Intelligence	Quality Assurance
IT	Workplace	Quality Assurance
Manufacturing	Business Value Growth Potential	Corporate Governance
Media	Marketing	Quality Assurance
Medical	Precision Business	ICT
Military / Police	Workplace	Customer Service
Mining	Strategy	Communication
Public Service	Business Value Growth Potential	Change Management
Security	Strategy	Quality Assurance
Services	Marketing	Corporate Governance
Transport	Sales	Change Management
Travel and Hospitality	Marketing	Innovation
Wholesale / Retail	Marketing	Quality Assurance

Tendency to focus only on marketing for growth

Other design areas that get a lot of energy and focus across all businesses are marketing, branding, sales and business intelligence. Businesses all tend to spend a lot of their strategic and operational energy on branding and marketing their products and services. A lot of emphasis is placed on sales. The data indicates that when businesses want to grow or find themselves in trouble, they tend to sell, sell and sell with the inevitable result of poor or no energy focused on other critical design areas. We tend to market what we can and in doing this, try to unlock more value growth potential in the business. This however suffers if the other key business drivers are not optimally designed. In a future world a strong marketing and sales drive without the support of sophisticated systems and customer interaction channels, will have a negative effect on the growth potential of a business.

Businesses struggle to change with the times

Many companies are obsessed about their business intelligence capabilities. They do however not capitalise on this intelligence to take the business to the next level in terms of a future ready design. One of the reasons for this is the fact that businesses are not strong on innovating and moving with the times.

It is interesting that strategy as a business driver consumes a lot of energy. The strategy is however not executed and operationalised successfully and optimally due to business processes being poorly designed.

The weakest areas of design across 400 businesses assessed are Corporate Governance and Quality Assurance. Businesses tend to let things fail before they recover it. Holistically businesses are not designed to deliver quality and they are not designed to be governed and regulated. Change Management also suffers. Companies are bad at being agile, reacting to a changing landscape and implementing change pro-actively.

A focus on people and customer service is lacking

Universally businesses struggle with their people energy management. It is also clear that businesses do not employ the latest and most sophisticated technology. They struggle to get their communication right and they pay little attention to innovation.

The data indicates that businesses tend to spend energy sparingly on their workplace. Most business leaders understand that the most important stakeholder in a business is the customer. Despite this knowledge, in general, customer service doesn’t get the attention it should.

Universally the leadership function in business measures in the middle range as an active business design function. This however is not where leadership should function. A future ready business is designed by leadership, innovation and change. These business design functions must measure in the strong to very strong design functions of a business.

Leaders must redesign their businesses for the future

In conclusion it is clear that businesses design themselves to do business and survive in an old or current landscape. To thrive and unlock business value in a future world, businesses would have to redesign themselves. Business leaders must invest in sophisticated technologies, automated business processes and interactive customer channels. To continue to only focus on marketing, branding and sales without the sophisticated legs to carry these initiatives, could soon result in many businesses finding themselves outdated, outrun by the competition and even irrelevant.

Authors: Lizette de Villiers and Guy Krige
Data source: NXTmove4.0 data