Intelligence gathering part 2

What’s Happening in Society and the World?

The world is changing at such a dizzying pace its difficult for many people to keep up with it. This is why your strategy needs to be extremely fluid. Big band music defined a generation changing the way people thought and acted as well as the structure of a number of businesses. Then, all at once, it vanished to be replaced by new ideas. Almost no one has control over what happens in society (a few companies like Apple do manage to control society, but if you run a restaurant, etc., odds are your impact will be limited). This means you must control how you react to society. There are three major types of changes; macro, micro, and migratory. Understanding what’s happening at each of these levels can help you make better judgments about your future.

Micro-changes occur when small groups of existing customers change their spending habits in a way that makes them easier for businesses to target or causes them to stop shopping at your store. Hipsters and hippies would be examples of these trends. They made up only a small percentage of society although they did make a lot of noise which caused a lot of businesses to try to target them. Macro-movements are large, social changes that impact a huge portion of the population. Macro-movements tend to be less extreme than micro-movements, but they often have more permanent impacts, and they involve more people. The movement towards being thrifty, online spending, or purchases of smart phones are macro-trends.

The last of these social changes involves migration patterns. Such patterns include both immigration to the United States and within it. One of the biggest social changes as far as businesses are concerned was the movement of Americans to the suburbs. Without this movement there would be no inner city poverty, and small, inner city businesses wouldn’t have gone out of business. At the same time, it would have been more difficult for large retailers like Wal-Mart to have grown as large as they did if most of their customers had lived in the middle of major cities. It’s interesting to note, however, that, at the moment, urban renewal is occurring in many places because people are moving back into the cities.

Society has been changing at a dizzying pace for hundreds of years, but now these changes are being exacerbated by a number of other changes that are coming ever more rapidly. Any successful strategy must not only take into account these changes as they occur; they must seek to take advantage of these changes. To a certain extent this means that you must invest and innovate around specific trends as much as you do around your core.


Study Other Industries

Many companies in industries other than your own have already dealt with issues very similar to the ones you’re dealing with. Whether they have similar customers, deal with similar social changes, or have to integrate with new technology, companies that may seem unrelated to yours may have found ways of doing things better than anyone in your industry has. Just as importantly, they may have tried a strategy or strategies which didn’t work allowing you to avoid making the same mistakes.


Where are you?

Although the purpose of a strategy is to help you get to where you want to be, you have to begin every strategy with where you are at the moment. Be honest in your evaluation of yourself. List what you’re good at doing and what you’re not good at doing compared to your competition. What are you efficient at; what makes your company special? When doing this, many businesses make the mistake of focusing on their customer relationship, their message, service, etc. While this is extremely important, it’s also important to consider your ability to manage projects, your costs to do business per product, the speed at which you can get things done, etc.