Build Future-Ready Capabilities to Create Value
Top performers develop future-ready capabilities to create value from four areas of the firm: customers, operations, and ecosystems, and foundational capabilities that enable the other three areas.
Customer Capabilities
Provide a great multiproduct customer experience. Future-ready firms delight customers by integrating products to convert the typical customer journey into a seamless multichannel customer experience. They strive to meet customer needs rather than push products.
Be purpose-driven. Increasingly, leaders, customers, employees, investors, and partners demand that firms have a strong purpose for existing beyond maximizing shareholder wealth. Creating a strong purpose around which people associated with the firm can unite encourages excellence and is the North Star of success for any journey to future ready.
Operational Capabilities
Become modular, open, and agile. To continually innovate at low cost, future-ready firms take their “crown jewels”—the components and capabilities that make the firm great—and turn them into modular, digitized services. These services can be combined, like construction blocks, into many different digital offerings, then sold and delivered both through direct channels and via partners.
Strive for ambidexterity. Future-ready firms use digital technologies and practices on the one hand to constantly innovate and on the other to control costs and accelerate transformation. This allows the firm to find new and better ways to solve customer problems and offer seamless experiences at the same time as it improves processes, encourages reuse of data, processes, and technology, and identifies enhancements to productivity.
Ecosystem Capabilities
Lead or participate in ecosystems. Future-ready firms are ecosystem-ready. Firms that lead ecosystems create go-to destinations for their customers, and partner to provide a wide variety of curated products. Firms that participate in ecosystems provide digitized products that easily plug and play in those ecosystems.
Pursue dynamic (and digital) partnerships. In the digital era, the fastest-growing firms digitally partner to increase both reach (by adding new customers) and range (by widening the variety of products they offer to their current customers). Much digital partnering is enabled by APIs that automate sharing of data, transactions, and insights.
Foundational Capabilities
Treat data as a strategic asset. Future-ready firms treat data as a single source of truth, supported by data monetization capabilities—accessible across the firm and used to make evidence-based decisions—and norms of acceptable data use. Firms get closer to this single-source nirvana by continuously standardizing, cleaning, simplifying, and learning how to monetize their data.
Develop and retain the right talent. As firms adopt agile methods, data analytics, robotics, AI, and other digital approaches and technologies, what they demand of employees is changing. While ensuring that employees have the right skills for their roles is important, it is just as important to empower employees to work collaboratively to solve complex problems.
Link individual and team behaviors to firm goals. Future-ready firms explicitly link individual and team behaviors to firm goals to help employees in their decision making, complementing the coach-and-communicate leadership style that empowers employees with accountability and data rather than telling them what to do.
Facilitate rapid learning throughout the firm. Given that the future is, by definition, uncertain, being future ready requires the ability to rapidly learn and adapt. Learning from born-digital firms, traditional ones are adopting test-and-learn approaches to explore ideas and create value and then scale the learnings across the firm.
These ten capabilities help firms move from Silos and Spaghetti—a state of having complex processes, systems, and data associated with extensive infrastructure organized in silos—to Future Ready. In our research, firms in the beginning of their transformations described themselves as 45 percent effective on average on the ten capabilities, while future-ready firms assessed themselves as 81 percent effective—a huge difference (see figure 1).
