How to create business adaptability, flexibility

 

By MURORI KIUNGA
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SUMMARY

• The covid-19 pandemic that is still ravaging the world has proven human resilience is innate.
• Many firms and individuals have learnt how to live with the pandemic and are now back on path to recovery.One of the greatest lessons we learn from history is that humans always adapt to change regardless of the level of hostility and other circumstances.

  The covid-19 pandemic that is still ravaging the world has proven human resilience is innate. Many firms and individuals have learnt how to live with the pandemic and are now back on path to recovery.

  The adaptability and flexibility are a mandatory requirement for any individual or business survival in a changing world.

  Adaptability is the ability to survive the challenges thrust on your life or business in a hostile environment and being flexible enough to adjust to those changes.

  It means you are able to behave or do things different and more so innovatively to live and flourish. Flexibility is the willingness to adapt.

  Some firms are still waiting for customers to come back after the pandemic or after the economy improves while their peers are busy adapting to the new environment. The latter are flexible.

  Whereas human beings have inborn capacity to adapt when pushed to the corner, businesses don’t.

  Business owners and managers must create environment of adaptability in their firm to survive or else they go the dinosaur way.

  To ensure your firm is ready for adaptation look at your internal structure and procedures and how they address the needs of rapidly changing customers.

  For instance, if a customer asks for delivery or customised product, do you respond by saying you don’t do that or you quickly find a way of doing it?

  Look around the market and you will see firms doing home deliveries, doctors doing prescription online, manufacturers shifting from their focus area and manufacturing products such as sanitisers, masks and items specifically tailored to address the demands of the pandemic.

  Adaptability and flexibility is the new competitive edge in business. Business that are thriving are not the ones with a lot of money in their reserves or best brands in the market.

  It is the business that are willing and able to move from the usual conventional ways of dealing with customers.

  The best way to making yourself adaptable is to look around the world and study current trends.

  Look at what your competitors are doing right or wrong and respond accordingly. Always remember opportunities are never missed; they are taken by your competitors.

  When changes sweep across the society it is inventible that some firms will fail. Should your firm be ill-fated to the point that no amount of adaptability can salvage it, accept the failure but never welcome it.

  The two phrases are different- accepting failure is giving up and losing the will to continue. Welcoming failure is confidently leaning from the event and moving on.

  It is knowing the difference between business failure and entrepreneur failure. It is enterprises that failure not the entrepreneur.

  If whatever products you offer have become obsolete, discard them regardless your passion or emotional attached to them and give your customers what they want.

  Mr Kiunga is author of ‘The Art of Entrepreneurship: Strategies to Succeed in a Competitive Market’. murorikiunga@yahoo.com