Opportunity-driven Growth:

Discovering Opportunities

Searching for Opportunities

Entrepreneurial Approach to Reinventing Your Business Continuously

5 Things You Should Know To Win

Clearly Define Your Search Strategies

Most opportunities are lost because of unfocused search goals and poorly defined (or "fuzzy") search strategies and priorities. Don't waste your their time wading through the volumes of raw or irrelevant information. Focus on two strategic types of information you need to gather, evaluate and apply to your operations:

1. How the situation around you is changing?

2. How well have you prepared yourself for the emerging opportunities?... More

Continuous Process

Unfortunately, most opportunities are lost because of unfocused search goals and "fuzzy" [or poorly defined] research priorities.

Opportunity can and does exist within nearly every situation, event, proceeding, or happening. The search for opportunities is not a one time event. It is continuous and on-going. You must develop your anticipating and entrepreneurial arts and skills to become sensitive to see not only those opportunities which are boldly advertised, but also those hidden under the day to day problems and issues.

Using Strategic Intent to Encourage the Quest for New Opportunities

Strategic intent is senior management's primary motivational tool for radical idea generation. Senior management uses strategic intent to communicate a misfit between current resources and corporate aspirations and motivate idea generation when it actively encourages the quest for new opportunities... More

Top 10 Essential Requirements To Be A Great Strategic Thinker

Essential Element #4: You must have an extremely high level of awareness of what is happening around you and be open to absorbing all that you can. In any business, there are clues, often subtle, both internal and external to help guide future direction and to identify opportunities. Great strategic thinkers take all of this in and then they set aside time to think about all the experience and information to guide them in the planning and working on the issues, challenges and opportunities that lie ahead... More

Changes – the Source of Opportunities

Mature companies must learn to be young at heart and fast. Executives who recognize that the days of slow change are over, will find boundless new opportunities around them.

The changes creating new opportunities for innovation can be both within the enterprise or industry and outside them. A three-level business intelligence system is thus to be established to collect and analyze information from within the enterprise; industry and market structure; and external sources, such as demographics, changes in perception, and new knowledge. Innovators who want to exploit new knowledge need to apply a careful analysis of the knowledge available and the knowledge needed.

"Change brings opportunity to those who can grasp it, and the discontinuities of the new economy offer unlimited opportunities."⁶

Entrepreneurial Approach

"Things work out best for those who make the best of the way the things work out."

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs. Doing new things, or doing old things in new ways is how entrepreneurs exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy; they always search for change, respond to it, and exploit it as an opportunity.

Turning Failures To Opportunities: 3 Steps

1. Get rid of all negative emotions – and lean: There is no failure, only feedback!... More

The Power of Your Cross-Functional Excellence

If you build broad cross-functional expertise, no idea will be wasted! Your mind can accept only those ideas that have a frame of reference with your existing knowledge. It rejects everything else. If your knowledge is functionally focused, you'll be open to new ideas related to your functional expertise only and will miss all other learning and innovation opportunities. If you develop a broad cross-functional expertise, no new idea will be wasted. It will immediately connect with the existing knowledge and will inspire you, energize you, and encourage your entrepreneurial creativity. The broader your net is, the more fish you catch... More

Seek the Optimum Balance of Opportunities

The task of a business architect and a process manager is to create systems, within a sensibly structured business, that empowers employees and enables people to achieve higher productivity and greater competitive advantage. In their book, Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will, an analysis of Jack Welch's GE and a business classic hailed as the unofficial GE Leadership handbook, Noel M. Tichi and Stratford Sherman cite the cause of a plant that makes wire, another that wraps the wire into coils, and a third that assembles the coils into lamps. If these are organized as three separate businesses, each optimizing its own performance, the totality may well not be optimized. Organized as a single unit, however those three plants can seek the optimum balance of opportunities: for instance, making a costlier wire may help to produce a cheaper lamp.

The Challenge for Small Enterprises

As young venture is organized around a new product or service meetings of the senior managers focus on problem solving and cash flow and have little or no time for identifying and exploiting opportunities. To overcome this issue dedicate one management meeting a month to looking for opportunities, new ideas, market trends, unexpected successes and competitive actions. Communicate the long-term benefits of investing time in these activities to your team members to ensure their willing and active participation.

Happiness – It's All in Our Own Hands

When you encounter a problem, try to look for the good points. Everything has at least one good point. Even sickness has its positive side. You get some extra rest or have more time to spend with your family or you use the period of recuperation as an opportunity to turn to dharma... More

Bibliography:

1. "The Practice of Management", by Peter Drucker

2. " Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices", by Peter Drucker

3. "The Frontiers of Management", by Peter Drucker

4. "Managing in Time of Great Change", by Peter Drucker

5. "Kaizen - The Key to Japanese Competitive Success", by Masaaki Imai

6. "Every Business is a Growth Business", Ram Charan and Noel. M. Tichy

7. "Lateral Thinking", Edward de Bono

8. Adapted from Sid Parnes

9. "Lateral Thinking Skills", Paul Sloane

10. Tichi, Noel and Sherman Stratford, "Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will"

11. "SMART Executive," Vadim Kotelnikov

12. "Entrepreneurial Leadership," Vadim Kotelnikov

13. "SMART Business Architect," Vadim Kotelnikov

14. "New Business Models,: Vadim Kotelnikov

15. "Strategies of Market Leaders," Vadim Kotelnikov