Leonardo Araújo

Introduction: A Model for Market Proactiveness

Why do some companies succeed better than others? Here is the essential question of competitive strategy. Its answer is the Holy Grail of strategic management. CEOs, directors, managers, businesspeople, and consultants, in fact all those involved with the routine of organizations and their strategies, long for the answer to this question. Many academic papers and books have been already written attempting to unravel the enigma of competitive advantage. The answer does not come easily, however. If you are intrigued by this question, this book has something to tell you.

Conclusion A Strategy to Anticipate theFuture

We have reached the end of our narrative. We have tried to describe what market proactiveness is and how it works. We have introduced capacities that ease its implementation. The ideas, models, and tools discussed in this book indicate a direction: now it is time to act.

Organizing the Company for Market Proactiveness the Capacities of a Proactive Company

The implementation of planned strategies remains one of the toughest challenges faced by a company, the Achilles’ heel of strategic management. Most managers and executives are convinced that it is easier to formulate good strategies than to ensure their proper execution. Historical data on the success of strategies agrees with them.1 This is so because strategy implementation is a complex activity that depends on factors ranging from the ability to manage people and processes to the usually difficult task of promoting organizational change. This is why so many strategies fail: all the variables that impact on their implementation must be managed continuously.

Industry Proactiveness Creating Moments Zero in aCompetitive Environments

The headlines of the world’s major economy and business newspapers always disclose facts that help us understand competitive environments. We often read news about mergers and acquisitions of companies, alliances between competitors, new regulations, differentiated ways of distributing products, agreements signed by companies and suppliers; in brief, a varied menu of events that, in some way, indicate dramatic changes in industries.

Customer Proactiveness Creating Moments Zero in Customer Behavior

The anticipation of changes in customer behavior is a challenging task that demands special abilities from companies. These abilities include an attentive regard for the many nuances that determine customers’ present consumption preferences and needs. When screening the future in an attempt to change consumption behavior, strategists must be equipped with the ability to develop what we call an empathic and persuasive relationship with customers. Otherwise, they will not be able to create relevant moments zero (MZs) and stimulate the positive involvement of customers, who are always bombarded by numerous messages and offers.

Future-today Management Believing in What Does Not Exist (Yet)

The anticipation approach presented in this book relies on a basic premise: that we can build the future by acting in the present. When we started our research on market proactiveness, something became readily evident: to be proactive, a company has to change its mindset towards the future and start to regard it as something it can create from its own strategies.

Action Tools and Models The DNA of Market Proactiveness

So far, we have learned that anticipation is an essential element of market proactiveness. Proactive companies anticipate moments zero (MZs) in the environment, either responding to signs of change before it actually happens or intentionally creating change. The question now is how to change the anticipation mechanism we described into a real and tangible strategy. Strategy formulation and execution are the most important tasks in the scope of both managerial activities and market proactiveness. This is the main reason that we have always been engaged in the development of analytical tools that could help guide the development of proactive actions in the market, showing executives the path to construct and exercise their anticipatory strategies.

Proactive Innovation Management Innovating to change the Market

Since Peter Drucker put innovation on the map of management, the capacity for innovating has been considered a key element of competitive success. Five decades have now passed since then, and no executive would today disagree on how essential innovation is to long-term growth and prosperity. But recognition of innovation’s strategic relevance has also led to multiple — not always coherent — interpretations of the subject, to the extent that many think a substantial part of what has been thought and said about innovative processes is false.1

Proactive Behavior Management Developing Personal Proactiveness

People behave in different ways. Some are oriented to change, transcend their instructions, undertake initiatives, and search for new ways of taking action. Others, resigned and complacent, tie themselves to routine and passively wait for others to make changes happen. Proactive people belong to the first group. They are the ones who ultimately make the difference between proactive and other companies. Most companies, however, complain about the lack of proactive professionals among their employees. Proactive behaviors seem to be the exception — not the rule — in the world of corporations. This reflects, perhaps, the biggest challenge to proactive companies: to manage people’s proactive behavior.

Uncertainty Management Learning How to Deal with Risk and Error

One of the reasons why companies are reactive is their defensive posture toward the unknown. Anticipating the future surely brings bigger risks and possibilities of failure; it is safer simply to respond to the market’s demands, reproducing what everyone else (that is, each competitor) does. Proactive strategies — exactly because they deal with what does not exist yet — intensify this fear of what is indeterminate. In addition, because market proactiveness proposes drastic changes in the current managerial paradigm, it ends up increasing the fear of uncertainty inherent in every change process. All this constitutes a huge barrier to the establishment of market proactiveness. Proactive companies must learn to manage uncertainty.1