Faster, cheaper, better. This mantra has become increasingly relevant in many industries, and the future promises more of the same.

When planning for long-term growth, businesses now must account for the potential effects of radical change and fast-moving competition on markets and supply chains. Success in this new world order will require businesses to become nimble players, plan for contingencies, and search for opportunities beyond their traditional sources of growth.

The habits of strategic flexibility

It’s obvious that technology and globalization have dramatically changed the competitive landscape for many industries, and more changes are sure to come. It’s also true that today’s most successful companies have learned to respond to these upheavals with enviable flexibility and speed.

Adopting the characteristics of those companies can be part of a reliable plan to achieve long-term growth. By acquiring the habits of strategic flexibility now, businesses will be prepared to respond to the pressures of competition and meet new challenges as the marketplace continues to evolve.

One way for companies to become more nimble is to develop a portfolio of contingency options. Exploring and planning out-of-the-box responses to various risks should become second nature to any organization that competes in a rapidly changing, highly competitive market.

Many of the same ideas should be applied to long-term strategy building. In creating business plans, companies must look far down the road from where an industry is today and identify, as accurately as possible, where it is heading. The more an organization’s leaders practice foresight, the better they can plan for successful outcomes.  

Opportunities beyond “new and improved”

The upside to fiercer competition is that it challenges companies to explore new opportunities that they might have missed in more complacent times. Those with the inventiveness and initiative to quickly pursue them can enjoy remarkable growth.

In many mature industries, the traditional strategies for growth – for example, gains in market share brought on by product improvements – are no longer effective. In such industries, the path to sustained growth often involves a move into adjacent opportunities – new products or services that border its current offerings or that appeal to the same customer base.

In order to succeed, such endeavors must be highly relative to a company’s core business. The closer they are to complementing the core, the better the chances for success. If an organization strays to far from its base, it’s in danger of diluting both its resources and its focus as it struggles to create and leverage the necessary synergies.

Building a better product may not be a viable option, but making life better for customers almost always is. The best growth opportunities involve finding new ways to help customers grow their own businesses or enlisting suppliers as new customers.  For instance, a manufacturing company might explore opportunities to contract its services to customers or suppliers.

The new keys to success: Conditioning and readiness

Intense competition and evolving technologies make long-term growth an increasing challenge. Getting there requires both a conditioning of corporate capabilities to deal with change and a readiness for adjacent action.

The companies that thrive in the future will be the ones that foster the characteristics and cultivate the opportunities to capitalize on the next major market shift – whatever it is, and whenever it comes.