Management
EVEN BEST SKILLS
BY DR BARRY CUMMINGS
If you think that your organization’s Core Skills (CSs) are the same as your core competencies and that they are simply the components of your operational systems that ensure your continued profitability, you may have a serious awakening looming on your immediate horizon.
Your senior management team needs to be more than just another level of overhead in your organization: it must be more than simply competent. Doing something well is useful, some might argue essential for the short term but Hamel and Prahalad (Competing for the Future; 1994, 1996) made and continue to make an excellent case for not supporting a faulty strategy.
That is, a strategy of assuming that being the best at something will prevent you from going the way of all Dodos (ask Kodak or Xerox!).
Anyone who has been a participant in or victim of
industrial tourism should already have learned of the dangers of benchmarking, especially when you benchmark against the wrong skills.
How do you identify the real CSs that you need to acquire very quickly in order to survive and prosper? You need to focus not on what the present looks like, but on how the future may appear.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, this outlook is very useful for establishing the CSs that you need now. In order to look forward, you need to understand the position you are in, either as a market leader or struggling debutante, and to avoid the pitfall of simply building a “better mousetrap”.
44 | TRAINING MAGAZINE MIDDLE EAST NOV 2014
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