Viewpoint: why business is at a crucial inflection point

By Dr Chris Smith, Senior Lecturer and Business Engagement Lead, Alliance Manchester Business School 

As Business Engagement Lead at Alliance Manchester Business School, I am regularly in contact with business leaders, and if there is one message that I hear repeatedly right now it is the huge challenges they face around the pace and rate of technological and societal change. Indeed, we are at something of an inflection point where businesses, governments, and societies are all struggling to keep up with these huge changes going on around us.

These challenges were brought into sharp focus at our recent Festival of Business conference which, as its starting point, aimed to outline the kind of business world we may all see in 2050. During the day I chaired three debates that brought together business leaders and academics to discuss challenges and opportunities around business transformation, work and society, and innovation and technology.

Business transformation

During our business transformation session, a key theme that emerged was around how you lead an organisation and people through profound change. We heard how consistency of vision and strategy is key, and the need to really listen to people at the bottom of an organisation and ensure that messaging reaches the top. In short, if there is an authentic and consistent vision grounded in truth then when companies begin a change programme their employees are more likely to come with them. 

We also heard the helpful distinction between instigators and enablers of change. While instigators drive the need for change. Whereas enablers can work as part of an ‘ecosystems’ bringing new capabilities or resources that de-risk change.

What is clear is that there is an overwhelming need to build agility into your organisation to take advantage of the opportunities as they arise. 

Work and society

The need to bring your workers with you on this journey was also a defining theme of our work and society session which discussed the need to provide a longer-term vision for employees and managers to seed change and win hearts and minds. 

However, this must be a transparent and authentic vision, not just built around marketing slogans. What business leaders achieve must not just be measured by the ‘what’ but also the ‘how’ in terms of values and behaviours. Is a business responding to the challenges of change in a manner that fits with the culture and purpose of the organisation? Is it maintaining a culture that its employees can identify with?

The resounding message from our session was that if you put purpose before profit and build a strong culture that includes trust and shows willingness to make tough decisions, then your staff are likely to come with you while profits are still maintained. 

We also heard how working together to create cultural spaces where people feel they are part of something more than themselves is important. It gives a sense of continuity and stability, and enables employees to be their authentic selves and, share their strengths and weaknesses so colleagues can get the best out of collaborating with them. 

Innovation and technology

Our innovation panel explored these themes further by discussing the importance of building and contributing to an ecosystem that enables change and innovation. And a key part of this ecosystem is of course data, the new constant in all our lives. In this context there are major questions around how firms capture, store and leverage data, and more broadly about who owns personal data. 

Fittingly, we also discussed Manchester’s own technological ecosystem of businesses, investors, start-ups, and universities, and compared and contrasted today’s massive changes with the transformation that took place in Manchester, the original ‘modern’ city, in the 19th century. A transformation which also had education at its heart too, with the opening of the University of Manchester exactly two hundred years ago, an anniversary which we have also been commemorating this year here at the Business School.

Chris Smith is a Senior Lecturer and Business Engagement Lead at Alliance Manchester Business School.