Stock market research tools
The tangible rewards that accrue from creating a successful business strategy in an environment of discontinuous change are as unparalleled as the challenge of divining that strategy in the first place. Navigating business hyperspace today requires new strategic skills and strategies ; it is no longer just about being nimble and agile enough to react to discontinuous change. Lean manufacturing alone will not sustain companies over the longer term, any more than downsizing alone is a winning strategy. Just in time responses and just in case marketing are insufficient in an era in which it is more important than ever to identify key trends first and then act more quickly than the competition.
What is needed to take companies to the next level before the competition gets there is the ability to strategically anticipate that is coming while continuing to efficiently manage the business on a day-to-day basis. Because so much of the future is connected to the past, let us begin by searching for a historical context into which we can place strategic anticipation.
The earliest precursors of today's best-of-the-best business leaders may very well have been fortune tellers. At one level, strategic anticipation does sound a little like fortune telling at first. Fortune telling has enjoyed quite a long history and it could be considered one of the world's oldest professions.
The tools to research the future
If you accept the need to constantly try to anticipate key changes in the environment and test your business design in light of what might happen then your inquiry must turn to how a business can do this. There is an old saying at racetracks when someone is trying to decide whether to buy a tout sheet that if the tout were really so good at picking, why would he or she waste time selling their picks instead of just betting on them. The point is that it is a great deal easier to sell advice about the future than it is to actually predict accurately. However, lest perfect become the enemy of good enough, the fact that the future is really unpredictable cannot be allowed to stop the process of thinking about what might happen and the consequences of such events. This is where research tools become vital. Historically, market research has been a fairly trivial pursuit carried out by people way down the organizational chain. The traditional pyramid or hierarchy suggests the path for prominence for researchers. The data gatherers support the information packagers and, if they are fortunate, top researchers may be asked for knowledge, if not wisdom.
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