in times that almost everybody dont know what will happen,
its when specially we need the strategic wisdom...hard times comes and go but the strategy must be steady...but flexible.
Stay tunned with the market and specially with the people and theyr changes.

Forecasts and predictions are increasingly unreliable when trying to make sense of uncertainty, because they tend to build on or refer to more stable times. Accordingly, it doesn't make much sense to try to use tools for stable times when times are unstable.

Reality: uncertainly unfolds gradually. Perception: signs are everywhere about specific change (product, behavior, cohort). Why the disconnect? New information is missed when it doesn't square with the familiar; and we are encouraged to dismiss or underestimate what doesn't fit the norm.

If we want to find the opportunities in uncertainty, we must acknowledge the value of what we previously ignored or dismissed. How do we do that? We developed several non-statistical techniques for providing better tools for dealing with uncertainty. Over the last twenty-plus years, they have provided accurate information on the world that currently exists, but is recognized – until months or years later.

Technique #1: Pay attention to events, behaviors, products, services that are surprising, bizarre, unconventional, and / or contradictory, etc.

You may not understand what this means - yet, but the very act of acknowledging what is offbeat or original will plant the notion in your brain. Capture what you noticed and revisit it in a few weeks. Continue to revisit your observations and over time you will begin to notice supporting evidence and to connect it to other happenings.

Think about why it makes sense, and then how this new information might provide a competitive advantage for your company.

You don't need software, technology or sophisticated mathematical models to identify uncertainty and how to deal with it. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that just thinking in a different way and relying on that seldom used skill, common sense, provides lots of great information and insight.

Seena Sharp
Sharp Market Intelligence

Managing during uncertain times presents both challenges and also great opportunities. To win during these times require leaders to be alert to new competitors, changing customer dynamics and speed in which to accomplish specific goals.

Anyone or company that continue to do business as usual will lose in the end! We have seen many industries completely morph…Steel, automotive and computer by becoming arrogant and stagnant in thinking. Do not understate emerging competitors or technologies but begin the EMBRACE change as a positive thing versus a pain…Remember change will happen regardless of what you do, thus use it to your advantage.

The other aspect of the uncertain time sis to fully utilize the global resources available to be better able to realize the changes occurring and then armed with your own global ‘knowledge’ team be able to turn the challenge into opportunity.

Richard Pryce

Age-old idiom that goes like “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” applies here. Organisations with an increased focus on specific regions will suffer with regional up/downturns. At present for example, organisations with substantial presence in emerging markets are not half as worried as those who have it all in the western markets and now being shattered by the sub-prime and its asset-backed securities debacle.

Such times allow the opportunity to tap into some of the other options and choices, which most organisations are doing already (ie, Top tier investment banks and Big4’s are increasing their footprint in India/China/Russia/etc).

I guess there are relationships here between the the pace of change and the capability to recognize the impact of change and adapt accordingly. Mechanistic organization and process does not recognize these relationships particularly well, (some) individuals do however.

Perhaps this is a fundamental paradox for management - a business organization is one that can survive the loss of an individual (Peter Drucker?) yet individuals are critical in steering a business organization through periods of uncertainty.

Over the past few decades, business organizations seem to have evolved by seeking out environments in which they can generate value and abandoning environments where they cannot (or not generate sufficient value). They expire when they have no environment where they can "live", or they are consumed/subsumed (M&A) by another business organization.

The challenge is choosing what environments to enter, what environments to leave and when to do either. Perhaps twenty or thirty years ago the role of the individual was in making these decisions. I remember reports in the eighties that Harvard Business School was particularly alarmed that many of its graduate MBAs recommended selling any business unit that was not a rising star. Today the situation is more complex. It could be argued that management have ducked many of the issues and changed the nature of the game by focusing on brand and outsourcing the rest - but someone, somewhere is managing the outsourced activities and the uncertainties associated with them.!

As we go forward into uncertain times I think that the definition of the environment is inherently unstable, so the criteria for making decisions on whether to stay and adapt or to enter/leave are in constant flux. It is difficult to build reliable organization and process in this scenario, but relying on individuals can bring its own high risks. I suppose that the growing emphasis on talent management in the professional press is a good indicator of this dilemma.

Bottom line is how do we manage this relationship between the individual and the organization and process. It seems to depend on where you are in the continuum between uncertainty and stability - and that is not always easy to determine.

Uncertainty and turbulence, these themes were brought up by strategy scholars during the 70s and mid 80s. There were some research efforts to measure these factors but failed to deliver any objective metric. Lots of articles and academic careers were made writing about uncertainty, turbulece and strategy.

Forward almost 20 years later and we are repackaging the same phenomena, with new twists but no effort to measure it or prove that these times are more uncertain or turbulent than those perceived y CEO and busines owners during the 70s and 80s.

I frequently ran into companies that never seem to see a turbulent or uncertain market, and then there are those who have been influenced to believe that their markets and competiton has become more turbulent, uncertain and more unpredictable. Then they react by "adjusting", making changes to their organization to their strategy and product lines raising the question if (the old argument by Pfeffer and Salancik) they themselves have created the turbulence and uncertainty in their own enviroment.

Now we have moved to "explain" business phenomena by citing mini-cases, many examples but no systematic metric nor serious longitudinal or any other in-vogue statistical method to prove if uncertainty is inside the CEOs mind or if it is real and how can we measure it. Old easures dealt with sales variance, shifting market shares and other but we never made any serious progress.

Maybe we sould go back and instead of generating anxiety and fear we should test if such phenomena (uncetainty and turbulence) is real there and if greater than it was in the 70s and 80s. Of course, there are many factors that we experience today that were not present then (internet, "globalization", the china factor and other), but still instead of running the bulls in front of the unsuspecting CEO let us go back and see if we are really dealing with a measureable, serious, relevant issue and how to measure and really understand it.

Jesus Ponce-de-Leon

To pre-empt and strategize or to act when confronted? Be it antecedent managment or consequent, some surprises shall always be in store. Smart managers are always thinking opportunity and growth. To them every uncertainty is a new project. Any new movement, regulatory change or competition can topple current plans. Implications of shift in one area can affect unrelated industries. Mobile phones have eroded wrist watch markets. Preachings by health gurus have rung alrarms for cold drink companies. Low priced car introduced at rock bottom price of $2500 in India could adversely hit mobike market at one end and enburden infrastructure on the other. Managers and leaders have to add speed to their thinking and execution. One can't crib about uncertainty in current times, one has to beat it.

My thoughts for smaller businesses published in The C-Level Advisor.

1.Update your annual strategic plan and budget to adjust as soon as you have some sense of the level of impact on your sales. Set clear trigger points for major planned expenses like new hires, capital investment and other long-term commitments that will not generate a return shorter term (3-6 months for SMBs). This sets the tone for managers to be more cautious and get approval of items that might have already been in their budget before the recession started, but may need to be deferred to maintain cash flow due to a drop in sales.
2.Look for ways to keep staff productive and focused. This not only generates value working inside the business (“on” not “in”) but helps maintain morale. Here you can work on longer-term issues and create value without increasing costs due to some additional time and other resources that could be available from a lower sales rate.
3.Look for ways to shift your sales more to products and services that will have a quicker ROI (the same 3-6 months that you would look for in a recession).
4.Customers and others will not be anxious to telegraph their own financial problems and will make other excuses to delay purchases. You may want to offer some creative financing terms that would allow them to capture some ROI before they pay. The retail offers of no payments for a year keep many sales going that would otherwise not happen. Since your suppliers could be in the same situation maybe they would rather have product put in the hands of customers for later payment than not at all? Therefore you may be able to get extended terms and pass that through to your customers.

Bob Norton is the author of four books on starting and growing companies and entrepreneurship. He runs the Advanced Entrepreneurship CEO Boot Camp and coaches CEOs in small and medium size busineses. He can be contacted at: Bob@CLevelEnterprises.com.