The current economic, political, social and environmental scenario is such that modern companies have to be capable of planning their own strategies and of measuring, dynamically, performances and response times.
LATI recently organised a training day focusing on the scenario planning concept under the lead of Dr Alberto Bubbio, associate professor of business economics and director of the programming, control and performance measurement courses at LIUC-Università Cattaneo (Castellanza, Varese, Italy)
It turns out that scenario planning is actually the means of acquiring the tools you need in order to navigate unknown environments with continuously and rapidly changing conditions, characterised by elements such as hypercompetition, overproduction, evolving customers, and a growing interest in environmentally compatible products.
In such complex, volatile and uncertain environments, efforts to predict, or rather anticipate, future scenarios demands extremely meticulous planning. The analysis should begin with an assessment of the current scenario, both within and outside the company, a careful study of your competitors’ financial, organisational and product assets, and, above all, a study of the megatrends that are shaping the evolution of the world’s social and economic fabric.
In this regard, a strikingly important role is of course played by the change in market dynamics imposed by the advent of the web communities and commercial web networks that have fragmented the market, creating, within it, new unexplored oases in which to compete.
For this reason, company performances now need to be translated and reinterpreted using a balanced scorecard, a complex and powerful corporate tool that makes intangible resources measurable and thus delivers tangible parameters that can be aligned with corporate missions, visions and strategies. The quantification of financial success is now accompanied by the assessment of medium-long term phenomena, such as customer perception, learning dynamics and development.
To integrate the structured approach to business strategy outlined by Prof. Bubbio, there followed a lecture by Prof. Dipak Pant, founder and coordinator of the Unit of Interdisciplinary Studies for sustainable economy at LIUC-Università Cattaneo in Castellanza.
Prof. Pant, who is considered one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable development, explained that the survival and competitiveness of structured companies cannot be divorced from the social and environmental sustainability of industrial operations.
Indeed, close attention to the need to respect our world and its resources may well prove to be the source of new economic and emotional drivers that we can exploit in order to increase our competitiveness.