Reinventing to adapt

During a tough economic period companies will be forced to adapt to a very different environment, but many won't have the leadership that can steer that ship, and so they will crash, and the end result will be many businesses going bankrupt.

Henry Ford paid his employees well as he believed that they should be able to afford the cars that they make, which is revolutionary even by today's corporate standards. The Ford corporation is going through a rough time currently, in my opinion because of strategic mismanagement, and I think a part of that is due in part to Ford Corp losing it's conscious, and becoming too focused on profit. This is evident in the fact that the main vehicles that were made in the past several years by Ford was SUVs, which are much more expensive than many people can afford. They became the SUV company, defined by making not only SUVs but also large pick-ups, which are built I believe on the same frame as SUVs.

If Ford Corp redefined themselves as a family transportation company, then they could bring in some engineers that may be able to look at alternative vehicles, or, they could just change their focus back to the early cars, which were electric cars. If they went to all-electric, and worked on making inexpensive cars, then they could use their name recognition to help change the way people view cars, and perhaps save their corporation.

One impediment to the reinvention of a company is corporate agility. For example, how quickly could the lines in Ford be changed to have a radically different type of vehicle. Unfortunately, I believe it would take a great deal of financial resources and time, which is something that Ford doesn't have, but that is because they chose to design each line to be hard to change.

Agility is so important, and going forward, each company will need to look at how they operate and ask how agile they really are. If customers want a change then a company can either adapt to what the consumer wants, which is tricky, as consumers can be finicky, or, spend a great deal of marketing capital to convince the consumer that they want what is already available.

Coming from a software background, being more agile is very important, as the changing desires of the consumer will help the company to see how it may want to adapt, to help show a roadmap.