Insights

Building a Sustainable Business – 360 Degrees explores six key pillars for sustainable growth, combining strategic insights, best practices, and real-world examples to help businesses build resilience and thrive in an uncertain economy.

Hiring decisions for senior level positions can save — or ruin — businesses in any industry. The right person for the job will have a clear vision of the opportunities and challenges ahead, the maturity to make wise decisions, the drive to dig deeper when the going gets tough, and the leadership qualities that will bring together a hard-working team to push forward.

2024 is set to be a year of mass disruption as long-standing business models are tested by the rapid pace of technological advancement, causing economic upheaval around the world. In the last great technological leap, we saw traditional businesses such as Blockbuster, Tower Records and Kodak disappear as Netflix, Spotify and Instagram came from nowhere to dominate.

We’ve all seen it: Companies coasting on past successes, telling themselves that they’ll start to push ahead in earnest once the economy gets better, and treading water in the meantime by focusing on modest incremental improvements in the products and services of which they used to be pioneers. They will have their reasons, and most will sound perfectly sensible when expressed and explained. But businesses should be extremely wary of all attempts to rationalise inaction, or deliver excuses rather than results. If an organisation’s key obstacles are not being aggressively addressed, the deeper problem is usually a lack of internal direction or urgency. Both of these are failures of leadership.

The effective application of artificial intelligence, as we’ve argued at length elsewhere, has already begun to reliably distinguish forward-looking businesses from those still coasting on the momentum of previous successes. Of course, this level of operational advancement remains difficult to achieve, as the integration and scaling of AI solutions represent a long and complex journey — though it is well worth the investment when implemented skilfully.