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The 10 Most Important Trends in Business

BY: Haydn Shaughnessy, Contributor

What is the single most important trend in business today? If there was a beauty contest or an arm wrestle to decide, then the big surprise would be the sheer number of contestants. Limiting the list to the ten most important trends in business today, there is a strong case for singling out just one of those as the most important.  What would it be for you?

For me it is radical adjacency,  a strategy that I have written about before.  Also on the list are:

Ten Trends
The emergence of a new type of business ecosystem, new ways to scale businesses, the emergence of a different type of leader and leader values, the rise of the global middle class, the new global division of labor, the ‘universal connector‘ or mechanisms through which business can be conducted anonymously at huge scale, the business platform, cloud infrastructure, the externalising of talent and in particular the rise of the bottom of the pyramid as a source of innovation.

These ten trends or developments are allowing companies like Apple and Amazon to cast a wholly new form of business. But the development is not confined to Apple and Amazon.

Tencent in China, NHN in Korea, Thomson Reuters, USAA, BigPoint Games, Facebook of course,  Google up to a point, all could lay a claim to appropriating five or more of these key trends and turning them to great advantage as could some surprising traditional brands such as Unilever. Unilever is also exceptional in workings its adjacencies through in the Indian market.

The topic of what makes the new generation of high performance businesses special is one that I’ve been researching with my colleague Nick Vitalari. We’re incorporating the results and thinking into in a new book. We are uploading chapters to the web from today onwards.

The book is called The Elastic Enterprise, a term we hope captures the sense that a new way to scale business, at low cost, has now emerged.

We’d really appreciate if you would join the debate here on Forbes or at The Elastic Enterprise.

Our argument is there are five pillars to the Elastic Enterprise and companies that migrate to these five pillars fastest and with sufficient competence are the ones that are returning often amazingly good results in a troubled economy. They are more than bucking the bad times though, they are creating a new manifesto for business.

So of the ten most important business trends we see five of them being especially significant – and each of these allows companies to drive significant radical adjacency moves.

Radical adjacency
Why is radical adjacency so important?

A radical adjacency is an acquisition or market move that takes the buyer or executing company into areas where its management has no, or little, current experience.

Traditionally, any kind of adjacency has been fraught with danger. Chunka Mui reiterates the point here on Forbes. A Bain study of 1,850 companies concluded that most sustained profitable growth does come when a company pushes its core business into an adjacent space. But 75 percent of companies that tried moving into adjacent markets, failed.

The adjacency moves we are seeing now are not just simple adjacencies into near-by markets. Apple from computing into music and mobile phones, NHN from search into games and payments, Tencent moving between IM,  games and payments, USAA moving into auto-buying advice and home-buying services, Amazon and Cloud, Kindle and, soon, tablet devices.

Continue reading this article at Forbes.com