Business Trends for Future

Business in today’s world is undergoing paradigm change and every year industry has seen changes in the factors having critical impact of nature of Business. Companies struggle hard to come in terms with the fast pace of change happening in the world of business. Customer taste, loyalty, technology and economic factors undergo rapid changes within very short span of time. Mckinsey has come up with list of Top 10 trends which are likely to have major impact in 2006.


Macroeconomic trends

1. Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly, not just globally, but also regionally.

2. Public-sector activities will balloon, making productivity gains essential. The unprecedented aging of populations across the developed world will call for new levels of efficiency and creativity from the public sector.

3. The consumer landscape will change and expand significantly. Almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace in the next decade as economic growth in emerging markets pushes them beyond the threshold level of $5,000 in annual household income—a point when people generally begin to spend on discretionary goods.

Social and environmental trends

4. Technological connectivity will transform the way people live and interact. The technology revolution has been just that. Yet we are at the early, not mature, stage of this revolution. Individuals, public sectors, and businesses are learning how to make the best use of IT in designing processes and in developing and accessing knowledge. New developments in fields such as biotechnology, laser technology, and nanotechnology are moving well beyond the realm of products and services.

5. The battlefield for talent will shift. Ongoing shifts in labor and talent will be far more profound than the widely observed migration of jobs to low-wage countries. The shift to knowledge-intensive industries highlights the importance and scarcity of well-trained talent. The 33 million university-educated young professionals in developing countries is more than double the number in developed ones.

6. The role and behavior of big business will come under increasingly sharp scrutiny. As businesses expand their global reach, and as the economic demands on the environment intensify, the level of societal suspicion about big business is likely to increase.Business, particularly big business, will never be loved. It can, however, be more appreciated.

7. Demand for natural resources will grow, as will the strain on the environment. In China, for example, demand for copper, steel, and aluminum has nearly tripled in the past decade.The world's resources are increasingly constrained. Water shortages will be the key constraint to growth in many countries.

Business and industry trends

8. New global industry structures are emerging. In response to changing market regulation and the advent of new technologies, nontraditional business models are flourishing, often coexisting in the same market and sector space.

9. Management will go from art to science. Bigger, more complex companies demand new tools to run and manage them. Indeed, improved technology and statistical-control tools have given rise to new management approaches that make even mega-institutions viable.

Today's business leaders are adopting algorithmic decision-making techniques and using highly sophisticated software to run their organizations. Scientific management is moving from a skill that creates competitive advantage to an ante that gives companies the right to play the game.

10. Ubiquitous access to information is changing the economics of knowledge. Knowledge is increasingly available and, at the same time, increasingly specialized. New models of knowledge production, access, distribution, and ownership are emerging. We are seeing the rise of open-source approaches to knowledge development as communities, not individuals, become responsible for innovations.

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Have you made the right decision ?

One of the typical problems being faced by many of those who pursue management as a career is the uncertainty about having a match of skill and personality.

Often we ask ourselves is this the right career for me?

Many people decide to purse management as a career because of the typical halo of good life, money and status attached to this career choice. Liberalization and globalization has had the maximum impact on fueling the mad frenzy about management as a career choice.

Here are few tips by All Business.com for those who are planning or already pursuing management as a career will find useful.

Can you embrace the concept of “career self-management”?

Lifelong employment anywhere is unlikely, which is why you must take responsibility for your own career. Are you willing to do that? Do you have the energy it takes -- and the creativity -- to identify your skills and abilities and channel them into current and future opportunities?

Are you committed to continuing your education?

Your company can support your development as a manager, but you should take the lead. In addition to finding resources, you must obviously make the commitment to spend time learning.


How well do you handle difficult situations and conflict?

Being a manager can be exhilarating and profoundly fulfilling, but it can also be a pain in the neck. Can you separate your personal views about people with how they might conduct themselves on the job? Being able to make the distinction is a critical and necessary skill when, as a manager, you must reprimand or even terminate an employee.


Do you set goals?

Without goals you can’t change and if you can’t change, you won’t grow. And without growth a successful career in management is practically impossible.


Can you handle being unpopular?

Being a manager sometimes means taking positions that are unpopular with your staff. You may not even personally agree with them yourself. However, you must keep overall company goals and objectives your number one priority, despite any potential impact on certain members of your group.


Can you deal with a variety of personalities?

Many managers will tell you that the hardest part of their jobs is handling so many different personalities. In addition to making sure various jobs get done, a manager must juggle traits and quirks that, while annoying, must be dealt with.

Performance Assessment Challenge

Accurate Performance assessment of every employee is a challenge being faced by most of the organizations. The process of performance measurement may be process driven and objective but if at all it truly measures one’s true contribution and performance potential for future is a debatable issue. It’s also one of the critical challenges being faced by HR folks today.Tim Adams tries to find a solution on how to reduce the guess work involved in performance assessment. His views on some typical observation during assessment are;

One-Dimensional Assessments Don’t Work:
Even organizations that recognize the ineffectiveness of standard assessment processes for measuring individual knowledge have had a difficult time identifying better solutions. Typically, they have improved the technical aspects of assessment processes, but they have not been able to overcome the “guesswork” factor involved in the testing outcome. In fact, this cannot be avoided in a single-dimensional assessment approach.

I Guess I Know This…
One of the most important questions in training these days is how to ensure that employees really understand what they need to know to perform quickly, confidently and reliably. Current multiple-choice tests fail to measure the degree of confidence that individuals have in their knowledge or the amount of information they retain that can be applied in the performance of their duties.

I Know I’m Right—Even If I’m wrong!
In addition to individuals who guess correctly (those fortunate few “lucky guessers” who knew they didn’t have a clue), there are also individuals who may be wrong about an answer but strongly believe that their wrong answer is correct. This high level of confidence in incorrect information is commonly referred to as “confidently held misinformation.” Such misinformation not only leads to poor—sometimes even dangerous—decisions and errors in performance, but can also become counterproductive to learning new material effectively.

Confidence-Based Assessments

Recognizing some of the issues around potential errors in the assessment process, UCLA professor James Bruno developed an assessment methodology that remedies these problems by using a two-dimensional assessment model that:

Identifies a person’s certainty of information as an essential element in defining that person’s knowledge.

Employs a method of testing, scoring and interpreting the test results based on a model that underlines the confidence a person has in the information as well as identifying the correctness of their answer.

Bruno’s research noted that traditional multiple-choice testing techniques used to assess the extent of a person’s knowledge in a subject-matter area typically include a number of possible choices that are selectable by right or wrong answer.

Covering Both Bases

Using confidence-based assessment methods allows employers to determine not only whether or not their employees are able to identify the best answer, but also how confident they are in their answers. Have they truly mastered the appropriate knowledge? Will they retain it? Will they be able to apply it? Test scoring based on confidence-based assessment evaluates not only the employees’ degrees of correctness, but also their level of confidence in gauging what they know and don’t know.

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