Delivering customer or beneficiary benefits requires 4 ingredients; insight, strategic focus, expertise and business flexibility.

Understanding customer or beneficiary needs is the insight. Choosing which of them to meet well involves both strategic focus and expertise. Building up and maintaining business flexibility ensures survival of the organisation in an uncertain world.

Perennial business brands typically have deep reserves of money, intellectual property, favourable contract clauses, risk hedges, a vibrant goodwill bank and political influence to draw from. These are all examples of business flexibility. Any business or charity wanting immortality would therefore be wise to build up its business flexibility, catalogue it and maintain it once it is built up.

Finally, how quickly a business threat impacts an organisation is critical, since some forms of damage may escalate exponentially, while others may increase at a steady or diminishing rate.

How can business flexibility help? Organisations under time pressure try to buy time, play for time or reinvent time. These are business flexibility techniques and can take many forms in practice. Four diverse threats currently facing businesses and charities include; cyber attacks, rapidly soaring inflation, supply chain shortages and pandemic-induced workplace changes. Having a business flexibility portfolio allows better management of such threats when they do emerge, especially when they emerge quickly.

Simon