Finding New Growth in a Time of Crisis

The future will belong to the prepared. While it might sound counterintuitive to spend time today identifying new growth paths, lessons from the past two recessions suggest companies that balance growth and cost management outperform their competition in the aftermath.

Accenture suggests prioritising three goals.

1) View your business through a customer lens: Product-minded organisations must shift their focus to the current, evolving and latent needs of their customers. Ongoing and localised insights into shifting customer behaviour, demand patterns and the operating conditions of important ecosystem partners are vital.

2) Rethink your channels and ecosystems: Business model flexibility will be more important than ever and having ecosystem partners that allow for experimentation and rapid scaling on a variable cost basis will be key to success.

3) Define a portfolio approach to invest wisely in what's next: Economic downturns require portfolio-minded investment decisions. The leaders going into a recession will not be the leaders coming out. An integrated and forward-looking approach to investment allocation and prioritisation can help future proof your business.