What are your business challenges today?

Mik You make some good points. The COVID-19 pandemic is severely affecting the world’s economies at a time when businesses were already adapting to volatility and uncertainty as a way of life. With the economic outlook and threats of all kinds continuing to test even the strongest organisations, companies are facing a variety of challenges as they strive to find growth and stay competitive. From improving operational effectiveness to expanding into new markets, we’re here to help. Explore the sections below to find insights and specialists that can help you find growth and value in this challenging business landscape. 1. Integrity. Business has never faced the type of moral challenges that it faces in today’s global economy. Everyone is struggling to be more successful, to make the next quarterly earnings estimate, to keep their job, to earn a big bonus, or to compete effectively. The temptation to cut corners, omit information, and do whatever it takes to get ahead occur every day. Many business employees and executives succumb. Sadly, the theme becomes highly infectious and soon people actually start to feel like lying a little, or stealing a little, or deceiving others, is just “a part of business”. These practices erode the trust that needs to exist between employers and employees, between business partners, between executives and shareholders. Without trust, the business will not be able to compete effectively and it will eventually fail. 2. Cash, Borrowing, and Resource Management. Cash is King! We’ve all heard this maxim and it is more true today than ever before. A healthy profit may look nice on your financial statements, but if capital expenditures or receivable collections are draining your cash, you won’t be able to stay in business for long. Too often executives and small business owners fail to focus enough on cash flow generation. In order to head off this problem, businesses must either be adequately capitalized and must shore up cash reserves to meet all obligations as they are needed and to handle downturns and emergencies that may arise. Cash management becomes even more important during recessionary times when cash is flowing more slowly into the business and creditors are less lenient in extending time to pay. For small businesses, handling business accounting and taxes may be within the capabilities of the business owners, but professional help is usually a good idea. The complexity of a business’ books go up with each client and employee, so getting assistance with managing cash and the bookkeeping can allow you to excel when others are calling it quits. Cash flow challenges are exacerbated by the lending climate, particularly for small businesses. Bankers are unlikely to be more liberal in their lending policies any time soon. 3. Increased selection and competition. It’s never been easier to start a business. Gone are the days when it took weeks, months, and a myriad of forms to get your business started. Now if you can buy a domain name and register your business online, you're in business. However, staying in business is a much more complicated matter. While business expertise was once an expensive and time consuming endeavor, you can now find experts online for many questions that you might encounter. There is help to starting an online store, for example, for getting business cards and marketing materials – all at a very reasonable cost. The ease of starting a business creates a much broader level of competition. You might find different business competing for each product you sell and new business that focus on a single item and spend all their time and focus on being the very best at just one thing. This increase in overall selection and more focused completion will make it more difficult for businesses of all sizes to retain customers who can change their suppliers with the click of a mouse. It's a battle of perception, focus, and marketing. Business owners who master these elements and provide a great customer experience will win the sale. 4. Marketing and Customer Loyalty. Along the same lines as increased selection and competition is the challenge to market to potential customers effectively and retain your existing customers. Smartphones, social media, texting, email, twitter and other communication channels are making it easy for businesses and individuals to get their messages out. Figuring out the right marketing channels is key for businesses to be successful in the future. Where are your customers and how do you best reach them and what is the right messaging? Once you get a new customer, how do you keep these customers when they are constantly barraged by competitors of all types, sizes, and locations, trying to convince them that they can do it better or provide it cheaper? Identifying what your customers want and doing a better job of giving it to them will make all the difference in your company’s future. The conservative spending climate is also causing a shrinking customer base. Consumers are still quite conservative with their pocketbooks, and as a result, organic growth from current and new customers is not growing as quickly as businesses would like. Business owners and executives are spending more time figuring out how to go above and beyond to keep existing customers, while at the same time figuring out how to cost-effectively reach new customers -- without competing solely on price, which always ends up to be a race to the bottom. 5. Uncertainty. All of us, and especially business leaders find great discomfort in uncertainty. Because of global debt and economic struggles, uncertainty is more pronounced today than in the past. The sad news is that uncertainty leads to a short-term focus. Due to uncertainty, companies tend to shy away from long-term planning in favor of shorter-term goals. While this might feel right, a failure to strategically plan five to ten years into the future can end up destroying value. Businesses must learn to balance the need for a more reactive, short-term focus with the need for informed, long-term strategies. Uncertainty tends to put many into a general malaise – unable to get anything done. The ever-running news cycle leaves everyone feeling a bit on edge. This causes business owners and executives to hunker down and customers to stop spending. You need to shut out the world ending news and get back to work." 6. Regulation. A changing regulatory environment is always of concern in certain industries, but uncertain energy, environmental and financial policy is wreaking havoc for nearly all companies today. Whether a demand from customers or shareholders to become more “green,” or the threat of increased costs due to new carbon taxes, environmental considerations are among the biggest challenges businesses face today. And we don’t need to give too much press to the current issue of financial reform and regulation, although we do have some opinions about how to prepare for that if you’re a bank or a brokerage house. The problems to be solved are to understand the meaning of regulation in your industry, its implications for your business, and to develop the skills necessary to deal with it. Two key areas of regulatory challenges are taxes and health care. Lawmakers are still haggling over what's called the fiscal cliff, the combination of billions of dollars in tax increases and budget cuts. Even if Congress reaches an agreement, businesses won't have the certainty they need to make intelligent decisions. When Congress does reach an agreement, it most likely won't be comprehensive enough that it won’t need to be revisited again next year. Health care has been another challenge for businesses. The new Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) is so complex that state and local governments won’t know what to do and businesses will have to devote significant time and resources to understanding the law — or for a small business, hiring some professional to help them do it. They'll have to get their arms around the law, look at their options, learn more about the exchanges and determine how to make it all work. Many businesses don't yet know whether their states will be creating exchanges, or whether they'll have to go into the national system — and they don't know what that will mean for their costs. For some businesses, that information will help them decide whether they will buy insurance, or whether they'll decide it's cheaper to not provide coverage and just pay the government a $2,000-per-employee fine. For those who have close to 50 workers, they may decide to not hire more workers in order to remain outside the law's jurisdiction. 7. Problem Solving and Risk Management. A major challenge for all companies is identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks, including human and financial capital, in addition to the macro economy. The lack of a sophisticated problem-solving competency among today’s business leaders is limiting their ability to adequately deal with risks facing their businesses. This is why corporate managers tend to jump from one fire to another, depending on which one their executives are trying to put out, and in many cases the fast-changing business environment is what ignites these fires. So what is the problem to be solved? We believe, to do well into the future, companies must resolve that problem solving is the key to business, then develop a robust problem-solving capability at all levels. As companies proceed to identify risks, they will then have the problem solving skills to know how to best mitigate them. 8. Finding the right staff. Without exception, every business executive I speak to says that one of their biggest challenges is staff – finding the right staff, retaining them, and ensuring they buy into the vision of the business. I'll freely admit that I have no magic answers here. In fact, if someone could develop a formula for recruiting and engaging the right team members, they would make millions. A small business is almost like a family, and, like many families, they can work well, or they can be dysfunctional. In big companies, the human resource challenge is politics and fit in the workplace, but when it comes to small business, its personalities and skill. When you work in a small environment, each team member's personality can have a huge impact on the harmony and productivity of the business. The key is to learn how to deal with different personalities, figure out what drives each individual team member and tailor your management accordingly. Despite high unemployment, many companies struggle to find the right talent with the right skills for their business. Many new manufacturing jobs require high-tech skills. They include positions at factories where computers are used to create products like airplane parts and machinery. And some require several years of training. Because of changing technology, businesses are struggling to find qualified workers with IT skills, problem solving abilities, and deductive reasoning skills. As I consider my own business and its challenges, I agree with Neal's conclusions that these are the critical 8. How about your company? Have we named the right issues? Would you like to include others? [removed] Author: Cheryl Conner | Google+ uncaptioned Gallery: The Most Annoying Business Slang 33 images View gallery Cheryl Conner Cheryl Conner I am an entrepreneur and communications expert from Salt Lake City and founder of SnappConner PR. I am the author of Beyond PR: Communicate Like A Champ In The Digital… Read More Print Reprints & Permissions Pause Unmute Current Time 0:22 / Duration 1:02 Share Fullscreen 7,052 views|Sep 7, 2020,06:00am EDT 21st Century Learning: More Than Just Resiliency Qatar Foundation Stavros N. YiannoukaBrand Contributor Qatar FoundationBRANDVOICE| Paid Program Leadership Right now, millions of educators are grappling with the new realities of teaching in the midst of a pandemic: extended periods of disruption, a lack of resources to support evolving needs and absent or disengaged students whose learning loss will prove to be enormously difficult to overcome with each passing week. However, education has always had a great deal of messy issues to resolve. Equity and access to quality education are not the mainstay of learning for the majority of the world’s population, and there have been more than enough examples to demonstrate how this sector has struggled to reconfigure itself to a 21st Century context. Serious boy doing homework while using laptop and mobile phone at home GETTY Over the past few months, we have expected schools to be resilient against the acceleration of these issues, but the exhaustion of simply surviving has begun to take its toll. We know what doesn’t work, so now is the opportune time to make that fundamental shift and create new, sustainable, pathways to quality education. Value vs Success There has always been an apparent divergence between mainstream curriculum learning and the skills required to thrive in the real world. Academic ‘success’ still largely relies on outdated methods of assessment which generally lack an understanding of what learning actually looks like. However, there are good examples of how schools have begun to evolve this mindset. Rather than focus on arbitrary measures of learning, The London Interdisciplinary School focuses instead on building global competencies which in turn, create intellectually curious problem solvers who are capable of dealing with the complexity of the real world. In doing so, schools like this can create enough space for content and learning based not on narrow metrics of success, but rather the needs of the students and the context in which they live. Innovative Ecosystems The education sector has often been wary of change, but as ‘future-proofing’ becomes more urgent, tapping into the experience of those outside of this silo will be the key to its future survival. A great example of this has been the developing relationship between the edtech space and academic leaders. In the past, there was a tangible disconnect between practitioners and entrepreneurs; they simply didn’t speak the same language. The result? Technology that did not meet the needs of the classroom, and teachers who were increasingly cynical about any new tool that came their way. In an effort to resolve this, ecosystems like Edtech Denmark were created to ensure continued dialogue between these key stakeholders, and the effect of this has been a deeper understanding of what makes edtech work and why. Beyond its ability to build greater innovations, ecosystems like this have become incredibly important because they encourage a culture of iterative design and experimentation that serves to further enrich the education space. Back to Basics As the new term begins, we find ourselves up against incredibly high stakes, and many of the students re-entering classrooms will face an immediate disadvantage, not because they lack access to resources, but rather due to the way that these resources are used. When the pandemic began, there was a rush to enter into the digital space without any real understanding of how to navigate within it. Edtech has, in many cases, provided immediate value to schools’ most recent pain points; however the innovation of any tool is tied to the capacity of its users. Only effective teachers will be able to leverage technology in a way to supplement, rather than replace, good pedagogy. If we are to see meaningful transformation in the way we learn, greater investment should be made in creating practitioners who are empowered enough to lead this change. Reimagining education does not require rebuilding it. Instead, we should take this opportunity to have a serious re-examination of purpose. What is the role of the modern teacher? How do we leverage existing knowledge for new gains? What should education actually help students achieve? For a long time, the education sector has managed to avoid this type of introspection, and there is still a temptation to return to some semblance of the status quo. However, the pandemic is forcing us embrace the existential crisis we’re now facing and learn from the hard knocks we’ve taken. Demonstrating resilience in education was necessary. Without it, in a matter of months, children could have been set back years. As an immediate response to a challenge we didn’t have a template for, it has served its purpose. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves that resilience means, or leads to, transformation. It has allowed us to cope, not to advance. And it remains to be seen whether the lessons we say our resilience experience has taught us outlive a pandemic. Education needed fundamental change before COVID-19, and it needs it even more now. It’s still within our power to make it happen. But if we don’t look beyond simply being resilient, we’ll certainly never get there. Stavros N. Yiannouka Stavros N. Yiannouka Stavros N. Yiannouka is the CEO of the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), a global think tank of the Qatar Foundation. WISE is dedicated to enabling the future