The road ahead for business transformation leaders
As businesses in Bangladesh grow, they are also participating in various programmes to transform their businesses for the future. Half of the CEOs in Bangladesh who were surveyed for PwC's 26th Annual Global CEO Survey 2023 responded that their business will lose economic viability in less than 10 years if they stay in the current course.
It is evident that these CEOs understood the fast-changing business landscape and risks that their organisations are going to face in the coming years. That's why many of them have been spearheading the transformation agenda for their business.
While it is important to set the tone at the top before such transformation, the success of each transformation programme depends on the participation of the business leaders across functions, and not just the CEO. Each leader of the business function needs to play a dual role – leading the respective business function and orchestrating the function with the whole organisation's transformation programme.
According to a PwC analysis conducted on the companies in Australia, Germany, the UK and the US, the top 20 percent of firms in these countries capture a performance premium worth more than 13 times that of their industry peers. At the same time, volatile environments push business leaders to prioritise their immediate operational issues, instead of their strategic goals.
To effectively transform a business, leaders must keep their strategic goals at the centre of everything they do, and become outcome-focused for the long-term success of their organisation.
In the road ahead for business transformation, leaders must drive innovation, particularly digital innovation. Many leading companies in Bangladesh have successfully implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) as part of their transformation journey. Early starters are now upgrading their ERP platforms to a cloud-powered one.
Such upgrades will be instrumental in reducing the barrier to innovation and will help realising the business benefits faster. Cloud-powered companies are four times more likely to experience the ease of innovation across their business functions.
In the 26th Annual Global CEO Survey, 69 percent of CEOs in Bangladesh stated that changing customer preferences is going to be the most important challenge to sustain profitability. That's why it is important to deliver unique and positive customer experience and establish differentiation in the market.
The goal of any customer-centric transformation should not be limited to increasing the expenditure on marketing and customer loyalty programmes, but also creating a framework for better understanding the customers.
Building and sustaining trust should be central to all business transformation initiatives that an organisation undertakes. According to PwC's 2023 Trust Survey, 91 percent of the business executives agreed that their ability to build and maintain trust would improve the profitability of their organisation.
Activities like protecting customers' data, quickly responding and resolving the customers' concerns, and consistently delivering positive customer experience are instrumental in building and sustaining the trust of the customers.
Shaping the business transformation agenda while aligning with the organisation's purpose, strategy and expected outcomes will keep the transformation leaders busy in the coming years. In a high-growth economy like Bangladesh, the road ahead of them will be challenging but full of opportunities. Their ability to drive transformation programmes successfully will be instrumental for their organisations to achieve peak positions in their respective sectors.
The writer is a partner with PwC. The views are personal