8 business imperatives for driving competitive advantage

Posted by Mark Brousseau

Businesses face eight strategic imperatives that will play determining factors in their short- and long-term success following the economic crisis, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC).

PwC’s recommendations include:

1. Sustain cost-reduction measures in order to improve margins with a smaller, more productive workforce and use newly freed resources for investments in the company's future.
2. Align risk to performance and create individual accountability measures by integrating risk at a business unit level and creating more personal accountability and reward structures.
3. Prepare for major regulatory changes through a cross-section of issues—international tax frameworks, infrastructure development, healthcare costs and environmental policies.
4. Enhance trust in your business through voluntary disclosures or independent verifications in areas such as supply chain integrity, measurement of carbon emissions and data integrity, to satisfy discerning stakeholders who now demand greater levels of transparency when making decisions about where to invest.
5. Make technology a strategic asset and competitive differentiator by increasing your investment in technology infrastructure and applications.
6. Leverage innovation to underscore differentiation, especially around hot-button global issues such as sustainability and climate change.
7. Move forward with deferred transactions and deals to help grow, protect value, and capture benefits of scale, productivity and efficiency.
8. Invest in leadership, talent development and deployment of for your employees, starting with the C-Suite.

"Executives must renew their focus on the most important issues to accelerate growth - both top and bottom line," says Bob Moritz, US chairman and senior partner, PricewaterhouseCoopers. "We believe that organizations that better engage key stakeholders while also making strategic IT, innovation, M&A and people investments will unleash potential growth that will create long-term competitive advantages."

These strategies have become particularly important as U.S. CEOs continue to respond to the significant shifts underpinning America's economic recovery. When asked about threats to business growth as their companies emerge from the recession, U.S. CEOs express the greatest concern about the prospect of overregulation, followed by shifts in consumer behaviors.

Interestingly, these concerns weigh more heavily in the US than elsewhere: 71 percent of U.S. CEOs are either somewhat or extremely concerned about overregulation compared to 60 percent of global CEOs; 62 percent of U.S. CEOs worry about changing consumer behaviors compared to 48 percent of global CEOs. Meanwhile, concerns about talent shortages have temporarily receded in the US, with CEOs focusing on organizational redesign and employee engagement and morale programs.