Adaptive goals are a critical technique in early childhood curriculum. Goals and objectives from key adaptive skills categories are usually set by educators to address a special needs preschooler’s known strengths and weaknesses as part of an individualized education plan designed to improve the child’s chances for academic and personal success.
Family businesses, privately held businesses have many important advantages. They can be adaptive. They can stay close to their customers and be more nimble and adaptive than their bigger competitors. They need to be cautious and guard against a number of traps.
Family businesses, privately held businesses need to evolve, change and adapt. Success can lead to unaware or uninformed self-satisfaction. Small businesses, family businesses can suffer from the BFLP syndrome. (Big Fish in Little Pond) At times these firms are important but only within their circle of influence.
Owners, Stakeholders, Leaders must avoid stagnation. Stagnation can be part of the Big Fish Little Pond Effect. Staffing, recruiting the right talent is a step in avoiding the doldrums. ‘Stagnation’ might be described as prolonged period of little or no growth in the business. Growth of less than 2 to 3% annually is considered stagnation. Periods of stagnation can be marked with contented, satisfied, unworried achievement. The right staff will bring skills, experience and the drive to take initiative, learn new skills, and advance their careers. Another way to avoid stagnation is to provide growth opportunities for your best people. A recent study by Blessing White showed 26% of employees left firms because of the absence or lack of growth opportunities. Growth opportunities can be personal and professional. Some Small business owners will ponder how do we pay this cost? How do we find the time? Some innovative suggestions might be MOOCs, massive on line open courses. Cross training is an often over looked growth opportunity. Cross training offers additional benefits, collaboration. Teams work better if they have an alliance, association and understand each other’s issues.
Family businesses, privately held businesses need to evolve, change and adapt. They need business intelligence and performance management. Business intelligence analyzes data, with no preconceived basis. It reports historical data and trends. It can identify anomalies, suggest Black Swans. Business intelligence enables analysis to facilitate potential decisions. Performance Management is a lighthouse. It monitors and alerts stakeholders of business activities as they occur. It is driven by business intelligence and links operations to financial results. It helps Team collaborate.
Family businesses, privately held businesses need to evolve, change and adapt. They need to increase communications and visibility of the Organizations success. Adapting requires sharing performance metrics, learning how these drive the organizations success. Adapting includes increased analysis and maybe even some modeling to better understand profitability, marketing, procurement and talent management. “It is much more difficult to measure non performance than performance.”
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