During his interview with Box CEO Aaron Levie, John Chambers, Executive Chairman of Cisco Systems, got the Keynote audience's attention at the BoxWorks 2015 conference (box.com) when he said that 40% of all Fortune 500 businesses today will die in 10 years. We see this potential risk increasing in every company from startups, small businesses, midsize companies... to Fortune 1000 international enterprises.  Is your company going to be one of the "survive and thrive" companies by 2025?

"At least 40% of all businesses will die in the next 10 years... if they don't figure out how to change their entire company to accommodate new technologies"    

- John Chambers, Executive Chairman, Cisco Systems

We've summarized five major topics discussed by John in several recent talks and some tips on how to survive and thrive:

1. Leaders Need to Reinvent Themselves
   Organizational and leadership changes will enable you to innovate faster. The best leaders are creating a "digital agenda" for their companies and evaluating how technology can be used to improve and change every aspect of their business before their competitors.  In most situations, you also need to change your organizational structure and process to get the desired outcomes.  
    
2. Get Ahead of Market Transitions
   Every industry is quickly being transformed by all this new consumer (worker) and business technology... and it's not stopping.  If you hide your head in the sand and do little or nothing, you will be squashed over time by new startups or competitors focusing on the new ways of doing business.
    

3. Establish Partnerships
   Most business professionals were taught in business schools and though years of experience to plan for linear growth. However, now you need to think differently and plan for potential exponential growth. Establishing strategic partner programs is one of the key strategies to quickly grow your business.

4. Digitalization in inevitable in your business, so get on board now
   Every business is going to be significantly changed by the coming technology. According to John, if you don't figure out how to change your whole business to adapt and implement cloud / mobile and internet of things (IoT) etc. you will face extinction. He predicts that 40% of companies will die in the next 10 years and he confirmed that number is "conservative."
    
5. Invest in new People Skills & Continuous Training
   Going forward, your people will have to adapt to new business technology every 2-4 years. You need to implement new low-cost ways of continuous training. The training needs to be broken down into small video sections, self-paced and cloud-based to address the Millennial way of learning.  It turns out that most of us prefer this approach to training.

Concluding Remarks

The good news is that we are at the beginning of all this change.  The bad news is that most leaders have not internalized that this change needs to start happening now and it will not stop in the foreseeable future.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider reading our other blog articles. They contain our thoughts on Technology Trends, Transformation Tips and Sales Productivity Best Practices.

Please contact us if you have any questions or need help transforming your business using the latest technology to survive and thrive in the future. It always helps to get another outside perspective to solving a problem.