The most important driver of continued business success in 2018:

When I type “driver of continued success in business”, in Google all i get is fluffy bullshit covering high level concepts like Leadership, Strategy and Culture.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying they are incorrect. They all contribute, but the thing that annoys me is these statements normally get dished out with no experience or insight, just textbook statements written by bloggers and journalists targeting web hits who have no actual skin in the game!

In this post I will cover what I think the #1 driver of continued success is, based on my experience as both an employee and an entrepreneur.

I started my career in Test automation, creating scripts to test software applications. I loved my job, but I constantly found myself banging my head against a concrete ceiling.

You see I was ambitious and wanted to grow and I didn’t find my job stimulating enough.

So I decided to do something at the time most people found CRAZY, I decided to do a masters whilst working full time.

It was difficult, but it also changed me, it did something I didn’t realise until years later…it increased my need for bigger challenges!

I worked for some great organisations and teams and some crap ones, but my biggest problem was remaining happy and content in a corporate environment for more than 6 months!

A friend and I started working on a startup idea and in 2012 we got accepted onto an accelerator, we received funding and we left our corporate roles and started working on our own thing full time.

£350k of investment and 5 years on we sold it to Crowdmix in 2016.

And after a period of reflection I realised something…

The #1 challenge most businesses face is motivating and retaining employees like me whilst scaling and remaining competitive.

In fact my solution to this problem is also regarded as one of the biggest drivers of success in high growth teams and organisations.

A continuous improvement culture

I didn’t need to form my own startup to remain motivated, I just needed a purpose and not many large corporations understand how to cultivate that type of culture.

In fact the Harvard Business Review agree. Companies like Google and Netflix have a continuous improvement culture in their DNA.

A company that has a continuous improvement culture have employees who live and breathe continuous improvement.

Employees that follow a continuous improvement culture constantly reflect and work to solve business problems, they are conscious of their weaknesses and strive to learn and improve, they operate as a team and constantly innovate.

Over the last decade we’ve seen a number of large corporations go stale, fail to remain competitive and a number of industries disrupted by agile cross functional startups.

We’re living in a time of great change, gen Z are haven entered the workforce and past success is not necessarily an indicator of future success.

In September Deloitte released their yearly paper “Global Capital Human Trends”. Every year they interview thousands of businesses and executives and this year the biggest trend is that of the future of organisation.

Hierarchical structures are falling by the wayside and flat autonomous agile networks of teams working together to solve problems are the future.

Continuous improvement is exactly what agile teams aspire to achieve and now more than at any time in history is there a need for companies to implement a continuous improvement culture if they are to continue to be successful and critically stay alive.