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There are Virgin financial products, Virgin records, Virgin
cinemas, and more. One of the few where the assets are
owned and run by the Virgin organisation in a traditional
way is the airline. For many, Virgin is just a marketing
and sales organisation that fronts a business run by others.
More
and more industries are following this path, seeing the
Virgin structure as a model for the future. Every company
now has the opportunity to go into any business that it
fancies. The graffiti on the Berlin Wall today applies
to every industry: ‘Auf die Dauer Fallt die Mauer’, ‘With
time the wall will fall’. The wall between your industry
and any other that you care to name may collapse tomorrow,
with unforeseeable implications.
What,
for instance, will be the implications for the water industry
now that power companies have decided that running one
utility is much like running another? Which utility ‘brand’
is going to come to the fore? And how long will it be
before we have Virgin Water and Virgin Power?
Behind
the fall of industry’s walls lie a number of more detailed
trends among firms that I see as being particularly significant.
In the rest of this chapter I look at my ‘Top Ten’, the
ten shifts currently taking place in corporate behaviour
that I believe provide the most telling pointers to the
future.
These
‘top ten’ shifts are:
1.The broadening of the range of products and services
on offer.
2.The creation of new value propositions.
3.The virtualisation of organisations.
4.The way that companies are getting closer to their
customers.
5.The addition of demergers to traditional mergers
and acquisitions (M&A).
6.The formation of strategic alliances.
7.The growth of outsourcing.
8.Expanding globalisation.
9.The rapid entry of newcomers into old markets.
10.Customisation.
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