Nigel Lake, Joint CEO of strategic and financial advisory firm Pottinger, warns that building a ’bucket list’ for your business may prove the best way to stave off an inescapable corporate collapse.

In an article called Bucket List 2.0 - Three things to do before your company dies, Nigel advises business leaders to make a ‘bucket list’ for their company. “The’ bucket list’ notes the things you really want to do before you die,” he said.

“But have you ever thought of making a bucket list for your company? The cold hard truth is that very nearly all organisations will meet with the corporate undertakers in the end.

“The past two decades have seen the spectacular overnight insolvencies of some of the largest businesses in the world. At the other extreme, the large majority of small businesses and start-ups fail, most before their tenth birthday.

“Although the timing of corporate failure may be very hard to predict, its certainty is inescapable.”

Nigel said a company’s bucket list could be as short as the five key things you care most about. “For some organisations, drawing up a bucket list will be very easy,” he said.

“There will be long established and well understood challenges that have never been properly addressed. Once on the bucket list, hopefully attention will focus on how you can begin to address these challenges.

“The point of a corporate bucket list is to focus your mind on things to do before the company dies.”

Nigel said that writing down the bucket list could reveal some very useful things about the company. “So will the sense of urgency – or otherwise – to tick the items off the list,” he observed.

“The list will focus on actions that can be taken now to address major long-term opportunities or challenges for the business that have been put in the ‘too hard’ basket.

“Here lies the heart of the opportunity. In most cases, the items on your bucket list will represent the best opportunities to transform the performance, reach and impact of your organisation.

“As much as anyone else, Steve Jobs personified this relentless drive to discover and bring to life new opportunity, and a matching hatred for the dull drudgery of the status quo. Under his leadership, Apple released three world-changing classes of product in barely a decade, something perhaps no other organisation has ever achieved.

“Will you seize this opportunity? Will your organisation draw up its bucket list and bring it to life? Or will you sit back, celebrate complacency, and run the risk of authoring a corporate epitaph which reads ‘Here lies a once great company’?”

This press release is extracted from Nigel Lake’s full article in Pottinger Perspectives which can be downloaded for free from http://www.pottinger.com/uploads/1/9/5/1/19512909/bucket_list_2.0.pdf .

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