What makes a winning company?

It has been my privilege to talk with many financial analysts and business people over the past few weeks about the difficulties of assessing and tracking the companies which are the builders of value in the new economy.

A broad range of enterprises are using technology, networks and information to reshape the world. This is not just about the new players, the stars of the high-tech sector, but about those brand names which are transitioning and adapting to the technological changes shaping our world.

Whereas industrialism is about efficient production processes, the revolution today is based on networked information - how to create, manage and move it.

One of the ironies is the difficulty in measuring the intangible assets that make up a large part of value in this new world. Traditional financial tools are becoming less and less appropriate, and right now there are few metrics.

Many of the brightest minds in the world are grappling with this topic. Much of the value expressed in share and market performance is based on an educated perception and an intuitive understanding and recognition of the emerging value patterns.

There are some common denominators among the players - old and new - who are performing and delivering sustainable value, and it is these common denominators I would like to explore.

Without realising it, we are increasingly fighting for the scarcest resource of our age. The stakes will be high - amazing success or dismal failure. A year-long study by McKinsey & Co, involving 77 companies and almost 6 000 managers and executives, revealed that the most important corporate resource over the next 20 years will be talent - smart, sophisticated businesspeople who are technologically competent, globally astute and operationally agile. The McKinsey report put it bluntly, calling it "the war for talent".

This is as much of a mindset as a reality. It is open thinking about geographies, people, information, markets, cultures and businesses. It is the exploitation of worldwide markets by large and small businesses, literally anywhere. It is increasingly about the seamless integration of the virtual networks of businesses and collaborators.

It is becoming increasingly evident that brands will reign supreme. As much of what constituted business in earlier times falls away, the brand becomes the manifestation of what the business is about and also what it stands for. In a major way, it will be about the brands and the superbrands owning and dominating mindshare.

Furthermore, as physicality becomes less important, by definition communication becomes more important. The way new-age companies make themselves real is through communication. Communication in terms of making itself visible and real to its market, but also communication in the sense of connecting with its clients and markets.

If ever the idea of "innovate or die" was appropriate, it is in this new economy. The ability to create and use new ideas, and the speed and agility to implement them in the shortest of timeframes, will set apart the winning companies in the information economy. Not only does innovation cycle time become increasingly shorter but the time to market has to be reduced. A new product of whatever kind has, at most, a couple of months to derive a return for the company before the next, improved version is out.

New-age companies will be fundamentally built on their exploitation of technology - their ability to recognise and put new technologies to work for maximum effect. We are talking about a pervasiveness and convergence of technology and the business. Where the business, its products and technology backbone is fundamentally integrated. Where business is constantly leveraged by the potential created by technology.

This encompasses seeing and understanding the wave before it is upon you, creating the offerings and positioning to best exploit that wave and then ensuring that you stay there. In many ways the nature of strategic planning is also going through a fundamental change, which needs a lot of thinking about. This links back very closely to innovation and the ability to continuously reinvent the organisation and its products.

Let`s take Fedex as an example. Not only was it a hero of the industrial economy, moving millions of packages per day to hundreds of countries, but it is emerging as a hero of the information economy. Linking electronically to its customers, it gives even the smallest companies global capabilities. Furthermore, Fedex increasingly enables its clients to do the bulk of the work involved in the logistics chain themselves, entering their delivery and tracking information. A fabulous example of a company continuously reinventing itself and an alliance-building computer system which increasingly is the business.

There are hundreds of organisations getting it right. Companies such as:

• Azxiom, which is built on the notion that information is money and has turned that into a 1997 revenue of $400m.
• Dell Computers, which has perfected just-in-time PCs, and whose business model is simply: "direct response to customer demands".
• Nokia, which sells more mobile communication devices than anybody else in the world and is increasingly adding new functionality which puts information at your fingertips.
• First Data, a transaction-processing company which has understood that this is what electronic money is all about, and controls more than a third of the US credit card processing market, hooking into the booming, almost invisible market for handling non-cash transactions.

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