Over the past two decades, in this time of great change when nothing’s normal, FountainBlue LLC has been working with leaders and organizations to understand and manage the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow, creating the trust-based, change-embracing workforce for tomorrow. Our latest publication highlights how we support our client companies in staying ahead of the change curve.

Navigating Change: Strategies for Effective Leadership in a Rapidly Evolving Tech Landscape

by Linda Holroyd, CEO, FountainBlue LLC, for Leadafi, June 21, 2024 

This Leadafi June 2024 article focuses on effective change management strategies for tech companies facing rapid market and technological shifts. FountainBlue’s CEO Linda Holroyd shares insights from her extensive experience, as well as a model she has created for facilitating organizational change while driving innovation. 

Change is a given, especially in the spaces where innovation meets leadership. The political, environmental, social, technological, legal and economic (PESTLE) shifts brought on by the pandemic and beyond have greatly affected the pace and direction of market and technology changes. 

Change has always impacted leaders of all shapes, sizes, backgrounds and perspectives since the beginning of time. It’s different now because today’s leaders face changes impacted by a multitude of accelerated and inter-related pressures brought about by our ever-globalizing technology and economy. 

• The pace of change is faster as we continue to leverage technology to connect to a global world.
• Technology changes have escalated exponentially as Ai and LLMs make room for broader and wider adaptations.
• The interconnectedness between formerly disparate, independent business units makes responding to change more urgent and also more complicated and complex.
• Collaboration and innovation are required, but adopting these practices also can complicate, stall and even stymie progress. 
• There are increasingly higher stakes as larger rewards for those with the insight and ability to be first movers or early adopters, but also huge risks involved for doing so.
• The continued rise of social media and the volume of empowered consumers worldwide can quickly provide wide and broad consequences for organizations and leaders.

Considering all of the above, there’s amplified pressure to do right for others, for the environment, and for those who come after us. With so much at stake and so much less time to navigate these technological and market changes, it becomes more critical to stay in front of the change curve by connecting the desire to innovate with the imperative to lead. 

Connect Innovation and Leadership

We can all tell a true tale of companies and teams who lead and can’t  innovate, and equally as many tales of companies who innovate and can’t lead. But it’s those who bring the two forces together who navigate the headwinds and tailwinds of change best. 

I have developed a model which helps respond to changes by facilitating leadership and innovation. This model is designed to strategically and proactively plan responses to technology and market shifts while respecting the interconnectedness of an organization’s people, product, operations, growth, and strategic plans to stay ahead of the change curve.  

Create a Clear Understanding of Your Current State

A foundational concept for this model is the concept that we must have a clear understanding of the status of our people, product, operations and growth. A detailed status report would provide an overview of workforce skills, of product offerings and product roadmap, of operational efficiencies and hurdles, of market share, indeed a corporate overview for an organization. 

	Staying Ahead of the Change Curve
	People	Product	Operations	Growth	Strategic Planning
Status Report	Workforce Skills	Product Offering and Roadmap	Operational Status	Market Share, Product Offering	Corporate Overview

Provide Detailed Red, Yellow, Green Ratings

Gather detailed data about the status of the product, people, operations and growth metrics for the organization. Decide where this snapshot fits in the graph below (generally it’s red or yellow). Then populate the remaining cells describing metrics that would be ‘good’ or even ‘stretch’ goals. Status reports would then be rated based on this chart and you will have a clear understanding of how to improve in each area. 

	FountainBlue’s Red, Yellow, Green, Blue (RYGB) Model for Managing Change
	Red (Danger)	Yellow (Risky)	Green (Good)	Blue (Stretch Goal)
People
Product
Operations
Growth
Overall

Evaluate Plans and Implementation Strategies

Once you have a status report, you can leverage the Change Curve model as a scenario planning tool so leaders can review the ripple effect of product, innovation, market, operations and people decisions. 

It can also be used to think through the BIG, HAIRY, AUDACIOUS, GOALS (BHAG, big ideas) which can help organizations stay ahead of the change curve. 

In fact, the model can be applied to everything from innovation planning to partnership evaluation, from M&A and investment opportunities to global expansion into new niche markets, from strategic partnerships to spin-offs. The sky’s the limit.

	Staying Ahead of the Change Curve
	People	Product	Operations	Growth	Strategic Planning
Status Report	Workforce Skills	Product Offering and Roadmap	Operational Status	Market Share, Product Offering	Corporate Overview
Evaluation	Evaluate Upskilling and Training Opportunities	Evaluate Innovation mapped to customer and market needs	Evaluate Operational Risk – financial, process, supply chain, partnership limitations	Evaluate Plans for Strategic Expansion Opportunities	Evaluate the Stretch Goal for Product, People, M&A, Partnership
Implementation	Optimize a Succession Plan for Key Roles based on product and operational capabilities, growth and strategic plans	Prioritize Product and Feature Prioritization based on people/ operation resources and growth/strategic plans	Manage Resources Proactively in alignment with current product and people capabilities as well as growth and strategic goals	Plan for Scenarios based on external changes: Market Trends and Customer Requirements	Plan for Scenarios based on Internal and External Factors

It takes a team of visionary leaders focused on innovation to plan, and implement a collaborative strategy to seize the market and business opportunities ahead. It all begins with finding clarity on where we are, where we want to go, and how we can work together to proactively navigate technology and market changes.

Interested in connecting and finding out more? I’m happy to send you appendices with step by step instructions as well as sample red, yellow, green and blue descriptions. Just Email me and/or schedule a time to connect and engage in a strategic discussion with your team regarding your change management goals. 

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Riding Innovation Inflection Points, part of FountainBlue’s August 2024 newsletter and profiled in July 2024 Leadafi article

The most successful entrepreneurs and leaders have strategically identified and capitalized on major shifts or turning points in technology, markets, or customer behavior and leveraged them for positive transformation. 

Lyft – from Taxi Services to Ride-Sharing

Lyft leveraged smartphone technology and the sharing economy to disrupt traditional taxi services.

Twitch – from Individual to Social Gaming and eSports

Twitch capitalized on the growing popularity of video game streaming and the rise of esports, identifying a new market at the intersection of gaming and social media.

Netflix – from DVD to Streaming Videos

Successfully predicted the shift from DVD rentals to streaming video, transforming their business model ahead of the curve.

Tesla – from Gas to Electric Cars

Predicted the shift towards electric vehicles and sustainable energy, becoming a leader in the EV market.

Airbnb – from Hotel to Shared Rentals

Identified the potential of the sharing economy in the hospitality sector, disrupting traditional hotel businesses.

Spotify – from Owned Records to Streamed and Shared Music

Predicted the transition from owned music to streaming services, becoming a leader in music streaming.

Equally impressive are the Fortune 500+ companies who have continued to pivot with the market and technology demands.

Nokia – Networking Solutions for the Enterprise

Nokia has shifted from being a dominant player in the smartphone market to offering enterprise networking solutions including network equipment and infrastructure, cloud and network software and services and licensing for 5G and future technologies for the Telecommunications, Enterprise networking, Industrial digitalization, and Defense markets.   

International Business Machines (IBM)

IBM pivoted from being a dominant player in the mainframe market to focusing on providing high-value enterprise solutions in software and services areas like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and blockchain.

Some of the biggest tech companies in the US – Meta, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon – each rode some critical inflection points in the 2000s and 2010s and are continuing to expand into future opportunities from there.

Microsoft – from Personal Computers to Enterprise Cloud Solutions

Shifted from personal computers to enterprise cloud, AI integration and security solutions.

Amazon – from Physical Storefront to Online Retail 

Anticipated the growth of e-commerce and cloud computing, expanding from an online bookstore to a global retail and technology giant.

Google/Alphabet – from Libraries to Online Search 

Recognized the importance of search engines and online advertising early on, building a dominant position in these markets.

Apple – from Mobile Phone to Mobile Computing

Foresaw the potential of smartphones with the iPhone, revolutionizing mobile computing and communications.

Facebook (now Meta) – from Email Communication to Social Networking

Anticipated the rise of social media and has continually adapted to new trends in social networking.

Riding Innovation Inflection Points

It takes a combination of anticipating market and technology trends and adapting internal technological capabilities, operational processes and workforce qualifications to navigate the challenges and seize the opportunities. It’s also clear that the companies mentioned above all invested heavily in technology, innovation, *and* in ecosystem development to capitalize on inflection points.

For entrepreneurs and small business leaders it comes down to three things: 

1. Strategic Focus on Market Evolution

• Monitor the macrotrends while also managing the implications on these trends on your business goals.
• Keeping abreast of industry pundits and benchmark data will complement your own assessment of market fluctuations, based on current and past customer requirements.
• Balance the need for proactive initiative with the requirement for managing risk, erring on the side of measured action and rapid iteration or proactive initiatives. 

2. Responsive Adaptability on Anticipated Pivots

• Prepare the company to be agile and flexible, while also creating clear guardrails to ensure compliance on critical people, process and operational requirements.
• Dealing with internal organizational hurdles *before* a market shift to increase the likelihood that the company can manage and lead through that shift. 
• Balance the need to be responsive and proactive with the need to serve the customer, optimize internal operations, and remain profitable and compliant.

3. Seamless and Timely Execution on Coordinated Initiatives 

• Create a culture that is agile, collaborative, proactive and empowered in order to seamlessly execute cross-functionally to seize a market opportunity. 
• Creating a collaborative, change-embracing, metrics-based, fail-forward culture will likely lead to improved bottom line results, even through market fluctuations.
• Balance the need to execute seamlessly with the need to deliver triple bottom line results – for the people, for the organization, for the environment.  

Adopting a strategic focus, responding agilely to recognized trends, and practicing seamless execution will serve your company well for the changing tides to come.

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FountainBlue’s strategic advisory services provide support for senior executives and their boards, focusing on three areas: 1) growth, 2) value creation, and 3) operational excellence.

Strategic Growth

• Scenario Planning around the VUCA Vectors – Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity
• Transformational Innovation factoring in operational and people requirements and needs
• Expansion into Adjacent Technologies and Markets

Collaborative and Exceptional Execution

• Teamwork focused
• Metrics-Based
• Incremental Innovations
• Strategically Relevant
• In alignment with customer, employee and partner needs

Delivering Value:

• In alignment with corporate mission, vision and values
• With measurable results as defined by customer and partners
• With measurable results as defined by the organization and its stakeholders

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Frequently Asked Questions

What geographic areas do we serve?

Although we are physically located in San Diego, we are proud to be selected as a top business consultant in many US cities. We do the bulk of our work online, but make arrangements for regular on-site trainings, retreats, workshops, special events for select clients.

For more information on how we can support your advisory, coaching, leadership development or mediation needs, see our availability and schedule a no-obligation zoom call by visiting https://cal.mixmax.com/fountainblue/15.

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Testimonials and Differentiators – Strategic Advisory

Strategy

1.Integration of Strategy, Planning and Execution: FountainBlue excels at facilitating a strategic discussion, coordinating planning across teams, and working with all parties to deliver and communicate measurable results.

2. Growth Mindset: FountainBlue centers our strategic conversations around the market opportunities and the current and projected customer needs.

3. Ecosystem Approach: FountainBlue excels at envisioning and creating an ecosystem of stakeholders, and engaging key parties to provide input on the visioning, planning and execution for key projects.

4. Facilitating Convergencies: FountainBlue facilitates discussions which look both at the market and customer impact as well as the operational and people impact for product and business decisions.

Planning

5. Innovation-Focused: FountainBlue helps us to focus on the business imperatives around innovation – stretching our technology, solutions, ideas, and creativity to better support our customers.

6. Scenario-Based Strategic Planning: FountainBlue consistently displays the extraordinary ability to facilitate conversations around scenarios to help us understand the short-term and long-term implications of our decisions and while also engaging stakeholders across the ecosystem in the decision-making process.

7. Collaborative Problem-Solving: FountainBlue excels at strategically bringing all stakeholders to the table to brainstorm alternatives, opportunities and implications to critical business issues.

8. Agile and Iterative Planning: FountainBlue’s ongoing support helps us all be more agile with our planning, more receptive to iterating our vision and plans as scenarios and priorities change for our organization, for our customers, for the market.

Execution

9. Efficient Optimization of People, Process, and Results: FountainBlue ensures that every conversation factors in the people, process and metrics needed to optimize performance and drive progress while aligning to values, goals and market needs.

10. Transparent, Inclusive and Direct Communication: Throughout the change management consultation process, FountainBlue worked with us to ensure that our communications were transparent, clear, inclusive, and aligned with our goals, values, and strategies.

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Investors

• It is Linda’s ability to look around the corner and identify trends that helped us serve anticipated needs, keeping us in the game, and even ahead of the field.
• There’s nobody better at connecting the dots than Linda Holroyd. Her technical aptitude, market understanding, and people orientation make her a great asset as an executive, manager, and strategist.
• Linda’s broad experience working with disparate leaders and markets make her the perfect strategic adviser and sounding board as our portfolio companies amplify growth.
• Linda has the impressive ability to listen, understand, synthesize and then deliver insightful observations, targeted feedback, and pragmatic recommendations for strategic and collaborative directions and growth. Our portfolio companies have greatly benefited from her leadership and guidance.
• Momentum is the key to any successful business, and Linda helped our portfolio companies to create that momentum in spades.
• It’s rare to see a professional as people-centered as Linda who is also so business focused and technology savvy. She brings the full package to every engagement!
• Linda is that rare executive who sees the vision and executes to achieve that vision, in collaboration with diverse sets of key stakeholders, ever seeking the win-for-all.

Executives

• Linda has the perfect balance of grace and no-nonsense, incisive clarity that creates immediate value in every conversation, driving and inspiring us all to both exceed  expectations and celebrate our successes.
• I am always amazed by Linda’s diligence, tenacity and entrepreneurial spirit. She is an exceptional communicator and collaborator, managing to tackle even the toughest assignments with grace and results for myself and my team.
• Linda combines a crystal clear understanding of business management with an enormous amount of energy for producing results. She works at the speed of light, cuts through complexity, focusing our team on delivering on targeted results.
• Linda’s ability to translate customer requests and input to the executives, engineers, product and business professionals have helped us more efficiently execute on our business imperatives.

Entrepreneurs

• Linda has tremendous bandwidth for understanding complex technical facts well enough to converse on the business opportunities, implications and direction, while focusing on our bottom-line results.
• Linda is exceptionally good at identifying what we’re doing right and also astute and creative about how we can do things even better. This is especially remarkable because she’s new to the industry, to the technology, to the space!
• Linda presents information in a way that makes people see more clearly and collaborate more readily. She then facilitate conversations and actions which positions an ecosystem of stakeholders to serve adjacent markets and nascent opportunities for niche customers.
• I have never seen anyone so deeply listen, so quickly get it, and then apply it to practical ways to build momentum for our business unit. It is quite impressive.
• Linda consistently raises the bar and inspires and enables us to drive business and social value.
• Linda has the uncanny ability to quickly grasp the business and technical implications for our help us refine our strategy, communicate our value to targeted niche markets, and then deliver customer feedback, partnership engagements and even funding.
• My team and I have greatly benefited from Linda’s amazing ability to quickly identify the core issues and then to immediately facilitate the creation of detailed, actionable, collaborative plans, focused on achieving overarching goals, and addressing identified issues. She has done this for multiple projects and multiple teams, and we heavily rely on her astute judgment, drive, and energy.
• Linda’s passion, dedication, energy and vision has supported our business launch and growth, exceeding our expectations.
• Linda’s deep experience as an investor and an entrepreneur across multiple industries helped our company to pivot our strategy, to refine our communication, and to secure paid enterprise use cases.

Sales Professionals

• Linda is customer-oriented, tech-philic, creative and innovative. She is superb at positioning our solutions to the wide range of decision-makers in our network and even better at teaching our team to do it themselves.
• Linda is authentic, credible, believable and quotable. She has taught me how to adopt these talents myself.
• Linda is the kind of strategic visionary who can envision and realize a brighter possibility, using existing technologies, resources and partnerships.
• People call Linda ‘the Mayor’ for a reason. She can connect you to so many great people.
• Linda is customer-oriented, tech-philic, creative and innovative. She is superb at positioning our solutions to the wide range of decision-makers in our network and even better at teaching our team to do it themselves.

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Recent Blogs:

The VUCA Vectors: The Art and Science Of Seeing Around Corners, January 2024

If you’re like me, you look upon a new year with hope and a bit of trepidation. Change is certain, but change is a double-edged sword. 

But how do you adapt to upcoming changes so that it’s in your favor? …

A Framework for Pivoting through Change, September 2023

So you’ve decided to change, you’re clear why that change needs to happen, and you’re successfully navigating that change. Maybe part of you thinks that you’re there – you’re done. It was a heavy lift for everyone to accept the change and even more difficult to work together to navigate it…

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Building the Trust-Based, Change-Embracing Workforce of the Future, April 2023 Blog

Our blog last month stimulated conversations around how to survive and thrive through the headwinds created by the pandemic and take advantage of the tailwinds that are stirring now and sure to grow...

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The Headwinds and the Tailwinds, March 2023 Blog https://fountainblue.substack.com/p/headwinds

The pandemic caused a host of ‘headwinds’, making it difficult to launch and grow companies and businesses. These political, economic, social, technological legal and environmental (PESTLE) micro- and macro- trends have affected us all at many levels...

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E-mail us if you’re interested in having a no-obligation call about how we can support your board and executive team or sign up for a complimentary 15-minute call to discuss ‘what’s next’ for your organization.

1. What do you (your team, your company) do for whom (specifically) and why are you (your company, your team) better than other options?
2. What kinds of micro- and macro- changes are impacting your team, your company, your industry?
3. What have you already done to address these anticipated challenges?
4. What were the results of those efforts?
5. What else do you need to do to better prepare for what’s next?
6. What does success look like specifically, over what time frame?
7. What is your potential role in that success?
8. Why are you well positioned to take on that role?
9. Who and what can help you be better prepared for what’s next?What are the guardrails and upsides for the strategies you’d like to adopt and why?
10. What else would you like to share about yourself, your background, your team, your company, your desired future state?

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E-mail us if you’re interested in discussing case studies, if you’re interested in executive coaching, leadership consulting or mediation support for your team, or if you are interested in our board advisory services.

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