Kinetic Consulting Services, a boutique consulting company for business strategy, artificial intelligence, customer experience, and transformation released a new paper titled Business 4.x.

The fourth industrial revolution, characterized by disruption on multiple levels, requires organizations to adapt their business practices to become more competitive. Business 4.x is a paper released by Kinetic Consulting Services and it highlights ten essential principles that organisations should adopt to develop a new operating mode capable of successfully tackling the constant change brought about by disruption due to high technology.

Business 4.x is designed to highlight the importance of the X-factor in a high-performance organization operating in a world shaped by the fourth industrial revolution. Technology has reached an evolutionary stage where almost anything is possible, and this is what makes the fourth industrial revolution so unique and dangerous for market incumbents. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, blockchain, the internet of things, augmented reality, and 3D printing are some of the technologies enabling organizations to create products, services, and new business models that deliver greater value than previously offered in the third industrial revolution. While many have written about the importance of having an agile organization, the survey results highlight that most organizations are struggling with the concept of agility. In a 2017 survey, only four percent of respondents were able to claim an entirely agile organization, and less than 25 percent said their internal performance units were agile.

“Business 4.x proposes an operating model that captures the energy, know-how, and courage of cross-functional teams. The culture must enable self-regulatory management of team members, and empower team members to make customer-centric decisions without referring to multiple levels in a hierarchy,” said Joe Tawfik, CEO of Kinetic Consulting Services.

The business practices in Business 4.x deliver speed, agility, focused execution, and self-regulated performance management of team members, leading to high performance. Many of the practices detailed in Business 4.x require organizations to challenge and abandon traditional thinking as to how businesses should operate. It’s only when they abandon traditional thinking, can they hope to create an X-factor that will enable them to differentiate themselves from the competition, and outperform in an environment where constant disruption is the norm.