How vulnerable our society and our economy are to change is shown with all its severity by the Corona crisis. The reason for this is dependencies of various kinds. Many companies react to this by permanently fighting symptoms. Medium- and long-term thinking organisations, on the other hand, strengthen their resilience by deliberately reducing interdependencies. With the purpose of making its clients more independent, Yellow has developed a method to support companies on this path.
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Dependence makes you vulnerable.
It has long been legitimate to acknowledge the positive aspects of the Covid 19 pandemic despite all the pain and adversity. One of these is that it has motivated us to question the status quo of our everyday lives. Not of our own free will, of course. Because from one day to the next and for an unforeseeable period of time, we were no longer able to travel abroad, attend cultural events, work out at the gym or spontaneously have a party with friends and family. Companies were faced with no longer being able to obtain raw materials, components or goods, or no longer being able to visit customers and trade fairs. In short, Sars-CoV-2 made us realise how dependent we are on our environment.
Restrictions are painful.
We have known how valuable and at the same time fragile independence is not only since the Corona crisis. Philosophers of all centuries have dealt with it. Independence as a state of self-reliance and self-determination is thereby also understood as autonomy as well as a person’s capacity for self-determination also as sovereignty. The prefix “un” gives the hint that an opposite must exist. A fact that we have become aware of through the above-mentioned restrictions in recent months. What is sometimes more, sometimes less unpleasant for us personally can endanger the long-term success of a company.
Tension in the company.
The forms of dependency are manifold and are always rooted in the relationship of the company’s activities to external or internal factors. These include society, the environment and politics, the supply chain, technology and the market, and employees, each with their many different manifestations. Any change in these areas automatically leads to tensions in the company, which can range from marginal to existential.
The smaller the number of dependencies, the more independent and thus sovereign a company is.
Expensive horror without end.
Today, companies and many of their agency partners react to changes by intensifying or adapting their communication and advertising activities. What may well be effective in the short term proves to be unpromising in the medium and certainly in the long term. This is because the method only combats a symptom. If the company has inexhaustible financial resources, this approach can be repeated at will. Solutions that have an effect in the long run eliminate the cause. And these lie almost exclusively with dependencies.
Independence makes for resilience.
The more farsighted path would therefore be to reduce dependencies. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the number of dependencies, the more independent and thus sovereign a company is. Being able to offer its services and products largely free of external and internal influences puts the company on a robust and promising footing. Those who want to position their organisation in a resilient way are therefore well advised to name the dependencies, assess them in terms of their impact and likelihood of occurrence, and to free themselves from them along the ranking list.
Manifesto as a basis.
Independence is thus the key to greater resilience and thus to long-term success. For this reason, Yellow sees its purpose in supporting companies in their striving for more independence. To ensure that this commitment is also free of any constraints and that the client can benefit from the unrestricted creativity of its agency partner, Yellow is guided by its Manifesto of Independence. In addition to ethical and organisational principles, it creates the basis for ensuring that the focus is entirely on solving the client’s problem. Independent of the agency’s service offering.
Independence is the key to greater resilience and thus to long-term success.
The path to more independence
The method Yellow uses to guide its clients towards greater independence is structured and transparent. In a collaborative process, the company’s interdependencies are identified in four directions. In the thematic fields of organisation, market, reference groups and trends, interdependencies are identified and evaluated using a matrix. In the following phase, ideas are developed on how the company can free itself from these dependencies and which offers can be designed from them. Which measures are finally realised is decided by a simple cost-benefit analysis, whereby the long-term is weighted very highly.
