What to make of the closing of two iconic South African businesses

The recent news of business closures, particularly in the Western Cape, is heartbreaking:

• A nearly 200-year old shoe factory in Clanwilliam is to close.
• A fruit canning factory in Tulbagh is closing down, putting a significant proportion of people in the town out of work.

In the case of both of these stories, the future prospects of entire towns are now at risk and civil society is understandably outraged.

But in both cases, the glaring truth also needs to be acknowledged.

'No business has a God-given right to continue to exist.'

Just because a business is old, or employs a lot of people...doesn't make it immune to forces of competition, nor the effects of a slow degradation of commercial relevance thanks to its own strategic inertia.

Closure in both of these cases is the result of strategic neglect over time, and for us, something that is frustrating to read about.

This frustration sparks a flurry of questions for us:

• Why was management so reluctant to innovate?
• Why didn't these businesses do something about their slowing topline growth before it was too late?
• Why didn't management take the time to understand what was going on in the marketplace and identify new opportunities into which to grow?

If only these stories would serve as a warning to all other local businesses to take their strategic practice more seriously, but we suspect that blame will sadly be assigned to some abstract issue outside of the control of management, and by this time next year we all will have forgotten about the lessons from the Tulbagh canning factory and Strassbergers Shoes.

As Gary Hamel says: "An organization cannot outperform its aspiration" - so maybe a part of the reason that both of these organisations ended up where they did, was simply a running out of hope, that tomorrow could look any different from today.

It's appropriate to feel despair here, but don't let the fall of these organisations go to waste. Let them now serve as a catalyst for all other operations to commit to becoming more agile and innovative.