About Us › Mission Statement
TBR's Mission statement
Mission Statement
Trends Business Research is a strategic consultancy.
“Our mission is: to create analytical insight to help our clients build businesses and economies that work.”
- We believe that this happens when they are demand led, inclusive and create high productivity.
- We fulfil our mission in three ways:
- We analyse the strategic background - thoroughly.
- We identify the strategic implications - intelligently.
- We engage with clients and their stakeholders - actively.
- We work to time and budget and enjoy what we do.
- We make the experience of working with us beneficial and profitable.
"Life is lived forwards but understood backwards"
(Friedrich Nietzsche: 1844 - 1900).
To advance an economy or business it must be understood. There are only two ways to do that. We call the process: Acquisition and Generation.
Acquisition is the process of gathering the information generated by others about the economy. We then make sense of it. This requires us to be confident about what we do not know as well as what we do.
Generation is the process of creating new information. It takes two main forms: we employ the talking armoury - face to face, focus groups, over the telephone, electronically, or on paper; we generate new information from existing data. This is a process of renewal.
Our understanding of an economy or business is guided by the principle of "gradually increasing confirmation" (Rudolf Carnap: 1891-1970). This concept captures the fact that we can never know everything there is to know about an economy but the more knowledge that is acquired, the more secure the foundations are likely to be. The principle of "gradually increasing confirmation" requires us to balance the need to understand, against our client's objectives and budget.
In doing so, we champion incrementalism. We favour taking small steps when making strategic change because they are likely to produce more successful results.
Occasionally developing economies are faced with what has been called 'lottery risk' type situations - situations where the outcome can go one of two ways and there is the possibility of reverting to the status quo. In these rare situations, radical change is appropriate. For most economic change, however, radical change is rarely successful because the outcome is unpredictable. Therefore we have to think about logical, incremental change in bite size chunks that leads to the objective.
As a result, the strategies we develop with our clients are most likely to comprise a range of things to do. On its own each may be small scale and involve few key people, but each will be a stepping stone on the path to sustainability and logically related to others and to the overall strategic objective.
Focus groups, surveys and discussions with key people are NOT stand alone events. They are part of the process of strategic change and we treat them that way. When we meet people, we do so with two functions in mind. Function one is MANIFEST - it is to ask questions and gather data. Function two is LATENT - it is a recognition that all people we meet are parties to the change process and they may need to be committed to it, engage with it or lead a part of it.
