20 Questions for Business Leaders Part 3

The entire history of management ideas can be seen as a series of answers to a few pragmatic queries.

by Art Kleiner and Nancy A. Nichols

https://www.strategy-business.com/feature/20-Questions-for-Business-Leaders?gko=e2585&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20180222&utm_campaign=resp

HOW DO WE PREPARE FOR UNCERTAINTY?

Watch out for megatrends.

All of business is affected by great sweeping forces: demographic and social change, shifts in global economic power, rapid urbanization, climate change and resource scarcity, and technological breakthroughs.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

John Naisbitt, Megatrends, 1982

PwC, “How to Seize Opportunities When Megatrends Collide,” s+b, 2015

Anticipate black swans.

You can’t predict or avoid impossible calamities, but you can develop your company’s ability to cope. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Black Swan, 2007

 Invent your own certainties.

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Alan Kay, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1971

Pay attention to the way you pay attention.

“How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

Karl Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995

Imagine multiple scenarios.

Explore several possible futures to raise your awareness of the present and help you make better decisions by distinguishing predetermined events from critical uncertainties.

Royal Dutch Shell Group (home to Pierre Wack, Ted Newland, Arie de Geus, Peter Schwartz, and other business thinkers), 1971; “The Man Who Saw the Future,” s+b, 2003

20 Questions for Business Leaders -Part 2
The entire history of management ideas can be seen as a series of answers to a few pragmatic queries.
by Art Kleiner and Nancy A. Nichols

https://www.strategy-business.com/feature/20-Questions-for-Business-Leaders?gko=e2585&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20180222&utm_campaign=resp

An interesting article. Over the next three postings, I’ll summarize three of the questions. I urge going to the article to get a fuller picture.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT CHANGE?

Change works best in small groups.

In small groups, people learn collective self-awareness. Kurt Lewin, Edith and Charles Seashore, 1930–46

Your culture is your ally.

Identify and promote a critical few people, attributes, and behaviors that point in the right new direction. Jon R. Katzenbach and others, “Stop Blaming Your Culture,” s+b, 2011, and “The Critical Few,” s+b, 2014

Only the paranoid survive.

Disrupt your own success, or someone else will. Andy Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive, 1996

Systems change in nonlinear ways.

You have leverage if you recognize the accelerating and balancing feedback in system dynamics. Can you ride the waves of change around you? Jay Forrester, Industrial Dynamics, 1961; “The Prophet of Unintended Consequences,” s+b, 2005

Changing a company is like running a campaign.

Articulate the urgency, set goals, organize a team to lead change, win hearts and minds, and roll out the new regime. John Kotter, Leading Change, 1996

Be agile.

Strategic responsiveness is the ability to sense new risks and new opportunities in the business environment and to quickly craft a response to those pressures.

USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, “The Agility Factor,” s+b, 2013

PwC’s Technology Industry Advisory Practice, “Agility Is Within Reach,” s+b, 2015

20 Questions for Business Leaders -Part 1
The entire history of management ideas can be seen as a series of answers to a few pragmatic queries.
by Art Kleiner and Nancy A. Nichols

https://www.strategy-business.com/feature/20-Questions-for-Business-Leaders?gko=e2585&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20180222&utm_campaign=resp

An interesting article. Over the next three postings, I’ll summarize three of the questions. I urge going to the article to get a fuller picture.

HOW DO WE WIN?

Build your knowledge, appear weak while growing strong, and when you’re ready, strike decisively.

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 500 BC

Plan for your plans to fail.

The “fog of war” means that strategists must continually contend with chance and emotion. Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832

Become a monopoly.

American Telephone and Telegraph avoided competition for 75 years by guaranteeing the U.S. government universal telephone service in exchange for the sole right to a nationwide phone system. Theodore Vail, first president of AT&T (and Alexander Graham Bell’s protégé) (1913–1982)

Build big strategic-planning operations.

Hire experts — the more, the better — put them in teams, and ask them to develop elaborate plans. It worked for major companies in the 1960s, didn’t it? Kenneth R. Andrews

Diversify.

Hedge your exposure to the business cycle, combining diverse businesses and relying on your own expertise to hold them together.

Gulf + Western, Hanson, ITT, Jardine Matheson, Mitsubishi, Tata Group, and others

Stake out a competitive position.

Choose a strategy defensible against “five forces”: substitution, competition from established rivals, competition from new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, and the bargaining power of customers.

Michael Porter, seminal theorist of the positioning school of strategy and author of Competitive Strategy, 1980

Compete on core competencies.

Develop a “bundle of skills and technologies” for an edge. C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, “The Core Competence of the Corporation,” Harvard Business Review, 1990

Execute excellently.

Focus your top leaders’ attention on operational prowess: Become a high-performance company. William Abernathy and Robert Hayes, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” Harvard Business Review, 1980

Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, Execution, 2002

Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Try as many options as possible. Embrace those ventures that work, discard those that don’t, and adjust your strategy rapidly as circumstances change. Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, 1994

Compete ruthlessly.

Make yourself stronger by taking advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses. George Stalk and Rob Lachenauer, Hardball, 2004

Keep asking, “Why does the world need this company?”

Leaders become better strategists by engaging in conversations about the purpose of the company. Cynthia Montgomery, The Strategist: Be the Leader Your Business Needs, 2013

Close the gap between strategy and execution.

A truly winning company is coherent: It manages itself around a few differentiating capabilities — and integrates them with every aspect of strategy and execution, across everything they do. Cesare Mainardi and Paul Leinwand, The Essential Advantage, 2011, and Strategy That Works, forthcoming, 2016