A Strategist’s Perspective Part B Transcript (Podcast to follow)-2015
A strategist understands that the three scarce resources within an organization are discretionary spending, talent and the ability to focus critically and reflectively on issues and challenges.
During the next decade technology will radically change how we manage organizations. These new powerful tools used to coordinate and align human effort must be understood and quickly adopted by strategists.
Again, a thought from Sun Tzu. Think like water. I want you to think of your organization and its life cycle ebbing and flowing as a result of the turbulence in the ecosystem. It is an absolute necessity to be proactive in understanding your firm’s life cycle, keeping in mind the challenges today’s disruptive technology can precipitate. As strategists, you must accommodate these ebbs and flows in order to exploit the opportunities they present or to mitigate the damage your firm might incur. Think of them as icebergs and a very real danger to your small sailing craft.
Another question. If the new mental model is that money is in every act undertaken by every employee in the organization, then the question becomes: how do you mobilize and monetize the imagination of every employee every day? How do you add value to each and every act? How do you make the ground fertile so that your employee wants to get up in the morning and come to work prepared to bring their imagination and passion for their job?
Application of these tools is significantly less effective in the 20th century, industrial age organizational model. Today’s strategists need to harness the energy of their colleagues, encourage critical thinking and enable self-directed people to make subjective governments based on their own special knowledge. Remember, each of us adds value by each act we undertake for the organization.
As a strategist you must identify the organization’s long-term vision, possibly ten years out, to include a mantra.( LINK) Using an analogy, running an enterprise is like sailing a small craft. The vision is your long-range beacon as you cross the economic turbulent water. You are required to continually adjust the boat’s jib to stay true to your course. Sometimes you reach what is called a strategic inflection point, a major crossroad, a situation that indicates the current strategic course no longer works and that wholesale changes are necessary.
As long as workers feel like citizens within a democratic organization, as long as they feel they can make a difference, as long as they are heard, as long as they feel they are part of a team, then strategists will have little difficulty in implementing strategy. However, when these workers feel they are not respected, not listened to, viewed as liabilities and not assets by management, and toil in fear of the consequences of their mistakes, then it will not be long until the tipping point is reached and these citizens will adopt the mental model of employees.
As strategists, take a reflective moment now and think critically about the current form of your industry and its substance. Ask how you might transform the form of the industry or your organization in order to exploit the wonderful opportunities presented by innovation and disruptive technology. As strategists, remember: just the act of observing can change what is observed.
As we commence scanning the darkness, recall Albert Einstein’s reflection on appreciative inquiry. He noted: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. We must learn to see the world anew.”
Automobiles. With web convergence technology, we have the ability to build our automobile in a virtual factory and have it delivered to our door three days later. Do we require acres of iron rusting in car lots? Is this an old mental model — the appropriate form for marketing automobiles?
Clearly, the print media is in trouble today because the younger demographics prefer to access their information online rather than acquiring hard copy in the form of a newspaper or magazine. Radio stations increasingly must fragment, as we have said, their offerings to meet the demands of the consumer. That form is the democratizing of the Internet where you and I can set up our own blogs, music stations, online newspapers and target specific segments of our fragmented market. This model is not government-regulated and has no licensing costs — clearly, a competitive advantage.
Crafting strategy. Strategists need to think differently about crafting strategy. The industrial age models discussed earlier would ask you generally to develop a five-year plan with the accompanying cash flow projections. Management would spend a great deal of time and effort in collecting and analyzing data and information and knowledge to undertake this task. But let me put this question to you. In today’s turbulent ecosystem, how much reliance can be placed on the economic variables in your firm’s ecosystem five years from today?
Do your people have the same passion for their job? Today management is not just about creating financial wealth. It is no longer about increasing the manufacturing of widgets on the production line. It is about creating a stimulating and creative work environment. It is about new, engaging jobs that will create viable, innovative products and services for the organization’s customers.
Employees only work for paydays on the 1st and 15th. There is need for a more fluid network system in our organizational design. The hierarchy organizational structures, for the most part, are a thing of the past. Draw circles of networks. It is about the whole system. It cannot be about “those people” and “us people.” It must be transformational recognition and embracement that no longer we will tell you, but rather it will be: we need you.
Finally, do expend a great deal of your time and effort on getting the vision right: where you want to be in ten years. Have a clear, high-level, long-term direction for your organization.
For many people, Pink recognizes that his vision of the future may seem dreadful and very threatening. Those who earn their livings as left-brain thinkers — lawyers, accountants and engineers — may struggle a bit more to adapt to the coming change. But fear not, Pink says. The right-brain, soft-skills abilities he writes about are fundamentally human attributes, which are sure to come back to us with practice. After a few generations of the information age, our right-brain muscles may have atrophied, but they’re not gone. Those who can regenerate these soft attributes first will have a huge competitive advantage. If you want to learn more about Pink’s book, visit the course site.
Form over substance. Another notion that gives rise to new mental models is form over substance. The exponential growth in innovation, in disruptive technology, requires strategists to monitor and indeed be a futurist in order to anticipate the form their industry is likely to adopt.
How many managers today take time to close the door and reflect upon the data, information and knowledge crossing their desk? How many read the daily news and reflect on the data, information and knowledge on the front page and how that will impact on the business section of the paper? How many ask the “so what” questions? The answer: a few.
Increasingly, strategists are required to adopt new organizational models, exploiting new technology that provides mechanisms for collaboration, both horizontally and vertically. We’ll have more to say about these topics later in the course.
Indeed, let me ask you how robust you think your financial projections will be in 12 months. Yet the first thing your banker requires when you’re asking for a loan is a copy of the firm’s business plan and financial projections for the next five years. You get the point: old mental model.
It is important for strategists, when developing their leadership competencies, to commence with knowing themselves. It is about understanding your aptitude for leadership, your attitude and the skills you have and/or will need to acquire to effectively lead.
It is important that a strategist sit down with a blank piece of paper and, possessing a clear and receptive mind to new business mental models, ask the question: wouldn’t it be neat if, rather than the more traditional view…? How do we make money?
Let me conclude this podcast with a quote. “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” It is my goal for the course that each of you will commence viewing your ecosystem and crafting strategies for your organizations standing on new terrain and viewing variables free of bias, arriving at informed findings and demonstrating a strategic perspective.
Most of us working for an organization, whether they are public, private or not-for-profit, have a tipping point. This point must be recognized by the strategist. When will the workers switch off from feeling and acting like citizens and simply become employees? The word “corporation” comes in large part from the Latin word corpus — body. The Greeks used the word democrata as “people’s rule.” Today, institutions would do well to remember their Latin and Greek genesis.
One such competency is the notion of left brain versus right brain in a conceptual age. Another new mental model, another synapse of light in the darkness, is found in Daniel Pink’s bestseller A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule The Future. The book delivers both good and bad news. The bad news is that people who make a living based on outdated, linear, left-brain thinking — traditional computer programmers, engineers, accountants — may soon find their jobs in jeopardy if they haven’t already. This includes industrial age management practices.
Over time, by collecting data, information and knowledge, you have moved up the corporate ladder from administrator to manager. Most people stop there. As a strategist, by undertaking critical thinking and reflective thought, you can acquire wisdom — a right-brain function. With wisdom comes recognition and a transformational shift from manager to a leadership role within your entity. It sounds simple, but this new mental model is the key to your success within your organization.
Pikes Place Fish Market in Seattle has found the secret. Make the workplace fun. They have created a workplace from a lowly fish stand to a world-famous business that has developed employees into skilled communicators working toward a common vision and inculcating the firm’s values and principles. Employees enjoy getting up at 5 a.m. to go to work with a smile to throw fish. Watch “The Fishmonger Theatre.” The link is available on the course site.
Recall for a moment your earliest memories of when you were a young child. Do you remember walking in a small cluster of little girls along a sidewalk? One little girl was out in front. One was behind. One on the left. One on the right. One little girl is leading in the centre. She had something, some unique quality that the rest of you, at age four, recognized. For some reason you wanted to stand or walk close to her. You didn’t want to tag along from behind the pack. You wanted to be next to her. There was, at this very early age, some aspect of inherent leadership recognizable in this little girl.
Reflect for a moment on two axises — one effort, the other time. Strategists will expend a great deal of time and effort on developing short-term strategies and the accompanying implementation materials. Your finances will be robust in the short term. Strategists will develop rapid, short-term prototypes, while the time and effort expended on the financials and other influencing variables five years out, while being considered, in turbulent ecosystems are not robust and should not consume much of the firm’s scarce resources.
See the course link for the Drudge Report; the internet newspaper widely read, The Huffington Post; and for online live radio stations. They have no government licenses, no towers, no stations, and are updated moment to moment. We can all do this. These Internet radio stations proudly announce they are run by real people and not generated by computers or focus groups.
So then, once the strategic plan, the road map, has been crafted, a tipping point requiring a shift by you from the reliance primarily on management skills to leadership occurs. This is not a bad thing. Just be aware of the shift from the left-brain, linear thinking to the right-brain, leadership, conceptual, soft-skill thinking.
Some attributes she was born with. That is not to say that certain aspects of leadership cannot be taught. Indeed, from the overlapping circles you imagined earlier, there are aspects of science in leadership and those skills and competencies that can be taught. But in large part, leadership is an art that is partly inherent. The other leadership competencies grow with practice.
Strategists are constantly zooming in and zooming out as they test and refine. They implement real-time metrics. They ask: what are the organization’s blocks to preventing even faster acceleration? Unlike traditional strategic planning, generally undertaken annually, strategists must review their strategies in real time. In some cases, monthly would be appropriate. Today’s strategists demonstrate the competencies required by nimble, transformational organizations, requiring wholesale or retail changes as ecosystems shift.
Sun Tzu stated that military tactics are likened to water, for water in its natural course runs away from the high places and hastens downward.
The challenge for strategists mainly lies in the implementation of the plan. To do this you need to transform and demonstrate competencies — not just those of a manager, but also of a leader. This ability to demonstrate effective leadership is a sine qua non of a strategist’s perspective.
The challenge for the strategist is to build an organization that merits the gifts of creativity, passion and initiative from its employees. Managers cannot command these attributes be present in every employee every day. Today’s employees, just as they dress in the morning for work, will also choose the mental models they will bring to the workplace.
The disruptive result, as you can imagine, is that this reality is precipitating great change in how you and I need to market and advertise our services and products. Does it make any sense for your institutions to take out a full-page ad in national and regional papers to attract students or customers?
The good news is that anyone can develop and master right-brain traits, upon which both personal and professional success will depend, in the dawning of what Pink refers to as the conceptual age, the age that shifts organizations from the information age to the age that highly values creativity, innovation, design, storytelling, teamwork and empathy — in short, organizations that concentrate on the cognitive and creative assets.
The Internet and the growth of management technology. The Internet may be the closest thing to working anarchy the world has ever seen. Nobody owns it. Nobody runs it. Most of its billion or so citizens get along for the most part by self-imposed online etiquette, not by rules and regulations. Unfortunately, Orwellian governments are emerging to seek ways to impose rules and regulations and control thought.
The necessity to transform from managers to leaders and back again. Strategists need to understand the notions of management and leadership. Imagine for a moment two overlapping circles. There are areas of mutual overlap, and there are areas that are the sole preserve of each field. Management for the most part tends to be a science, while leadership tends to be an art. The degree of overlap between these two fields adjusts to meet the requirement of the organization.
The real source of profit. How is wealth created today? What is the real source of profit? We have briefly reviewed the traditional perspective, industrial age organizations, recognizing that wealth was created from the effective and efficient use of what Karl Marx and other 19th century economists termed “factors of production” — land, labour, capital goods. This has become an old mental model.
The science of management can in large part be taught by business schools. The processes, systems, models and competencies are generally well canvassed by management schools. For example, in this first unit in this course, you have been provided a little red tool box that will assist you in analyzing and crafting strategies. Most will have little difficulty with the science aspect of management, of applying the tools when crafting a workable strategy. In many ways, it’s like baking a cake. Just follow the recipe.
There are great first-mover advantages for strategists who get this notion right. Certainly the stories of Michael Dell and the young man who introduced Napster illustrate perfectly how entrepreneurs with little capital nor significant formal business education are able to reflect on new technology and, as a result, innovate and transform the form of their industry.
There are many other examples we can turn our minds to. Banking. We all agree we require the substance — banking. But do we require a bank on every street corner — the form?
There is a transformational process, a new mental model you must acquire if you want to move from the traditional role of manager or administrator within your organization to be recognized as a leader. Throughout your training you have acquired, as a science — a left-brain function — a collection of data. You have acquired some information, and as a result you have gained some knowledge about your role as a manager or administrator in the workplace.
Today wealth is created by monetizing ideas — the conversion of ideas into money. Ideas are being monetized in ways never before possible, and the world is a richer place. This is an important concept. Reflect upon it for a moment. Facebook, Google, YouTube and other innovative initiatives validate this notion. These are examples of great wealth being created, initially without great pools of labour, capital goods and land.
Today, of course, due to their success, their capitalization is large. If this hypothesis is true, then a number of new management mental models are required. Consider, for example, what would be the new metric to measure every act by every employee. No longer, it seems, can we solely rely on financial ratios such as return on investment to measure profit. So one challenge for strategists is: how will they measure their employees’ individual contribution to monetizing of ideas?
Today’s strategists, when crafting their planned strategies and responding to their emergent strategies, must be prepared to adapt quickly to its ecosystem as it presents itself. Strategies are formulated having full regard to the organizational values and principles. We will discuss these and corporate culture later in the course.
Using this analogy, this requires a major shift in the direction of our small sailboat. It may well be as a result of our frequent monitoring and adapting the plan and subsequent emergent strategies that the plan is substantially working. Therefore, only minor adjustments are needed on the jib — small tweaks here and there to stay aligned with the long-term vision.
You can, as we have said, strengthen these conceptual skills through practice. Remember: knowledge is power, but only if you use it. It will differentiate you and your degree from others. It will position you for leadership.
Your mental model. Are you a citizen or an employee? There is no room today for Taylor’s robotic android perspective in 21st century management. Strategists today must ask: how can I create an organization with engagement in the workplace? The answer lies in part in how your employees view themselves: …. as citizens or employees.
