Leaders In London

Too much writing about leadership and innovation says it is about predicting, forecasting, inventing the future. No, it’s not. It’s about understanding the present more deeply than your competitors do. Gary Hamel explained it to me in an interview once:

“People who innovate successfully are not forecasters. They are in touch with what’s happening, whereas the competition simply haven’t noticed. People who innovate successfully don’t see the future. They see beneath the surface of the present. And they pull together what they see into a proposition that has instant appeal for customers, but which customers didn’t even know they wanted until it appeared.

“How do you do this? Nokia are a great example. Twenty years ago the top people at Nokia got together in a cold room just outside the Arctic Circle and decided they were going to beat Motorola. Very funny. Motorola was and still is one of the most respected companies in the world, up there with GE.

Nokia succeeded because they saw what was changing and exploited it. There are three steps to doing this:

1. Find the fringe
2. Look for the pattern
3. Data is not enough: Experience, feel and understand what’s happening.

It’s at the margin that you notice change happening first. Nokia sent its engineers from Finland and told them to live in places where exciting things were happening. They sent them to spend time in nightclubs in Tokyo, in the King’s Road in London, on Venice Beach in southern California.

Their brief was to observe marginal trend-setting lifestyles and blend in, then report back. It was that experiential learning, getting under the skin of the ‘now’ by actually living it rather than conducting a questionnaire, that brought Nokia’s engineers back to Finland with an emphasis on aesthetics and design and on more elegant, user-friendly interfaces. And that was how they did, indeed, beat Motorola in the phone handset market.”

Source: My notes from an interview I did with Gary Hamel a while back.

Posted by: Phil Dourado of  The Leadership Hub

on behalf of www.LeadersinLondon.com

According to Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad’s book Competing For The Future, there are eight questions your senior management team should sit down with a pad and pencil and ask themselves. Actually, GH and CK cheated, as some of these questions contain more than one question. So, it’s more like ten or eleven questions in the end.Working through these questions is a powerful exercise for you to do on your own, in the quiet thinking time you set aside for yourself (what do you mean ‘what quiet thinking time?’). It’s even more powerful if you set aside some open thinking time in your next board meeting or senior management group and get your fellow leaders to think through these questions with you…

Linking the short-term future with the long-term

1. Does senior management have a clear and broadly shared understanding of how the industry may be different in ten years time? Is management’s view of the future clearly reflected in short-term priorities?

Making rules or following rules?

2. How influential is my company in setting the new rules of competition within the industry? Is it regularly defining new ways of doing business and setting new standards of customer satisfaction?

Avoiding being blindsided

3. Is senior management fully alert to the dangers posed by new, unconventional rivals? Are potential threats to the current business model widely understood? Do senior executives possess a keen sense of urgency about the need to reinvent the current business model?

Growth, not just hollowing out

4. Is my company pursuing growth and new business development with as much passion as it is pursuing operational efficiency and downsizing? Do we have a clear view of where the next revenue growth will come from?

Playing catch-up or forging ahead

5. What percentage of our improvement efforts focuses on creating advantages new to the industry, and what percentage focuses on merely catching up to our competitors? Are competitors as eager to benchmark us, as we are to benchmark them?

Offensive or defensive play

6. What is driving our improvement and transformation agenda - our own view of future opportunities or the actions of our competitors? Is our transformation agenda mostly offensive or defensive?

Sustaining the past or creating the future

7. Am I more of a maintenance engineer keeping today’s business humming along or an architect imagining tomorrow’s businesses? Do I devote more energy to prolonging the past than I do to creating the future?

Hope versus anxiety: striking a balance

8. What is the balance between hope and anxiety in my company; between confidence in our ability to find and exploit opportunities for growth and new business development and concern about our ability to maintain competitiveness in our traditional businesses; between a sense of opportunity and a sense of vulnerability, both corporate and personal?

SOURCE & COPYRIGHT: This exercise was adapted for Leaders in London blog readers by Phil Dourado from the work of Gary Hamel and C K Prahalad. More on Gary Hamel’s brilliant work on strategy and differentiation on his company’s website, www.strategos.com