Leaders In London

According to Vijay Govindarajan, GE’s innovation guru and a profesor at Tuck Business School, everything you do falls into these three boxes:

1. Manage the present

2. Selectively forget the past

3. Create the future

Now, that’s a powerful mental formula to help you lead in fast-changing times. As a framework, it helps you continuously evolve your organization to keep up with fast-paced change.

We spend too much time on box 1., whereas strategy lives in boxes 2. and 3., he says.

Here’s a clip of VG, as he likes to be called, explaining the three boxes. You can learn in person from him, if you are quick (as time is running out) by reserving your place at Leaders in London (that link takes you to the event details).

Here’s the clip: Vijay Govindarajan explains the three things leaders have to do

Why strategy execution is life or death at the moment

In a forgiving economic climate (remember that?) you can get away with the fact that, on average, 50% of strategy fails to get delivered. But, in an unforgiving economic climate (ah, sounds more familiar) if everyone and everything is not focused on delivering your core strategy, then you are in trouble. That’s assuming your strategy is a sound one, of course. But, that’s a different subject.

So, here’s the one thing you need to know to maximise strategic execution (i.e. making sure what gets done throughout the organisation is directly geared towards your core purpose, with no wasted effort and resources at a time when you can’t afford any).

The one thing…

Booz & Company consultants collected survey data for almost five years from more than 125,000 employees of 1,000 organizations in over 50 countries.

From this data they distilled - and ranked in order of importance - the top traits exhibited by the organizations that are most effective at executing strategy.

The single most common attribute of such companies is…that their employees are clear about which decisions and actions they are responsible for.

Source: The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution, Harvard Business Review, June 1, 2008

Book by end of Friday (tomorrow): Last chance to save up to £400 on learning how to put strategy into action from the phenomenal lineup of leaders at Leaders in London. Click on the link and book before Friday October 31st.

I like this, from smith+co’s Customer Experience blog (declaration of interest: I work with Shaun Smith and his team quite regularly):

“Richard Branson has a new book out – Business Stripped Bare, Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur.

A while ago. Branson was asked about strategy and said that he didn’t run his businesses by strategies. Instead, he keeps a ‘to do’ list, that he writes at the beginning of each day. Working his way through his ‘to do’ lists, cumulatively, pushes Virgin as a group in the direction he instinctively feels it should be taking.

If you open the hardback version of his book, there’s one of his to do lists, in his handwriting, photocopied into the inside cover of the book. It goes like this:

Things To Do

1. Ring Steve Fossett*
2. Letter for Airline Staff
3. Letter for Retail Staff
4. Book – Autobiog – see photos
5. Pictures from Zambia – show mum
6. Ring S. Africa re. Lottery
7. Job swaps. Unpaid leave. Do more for staff.
8. Rail and others. Write letters.
9. Rail. On-time figures last month. Get adverts prepared.
10. Virgin America – Ring David

And so it goes on, 22 items in all.

I love the way showing his mum his holiday pictures and ringing South Africa to see if he can run a national Lottery for them nestle next to each other.

Of his top three things to do that day, two were to do with communicating with his staff. The remains of Steve Fossett’s crashed airplane were found a week or so ago, so Branson’s number 1 to do for that day is poignant.”

Branson has taken steps to define a strategy for the Virgin Group in recent years - Branded Venture Capitalism was what his strategy advisor called it, and when Branson talked to us at Leaders in London from his island home on Necker, that’s the phrase that was being used to describe Virgin strategy.

But, old habits die hard. And I wouldn’t be surprised if those daily ‘to do’ lists and Branson’s gut feel are what is driving Virgin strategy, such as it is. That’s not a criticism - those words ’such as it is’. Heretical as it may sound, I think strategy, as practised by most large organizations, that is, is over-rated. Branson became a billionaire and his companies became icons over the course of more than a decade during which, when asked “What’s your strategy?” he happily replied, “I don’t have one.” Good for him.

Tim Clark sent me his book, Epic Change: How to Lead Change in the Global Age. I like it a lot. He points out what a lot of leaders and commentators fail to notice: that the leaders’ (plural on purpose) ability to draw out people’s discretionary efforts is more important in success than strategy or other issues that are usually assumed to be primary success factors.

I also like his other central point - that the role of leader(s) is largely one of energy management within an organization; generating, releasing and channeling people’s energy.

This brief extract is particularly relevant to leadership today:

Great results over time isn’t a mark of a great leader, it’s often a sign of a ‘Teflon’ leader

“I was more than a bit startled to hear a quartet of prominent leadership scholars recently declare that ’superior results over a sustained period of time is the ultimate mark of an authentic leader.’ My own research comes to a very different conclusion. What I find instead is a pattern in which capable leaders at every level are struggling with unremarkable results and are often checkered with failure. The leader who is able to move through a career with sustained results and uninterrupted success is the rare exception indeed.

“Often these are the leaders who are either not playing hard enough or gaming the system to select low-risk opportunities that are likely to return professional success. So-called Teflon leaders are more often those who have ridden market waves but successfully avoided down cycles.”

I guess now’s the time we find out.

Early Bird Deadline Reminder:

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Forget strategy? OK, I’m exaggerating. But, in difficult trading conditions, it’s pretty clear that your mission, not your strategy, is what will deliver the discretionary extra from your people that marks out winning companies from losers.

In a paper for IESE Business School, Professor Pablo Cardona makes this very sound point, that would have strategists such as Michael Porter, who presented to Leaders in London last year, up in arms:

“Ever since the military term ‘strategy’ entered the business lexicon, considerable attention has been paid to different methods of deployment and implementation. From planning in the 1970s, to the analytical models of the 80s and the re-engineering of the 90s, or more recently, the ‘balanced scorecard’ model, the objective has been to create ‘organizations focused on strategy.’

However, experience shows that when focus is placed entirely on that aspect, the mission (the company’s purpose) is relegated to a secondary plane, at the mercy of intuition and the good example set by the company’s leader. Actually, there are scarcely few management tools for moulding ‘organizations focused on the mission.’ ”

Professor Cardona’s paper is in the IESE newsletter, which you can read online here:

Manage By Mission and other papers from the IESE Newsletter

For monthly insights like this on leadership, you might like our Taking The Lead email newsletter, which you can sign up for using the link on the right. Here’s the content list from the July issue to help you decide (each item is designed to be a 60 second read: you’re busy; who has time for more?)

TAKING THE LEAD CONTENTS: JULY’S LEADERSHIP LESSONS

1. Philip Kotler’s Ten Deadly Marketing Sins
2. Forget strategy: Manage by Mission
3. What can’t be measured doesn’t get done
4. You need a new Golden Rule of leadership
5. The power of after-action reviews
6. And, finally…Luke Johnson’s recommended read