MarketBusters out in Russian!
We’re very pleased that MarketBusters has now been translated into many languages - including Japanese, Chinese (3 versions!), Thai, Portugese and others. The latest (at least I think) is a version in Russian, which arrived across my desk today.
It will be interesting to see what our Russian readership makes of some of the examples.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 28, 2008
When Yesterday’s Leaders Can’t Lead Tomorrow’s Business-some ideas from Doz & Kosonen
One of the enduring dilemmas of any successful business is that there will inevitably come a time when those who led the great success of the past will be faced with the erosion of what made the past so successful, and the need to develop new capabilities, skills, market positions and the like. Often, such a shift is deeply threatening to these former leaders, setting in place all kinds of dysfunctional behavior throughout the organization and ultimately hampering its ability to effectively mobilize around new opportunities. But what can you do? These folks are often very respected, have deep internal networks, are seen as representative of the company to outsiders and have considerable formal and informal authority.
An interesting idea for how to deal with this is in Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen’s brand-new book Fast Strategy. The book is getting great reviews for its practical but novel ways of thinking about strategic agility.
The excerpt that caught my attention is on page 91-92, as follows:
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 24, 2008
Pfizer’s Office of the Future and the Great Irony of Information Work
It has long fascinated me that an entire class of information work that used to be done by trained professionals is now being muddled through by the rest of us. I’m referring of course to data archiving, preservation of records, doing small research projects, preparing presentations and the like—which used to have skilled people to handle them. Well, turns out the next wave may bring some relief to those of us who wonder what we could be accomplishing if we weren’t revising the dancing baloneys on the PowerPoint presentation one more time.
Pfizer has adopted an innovative program call Office of the Future (or OOF) which allows employees to selectively outsource so-called “scut work” to two firms in India, for a price. The benefits to Pfizer people? Shorter turnaround times for projects, more consistent handling of tasks and of course time saved for higher value added work. In my own life I’ve learned the benefits of having a little help. My assistant, Anne Ferguson and I have been working together virtually for three years now, and it has been wonderful.
For a full description check out the Fast Company article.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 22, 2008
So-called rigorous but meaningless research - From Ian MacMillan
Co-author Ian MacMillan made the following observation, which I thought merited a post here:
In his words:
Our obsession with research that “rigorous"is driving out relevance.
Here is a beauty: The author did an exquisitely detailed analysis of all start-ups of firms making components for manufactured products, conducted over a period of decades. The author then went into a methodological frenzy and eventually tested fourteen regression models. The conclusions (once you cut through the obfuscating theoryspeak) were:
Component manufacturing start-ups are more likely to choose a location:
a. The more manufacturers there that are making products needing these components
b. The more products being used there that need replacement components
c. The more people there that use the products which need these components
d. The more suppliers that are there that are making raw material for the components
This typifies a lot of the work that you see in the “Top Journals” today - arcane theoretical arguments, leading to excruciatingly detailed data collection and exquisite analyses, that in turn lead to banal and/or self evident conclusions.
Does anyone else have examples?
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 22, 2008
More examples of the benefits of early warnings and leading indicators
As I often say in class, information that we use to make decisions falls into three categories:
1) Lagging indicators: Often highly accurate and precise, but give us data only about the past;
2) Current indicators: Tell us where we are at the moment - for example, what inventory turns are right now;
3) Leading indicators: Give us information (albeit subjective information) about where we might be headed. Leading indicators belong in every company’s strategic toolkit, but all too often they are completely overlooked.
A really good recent example of a company that effectively acted on leading indicators was noted in the Wall Street Journal of January 14, 2008. The Journal mentions how YRC Worldwide, a global transportation company, noted that the size of shipments it was handling for customers was declining as was the size of those shipments. Anticipating a major retail slowdown, which would have harmed their business, the executive team laid off staff, took about 12% of its vehicles out of commission and otherwise prepared for a much slower season than normal.
In my experience, such bold action is often not taken in time. Why? Companies don’t get the data for starters. Or they get it and don’t know what to do with it. Or even worse, they get it, know what to do with it, but don’t believe it (sub-prime, anyone?). Or worst of all is to avoid taking action in the futile hope that all will recover on its own.
So, questions to ponder: Are you getting enough data on leading indicators to inform your decision making? And if you get it, are you regularly spending time to make sense of it?
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- Posted Rita McGrath on January 15, 2008
