The Four Guardrails That Enable Agility
Nick van der Meulen
Key Insight: Defining constraints can help large companies foster employee autonomy and agility while maintaining organizational and strategic alignment.
Top Takeaways: Organizational agility requires that employees be empowered to make fast decisions, take risks, and consider new ideas, but companies also need a certain level of coordination to reach their strategic goals. Creating an environment in which employees are empowered to act autonomously but within carefully defined constraints allows even large companies to operate faster, reduce risk, and maintain strategic alignment. By implementing four decision-making guardrails based on purpose, democratized data, minimum viable policies, and appropriate resources, established organizations can better compete with smaller upstarts.
A Better Way to Unlock Innovation and Drive Change
Diya Kapur Misra, Linda A. Hill, Gaurav Laroia, and Christiane Hamacher
Key Insight: Organizations can cultivate a more innovative, agile, and inclusive culture by taking a strengths-based approach to individual and team development.
Top Takeaways: Through their experience helping companies with organizational transformation, the authors found that establishing a foundation of strengths-based development and forming teams based on individuals’ diverse strengths results in a more innovative and adaptable culture. This involves engaging employees — especially those who are closest to the customers — in cocreating the organization’s purpose, vision, and strategic impact goals. The authors share four steps companies can take to break down hierarchies, encourage people to share their ideas, and enable teams to deliver on strategic priorities.
Build the Right C-Suite Team for Your Strategy
Marianna Zangrillo, Thomas Keil, and Benedetto Vigna
Key Insight: CEOs can foster a more effective C-suite by better balancing the tension between collaboration and competition among its ranks.
Top Takeaways: When building a strong leadership team, new CEOs need to understand and manage the dynamics — and egos — at play. The ambition and competitiveness that help high-level executives reach the C-suite can also lead them to put their own priorities ahead of organizational goals. When such behavior results in infighting, it creates a barrier to making decisions and executing strategy effectively. CEOs can avoid that scenario by establishing and communicating their strategic vision, deciding whether a competitive or collaborative dynamic will best execute that vision, selecting appropriate team members, and establishing norms for team behavior.
What Makes Companies Do the Right Thing?
N. Craig Smith and Markus Scholz
Key Insight: Leaders who articulate an ethical purpose encourage employees to act more prosocially than those who focus on short-term gains.
Top Takeaways: Some pharmaceutical companies contributed many doses of their COVID-19 vaccines to the COVAX global public health initiative, which sought to ensure equitable access to immunizations. Other companies booked record profits by selling vaccines to wealthy nations. A study of companies’ engagement with COVAX found that the three V’s of ethical leadership — having a values orientation, giving voice to it, and providing a longer-term vision — were characteristic of leaders whose companies took a more socially responsible approach to making business decisions during the pandemic.
The Three Traps That Stymie Reinvention
Ryan Raffaelli
Key Insight: Successful growth in new sectors requires balancing support for the core business with investment in radical innovation.
Top Takeaways: Efforts to capitalize on growth opportunities that involve new markets or new kinds of products can stumble for three reasons that the author has dubbed reinvention traps. These obstacles occur when a company culture is too strongly identified with its traditional offerings, its organizational structures don’t serve both incremental and radical innovation, or competing factions limit collaboration. Organizations can avoid these traps by separating “who we are” from “what we do,” better aligning innovation structures and incentives, and facilitating the development of productive, trusting relationships between innovation teams.
Make Smarter Investments in Resilient Supply Chains
Walid Klibi, Kai Trepte, and James B. Rice Jr.
Key Insight: Applying the concept of real options to evaluating investments in resilience can help companies maintain their supply chain capabilities in any crisis.
Top Takeaways: Many companies focus on mitigating the risk of supply chain disruptions. When one occurs, they take a boom-and-bust approach, investing in resilience, spending heavily in the immediate aftermath, and then doing little more until the next crisis. As an alternative, the authors propose a real options approach to resilience investing, which gives companies a way to focus their resilience investments on maintaining supply chain robustness over the long term so that they’re always prepared for the next crisis.
Where To Next? Opportunity on the Edge
Emily S. Block and Viva Ona Bartkus
Key Insight: Investing in less stable or developed regions can be a source of growth when companies build strong ties with local communities.
Top Takeaways: Executives seeking opportunities for international growth may overlook regions with underdeveloped infrastructures or political risks, but the extra effort of establishing a presence in such places can reap big benefits — for both businesses and local communities. The authors explain why working on the “front lines” is different from other expansion initiatives and offer guidance on understanding the risks. They also share examples of companies that have successfully engaged with local businesses and residents to gain first-mover advantage while growing the local economies in which they operate.
Do You Really Need a Chief AI Officer?
Michael Wade, Anja Lagodny, Ann-Christin Andersen, Corinne Avelines, and Achim Plueckebaum
Key Insight: The decision to hire a CAIO depends on your company’s technology strategy, stage of AI adoption, and current access to expertise.
Top Takeaways: A chief AI officer (CAIO) can reduce AI fragmentation, lead transformational change, centralize risks, and overcome internal deficiencies. But the role can be less successful when there’s cross-functional conflict and overlap, an overemphasis on AI as a solution, or excessive costs to contend with. The strategic importance and organizational maturity of AI within a company can help it determine whether it should bring on a CAIO — and whether the role is no longer needed. The authors lay out the pros and cons of hiring a CAIO, as well as four elements for setting them up for success.
How to Turn Professional Services Into Products
Mohanbir Sawhney
Key Insight: Services firms can achieve greater scale and profitability by taking a product-based approach to transforming their businesses.
Top Takeaways: Thanks to the slim margins and scalability challenges of their business model, professional services firms face more impediments to growth than do product-focused businesses. To circumvent traditional growth limitations, some service-oriented firms are shifting toward productizing their services. Although companies can achieve greater scale and profitability by automating, standardizing, and packaging aspects of a service into a tangible, repeatable, and scalable offering, executing such a transformation can be challenging. A five-step road map is provided to help leaders assess the potential of their services to be productized, decide the optimal productization level, define the offering portfolio, build product capabilities, and proactively adopt strategies and tactics to address the challenges of transformation.
Make a Stronger Business Case for Sustainability
Karel Cool, Atalay Atasu, and Nathan Furr
Key Insight: Sustainability initiatives can be profitable if managers think creatively about pricing, market demand, and costs.
Top Takeaways: Improving the sustainability of products or services is often seen as adding costs that cut into profitability, but this view is short-sighted. Winning support from senior leadership peers and boards requires demonstrating that there’s an economic case to be made, not simply an altruistic one, with an opportunity to shift the levers of cost, pricing, and demand. The authors share a framework that provides three attainable strategic avenues for capitalizing on that opportunity: reducing costs, creating a willingness to pay, and reaching new customers.
Avoiding Harm in Technology Innovation
Tania Bucic and Gina Colarelli O’Connor
Key Insight: Innovation managers must systematically vet emerging technologies to anticipate and prevent potential risks to customers and other stakeholders.
Top Takeaways: In the rush to capitalize on innovations, some organizations fail to consider the potential risks of deploying immature, poorly understood new technologies. And even when employees have concerns about the ethics or potential negative impacts of a new technology, some leaders discourage or avoid feedback that might derail a potentially revenue-generating project. By taking a more systematic approach, modeled on a framework for responsible scientific research, enterprises can comprehensively evaluate the possible risks and benefits of technological advancements and make more ethical deployment decisions.
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