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 Build Intuition, Stimulate quick conflict, maintain disciplined pace, and diffuse political behavior
1. Build collective intuition that enhances the ability of top management team to see threats and opportunities sooner and more accurately.
a. Sharing information at must attend meetings is an essential part of building collective intuition. The interplay of ideas during these meetings enhances managers understanding of the data. Less successful top-management teams rarely meet with their colleagues in a group. These executives typically make fewer and larger strategic choices. When they do turn their attention to important decisions, they rely on market analyses and future trend projections that are idiosyncratic to the particular decision. Intuition is gained through experience, the ability to recognize pattern and process information in blocks. This Rapid pattern recognition is faster than processing single pieces of information.
b. Traditional approaches to strategy overemphasize the executives ability to analyze and predict which industries, competencies, or strategic positions will be viable and for how long. No advantage and no position is advantageous forever.
c. The ability to make fast, widely supported, and high quality strategic decisions on a frequent basis are the cornerstone of effective strategy.
2. Stimulate quick conflict to improve the quality of strategic thinking without sacrificing significant time.
a. In dynamic markets, conflict is a natural feature of high-stakes decision making because reasonable managers will often diverge in their views on how the marketplace will unfold. Strategic decision makers in rapidly changing markets not only tolerate conflict, they accelerate it.
b. One technique is scenario planning, creating advocate alternatives consider many future states. Remove stale thinking.
c. Another technique is to create multiple alternatives that the team can work with simultaneously. The teams come up with more varied viewpoints than homogenous teams. Teams rapidly compare alternatives and gain better understanding of their preferences. The multiple alternatives help the executives feel confident that they have not overlooked a superior alternative.
3. Maintain a disciplined pace that drives the decision process to a timely conclusion
a. Effective strategic decision makers focus on maintaining decision pace, keeping up the energy surrounding the process, and cutting off debate at the appropriate times. Decision makers use rules of thumb to determine time span to arrive at a decision. If a decision takes less time, then the decision is not strategic enough to warrant management team attention. Time frame allows executives time to adjust the scope of a decision to fit the allocated time frame as the process unfolds.
b. Typical strategic decisions including entering or exiting markets, investing in new technology, building manufacturing capacity, or forming strategic partnerships.
c. Decision making rhythm helps managers plan their process and forces them to recognize the familiar aspects of decision making that make the process more predictable. Decision timing being more important than consensus. Consensus is nice but keeping up with the time constraints is important.
4. Defuse political behavior that creates unproductive conflict and wastes time.
a. Lobbying one another, manipulating information, and forming coalitions is wasteful.
b. One way in which executives defuse politics is to create common goals.
c. The goals suggest the managers share a common shared vision of what they want.
d. A more direct way to defuse politics is through a balanced power structure in which each key decision maker has a clear area of responsibility, but in which the leader is the most powerful decision maker. (King Lear scenario)
e. Humor diffuse politics
Outstanding!
This is a great collection of essays that delivers a consistent message throughout. It begins with a new management manifesto, past theory, and works its way through flexibility and growth and innovation. A great, quick-reading book for those interested in the 'new' strategy game.
Preparation for a Never-Ending Quest
Here is an absolutely first-rate collection of essays which, with commendable diversity but consistent brilliance, examine fundamentals of strategy and value creation, strategic flexibility in (heaven knows) a volatile world, strategy marketing in uncertain times, and strategies for growth in fast-paced markets. We should not be surprised by the quality of content selected nor by the quality of editing provided by Cusumano and Markides. As they explain in the introduction, "The chapters in this volume fall into four categories. Part One (two chapters by Ghoshal, Bartlett, and Moran and one by Mintzberg and Lampel) deal primarily with strategy and value creation in the next economy. Part Two (one chapter by Hax and Wilde and one by Eisenhardt) talks about flexibility in a volatile world. Part Three (three chapters, by Pascale, Beinhocker, and Williamson) continues on this theme but focusses on strategy and strategy-making process in times of uncertainty. Finally, Part four (five chapters, by Hamel, Kim, and Mauborgne; Markides, Prahalad and Oosterveld, and von Krogh and Cusumano) concentrates on strategic innovation and strategies for growth, particularly bin fast-paced markets." Those (such as I) who subscribe to the MIT Sloan Management Review have perhaps already read many of these essays. How convenient to have a single volume in which they are gathered; also, to have such a well-written Introduction by the editors and then a section ("The Authors") which suggests additional resources to explore. (I consider Markides' All the Right Moves: A Guide to Crafting Breakthrough Strategy to be one of the most important business books written within recent years.) Some owners/CEOs of smaller companies incorrectly believe that strategic thinking (at least as they understand it) is not of major importance when, in fact, the opposite is true. Go back and examine the origins of what have since become the world's largest corporations and you will learn that each began with one or two basic strategies. For example, when James Cash Penney opened his first store (named "The Golden Rule") in 1902 in Kemmerer (WY), his basic strategies were (a) to treat each customer as a guest and (b) to offer merchandise of the highest possible quality for the lowest possible price. More recently, in 1983, Michael Dell began to re-sell RAM chips and disk drives for IBM PCs (from his dormitory room at the University of Texas) and by April of 1984, his computer component business was grossing about $80,000 a month. His basic strategy then and now: To sell a limited selection of products directly to consumers and then provide superior service. My point, obviously, is that this book can be an invaluable resource for senior-level executives in large companies but can also be every bit as valuable to decision-makers in small-to-mid size companies. The authors raise almost all of the most important questions to be asked about strategy and then, together, offer thoughtful (at times highly innovative) as well as practical responses to those questions. For example: How to define a company as a value creator rather than a value appropriator? How can a new management framework address the current business environment of complexity and uncertainty by expanding the spectrum of strategic positions? How can successful business strategy emerge from a decision-making process in which executives develop "collective intuition" and accelerate "constructive combat" while maintaining decision pacing and avoiding politics? You may not agree with all of the authors' observations and conclusions. Fair enough. But I am certain that, after having read this book, you will be a much more effective strategic thinker.
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