The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. - Albert Einstein

There are three areas where improved "questioning" can strengthen managerial effectiveness; and it might be worth considering how you can improve your skills in each one.

First is the ability to ask questions about yourself. All of us fall into unproductive habits, sometimes unconsciously. Good managers therefore are always asking themselves and others about what they could do better or differently. Finding the right time and approach for asking these questions in a way that invites constructive and candid responses is critical.

Second is the ability to ask questions about plans and projects. The examples mentioned above both fall into this category. The challenge with questioning projects is to do so in a way that not only advances the work, but that also builds relationships and helps the people involved to learn and develop. This doesn't mean that your questions can't be tough and direct, but the probing needs to be in the spirit of accelerating progress, illuminating unconscious assumptions and solving problems. This is in contrast to some managers who (perhaps out of their own insecurity) ask review questions either to prove that they are the smartest one in the room, or to make someone squirm. On the other hand, many of the best managers I've seen have an uncanny ability to engage in Socratic dialogue that helps people reach their own conclusions about what can be done to improve a plan or project, which of course leads to much more ownership and learning.

Finally, practice asking questions about the organization. Although usually unspoken, managers have an obligation to always look for ways that the organization as a whole can function more effectively. To do this, they need to ask questions about practices, processes, and structures: Why do we do things this way? Is there a better approach? Asking these questions in a way that does not trigger defensiveness and that is seen as constructive is an important skill for managers.

Most of us never think about how to frame our questions. Giving this process some explicit thought however might not only make you a better manager; it might also help others improve their inquiry skills as well.

Adaptability : The new competitive advantage

We live in an era of risk and instability. Globalization, new technologies, and greater transparency have combined to upend the business environment and give many CEOs a deep sense of unease. Just look at the numbers. Since 1980 the volatility of business operating margins, largely static since the 1950s, has more than doubled, as has the size of the gap between winners (companies with high operating margins) and losers (those with low ones).

Market leadership is even more precarious. The percentage of companies falling out of the top three rankings in their industry increased from 2% in 1960 to 14% in 2008. What’s more, market leadership is proving to be an increasingly dubious prize: The once strong correlation between profitability and industry share is now almost nonexistent in some sectors. According to our calculation, the probability that the market share leader is also the profitability leader declined from 34% in 1950 to just 7% in 2007. And it has become virtually impossible for some executives even to clearly identify in what industry and with which companies they’re competing.

All this uncertainty poses a tremendous challenge for strategy making. That’s because traditional approaches to strategy—though often seen as the answer to change and uncertainty—actually assume a relatively stable and predictable world.

Think about it. The goal of most strategies is to build an enduring (and implicitly static) competitive advantage by establishing clever market positioning (dominant scale or an attractive niche) or assembling the right capabilities and competencies for making or delivering an offering (doing what the company does well). Companies undertake periodic strategy reviews and set direction and organizational structure on the basis of an analysis of their industry and some forecast of how it will evolve.

Thor's Strategic Leadership

THORS Strategic Leadership is the relentless pursuit to positively impact the personal and professional lives of business managers. This allows us to multiply team´s influence on making the world a more prosperous and better place to live in.

In our daily actions we are guided by 5 core values, that are such big influencers on us, that they should be easily experienced by all our clients. They are as follows:

RESPECT:  Every person that we meet, enjoys our respect. We treat all people equally, with care and concern for their well being. This we see as the premise for our other values. Without respect for others, the following values are rendered meaningless.

PASSION:  We are so passionate about our mission to positively influence the lives of others, that we never let up in our efforts to help them….or in learning how to perform better on that quest. Our passion is the engine that drives us forward……an engine that never stops!

LEARNING:  We use our passion to drive our learning about leadership. We are full of respect for the challenging task of leading other people and we see our learning about  it as a life-long process where we have the attitude of “rookies with experience”  (translated into: humble and willing to learn, but balanced and confident in what we do for a living).

HELPFULNESS:  We constantly go out of our way to help our clients. We always aim to go “the extra mile” to exceed our client´s expectations. We are proud of always being ready to help and are happy to have the chance.

ENTREPRENEURISM:  Every one of our team members thinks and behaves as if our company were theirs. We all make decisions in the field, seek ways to recuce costs and are constantly seeking new business opportunities. This provides the foundation of a healthy business, that provides secure and well paid jobs to all of us.

Collaboration

Collaboration is a buzzword these days. Leaders want to get people to think as one company. But managers in different functions or different business units seem surprisingly reluctant to work together. Jealousies, misunderstandings and enmity seem more common than collaboration.

Why does collaboration fail? There are lots of reasons. Collaboration can be time-consuming. It creates risks for the participants. Competing objectives can be hard to resolve. But to my mind the biggest problem is that people confuse collaboration with teamwork.

To understand the difference, think about what a team is. Teams are created when managers need to work closely together to achieve a joint outcome. Their actions are interdependent, but they are fully committed to a single result. They need to reach joint decisions about many aspects of their work, and they will be cautious about taking unilateral action without checking with each other to make sure there are no negative side effects.

Now, so long as the team has someone with the authority to resolve disputes, ensure coordinated action and remove disruptive or incompetent members, teams work well. Team members may dislike each other. They may disagree about important issues. They may argue disruptively. But with a good leader they can still perform.

Collaborators face a different challenge. They will have some shared goals, but they often also have competing goals. Also, the shared goal is usually only a small part of their responsibilities. Unlike a team, collaborators cannot rely on a leader to resolve differences. Unlike a customer-supplier relationship, collaborators cannot walk away from each other, when they disagree.

So a collaborative relationship is necessary when you cannot use a team or a customer-supplier relationship. It is a form of customer-supplier relationship in which the participants have all the difficulties of contracting with each other without the power to walk away if the other party is being unreasonable or insensitive.

For these reasons, my advice is to avoid relying on a collaborative relationship except in the rare cases when a company objective is important enough to warrant some collaborative action but not so important as to warrant a dedicated team. For example, you might want to rely on collaboration if you need to get geographic business units to work with a central product development team or where business units share a sales force or a brand.

In these circumstances, success depends on whether:

• the participants have committed to work together — collaboration requires emotional engagement;
• the participants have high respect for each other's competence on the topic of the collaboration or a natural first-among-equals exists amongst the participants, because of technical knowledge or experience; and
• the participants have the skills and permission to creatively bargain with each other over costs and benefits.

Before setting up a collaborative relationship, assess whether it is really necessary and whether the conditions for success can be created. And don't think of it as a permanent solution. You should be looking to transition to an easier form of interaction, such as a team or a customer-supplier relationship. In these forms there are clear mechanisms for resolving disagreements.

Servant Leadership

Ronald Claiborne in a 2010 article “Benefits of practicing servant leadership” quotes Karakas (2007) as saying”

“Leadership in the 21st century must deal with problems of global uncertainty, chaos, innovation, change, dynamism, flux, speed, interconnectedness, and complexity therefore, the benefits of practicing servant leadership becomes a critical success factor in any business.”

 It is insightful that Jeff Iorg, in his book “The Character of Leadership, states in describing servant leadership, “Servant leadership is, in its essence, an attitude. Servant leadership is defined more by who you are than by what you do” (p.117), and yet our talk must match walk in order to be a true servant leader. How is this essence and attitude lived out for the world to see.

Servant leadership takes many forms, some outside corporate boardroom and office. Whether it is being a servant leader attempting to usher in change in a nation, or whether it is being a servant leader in our particular vocation, as a fellow human being, becoming a servant leader is a process that happens over a lifetime. It involves for many of us becoming a work in process as we continue to read, study, and slowly implement change into our lives, developing that servant leadership perspective.

Employees and followers want leaders who are honest, open, and who keep the   organization moving in a positive direction during both calm and stormy seas.       Employees and followers want leaders who are “others-centered.” Employees and followers want leaders who can bring out the best qualities in them. Beyond   this, leaders must also love all the organization’s stakeholders from customers, vendors, regulators, shareholders, members, as well as contributors (p.9).

In The Steward Leader: Transforming People, Organizations and Communities, R. Scott Rodin (2010) quotes leadership expert Max DePree’s saying, “The first responsibility of the leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the leader is a servant.”

Dr. Corné Bekker, associate professor for the School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship, Regent University, in his paper Prophet and Servant: Locating Robert K. Greenleaf’s Counter-Spirituality of Servant Leadership, (2010), states that for Greenleaf, servant leaders are characterized by:

§  Being visionaries

§  Having high ethical standards

§  Doing things with excellence

§  Being persuasive

§  Rational thinking

§  Being prophetic [futuristic] imaginative

§  Ordinariness

§  Comfortable with paradox

§  Being a good listener

§  Accomplishing transformative actions

 Dr. Bekker, noting that Greenleaf himself was a religious man, and described servant leaders leading as prophets by (a) healing, (b) persuading, (c) creating systems of thinking, (d) opening alternative avenues for work, (e) serving, (f) inspiring, (g) facilitating individual and societal transformation, (h) empowering followers, (i) uniting leaders and followers, (j) building bridges between organizations and communities, and (k) by ushering in a new era of servant leadership. The intended outcome of these prophetic servant leaders is to re-imagine and reshape the social domain of leaders and organizations (p.10).

Whether you believe Jesus at best was just a good man who lived and died on planet earth some 2000 years ago, read the story found in the Bible’s Gospel of John 13.1-17. It is the story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. This is what being a servant leader is about. Would any of us as an organizational leader be humble enough to wash someone’s feet if that is what it would take to make him or her committed followers? Who among us is the next Mother Teresa?

The Medici Effect

The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson investigates how new and extraordinary ideas can be formed by established ideas from different cultures, disciplines or fields of study when they collide. According to Johansson innovative ideas spawn from intersections. Intersections happen when two unrelated fields, for example culinary arts and the flocking formation of birds, are connected and made relevant to each other. At an intersection a vast pool of creative and unlikely ideas can be created due to the unlikely pairing. This intersection spawns the Medici Effect, which is a burst of creative ideas resulting from this convergence of knowledge. The book then details the trials and tribulations encountered on the path to creativity (generation of new and valuable ideas) and innovation (realization of creative ideas).
Johansson speaks with many innovators of the époque throughout the entire book and they all agree upon the Medici Effect and its remarkable potential. While innovation is universal throughout history, Johansson highlights that globalisation and recent advances in technology make way for innovation now more than ever. This intriguing model outlines three forces which favour intersectional ideas to form. Intersections are becoming more likely first because of the movement of people since cultures and perspectives can clash, mesh and feed off one another, second by the convergence of science or interdisciplinary sciences which make way for new discoveries and perspectives and lastly the leap of computation which enables human capital to be freed from tedious tasks to engage in further innovation.
One concept, lowering associative barriers to facilitate innovation suggests that laypeople in a specialisation are more likely to be able to come up with creative solutions. Ideas are linked to one another in the mind based on previous experience and gained knowledge in chains of association. These chains of association streamline thought and make the process efficient but may also inhibit creativity by directing thought towards assumptions and blind-siding us to unconventional associations between ideas. Low associative barriers can be built when a person is exposed to a diverse range of knowledge and move outside their expertise so that they ideas are not always linked to one another in a “typical” fashion. This concept reveals to us why it is important to have a mixture of experiences as well as be exposed to different perspectives to be effective problem-solvers and creative thinkers.
Another interesting concept is the link between productivity and innovation. Although the burst which happens at an intersection opens doors to fantastic ideas, obviously not all ideas can be hit-wonders. One key to innovation is constant productivity. Innovation does not necessarily happen in an incremental fashion. Just because a vast number of new ideas is accessible by combining two different fields does not mean that every one of these permutations is viable therefore constant and voluminous productivity is necessary to be able to innovate. Also, being primed for failure enables people to learn from mistakes as well as lowers the risk of spending all resources on the first trial if we know that it is highly improbable that we will succeed on the first attempt.
What Johansson proposes in this book does not only benefit innovators but are smart nuggets of advice for any person, professional or layman living in the 21st century. The paradigms have shifted from specialized to interdisciplinary, from homogenous to diverse. In an age where knowledge is a commodity an innovative approach to thought and life has become extremely valuable. Organisations of the world can use this standpoint of innovation on many different planes.
The Medici Effect reaches past innovation and applies also to how people can up their quantity and thus probability of quality of work by doing some rudimentary things like diversifying their experiences, learning and practicing outside of their specialties, keeping low associative barriers, always being productive and priming themselves for failure. These concepts are very simple, very obvious and yet they are revolutionary.

The Alchemist and Business

“To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only obligation.” Paulo Coelho author ‘The Alchemist’

'The Alchemist' is an allegorical novel by Paulo Coelho, and is one of the best selling books in history. Its a simple tale of young shepherd who follows his dreams of treasure and encounters  many experiences, learning wisdom and life lessons on the way.

The core message of the book is, doing your best to fulfill your life’s true calling. It’s about having the courage to listen to your heart and often going against all odds to get what you want. Along the way you will be severely tried and tested. The fear of losing it all will tempt you to quit and take the easier path. However, if you truly want to fulfill your Personal Legend you will overcome all odds and will achieve what you set out to get.

This, I feel, is the most important lesson for any entrepreneur.

Leadership lessons from "Up in the Air"

George Clooney’s character and the situations presented in “Up in the air” were fairly realistic reflections of the anxiety that plagues much of today’s business world. Allow me to briefly set up the movie.

Clooney’s character works for a company who is contracted to manage the termination process for downsizing organizations. His job takes him all over the world, helping him in his pursuit of elite status with Frequent Flyer programs. Of particular note is the brilliant product placements throughout the film which almost serve as characters. Clooney’s character brilliantly spins a termination into an opportunity for the films “victims”. As Clooney mentors a Generation Y protege, we are taken on a journey of the frailty and victories of human relationships. So what does this have to do with leadership.

People are anxious today. Even those in the most stable of industries are seeing the dark veil of uncertainty as tomorrow’s accessibility becomes more a question than an expectation. Leadership is most visible during times of adversity. If it’s not evident in your organization during these times, chances are your ranks don’t contain many leaders. Here are some tips

LISTEN. Simply stated but often a complex execution. Clooney’s character was cleaning up a termination meeting gone south (due to the naivety of his mentee). He read between the lines on the employees resume only to unveil that this job was a prison to the employee’s aspirations. He restated this as an opportunity to follow that dream for the benefit of his children. The employee took pause to this. What are your employees aspirations and needs? Do you create opportunities to listen?

ENGAGE IN RELATIONSHIP BUILDING. Your employees are feeling more and more isolated these days. Every time they don’t see their managers, they started drawing their own conclusions. This fosters that “stay off the radar” mentality my mentee stated. It’s destructive and a sure fire way to slow the progression of success.

COMMUNICATE. Information is gold in this day and age. As “Knowledge Workers” your employees need it. As a leader, it should be a driving passion to provide it. Let them know what you know and what you don’t know. They need a leader they can trust. Don’t hide behind the curtain of uncertainty. Instead bask in the warmth of focus and direction.

CELEBRATE THOSE THAT TAKE RISKS. You need to grow today. This isn’t the time to join your cowardly competitors who are hiding under rocks and regressing from the life force of business, growth. Growth is not waste. Help your employees see their potential by “Getting on the Radar”.

Reasons why mergers fail

Culture shock: Can you imagine IBM buying Google? The 'suit' culture of IBM will not at all jell with the casual approach that Google has, and a merger of this sort would fail miserably.

 2+2>4 attitude: This is a merger between #2 and #3 trying to take over #1 by merging. Typically, the customers of both #2 and #3 get confused and move to #1, leaving the merged entity in the lurch.

 No plan: Two companies try to sometimes merge and see if they can work out something in the long run. But if both of them didn't have a plan to begin with, then they may end up not having a plan even when they join.

 Poor integration: In IT, integration between products matters a lot, and a company that tries to grow by acquiring many companies tends to fail simply because it looks like a jigsaw puzzle that has not been put together properly.

 People trouble: Many companies tend to tell employees about mergers way too late in the day, and so confused people tend to leave and the ones who leave first are the smartest ones.

Lack of enthusiasm: Usually you hear of a brilliant start-up that was acquired by a respected brand and one year later, the founder of the start-up decides to 'pursue other interests' and from then on, the project runs out of steam. The failure here happens more due to lack of enthusiasm because the bright idea has become staid as time passes.

Who needs you? Sometimes, two companies decide to merge a little too late, when both their technologies have been outdated and surpassed by a superior force. A merger at such a time is not bound to produce the best of results. In fact, the top gun company may actually benefit while the two merged companies struggle to find their collective feet.

 Poor decisions: Who will do what at the top management level once the merger happens? Will the CFO of the bigger entity become the CFO of the combined entity even if the CFO of the smaller company is more capable? Put the wrong CFO on top and he will botch up, while the better CFO resigns in disgust and moves on to a competitor.

 Ego clashes: This is ultimately one of the reasons why a merger fails. People who have been given short shrift, or who perceive it as such (let's face it, most of us are legends in our own minds) are bound to try to cause friction, leading to a failed merger.

Importance of leadership in Strategy Execution

In the Best Companies for Leaders survey, management consultancy Hay Group identified the top 20 best-in-class companies as well as what makes these companies known for great leadership.

Key findings of the Hay Group's research:

• When asked what organizations value the most in leaders, 83 percent of the best-in-class organizations as compared to others said “execution.”
• Organizations value leaders who can achieve results through others.
• In tough economic times, employees desire more communication and clarity around goals. They want their leaders to become more visible and to be leading from the front.
• During tough economic times, best-in-class companies create clarity, encourage development, drive accountability and recognize successful leaders.
• The top 20 best companies for leaders make leadership development a priority.

BOTTOMLINE:  What's valued most in leaders?  The ability to execute on strategy - and get the job done.

Implementing Strategy

Reiterating the importance of execution in implementing strategy. Here are 5 keys to getting the job done.

Develop a model for execution.

Strategic yardsticks are plentiful. Michael Porter's theory of comparative advantage, for instance, gives strategists a way to conceptualize market leadership goals. In the evaluation of narrower plans, William Sharpe's capital asset pricing model, or more recent schema such as real options theory, can play a similar role. But when it comes to managing change, there are few such guidelines.

It's important for managers to have a model identifying the critical variables that define -- at least for the manager -- the things they have to worry about when they put together an implementation plan. Without that, managers will say something like, 'We just hand the ball off to someone and let them run with it,' and that's the execution plan. That isn't going to go anywhere.

Choose the right metrics. 

While sales and market share are always going to be the dominant metrics of business, more and more of the best companies are choosing metrics that help them evaluate not only their financial performance, but whether a plan is succeeding. For example, when a large cable company realized that the speed at which it penetrated a new market correlated directly with the number of service representatives it had in the field, executives began tracking the progress of how quickly representatives were being added in particular territories.

It’s important to choose metrics in a package so that they can change if market conditions change. For example, sales of cars might be a good metric for a car manufacturer, but if interest rates rise, sales will likely suffer. A good set of metrics takes that into account.

Don't forget the plan. 

As noted above, plans are often simply agreed to and then forgotten. One way to keep the plan on center stage is to separate executive meetings about operations from those focused on strategy. Strategy only succeeds when it is integrated into operations, but day-to-day concerns often so overwhelm the executive team that such an agenda management process is the only way to keep executive attention focused on the organization's progress. 

 Assess performance frequently.

Performance monitoring is still an annual affair at most companies. However, plan assessments at many of the leading companies happen at much more frequent intervals than they did in the past. The reason why Wal-Mart is so good at execution is it knows daily if what it is doing in each of its stores gets results or not. For example, when Wal-Mart learned this year that its Christmas sales strategy hadn't worked just eight days after the close of the season, it was able to mitigate the damage in a way it wouldn't have if results had been slower in coming. By shortening the performance monitoring cycle -- from quarter-by-quarter to month-by-month or week-by-week -- top management can get more "real-time" feedback on the quality of execution down the line.  

Communicate. 

Companies often go wrong by creating a cultural distinction between the executives who design a strategy and people lower down in the corporate hierarchy who carry it out. Asking ongoing questions about the status of a plan is a good way to ensure that it will continue to be a priority. 

Myths about Business Innovation

Geofferey Moore lists the top ten myths about Business Innovation. So here goes, in classin David Letterman tradition:

10. We don’t innovate around here any more.    Baloney.  You are innovating all the time.  The problem is, you are no longer differentiating your offers in distinctive ways.  Your innovations, in other words, parallel your competitors’ innovations, with the result that you all look more or less alike.  Customers, seeing little to no difference, put more and more emphasis on price.  Unable to distinguish your offer, you have no bargaining power, and most capitulate to their pressure.  On weekends you complain about commoditization, but during the week you do nothing to address the problem.

9. Product life cycles are getting shorter and shorter.  And whose fault is that?  If you do not differentiate in hard-to-copy ways, you cannot expect what differentiation you do create to be long-lived.  iPod’s product life cycles are longer than its competitors, not because it has a way-cool form factor but because iTunes is part of the iPod experience that Apple’s rivals are still struggling duplicate.  And as cars make their dashboards iPod compatible, then once again the competitors have to run around catching up to Apple instead of making their offers distinctive in some other dimension.  Sustainable differentiation requires barriers to entry and barriers to exit.

8. We need a Chief Innovation Officer.  Like a hold in the head.  Think about what your true goal is:  you want innovation that creates differentiation that leads to customer preference during buying decisions.  That sounds about as close to a core business strategy as you can get.  It has to be grounded in the realities of operational capabilities, customer feedback, competitor investments, and capital constraints.  So your chief innovation officer by default must be your P&L owner.  If that person isn’t stepping up to the innovation task, replace them with someone who will.

7. We need to be more like Google.  Not on your life.  Google is a once-in-a-decade phenomenon, a company riding a wave of adoption so powerful that not only is the first derivative of its growth curve positive, but so is the second derivative as well.  If that describes your market, we doubt you are worrying about innovation.  If it does not, and you want outside help, seek it from someone who has had recent experience with markets like yours.

6. R&D investment is a good indicator of innovation commitment.  No, it is not.  In the first half of this decade, HP invested 15% in R&D and Dell invested 5% and cleaned their clock.  How?  They out-innovated them in process innovations led primarily by their operations folks.  Innovation that leads to sustainable competitive advantage can be initiated and led by any organization in the company.  R&D represents the engineering department’s lead, and in general pays off well in double-digit growth markets and increasingly poorly in single-digit growth markets.  Continuing major investments in R&D in slow-growth markets is a good measure of lack of innovative thinking.

5. Great innovators are usually egotistical mavericks.  Not any more (although there is no shortage of egotistical mavericks that would have you think otherwise).  In the current decade there is more competitive differentiation to be gained through collaboration than through busting out on your own.  That’s because our extended supply chains reward each company for focusing on its core and outsourcing the rest of the offer to someone else in the chain.  But actually orchestrating these chains to perform effectively in real time requires enormous innovation.  And that is a job for people who listen well, empathize deeply, and make the differentiated performance of the chain as a whole as important as their own local success.

4. Great innovation is inherently disruptive.  Not necessarily.  To be sure, authors like Clay Christensen and myself have spent much of our life’s work chronicling the impact of disruptive innovation, but it is only one type among many.  And the more established your company, the less likely it is a type for you to specialize in.  Alternatives include application innovation, product innovation, platform innovation, line extension innovation, design innovation, marketing innovation, experiential innovation, value engineering innovation, integration innovation, process innovation, value migration innovation, and acquisition innovation.  This last one, in particular, is usually an established enterprise’s best bet for dealing with disruption.

3. It is good to innovate.  No, it is good to differentiate on an attribute that drives customer preference during buying decisions.  Innovating elsewhere costs money and entails risk but does not create competitive advantage.  It might still be worth doing, either to neutralize another company’s competitive advantage or to improve your own productivity, but you would be surprised about the amount of innovation going on in your company right now that serves no economic purpose.  Rather it is being undertaken as a form of corporate entertainment, creating the illusion of purpose and meaning while carefully skirting the need to be economically accountable.

2. Innovation is hard.  Actually, it is not.  What is hard is deploying innovation, especially in an established enterprise.  That’s because the critical deployment resources are all engaged trying to make the quarter on the back of the existing offer set in the existing market categories.  They cannot be bothered with next-generation responsibilities when their current ones are hanging by a thread.  The net result: Too often, when a genuinely innovative offer is ready to go to market, there is simply no one there to sponsor it, and it dies on the vine.

1. When innovation dies, it’s because the antibodies kill it.  Yes, but not how you think.  The murder takes place in the customer’s world, not in yours.  Here’s how.   As a management team you hope to leverage the current relationships managed by your sales force to introduce the next-generation innovation.  But the synergies implied by this tactic are revealed over time to be false—the current team does not have any relationships of merit with the new target customer.  Instead it has legacy commitments to the old target customer who in turn is threatened by and resents the intrusion of the new innovation.  Thus your own sales force finds itself more or less honor-bound to sabotage your next-generation effort.  Whether they actually do or not, they are in no position to lead the kind of charge required, and it is no wonder when some piddly little start-up beats your finely tuned sales machine to the punch

In troubled times, boards must step up

This post is essentially Lucy P Marcus' (founder and CEO of Marcus Venture Consulting, who also serves as an independent director in number of boards) opinion about the role and importance of boards in troubled times.

There are some essential things boards and board members need to think about, no matter the size, location or sector of the organization. They are infrastructure, technology, internationalization, communication, and the balance of continuity and change. There is a need to achieve balance between grounding and strategizing. 

1) Infrastructure
Is the organization addressing issues around energy consumption, including integrating clean tech and sustainability? Is it covering infrastructure and from all angles--from facilities to building stock and rolling stock and the risks they may be exposed to, from changing work patterns and practices to the ways in which companies engage with their stakeholders and the local communities where they are based?

2) Technology
Is the organization flexible enough to recognize important technological developments and incorporate them into existing business models? Does it recognize places where technology and technological innovation may be fundamentally changing the way their organization is run in the future?

3) Internationalization
No matter what a company's main business is or where it is located, its success will ultimately depend on grasping the internationalized environment in which it operates. The world today is politically, socially, and economically more inter-connected, and this offers opportunities and poses risks at the same time. Is the company focused on attracting the best people from anywhere and put them in a place where they work most productively for the success of the company as a whole?

4) Communication
Is the company effective and dynamic in its communications, both with all its stakeholders (customers, staff, investors, etc.) and with the board room? Companies that send out a message of a forward-looking, socially and environmentally responsible, and politically aware strategy and do it by old and new forms of communication also send a message about the right balance between continuity and change, about the unity of word and deed, demonstrating in action to which it rhetorically commits.

5) Balancing Continuity and Change
Boards will only succeed in their task of future proofing their organizations if they see the connections between the old and the new. Is the board embracing new ideas and new ways of thinking while at the same time not ignoring or disregarding the old? Is the company being driven by short-lived 'flavors of the month' or temptations of every disruptive technology or idea that comes into the room, rather than being guided by the needs and vision of the business?

Organizations of all kinds, be they public or private, profit or not for profit, educational institution or Fortune 500, will need the best from their boards and from their director. By leading through example, boards will help organizations face the sense of instability with aplomb, and emerge stronger, more self-assured, resilient and capable. 

Keiretsu : A Japanese concept

Keiretsu is defined as a system, series, grouping of enterprises, order of succession) is a set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings. It can be briefly described as a long continual business relationship, and has been a significant force in the Japanese economy for over sixty years

Keiretsu relationship can be defined as a series of repetitive transactions that occur long term between two or more entities in an asymmetrical relationship where one entity uses its position to govern the relationship. A Keiretsu relationship is based on close and stable business collaboration between affiliated entities. This can be especially useful in company’s supply chain management to get a competitive edge.

• ·    long-term trade relationships that often prevent third parties from participating freely in the market : This can create excellent economic efficiencies and make sense among companies that specialize in a particular product
• ·    companies often hold significant amounts of each other's stock to prevent other companies from acquiring shares; This can create stability in the stock market  and provides protection against hostile takeovers
• ·    fixed non-symmetrical trade between companies

Furthermore, Keiretsu is often established to

• ·    move low-value-add production to subsidiaries
• ·    ensure continuous high quality production capability to avoid excess production and consumer problems
• ·    improve risk management, especially with regards to variable or uncertain demand
• ·    ensure that increased sales mean a corresponding increase for subsidiaries
• ·    prevent technological information from being disclosed to competitors through close continuous relationships

A close examination of each of the above points is based on an underlying idea that can improve your supply chain. Specifically:

• ·    strategic long-term trade relationships with key partners with a long-term focus on process improvement can generate excellent efficiencies
• ·    a minor position in your key partners demonstrates commitment, and it can help provide financial stability in unstable times
• ·    non-symmetrical trade stabilizes the relationship
• ·    seasoned executives have a lot to offer, and should consider consulting beyond retirement from full time positions
• ·    companies with more resources and established processes should transfer those capabilities to their strategic suppliers to improve processes and reduce costs
• ·    a company should be focused on high-value-add production, and since value-add production is relative, low-value-add production for one company might be high-value-add production for its supplier
• ·    the best way to maintain quality is to maintain relationships with suppliers who consistently produce quality
• ·    risk can be shared among partners and reduced
• ·    strategic relationships can insure that your key suppliers succeed and remain stable
• ·    forming key relationships with key suppliers that can adapt to changing demand minimizes the spread of trade secrets

Thus correctly applied Keiretsu teachings can rejuvenate your supply chain, and eventually your business.