And if you separate those activities, then you really risk not executing the very important things that are going to drive your strategy. You have to worry about the now, while also planning for an uncertain future. MARK JOHNSON:  Well, again I think, I think especially for the purposes of those that support higher education or a specific institution, you need to think about again, how would you have discussions about what is – what stays true to the purpose and the collection of various elements of learning and how you serve the right students and all of that – and do that probably pretty quickly. And how is that different and more valuable? Gupta says successful digital strategy is more complicated than that. So we’re starting in an environment where people don’t feel confident about their ability to win in the market. We really want to get everyone together. New Recruiting Strategies for a Post-Covid World. Are there not just this threat of things plateauing and declining, but are there down the road some real opportunities to do things cross industry, or industry transforming where it’s as much about an opportunity that we could see out in the future as it is a threat, and begin to start talking about that? Maybe you’re in a software company and it’s going to be four years, or if you’re a pharmaceutical or defense contractor, it could be 15 years. And you can redirect a little, but you can’t suddenly take a culture that’s very risk averse and turn it around and make it into a bunch of risk takers. Mark Johnson, cofounder of the consulting firm Innosight, says that too many managers develop strategy while focusing on problems in the present, and that’s especially true during a crisis. And you know in the early 1820s and 30s, when the first locomotive was developed, what was behind it was a set of stagecoaches. Episodes How to Listen. After surveying thousands of organizations across the world, she found that only 6% of firms qualified as highly well-managed — and that managers mistakenly … But it actually could be a transformation. Marketing challenges. Paul, thank you so much. Now all of a sudden, the trajectory to reach that just seems a lot shorter, certainly a lot steeper right? MARK JOHNSON:  I think the first is to recognize that sometimes you have to change behavior before you change mindset. CURT NICKISCH:  Are you in trouble if you’re a business that hasn’t done this already? Building a Company While Battling Depression. Systems would have to be in place, having certain curriculum locked down. We can’t possibly be great at everything. You know, you name it depending on the different business function. Looking at the scenarios of how things could be at least a year out or more, and then working that backwards, will allow for a better sort of point of view about how things could and should be, that as opposed to just again, incrementing off of today and just if you will, putting people, you know, putting classrooms online. Instead, he argues companies should simplify and focus on two value drivers: customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. One is it’s a way of thinking which says we have to break free for the moment from the way things work today and the past so that we can open up our mind to think about the art of the possible. But it’s a further out horizon to start, in order to be able to have these conversations and you know, the conversations are structured. Joshua Gans, a professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, advises against trying to commercialize a new technology or product before considering all the strategic options. And think of it as three pieces coming together. How does the vision need to adjust? You’re giving that opportunity to develop the art of the possible. It certainly can not think about time horizon as much as it should. Whereas vision as we define it is also, is really more about, what is the game that you should play in the first place, and being prepared to play a different game. CEO Series: Mary Barra of General Motors on Committing to an Eco-Friendly Future. MARK JOHNSON:  Thank you Curt. No signup or install needed. So you have to do that. And that’s in some ways a very historic view of these are different skill sets. To be able to set experiments and figure out what needs to be learned. In this episode, you'll hear about the tension that comes from feeling like you are a shy person, but also an ambitious one who want to lead a team. It’s at HBR.org/podcastsurvey. Before we get into the interview, I have a quick request for you. If you’re in health care, education, retail, or many other industries, the future you had been planning for is not necessarily the one you’re going to face. I think online education is one of those things that people have seen coming for a long time and of course there’s a lot out there. No signup or install needed. Instead, he argues, leaders should imagine the future and work backward, so they can build their organization for that new reality. On this show, for nearly 800 episodes now, we’ve … ... - Future-Proofing Your Strategy with Scenario Planning. It’s actually an impressionist painting. PAUL LEINWAND: Well, this is a really important topic, because I think as human beings we are always looking somewhere else for ideas. And you want to think about your spending. MARK JOHNSON:  I think you have to have the right perspective – which, if vision is viewed as a somehow you have certainty about this five to 10-year horizon, then it definitely would seem not only overwhelming, but probably ridiculous. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I just want to know, is there anything else that you think that we can’t end today without explaining this xyz factor of how strategy and execution can get a little closer together? But it’s not really about developing certainty about the future. 754 - Pricing Strategies for Uncertain Times. PAUL LEINWAND: I think in the research, Cesare and I were always amazed at how important culture was to the 14 companies in this book. And using that to define implications, you know, we talk in fact, very practically about implication archetypes. You’re arguing for this futureback approach which is, is it essentially trying to get a sense of what you think the future is going to be and working backwards? Mark Johnson, cofounder of the consulting firm Innosight, says that too many managers develop strategy while focusing on problems in the present, and that’s especially true during a crisis. And it’s never too late, and I’ll give you one other example of this actually, is Satya Nadella in transforming Microsoft of when he took over was in real trouble. And so that’s an incredibly important point, because when we connect strategy to execution, we want to make sure that the identity of the company, the strategy, isn’t going to change wholesale. How am I going to design the actual merchandising of the store environment so that the customers are partaking in the process to lower my labor costs? How are our scenarios playing out? And the second problem is that often, strategy and execution are managed in very different areas of the company. Because we can see the convergence of life sciences with biomedical devices, with the ability to monitor and have biosensors, and a whole set of things converging together to where we could begin – that group could begin to see that diseases like lung cancer, or colon cancer could be intercepted well before they manifest into a stage 1, 2, 3 or 4 cancer. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. You know, is our business on a trajectory to keep moving onward and upward, mainly with what the core operations and core innovation can do? Quit Overthinking Things. And what we learned in the research is that these companies, instead of trying to chase change and being worried about being agile in every dimension, they’re trying to shape their own future. You’re actually thinking about the culture to support it. We are going to open up in an egalitarian way and debate and discuss, and really try to understand trend lines and what things are going to converge or deal with scenarios and their implications. No signup or install needed. But in reality, what we’ve learned in the research from this book, and in all of our experience, is that in fact, strategy, when it works well, is executable. We’re so worried about change. Think about a company out of China, Haier, and the fact that they customize all of their products for particular uses. HBR IdeaCast. And strategy’s the means to get there. He shares practical steps managers can take to look beyond the typical short-term planning horizon and help their teams grasp future opportunities. Building some of these amazing capabilities, they don’t fit typically in just the marketing function or the sales function. Yes, they could be dealing with how do they address what’s going to happen in the fall, but what about thinking about what is the role of online and virtual learning that maybe they hadn’t thought as much about? How do you have people trained and hired? Their leaders think of "going digital" as either a way to cut costs or to attract customers with a flashy new app. Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, cofounders of the consultancy Management Lab, say that even though we all lament how rigid, parochial, and time sucking bureaucracies can be, they … Raffaella Sadun, a professor at Harvard Business School, explains why seemingly common-sensical management practices are so hard to implement. CURT NICKISCH:  Yeah, let’s play that scenario out a little bit. Paul Leinwand, co-author of the book "Strategy That Works," explains how successful companies solve this thorny problem. I mean just as a very quick example, and it’s a well-known one in general in terms of Apple and Steve Jobs. And that was certainly a big aspiration. Other organizations have kind of drifted with the market. CURT NICKISCH:  Mark, thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about this. And he had a number of folks at Intel who really embraced the theory of disruption and saw that as actually happening, or could happen to Intel. He cowrote the book Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking into Breakthrough Growth. That is really admirable discipline. I’m Curt Nickisch. So we might have the chief strategy officer, a president of a business unit, the CEO, the management team thinking about the strategic direction. The resources you allocate in terms of leadership time, bandwidth, dollars and people. I mean, that is a very complex capability, and it’s got to impact every single product that goes to market. HBR IdeaCast Harvard Business Review ... Felix Oberholzer-Gee, professor at Harvard Business School, says many organizations spend so much energy on strategy that it overwhelms with conflicting priorities. We have to be choiceful. And I think that’s partly why the long-term horizon gets such a bad rap and vision can be dismissed as not being practical. That’s part one. Is that something that you would agree with? ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I know some of our other authors, like Roger Martin comes to mind, who’s a big heavyweight in this area as well, he has said that strategy and execution really are the same thing. HBR IdeaCast / Episode 510 Closing the Strategy-Execution Gap Paul Leinwand, co-author of the book “Strategy That Works,” explains how successful companies solve this thorny problem. What we often find and what we hear from executives is that sometimes the lack of strategy opens up the door more to looking at what my competitors are doing. Think about what we often hear in companies as, well, we make slow decisions. Their leaders think of "going digital" as either a way to cut costs or to attract customers with a flashy new app. HBR IdeaCast / Episode 748 Pricing Strategies for Uncertain Times A conversation with pricing expert Rafi Mohammed on when and how to change prices in response to Covid-19. 755 - Helping People Move from Trauma to Growth . They have a big dream that they want to chase. We make sure everyone understands the value of those cultural attributes. Women at Work is a podcast from Harvard Business Review that looks at the struggles and successes of women in the workplace, hosted by HBR's Amy Bernstein, Amy Gallo, and Emily Caulfield. And all of his research pointed to the fact that you could find these critical few behaviors that really matter to the company’s strategy. Responding to the current situation and keeping a mission and vision that’s the same, but looking at the data and imagining how the future is going to be and trying to work yourself to that? Basic Competence Can Be a Strategy. But if you don’t carve out how to think about things down the road, then I think you end up in this problem of what we call the “present-forward fallacy.”  A great example here would be executive education or other forms of higher education. Today I’m talking with Paul Leinwand, co-author of the new book, “Strategy that Works.” Paul, thank you so much for talking with us today. HBR IdeaCast Sunil Gupta, a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that many companies are still doing digital strategy wrong. He’s sort of very strong in his opinion on this. I think the same thing here. That they’re literally walking a process to do that future back. Muriel Wilkins, cofounder of the executive coaching … Vision is getting you out in that five to 10-year horizon of what you could and should be, not just about the way things are today, to seize on those opportunities that can develop well past your core. The architecture of the new store that we’re building – how are we going to do that differently based off of what we’re learning today? There’s an absolute role that they need to play along with what executive leaders do. And it’s impossible from a capability perspective– think about the average company and the number of capabilities they have to manage. Where does that need to be? CURT NICKISCH:  How does this apply to you if you are a regular employee, a lower level manager, a middle manager? Dealing with challenges in the supply chain. Sunil Gupta, a professor at Harvard Business School, argues that many companies are still doing digital strategy wrong. And cost is actually where you have your precious investments to invest in these few differentiated capabilities. I’m Alison Beard. It’s culture that often allows this stuff to happen. And many cultural behaviors actually have two sides to them. It wasn’t too late for Microsoft to change its culture in the way it did things to look further out and to have this mindset that we need to be more focused, not just as leaders, but as the overall organization, to be learn-it-all’s as opposed to know-it-all’s. And a classic approach would be to respond to those market signals – that’s kind of a present-forward approach. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I see what you’re saying, yeah. But then just as a very practical element, I think these members of faculty and others have to ask themselves, what is, what does the academic year look like, not in 2020, but in 2021? That seems pretty tough. How do things just have to be organized in a world where social distancing might be here for the long term? Menu. And there certainly was quite a bit of genius. Frank Cespedes, HBS professor and author of “Aligning Strategy and Sales,” explains how to get the front line on board. And thinking about it, Curt, as it’s not a one and done. And the first thing that you have called out is that these companies actually commit to what they do best instead of chasing multiple opportunities and multiple priorities. And it sort of developed within the organization at midlevel, with an innovation teams and other places, a common language in a common way to think about the mechanics of disruption and how it applied to Intel. Because I think what is misunderstood is one, this idea that the future that we’re trying to develop with a vision is a photograph. How do you play a part in this – how does this apply to you? And vision is just one component of a process that leadership teams need to amp up their game. If we’re not careful we’re going to be in a present-forward mentality and not understand that there’s going to be some discontinuities. For instance, how am I going to design furniture so that I have the cost and the price in mind when I’m doing it, empowering designers with all that information so they can make the right choices? And often, again, companies are spreading their limited cash across way too many priorities. Workplace Design, Post-Pandemic. Tell me a little bit about how these companies do that. Think about that design capability of Apple. And we have to make the decisions about what’s going to matter for my strategy given my portfolio, given my promise to customers in terms of the value I’m going to create. And of course we know the history there that music industry and other industries were transformed by Apple’s vision – Steve Jobs and team’s vision – looking 10 years out and then walking that back practically to a strategy. He talks through some questions entrepreneurs should ask themselves — like, collaborate or compete? But instead of fighting those, what these companies say is, we focus on the ones that help our strategy. We are going to say, what is it that we need to learn? SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Paul Leinwand, and the book is “Strategy that Works.” For more, visit hbr.org. And I know you and your co-author, Cesare Mainardi, you’ve examined companies that have managed to overcome it– those few, those mighty few. Or do we see it plateauing? Tue, 28 Jul 2020. 756 - Every Business Can Be a Subscription Business. How much is a conventional offering versus an online offering? I’m less interested in necessarily copying everyone. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor at Harvard Business School, believes the world demands a new kind of business leader. 750 EpisodesProduced by Harvard Business ReviewWebsite. Tue, 21 Jul 2020. So present-forward is exactly as it sounds which is to really be able to take the existing operations, the way activities work, processes and the way things are organized, dealing with the immediate market needs. You’re thinking about the capabilities. And we see that management teams and leaders that really get it right, they’re spending the time on what they do, not just what they sell. Ikea, in terms of its supply chain– very, very different than how other retailers think about moving merchandise, and designing merchandise with cost in mind. And we’ve published a few articles that could be maybe interpreted that way. Do you think they’re closely related things? But what I propose is that there’s carving out, even in this time of crisis, 10 to 20 percent of leadership time to really think out past the two year out to the five year to 10 year horizon. Podcaster Tools Podcaster Login. Revisiting “Jobs To Be Done” with Clayton Christensen . So their view about how the technology could be applied to a new paradigm of transportation was to think really in the rearview mirror about the way transportation worked. Take an example like Ikea. Of course we know passenger trains quickly developed from there to be something completely different than the stagecoach. What he didn’t announce was that actually they envisioned a white space and said we can actually get into consumer electronics ourselves. But the differentiated capabilities are usually things that are very specific to you, specific to your strategy. So we got to change the mindset. Again, I think it’s never too late to learn. Listen to To Build Strategy, Start With The Future and 748 more episodes by HBR IdeaCast, free! Making that choice to say, we are going to spend 10 percent of our time thinking about the longer term and then the mid-term future. Well and I think similar to you need management along with leadership, you need to think in a present forward way and in fact it will be 90 percent of your time, 80, 90 percent. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And it’s interesting, too, because obviously there can be negative aspects to a company culture, but it seems like in some ways, what I hear you sort of saying is you kind of go with what you got. And they’ve now got the number one market share in white goods. HBR IdeaCast finance management Edit these tags. And to think about that from a future back way which really had two pieces. 23:53. So it’s not a once-every-five-year exercise, big picture strategy, and then it’s all the tactical execution. Peter Scoblic, cofounder and principal of the consultancy Event Horizon Strategies, says that too many companies are short-sighted in their strategy-making and don't effectively plan for different potential futures. And what are those changes like in the grocery store example to adjust the business model, to keep it viable as it looks to get past the post-Covid crisis. How close do you see them to each other? One is companies sometimes have great aspirations, and they get excited about a particular market they want to go after. MARK JOHNSON:  Yes. And it’s often driven from functional leaders that, with great intentions, are trying to create great things in their function. PAUL LEINWAND: Well, the capabilities that really help set companies apart are connected to their mission. But you argue that actually the companies you studied that get this right, they actually put their culture to work. Because without an advantage, we’re up against too much when change comes. Mark Johnson, cofounder of the consulting firm Innosight, says that too many managers develop strategy while focusing on problems in the present, and that’s especially true during a crisis. And only 8% of leaders were seen as being able to be great at doing both. Strategy is how you get there in terms of the choices you make of where you’re going to play and how you’re going to win within trying to achieve that aspiration, that vision, of what the future of the enterprise could be. To launch … The example which we went just very deeply in lead from the future is Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Division, which is their pharmaceutical division, and a great visionary leader named Bill Hait, who was the head of Janssen’s R&D, looking, looking into the future at a time in 2012 when Janssen was very, very successful, and it is still successful, you know, overseeing a very, almost $10 billion budget of R&D, but as an oncologist by training, looked and said you know, we can look out to 2030 and see, see a vision of where we not just are in a break fix mode of disease, fixing diseases or treating diseases, but we can actually look to intercept and to prevent disease. CURT NICKISCH:  So if I can apply this a little bit to say the owner of a store, a food market or some other essential kind of service like that. And so these differentiated capabilities are very specific. So the land of benchmarking and benchmarks have their place, if you understand your strategy. CURT NICKISCH:  Managers and business leaders right now are encountering lots of change and that is essentially the market sending them lots of signals. CURT NICKISCH:  How do you practically do that? It’s being able to take trends, to take where the consumer’s heading, to take points of inflection, you know, how to trends converge? Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. Do we see commoditization setting in and we’re actually going to have what we call a growth gap? And we’re wondering, are we doing good enough? And so having a promise is one thing, but being able to deliver it is all about those capabilities. Mark Johnson, cofounder of the consulting firm Innosight, says that too many managers develop strategy while focusing on problems in the present, and that’s especially … I mean, do you think that they’re the same thing? We are going to be more questions-oriented. And he’s here to tell us exactly what he means by that. And strategy unfortunately can, oftentimes not be about breaking free from the past. Do we have to change our plans for how we’re expanding into certain places? They really describe culture as a huge advantage. Stop Micromanaging and Give People the Help They Really Need. But I have my own path. 26 min; 13 APR 2021 ; The Career Rules You Didn't Learn at School The Career Rules You Didn't Learn at School. Listen to Breaking Down Bureaucracy And Building Up Workers and 748 more episodes by HBR IdeaCast, free! I’m wondering if you could tell a little bit more about how they managed to do that while still managing to adapt and be innovative. CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, that raises a really interesting question. SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And this is helpful, because I think it’s bringing us towards another big point that you make in the book, that the companies that you studied who close the strategy-execution gap really do build their own capabilities and leverage those instead of trying to copy other companies’ capabilities. Taking on a Senior Leadership Role Remotely. And using that to say, we have to learn certain things and we have to experiment and that’s where we’re making choices of dollars and people to be able to, in this high degree of uncertainty, start to move forward. But that still needs to be there. But if I have a clear path and I’m convinced it’s the right path and I’ve got the capabilities required, I’m focused in the areas that matter. I’m Curt Nickisch. He calls this taking a “future-back” approach rather than a “present-forward” one.