The executives I work with are not looking to hand their responsibilities over to the latest fad method or philosophy. Leaders are looking for good people to help the business thrive. They are focused on leadership, capabilities, and strategy.
They may want help in refining their strategy or more clearly defining their company’s purpose, but many have these worked out before meeting me. What I find most executives are looking for is help in making sure their organization is fulfilling the promise made to their customers and to make their strategy a reality.
I suppose productized solutions are still popular because they best fit at the point where ideation needs to become a reality; where most executives are looking for help. The vast amount of my career making strategy a reality and ensuring organizations reach the full potential of their unique way of creating value. It is most beneficial to learn all you can about strategy, building capabilities, and executive management, because those things always show up where ideas turn to action.
Who do I turn to when I want to learn? Some of the great thought leaders that articulate executive leadership, business capabilities, and strategy far better than I can are Peter Drucker, David Teece, Roger Martin; listed in order that I discovered their wisdom. Following are some snippets of who they are.
Effective Leadership
If you have not read Drucker’s “The Effective Executive”, I highly recommend it. You can find leaders anywhere in an organization and leadership has a different purpose than management. This is a great read because it is about improving leadership skills versus abdicating them to a productized solution.
Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. – Peter Drucker
Needed Capabilities
David Teece has written a great deal about Dynamic Capabilities. One of the highest levels of capabilities a leader can learn. Dynamic capabilities allow organizations to free themselves of productized solutions by putting why you need to make changes ahead of how you will make changes.
Developing a framework as you are defining why you need to change, requires dynamic capabilities. They allow organizations to develop frameworks as part of advancing, improving, and innovating instead of trying to follow someone else’s scripted result.
Check out “Dynamic Capabilities & strategic management” – David J. Teece. He goes into great detail how dynamic capabilities, business models, and organizational design are the effective big levers available to leaders.
Dynamic capabilities, which are underpinned by organizational routines and managerial skills, are the firm’s ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal competences to address, or in some cases to bring about, changes in the business environment. – Teece et al., 1997, Teece, 2007.
True Strategic Intent
Where do I begin with Roger Martin? There is so much of his work that resonates with me. He of course has mastered a remarkably effective approach and has been at it a little bit longer. I took part in one of his strategy cohorts in 2022, it helped me be much more effective in my strategic practice.
Two big take aways are leaders don’t do strategy very well because most strategic decision are based on past performance. The problem is if you want customers to behave differently you must imagine a new way for your organization to behave. Do not shy away from new activities that have not been measured yet in your organization.
The second is about the mental models we use to navigate our lives with some semblance of predictability. Martin challenges popular business models without getting into all the psychobabble. What he asks his readers to do is to revise or improve our routines so that our fast brain works more effectively. Readers should keep in mind that our fast brains and slow brains are equally susceptible to error. Little known fact: our biases and heuristics are what create fallible models.
Get copies of “Playing To Win: How Strategy Really Works” by A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin AND “A New Way To Think” by Roger Martin. They offer a new way to think about strategy and business models.
Strategy is not a long planning document; it is a set of interrelated and powerful choices that positions the organization to win. – Roger Martin
Using these thought leaders as guides and remaining true to your purpose for being in business, staying people-focused, and understanding your unique way of creating value will get you to the future version of your company. Please stay away from productized solutions, no matter how tempting they may be.
Additional Reading
Read my articles on why productized solutions will lead you astray: Lean… Just Another Productized Solution and If Not Productized Solutions, Then What?
