Roger Martin, author of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, gives his take on why smart people struggle with strategy: "The problem with smart people is that they are used to seeking and finding the right answer."
Problem is, the world's changing too fast to get a grip on and the ability to accommodate failure and success is important. It's all about the choices one makes and some of those choices are going to be wrong or things will happen that will make them wrong. Good strategists are people who have "flexibility, imagination, and resilience."
Truth is, if we were all so good at strategy, things could be very different today...but perhaps not for the better. What would we teach in management schools if all companies were successful strategists?
But then again, one reads so many points of view on strategy that developing a clarity on the term and the process can become a tad difficult. Is strategy more innovation today, for example? Here is Jill Lepore writing in the New Yorker and comparing innovation to terrorism: "Things you own or use that are now considered to be the product of disruptive innovation include your smartphone and many of its apps, which have disrupted businesses from travel agencies and record stores to mapmaking and taxi dispatch. Much more disruption, we are told, lies ahead...If you saw the episode of the HBO sitcom “Silicon Valley” in which the characters attend a conference called TechCrunch Disrupt 2014 (which is a real thing), and a guy from the stage, a Paul Rudd look-alike, shouts, “Let me hear it, DISSS-RUPPTTT!,” you have heard the voice of Clay Christensen, echoing across the valley."
Steve Denning offers, as usual, an interesting analysis and defence of Clayton Christensen, in his inimitable style: "First of all, let’s give Lepore credit for writing with considerable brio and flair. As always, The New Yorker’s prose is literate and often funny, even when it’s talking total nonsense. It’s a pleasure for anyone who likes good writing to read her well-crafted sentences and her flights of fancy, even when they are wildly misguided.
Indeed, it does take a leap of imagination to grasp the analogy between business disruption and terrorism. And in one sense, she is right: when executives at the New York Times saw its ad revenue stream suddenly collapse, they must have felt as anxious as they were when they were watching the twin towers fall down. In both cases, it wasn’t just a nightmare: the nightmare actually happened."
If you have clarity on the strategy v disruptive innovation debate, good for you. It's going to take me a while longer...
Problem is, the world's changing too fast to get a grip on and the ability to accommodate failure and success is important. It's all about the choices one makes and some of those choices are going to be wrong or things will happen that will make them wrong. Good strategists are people who have "flexibility, imagination, and resilience."
Truth is, if we were all so good at strategy, things could be very different today...but perhaps not for the better. What would we teach in management schools if all companies were successful strategists?
But then again, one reads so many points of view on strategy that developing a clarity on the term and the process can become a tad difficult. Is strategy more innovation today, for example? Here is Jill Lepore writing in the New Yorker and comparing innovation to terrorism: "Things you own or use that are now considered to be the product of disruptive innovation include your smartphone and many of its apps, which have disrupted businesses from travel agencies and record stores to mapmaking and taxi dispatch. Much more disruption, we are told, lies ahead...If you saw the episode of the HBO sitcom “Silicon Valley” in which the characters attend a conference called TechCrunch Disrupt 2014 (which is a real thing), and a guy from the stage, a Paul Rudd look-alike, shouts, “Let me hear it, DISSS-RUPPTTT!,” you have heard the voice of Clay Christensen, echoing across the valley."
Steve Denning offers, as usual, an interesting analysis and defence of Clayton Christensen, in his inimitable style: "First of all, let’s give Lepore credit for writing with considerable brio and flair. As always, The New Yorker’s prose is literate and often funny, even when it’s talking total nonsense. It’s a pleasure for anyone who likes good writing to read her well-crafted sentences and her flights of fancy, even when they are wildly misguided.
Indeed, it does take a leap of imagination to grasp the analogy between business disruption and terrorism. And in one sense, she is right: when executives at the New York Times saw its ad revenue stream suddenly collapse, they must have felt as anxious as they were when they were watching the twin towers fall down. In both cases, it wasn’t just a nightmare: the nightmare actually happened."
If you have clarity on the strategy v disruptive innovation debate, good for you. It's going to take me a while longer...
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