09 Sunday Mar 2014
Posted in business, design thinking, management, strategy
Tags
Analytics, Big Data, business, Clay Christensen, Design Thinking, disruptive innovation, Generative Management, George Gilder, integrative thinking, Kevin Kelly, Nassim Taleb, operations, Peter Drucker, Roger Martin, Russell Ackoff, strategy, thought leaders
Like yin and yang, human enterprise has two facets: closed-loop activities and open-ended endeavors. In management we call these two operations and strategy.
25 Tuesday Feb 2014
Posted in complexity, consulting, design thinking, innovation, knowledge, management, problem solving, strategy
Tags
Alignment, complexity, Criteria, Innovation, Performance, Peter Drucker, phase transitions, Portfolio, Qualitative Leaps, Quantitative, strategy
When people ask me what it is that I do, they often act surprised and sometimes suspicious upon hearing my answer: “I solve wicked problems with undefined parameters”; yes, really.
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Tags
Decision Making, Heuristics, Human Systems, Humans, Implicit Knowledge, Life, problem solving, Science vs Art, Social Context, strategy
Life is not a sanitized laboratory experiment. It’s rather a messy ebb and flow that makes scientific precision a futile pursuit. The scientific method has its rightful place in the universe, but human affairs are more artful than scientific.
13 Saturday Jul 2013
Posted in human capital, innovation, knowledge, problem solving, strategy
One of my favorite study subjects is of course myself. And when it comes to good ideas, I’ve come to notice over the years that the essence of a truly inspired idea forms in only a few seconds. This almost instantaneous process is usually triggered by exposure to a unique experience that provides the missing piece that completes a thought pattern in the making. Patterns in the making or simply incomplete patterns, are themselves the result of internalizing prior knowledge and experiences, which, for a creative individual, should be a continuous process. And so, the creative potential emerges at the intersection between patterns in the making and exposure to diverse experiences.
21 Friday Jun 2013
Posted in business, capitalism, Organizational Development, society, strategy
Tags
2008 financial crisis, business, Enron, Invention, Machiavelli, Morality, Society, Speculation, strategy, Wall Street
With Enron still in recent collective memory, business has not fully recovered its morality and ethics standing. And the 2008 financial crisis didn’t help, in fact lowering trust in the world’s business establishment. So the question of whether morality and profitability in business can be symbiotic is fair. I had not really formed an opinion on this issue until the very recent past, when several incidents in my professional life gave me no choice but to do so.
And so, having pondered the issue, I believe there is an answer that constructively transcends the growing divide between the pro-profit and anti-corporate, anti-globalization groups. In short, business success doesn’t have to be synonymous with immorality. The key to achieving a symbiosis between profitability and morality is in my opinion a combination of strategy and invention.
06 Thursday Jun 2013
Posted in complexity, consulting, human capital, management, strategy, taxonomy
Tags
Abductive Reasoning, abstract thinking, antifragility, Art, business schools, Categorization, complexity, Daniel Pink, Dave Snowden, hierarchy, integrative thinking, management consulting, Management Theory, mental models, Nassim Taleb, right brain thinking, Roger Martin, Sense Making, statistical analysis, strategy, weak-signals
As I have recently argued, the world’s top strategists agree that strategy in complex, cause-and-effect blurred environments requires a unique mindset.
According to Snowden and others, in complex environments cause and effect relationships do not repeat and a categorization mindset where data is fit to preconceived notions about reality (i.e. models, frameworks, etc.) is ineffective. This by the way rules out most of the consultants who provide precisely this: prescription style, a-la-carte frameworks and models. What works are sense-making models (to understand the distinction between categorization and sense-making in the words of the world’s top strategists, see my related blog). Categorization models are fast and efficient, but may miss so called “weak signals”, comparatively insignificant data points that are simply part of the average in normal situations, but which can be the source of new emergent patterns in complex circumstances – fat tails and Black Swans respectively in Nassim Taleb parlance.
13 Monday May 2013
Posted in business, consulting, Crisis, strategy
Tags
business, Business Development, Crisis Turnaround, Recovery, Risk, Selectivity, strategy, Tailspin, Vicious vs. Virtuous Cycles
Just like aviation seems to have mastered the science of stable flight, so does business look stable and predictable from afar. But at a closer look tailspins are never far-away and remain a possibility. Many companies don’t go out of business over prolonged periods of decline, but rather suddenly. The warning signs for a vicious cycle are there, but the signals are usually weak and management overlooks them until it is too late. At that point revenue spirals downward, less money is available to pursue new business resulting in a reduced probability of getting business, and the enterprise is headed straight for a spectacular crash.
I will save the details for how a company enters tailspin for another blog, but here I want to focus on the key strategy to recover from vicious cycles, and even turn them around into virtuous ones.
02 Thursday May 2013
Posted in complexity, design thinking, management, strategy, taxonomy
Tags
Ackoff, business, complexity, Cynefin, Design Thinking, Idealized Design, Martin, Planning, Playing to Win, Roger Martin, Snowden, strategy
Following the publishing of his latest book, “Playing to Win”, Roger Martin has made a paramount distinction between strategy and planning. Having the greatest respect for Roger Martin’s thinking, I usually take his insights as foundational. Since foundational insights are few and far between, there’s a likelihood that other thinkers have come across similar distinctions. I didn’t have to search for long to find echoing insights in the work of Russell Ackoff, systems thinker emeritus, and Dave Snowden, complexity guru.
25 Thursday Apr 2013
Posted in complexity, consulting, human capital, management, Organizational Development, science, strategy, taxonomy, technology
Tags
Analytic Thinking, bureaucracy, business, complexity, effectiveness, Engineering, future, management, models, philosophy, Validity
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The most important function of management, particularly executive management, is setting future direction. That implies decisions and choices about the present and future.
Because engineering thinking or more broadly speaking analytic thinking predominates in many executive and consulting circles, it is believed that decisions require a degree of rigorousness similar to that of the scientific method in natural sciences. And so, it is firmly believed that analytic tools empower managers to make sound decisions. The result is a myriad of tools reminiscent of engineering speak – frameworks, trade-spaces, matrices – packaged in neat Power Point slides.
This all very good, but, as philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers remarks “tools are demanding – they do not confer the power of judging, they ask for the choice of the right tool for the right situation; in other words they oblige us to think and wonder”. The danger that Stengers cautions against is the rigid interpretation of the power of tools. Tool power should never be situated above human judgement. And when it does, this results in the tools getting a life of their own, and embedding the human element which is helpless to escape their hold. This ultimately results in a bureaucratic construct as the purpose of humans becomes not the seeking of meaning and validity, but rather the maintenance and upgrading of the tools. This also results in a proliferation of enforcer types at the expense of creative types, reducing the number and quality of choices about the future.
A more progressive view of management tools is as “enlightening abstractions, precious new tools for thinking” rather than “ready made instruments”. Also, in Stenger’s view, the relationship between user and tool is not one-directional; rather, “tools modify the ones who use them; to learn how to use a tool is to enter a new relation with reality, both an aesthetic and practical new relation”. In my experience, this dual directionality can also unfortunately work backwards: rigid tools can have a limiting effect on thinking.
Source of Isabelle Stengers quotations is “The Challenge of complexity: Unfolding the ethics of science – In Memoriam Ilya Prigogine”
Also check out Dave Snowden’s related blog entry.
21 Thursday Mar 2013
Posted in consulting, design thinking, human capital, strategy
Tags
Accenture, business, creativity, future, Harvard, Harvard Business Review, human, McKinsey, philosophy, Porter, strategy
Strategy is adding constitution to an ambiguous mess we call the future. Strategy focuses discernible choices from the fog of ambiguity by way of assertions and assumptions. It reduces the universe’s entropy. Strategy is deliberate choice. Strategy is awareness and self-awareness. Strategy is wisdom: it is a mirror. Strategy is integrative and convergent. Strategy is identity.
Strategy is not political correctness, nor is it group consensus. It is selective and competitive. It does not agree well with bell curves. Strategy is neither nice nor nasty. Yet it will be deemed heretic and non-compassionate, unfair. Good strategy is controversial. Good strategists will be called dictators, non-team players, naive, inconsiderate. Strategy is participatory only as a common pursuit of a better state of affairs. Strategy is fair to those who wish for better. It is unfair to those who hang on to the past. Strategy is change.
Strategy is creative. It is substantive. It is pleasing to the eye. It appeals to common sense and it is not information overload. It is a straight-forward perception of an in-achievable ideal: truth. It exposes cowardliness, laziness, hypocrisy, envy, falseness by denying them opportunity to hide behind the curtain of ambiguity. Strategy is accountability. Strategy is transparency. It is risk and courage. Strategy is sacrifice. Strategy is long term and it makes things worse before so they can be better. Strategy is responsibility. It is leadership. It is patience and self-control. Strategy builds character and nourishes morality and ethics.
Strategy is narrative. It is forged of convictions and ideals and desires. It is biased. It is ideological and not technocratic. Strategy is subjective and incomplete, but not superficial. Strategy makes leaps of fact and logic. Strategy is not planning and it cannot be proved. Strategy is not a simple process with discrete steps that spews guaranteed and repeatable results – it isn’t an algorithm (sorry Professor Porter, HBR, McKinsey and others). Sustainable strategy is not imitation. It isn’t bench-marking, performance, metrics and measurements (sorry Accenture, CapGemini and others). Strategy isn’t statistics. Strategy is not business process re-engineering. It is discontinuous. Strategy is organic. Strategy is adaptive and resilient. It is educated trial and error. Strategy is real and surreal: surreal because it describes what does not yet exist, real because the future is always born of the inference between what is and what could be.
Strategy is personal and quintessentially human. Strategy is enlightenment and fulfillment and wisdom. Sustainable strategy is the ambition to better oneself while not wishing others ill. Sustainable strategy is not playing zero sum games. Strategy is humbleness. It is observation, empathy, comparison, categorization. Strategy is artful design. It is meditation and self-reflection. Strategy is play. It is fun and thrill and adrenaline. Strategy is loneliness and hopelessness. It is pain and failure and rebirth. Strategy is cumulative. Strategy is a liberating journey. It is a quest for purpose and meaning with no room for regrets.
The art and science of the possible 