Media Spotlight: Making Strategy Work - Harvard Business Press
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In the past two years the difference between firms that have been able to survive the downturn and those that have not has been strategy.
The brokers, packagers and even lenders that have been able to branch out and offer a wider range of products tend to be the ones that are still around.
But communicating such radical changes to staff can be tough. In good times and bad it can be hard to keep employees motivated to ensure your organisation stays ahead of the competition.
The aim of Making Strategy Work is to provide managers with bite-sized morsels of advice from the best of the best across a wide range of industries.
For example, we find the chief executive officer of Domino’s Pizza explaining how he uses his experience of playing American football when he was young to remind himself that only by constantly striving to do better can things even remain the same.
His college football team were winners but only because the coach drummed into the players that if they didn’t strive to constantly improve they would get worse.
A lot of the advice in the book is about how to keep staff on the same page - literally in the case of the chairman of mobile phone company Orange, who recommends having the company philosophy set out on a single page of A4 that everyone can read so they all know the parts they play in the grand scheme of things.
But hands down the most surreal story in the book has to be the one related by Philip Kotler, professor of international marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, about when he did some work with IBM in 1991.
Unusually, the IT giant liked to have representatives of its competitors speak at its annual board meetings and the year that Kotler attended Scott McNally, head of IBM’s biggest rival Sun Microsystems, gave a speech.
Except it wasn’t McNally. Unable to get hold of the Sun boss IBM looked through the firm for someone who used to work at Sun and asked them to become an expert on their former company and explain what made it tick to the board.
All was fine until he was told by IBM management that they didn’t want just a report on their big rival - they wanted him to pretend to be McNally.
Incredibly, the guy agreed to this and was even introduced to the board not as someone pretending to be McNally but the real deal.
And rather than delivering a rambling speech the bogus McNally simply stated that “we will bury you. We are a network-centric company and networks are more important than hardware. IBM is a hardware company - you keep doing your thing and we’ll catch up”.
Stunned as the board may have been by this the research and development director got into a debate with bogus McNally and won.
Kotler argues that this was a big mistake as the board had failed to heed the message of its competitor - albeit a bogus representation - and this set IBM back a decade.
In fact, when new management took over IBM 10 years later a network-centric model was adopted.
Now it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what a network-centric model is, the core message is that when you get feedback, negative or otherwise, it’s important that you listen to it.
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