Editor's letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2014), "Editor's letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 42 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-03-2014-0027

Editor's letter

Article Type: Editorial From:Strategy & Leadership, Volume 42, Issue 3

Customers constantly rethink their choices based on a rapidly expanding information universe. To respond, corporations must learn to continuously provide value in a customer-intimate way, which requires ever faster decision making. Rapid decision making depends upon continuous learning about customer needs given advances in technology and insights into economic prospects. As major opportunities become commercialized to deliver innovative goods and services, new ecosystems of businesses quickly spring up around them, giving rise to more opportunities and more decisions. So it is especially timely that this issue re-examines how to make decisions in dynamic ecosystems, given that much innovation now occurs outside the company and is unmanageable by traditional methods. Six articles in this issue offer solutions.

Crowdsourcing the ecosystem's expectations: a decision-making process to manage the unmanageable. Haydn Shaughnessy observes that increasingly it is the innovations and expertise of an app developer community, a content community, an advocacy community or a customer ecosystem, not the talents and resources of the firm, that are crucial to its future wealth generation. He warns that companies' growing reliance on such ecosystem partners creates a new level of uncertainty in the innovation and market adaptation process because firms cannot "manage" in a traditional sense the activities of thousands of independent actors upon whom their success depends. His proposed decision fix: crowdsourcing to quantify uncertainty.

Interview: Paul Nunes: Riding the wave of "Big Bang Disruption" by Stephen Denning. A new book by Larry Downes and Paul Nunes warns of the dangers of the Big Bang Disruption phenomenon. They found that the current generation of disruptors can quickly overtake established firms by using social media to attract a highly motivated network of customers and partners, or by customizing or integrating with other products and services. Nunes explains twelve new rules to guide decision making in the midst of disruption.

A step-by-step process for transforming contentious disagreements into creative collaboration. R. Edward Freeman and Mark E. Haskins believe "root-cause analysis," coupled with critical thinking, offers a process to both understand and resolve contentious disagreements that arise from time to time within management teams facing strategic decisions. By subjecting the disagreement to a step-by-step analytical process, a rich array of considerations often surfaces, a more expansive discussion ensues and the decided course of action is likely to be more wholeheartedly embraced.

Principles operationalize corporate values so they matter. Norman T. Sheehan and Grant E. Isaac urge companies to develop a set of principles that amplify and fully define the organization's values in operational terms. The principles provide each employee with clear guidance when making decisions in their work so their actions will be consistent with the organization's vision, mission and strategic goals.

Time to raise the bar on non-profit strategic planning and implementation. A large-scale survey by researchers Margaret F. Reid, Lynne Brown, Denise McNerney and Dominic J. Perri provides useful insight into the actual planning practices of successful NPOs and demonstrates that well-formulated strategic plan development as well as ongoing implementation-oversight practices significantly influence overall organizational success.

"Performance Accelerators" push the frontiers of CFO leadership. Through interviews last year with 576 CFOs to find out how they're contributing to the revenue, growth and foresight of the enterprises they represent, IBM researchers found a subset of firms that far outperformed the rest. The researchers dubbed these superstars Performance Accelerators because they've mastered a particular blend of skills and practices that enabled them to help their companies make smarter decisions.

Five reframing questions every strategy leader should ask. Alex Lowy offers leaders a set of five questions they should ask themselves and their team when the process of strategic change gets stuck, or the thinking narrows and becomes defensive or too careful, or circumstances suddenly shift, demanding real-time adaptation. At these moments, leaders need ways to challenge practices and assumptions; to see more honestly, clearly, and creatively, even if to do so is painful. At such times leaders need probing questions that help them reframe issues.

Good reading!

Robert M. Randall
Editor