Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2016), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 44 No. 5, pp. 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-08-2016-0068

The scope of this issue of Strategy & Leadership is, broadly speaking, sustaining growth. The feature articles approach the topic from a wide variety of perspectives but all convey an existential urgency:

• How platform-based business models power disruptive innovation

• Agile’s 10 implementation challenges

• How top leaders guide transformative innovation

• Finding growth opportunities in wicked problems

• Two growth strategies: restoring “founder's mentality” and implementing “The Three Box” solution

• A unique corporate theory of value-creating growth

A mix of frequent contributors to S&L and new ones, the distinguished authors offer strategic leaders new insights, processes and tools:

• In his guide to implementing a platform ecosystem strategy “Harnessing platform-based business models to power disruptive innovation,” digital consultant and author Haydn Shaughnessy warns that “Adopting and implementing a platform-based business model is fraught with problems and complications, many of which are poorly understood even by industry insiders.”

• Stephen Denning author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management diagnoses “Agile’s ten implementation challenges,” in an article that declares, “Agile offers a methodology that can improve the chances of building a new product or service that people will actually buy, use and like.” His challenge to management: “Agile is the only way for organizations to cope with the 21st Century marketplace and deliver what customers expect and demand: easy, quick, convenient, personalized responsiveness at scale.”

• Senior IBM strategists Saul J. Berman, Steven Davidson, Kazuaki Ikeda, Peter J. Korsten and Anthony Marshall have discerned significant trends in their research analysis “How successful firms guide innovation: insights and strategies of leading CEOs.” They found that, “More than two-thirds of CEOs believe traditional industry value chains are morphing into cross-industry ecosystems.”

• In an interview “John C. Camillus: discovering opportunities by exploring wicked problems” the Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Pittsburgh. says, “The ‘wicked strategies’ approach that I propose is designed to convert disruptive technologies into innovative business models, reconcile conflicted stakeholders by engaging them in co-creation of value and transform an unknowable future into a desired one through the alchemy of a Feed-Forward Framework.” Camillus discusses his new book Wicked Strategies (2016) with Liam Fahey, executive director of Leadership Forum Inc., an executive leadership education company.

• Contributing Editor Brian Leavy’s Masterclass: “Two approaches for sustaining growth: re-introducing the ‘founder’s mentality’ and implementing ‘The Three Box solution’” looks at two very different ways corporations can continue to produce long-term stakeholder value. One approach, by Chris Zook and James Allen, is for firms to “‘consciously and assiduously’ preserve and enrich their ‘founder’s mentality’ at every stage of their development.” In contrast, “Vijay Govindarajan’s Three Box Solution is about managing the natural tensions among the values of preservation (Box 1), destruction (Box 2) and creation (Box 3).”

• A third approach to sustaining growth is examined in the Masterclass “The ultimate leadership challenge: a unique corporate theory of value-creating growth” by Oleksiy Osiyevskyy, an assistant professor at Northeastern University. We learn that, according to the new work by Professor Tod Zenger, “The corporate theory of value structures the logic practitioners can use, repeatedly and consistently, to assess an enormous array of possible combinations of resources and activities … The logic enables strategists to define what is special about the options that are likely to create value.”

Good reading!

Robert M. Randall

Editor