Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2020), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 48 No. 6, pp. 1-2. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-11-2020-209

This issue starts off with an interview with Roger L. Martin, one of the world’s most respected strategic thinkers, then features a treatise that contrasts hierarchical 20th Century corporations with agile 21st Century customer-focused management, an innovative guide to adding value to customer experiences, new insights into effective leader/follower relationships, a primer on risk management in a crisis, research on a strategy for re-allocating resources post-crisis and a how-to on accurately estimating revenue from new offerings.

In his interview with strategist Roger Martin, “The problematic economic efficiency mindset that threatens corporations and democratic society,” Professor

Brian Leavy notes that “Professor Martin has been concerned for some time now about the capability of the American capitalistic model in its current guise to deliver continued prosperity for the many and keep the American democratic dream alive.”

In his article, “The challenge: 20^th Century vs. 21^st Century management,”

Agile guru Stephen Denning chronicles how the old and new business mindsets are playing out. His message: “Understanding how 20^th Century and 21st Century management differ offers an evidenced-based theory why today’s leading firms are leading and why yesterday's giants are flailing.”

Leading experience-marketing consultant B. Joseph Pine II explains the formula for “Designing employee experiences to create customer experience value.” In sum, “If companies want to create and consistently offer engagement experience value, then they had better give their employees the wherewithal to design, create and stage such offerings through an employee experience that is equally personal, memorable and of course engaging.”

“Leadership is about empowering other people as a result of your presence—and making sure that impact continues into your absence,” say Harvard professor Frances Frei and consultant Anne Morriss in their interview with Professor Brian Leavy, “The dynamics of empowering leader/follower relationships.” Their message to executives: “Your job as a leader is to create the conditions for the people around you to become increasingly effective, to help them fully realize their own capacity and power.”

“The global pandemic revealed weaknesses in the traditional risk scoring and display tools,” warns Norman T. Sheehan, Professor and CPA Scholar at the Edwards School of Business, University of Saskatchewan, in his article “Revisiting risk management in a time of crisis.” He counsels that “An effective way to manage in a post-pandemic world is to reset the organization’s strategy to favor responsiveness and resilience over efficiency.”

Researching their article on how executives were successfully “Redirecting resources to promote post-pandemic growth,” Christian Bieck and Anthony Marshall of the IBM Institute for Business Value concluded that “An organization that wants to cut costs and not invest in transformation does not effectively serve an environment in which transformation is a mandate.”

In their article, Professor Daniel Deneffe, Hult International Business School, and Herman Vantrappen, Managing Director of Akordeon, a strategy consultancy based in Brussels, map out “How to improve revenue forecasts from strategic investments.” They offer a step-by-step guide to obtaining “sufficiently reliable estimates of the likely revenues and profits from making a strategic move.”

Good reading!

Robert M. Randall

Editor

Strategy & Leadership