How to Create a Culture for Market Dominance

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UNRELENTING INNOVATION

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT WITH INNOVATION

In the excellent 2001 book Will and Vision, Gerard Tellis of USC’s Marshall School of Business and co-author Peter Golder of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business documented how latecomers to an industry can successfully attack and knock off entrenched incumbent companies, no matter how large and successful they might be. In his new book, Unrelenting Innovation, Tellis looks at the other side of the coin, explaining how successful incumbents can avoid losing the leadership of their industries. After years of research, Tellis has identified three traits of a company’s culture that ensure continued success: the willingness to cannibalize successful products, embrace risk and focus on the future. In Unrelenting Innovation, he details these three traits, then explores the three practices — providing incentives for enterprise, empowering product champions and encouraging internal markets — that create the innovative culture based on the traits.

Who Wants to Be a Cannibal?

In an early chapter of the book, Tellis quotes Howard Stringer, the former CEO of Sony: “Love affairs with the status quo continue even after the quo has lost its status.” Sony invented mobile music with the Walkman, only to let Apple and its iPod take over. The problem facing incumbents is even more complex because, to use Stringer’s terminology, the quo doesn’t visibly lose its status until it’s too late.

Tellis proves convincingly that only a company whose culture enables the cannibalization of successful products will stay on top. Unfortunately, there are myriad reasons why cannibalization is difficult. Kodak is a simple and sad case: It didn’t move into digital photography (which it had already developed!) so that it could continue selling film. Sony’s case is a bit more complex. It was clear that MP3 was the future of mobile music, but Sony had also through joint ventures and acquisitions become directly involved in music publishing and movie production — industries in which piracy is a threat. Sony included safeguards against piracy in its MP3 players, making them less user friendly. Consumers went elsewhere.

With equal depth, Tellis explores in the other two traits of innovative companies the nuances of what might seem as clear-cut directives that in reality are complex and often hampered by not always apparent biases.

Three Practices

In the second part of the book, Tellis describes the three corporate practices that can engender the three traits of innovative companies. The first practice is to provide incentive for enterprise — once again a seemingly simple and clear directive hampered in the real world of business by what appear to be logical considerations. It does make sense, after all, that a very successful company with a large and happy customer base would design its incentives around customer loyalty. Such incentives, however, are not going to spark the innovation and creativity that truly keep customers. Tellis advocates “asymmetric” innovation incentives: strong rewards for success and weak penalties for failure. Understanding the psychology of incentives is equally important. Subsequent chapters cover fostering internal markets and empowering innovation champions.

Each chapter in Unrelenting Innovation is carefully structured, with an explanation of the topic, a series of supporting case studies and a final concluding section. The framework that Tellis has created is an insightful and valuable map for those companies looking to emulate such star names as Apple — or to avoid the fate of Sony, the once-admired innovator that Apple tumbled from its perch.

Survival Instinct Gone Wrong

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Survival instinct – it can save our lives, but it can also make us sick.

That is the conclusion of Dr. Marc Schoen in his book Your Survival Instinct is Killing You. Dr. Schoen explains how the Survival Instinct is the culprit that triggers a person to overeat, prevents the insomniac from sleeping, causes the executive to unravel under pressure, leads travelers to avoid planes or freeways, inflames pain, and closes down an individual to love. 
  
Provocative, eye-opening, and surprisingly practical with his strategies and ideas, Dr. Schoen shows how to build up your “instinctual muscles” for successfully managing discomfort while taming your overly reactive Survival Instinct.

Are you experiencing symptoms of an overactive survival instinct? Then please join us on June 12th to hear Dr. Schoen discuss his discoveries over the past 30 years and how they can impact your ability to function in this complex world. You will learn that the management of discomfort is the single most important skill for the twenty-first century.

Our Soundview Live webinar, How to Retrain the Brain may provide answers to some of the maladies that have been wearing you down.  Is it worth an hour of your time to find out?

Book Review: How to Say Anything to Anyone

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by Shari Harley

by Shari Harley

Sometimes getting what you want is simply a matter of knowing the right way to ask for it. However, if your organization suffers from a chronic case of broken lines of communication, it’s unlikely that you’ll produce the results you desire. The nature of today’s organizations requires leaders to be able to speak with every level of the company. Author, speaker and consultant Shari Harley reveals that the secret to improved communication starts with improving your relationships. She offers advice to take charge of your company and your career in her book How to Say Anything to Anyone: A Guide to Building Business Relationships That Really Work. This title is now available for download as a Soundview Executive Book Summary.

One of the strengths of Harley’s book is its incorporation of all rungs of the corporate ladder. By including the subject of managing up, she takes readers into an area for which there is great interest but little published material. How to Say Anything to Anyone offers one of the more accurate assessments of the need for the cultivation and maintenance of relationships across a company.

For example, Harley describes the limited view employees and managers have of other departments. This creates its own level of tension that increases when we ourselves are misunderstood. She writes, “We just expect people to know why we do what we do and to follow our rules … In the absence of knowledge, people fill in the gaps. And it’s never good. Give more information than you think you need to give.”

How to Say Anything to Anyone offers a balanced approach to improving communication by first improving relationships. Strengthening each part creates a solid, successful whole. Harley’s system for improvement, drawn from real-life examples, will benefit executives seeking to renew their workplace communications.

Unlock the Potential of Everyone in Your Organization, One Decision at a Time

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THE DECISION MAKER

DO YOU TRULY MAKE THE TOUGH CALLS?

Coaches don’t play sports. When the whistle blows and the game begins, it’s not the coaches who run onto the field or the court, it’s the players that the coaches have chosen. In The Decision Maker, author Dennis Bakke returns to this metaphor a number of times: coaches choose the players. The theme of The Decision Maker is that bosses should not be making decisions in a company; they should be choosing the decision makers. The decisions themselves should be made by everybody else — including, and perhaps especially, the front-line employees. The Decision Maker is a business fable; Bakke uses the story of a midsize company recently acquired by two business partners — one of whom champions the decision-making revolution in the company — to illustrate the potential benefits and obstacles related to pushing decision-making down the organizational hierarchy.

Bosses Know Less

According to Bakke, benevolent paternalism is the kind of mindset that still defines most of today’s businesses. Bosses make the decisions, even though they are less informed than the people closer to the “action” — the people who are actually dealing with customers or making the product. Shouldn’t the workers on the assembly line be making assembly line decisions? Shouldn’t the techs that transform the ideas of the R&D researchers into prototypes be making decisions about how the prototypes are to be built?

In many companies, they are not making the decisions, and as a result, according to Bakke, they are disengaged, unmotivated, and just working to collect a paycheck and go home. Treat people like machines and they will act like machines, he writes.

In Bakke’s story, the former head of the company was a traditional, top-down control executive. Tom, the new co-owner, sees that he has acquired a company filled with uninspired employees. It’s not just a question of morale. As described by Bakke, the top-down command-and-control culture of the company shackles employees trying to do their jobs. For example, the story begins with an explosion on the manufacturing floor. No one was injured, not even the worker assigned to the machine that exploded; he was away from the machine because he was looking for his boss to get permission to shut the machine down. He knew the machine needed to be shut down, but he didn’t have the authority to make that decision.

For Tom, every person in the company is unique, a creative thinker, capable of learning and capable of taking on a challenge. Every person, in other words, is capable of making decisions. When Tom decrees that employees will be making the decisions that concern their work, the resistance from the managers is palpable. First, managers wonder what their jobs will become if they are not making the decisions. Tom replies that, just like coaches, their job is to choose the decision-makers — a serious decision based on the managers’ knowledge of the tasks at hand and the experience and professional attributes of their employees.

Managers are also concerned about the capabilities of employees who are not used to making decisions. These concerns seem to be borne out when a front-line employee decides to change suppliers, a move that leads to disastrous results. At this point in the story, Bakke introduces a key component of his decision-maker process: advice. Decision-makers must ask for advice from peers, bosses and employees below them in the hierarchy — anyone who has the experience and knowledge to help. It is, however, up to the decision-maker to make the final decision and to take full responsibility for that decision.

The former head of a Fortune 200 global power company and the founder of Imagine Schools, Bakke is not an academic theorist but a successful business leader who has implemented the decision-making program described in the fable. The PowerPoint presentation included at the end of this thought-provoking book summarizes the program succinctly and provides a simple guide for those who will have the vision (and courage) to follow Bakke’s lead.

Lessons in Leadership

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Whether you’re already in a leadership role or are moving up the management ranks, it’s always helpful to hear the perspective of those who have mature leadership skills and are now helping others to develop their own.

Next week we will be hosting two excellent leadership webinars, one for managers who are working their way up and taking on more leadership responsibilities, and the other for leaders who are involved in change. Check out the descriptions below to see how the experts can help you.

How Managers Can Become Leaders with Alan Berson

Often the very same skills and traits that enable rising stars to achieve success become liabilities when promoted into a leadership track. While managers’ conversations are generally transactional, leaders must focus on people, asking great questions and aligning them with the vision for the future.

In this Soundview Live webinar, How Managers Can Become Great Leaders, Alan Berson will demonstrate that leadership mindsets and skills can be developed, and the Leadership Conversations Model provides practical guidance for connecting with others in ways that transform each interaction into an opportunity for organizational and personal growth.

Alan S. Berson is an executive coach, leadership consultant, speaker, and professor. Since getting his MBA from Wharton, he has held leadership, strategic planning and marketing roles at Fortune-500 firms including Gillette, Bausch & Lomb, and Marriott. He was also the CEO of a VC funded training company with Fortune 500 clients.

Answers to the Biggest Questions of Change Leaders with Phil Buckley

In this Soundview Live webinar, Answers to the Biggest Questions of Change Leaders, Phil Buckley will provide complete, actionable answers to the fifty burning questions change leaders routinely ask about how to manage change successfully.

He has detected a pattern to what leaders typically don’t know about managing change in their organizations, and distilled that pattern down to the top fifty questions that keep change managers up nights, giving you prescriptive answers that will build the confidence required to successfully tackle any change project.

Phil Buckley is a senior change management professional with over twenty years of global experience developing and executing change strategies. His experience includes managing twenty-seven large-scale change projects, directly working with teams in twenty countries. His assignments include mergers, de-mergers, organization restructurings, efficiency drives, culture initiatives, strategy creation and deployments, and capability developments.

Please join us for one or both of these webinars. Just click on the title to learn more and to register. Both events promise to give you the tools you need to meet the challenging demands of a leadership role. You’ll have the opportunity to ask your questions of these experts during the events.