This month, I had a chance to attend the Water Summit in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The purpose of the conference is to draw out the leaders from government, industry and academia to build a foundation of dialogue around an issue that is hard to find actionable agreement on: the availability of abundant, clean water for the […]
Have you had the feeling? You are at a great conference and have found yourself in the zone. The speakers are doing a great job of landing concept after concept and your notebook is bursting with insights and actions. You may even put some open circles behind those items so you can cross them off […]
Growth Leaders need to be the “meaning makers” in our firms – and the current best method of doing this is to create a narrative. Growth Leaders catalyze action by creating lucid pictures of the future in their organizations by stepping into complexity and creating clarity. They paint on three canvases: the now, the near […]
“In business, there are two ways to make money. You can bundle, or you can unbundle.” –Jim Barksdale, Former CEO, Netscape For shrewd readers of the business cycle arc, there are opportunities coming forward that deserve some serious consideration. The drivers of these opportunities are there in plain site, yet many firms I talk to […]
It’s a constant cycle in sports. After the completion of the championship cycle, there is a draft. Rookie players are chosen, then free agents (experienced players) are bid on and a preliminary roster is set. It’s then that the war games begin. Each team tries to outguess each other’s strategy by looking at who has […]
We have an interesting case study playing out right now: Ford Motor Company has had three recent waves of leadership changes that give evidence to the demands of leading a large mature firm into what has become a classic set of trade offs between optimizing the current business model and creating the next. For those […]
I was in a great session recently with mid-sized business owners, and as we were coming back from a break, one of the owners asked a very thoughtful question: “We have a good handle on operations, but we only do strategy sporadically and on demand. As our business gets more complex, how should I be […]
Colonel John Boyd was an enlistee in the Army Air Corps late in World War II. With the war ending quickly, he went on to be a pilot in the Korean conflict, and was later invited to the most prestigious fighter training school of the time. It was here that he would develop his most […]
There is a fascinating property of water that while not well understood, provides a great organizational analogy for the role Growth Leaders play and where to find them. This unique property of water is the phase change it undergoes at freezing (zero degrees Celsius) and how it can be inhibited if the water is super […]
I was facilitating a group of senior leaders in a workshop environment recently and the dialogue turned to accounting. A strange twist in an innovation session? Not really, as we were talking about how the accounting systems we have in place today are based on the Taylor factory model. It was a model that made […]
