Seeing Around Corners

Spotting inflection points is critical to staying in business, and spotting them early could give the much needed advantage to stay ahead in the game. But spotting them is easier said than done. Inflection points – a word popularized by the legendary CEO of Intel, Andy Grove – represents a point in time when the very fundamentals (assumptions, knowledge) of a business change forever. They appear slowly, grow steadily and seem to happen instantaneously. It is therefore no surprise that when not identified in time, inflection points result in disruptions, and quickly turn established organizations into obsolescence. The more successful the organization today, the more its leaders should worry about inflection points. Today’s advantages blind and slow the search for tomorrow’s advantages. Therefore, revitalizing today’s advantages and creating new advantages for the future are two big challenges facing large corporations. Some of the other concepts that deal with similar ideas include organizational ambidexterity and strategic entrepreneurship.

Change is certain. Sensing them is not. Leaders struggle with sensing changes. For leaders of organizations, sensing emerging trends or changes provide opportunities for replacing old strengths with new capabilities and/or an opportunity to renew old capabilities. Both are urgent and necessary. The urgency for venturing and renewal has only accelerated with emerging trends such as digitalization, sustainability, and pandemics. Surviving and thriving in uncertainty is today becoming the norm. But embracing uncertainty and thriving in it requires new tools and capabilities. One such tool was introduced to us by Rita McGrath several years ago. In a new book, she builds on those ideas and provides several new tools to engage in spotting inflection points in a more disciplined manner.

All entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial leaders need to see around corners and Rita McGrath’s book shows how this can be done in a disciplined and repeatable manner. The book provides tools to sense inflection points. It also talks about what qualifies as a disruptive change, explore how leaders can decide whether a change is to be acted upon now or requires continued sensing, who are best placed to sense such changes, and how leaders can humbly make use of such sources for the greater good of organizational success. Her ideas build on her prior work, Discovery Driven Growth, and I particularly liked the idea of placing ‘little bets’. My work on corporate accelerators fits with this books’ ideas, particularly the approach of placing ‘little bets’ to validate signals, before making large investments. The two pathway model of corporate accelerators allows corporations to sense different types of changes – incremental and radical – and place ‘little bets’ before diving deep into developing new capabilities. Therefore, corporate accelerators seem to be one possible innovation space where large organizations can encourage experimentation and exploratory activities. Moving interesting and useful findings from such centres to the main business, calls for handling several challenges, but that would be a nice problem to have and solve. While the book provides several models, tools, and frameworks, it is also filled with innumerable cases of organizations that have been both successful and unsuccessful in sensing and adapting to change. Rita McGrath’s style of interspersing theory and cases makes the book a highly useful read for any practitioner. I have written notes to myself all over the book and looking at these I sense scholars of innovation, strategy and entrepreneurship may also find the book useful. Though not a difficult read, the book is best suited for slow consumption by thoughtful practitioners.

As a scholar of corporate innovation and entrepreneurship, I have always enjoyed Rita’s work and recommended her books and articles to my students. Thanks Rita for another thought provoking addition to this already fantastic list.

Reference: McGrath, R. G. (2019). Seeing Around Corners: How to spot inflection points in business before they happen. New York, USA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Books and Me: How will you measure your life?

Book Title : How will you measure your life?

Authors     : Clayton M. Christensen,  James Allworth and  Karen Dillon

In recent times the discussion around  ‘ethics’, ‘values’ , ‘happiness’ and ‘fulfilment’ have increased manifold. The surge in demand has been adequately serviced by the supply side with most book stores stocking hundreds of titles on self-help for the working executive. The world seems to be becoming more complex as science discovers ways to make life more and more simple. This contradiction arises out of conflicting thoughts, as people make choices in personal and professional life.

Being a fan of Clayton Christensen’s literature, I was both excited and eager to read this book ‘How to measure your life’, which promised to throw light on this very aspect.  While I had read the article of the same title some time ago on Harvard Business Review, the opportunity to read it in detail seemed too good to pass.

This is not the typical business self-help book simply because he does not follow the usual route of writing that the genre follows.  In a sense we can say that this book is a trigger to disruptive change to the writing of business self-help books. For students of management reading this book would be a bonus since it uses proven theories commonly used in business decision making, to view individual life.  An important take-away for me personally was finding the right theory to solve the problem at hand.

Why is this book different?

1. It is not suggestive/recommendatory  in nature. Most of the books in the genre of self-help tend to make a useful list of suggestion for changing our habits behaviours and thought processes. As they are broad generalization they may not be solutions to every readers problems/issues.  However these do have their own value especially in a time constrained audience. But this book does not make recommendation or suggestion.
2. It uses theories to uncover options for our issues. Throughout the book the authors constantly reiterate the immeasurable value of using great theories.  Across aspects such as finding the true purpose of your life, setting objectives, developing strategies and allocating resources identifying capabilities. Retaining motivations and making decisions – the various theories used by the authors provide a excellent start point for someone to redraw and re-chart the journey of life towards attaining fulfilment.
3. The inherent nature of the book is that it introduces theories and raises questions and provides examples from the author’s life on how it was put to use. This leaves the reader with enough questions and directions to start finding their own answers and plan their lives as a fulfilling journey rather than towards any particular state of success.

The book is full of wisdom by one who is hailed and accepted as one of the top thinkers of the world, and everyone is bound to have something that would hit them hard. As a person early in my career which involves thinking, writing and teaching I found a lot to take away beyond the obviously stated ones in the book.  But two things in specific which I think are something that I want to reiterate and share with my clients and students are:

1. Choosing experiences over grades
2. Just this once Vs All the time.

While these two stuck me personally; a whole lot more may strike you as you read.  I strongly recommend this for people who are interested in a happy and fulfilling life at both personal and professional level!