Holly Weeks: A second interview, by Bob Morris

Holly Weeks publishes, teaches, and consults on communications issues. She is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy teaching the Arts of Communication at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her book Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them (Harvard Business Publishing, 2008) emphasizes handling difficult conversations well.

She gives advice for difficult communications in publications and broadcasts ranging from Harvard Business Review to O, the Oprah Magazine to ESPN Radio and CBS News Sunday. She is an advising expert for Harvard ManageMentor and a Conversation Starter on the HarvardBusiness.org blog.

As principal of Holly Weeks Communication, she consults and coaches on communications issues, with a special emphasis on sensitive and difficult problems. She is a keynote speaker, presenter, and workshop leader at national and international conferences with groups interested in these issues.

Holly was previously an Associate in Communications in the Harvard Business School MBA Program. As a Distinguished Instructor, she taught Management Communication, and Negotiation and Conflict Resolution, at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University. Holly has a master’s diploma in literature from the University of Edinburgh and an AB cum laude in English language and literature from Harvard University.

Here is an excerpt from my second interview of her. To read the complete interview, please click here.

To read the first interview, please click here.

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Morris: Who has had the greatest influence on your personal growth? Please explain.

Weeks: Not a person, but books. Reading is how I learned to understand the world.

Morris: Was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) years ago that had a great impact on your professional development or set you on the career course that you continue to follow? Please explain.

Weeks: My junior year in high school—small school, small town, upstate New York—the chemistry teacher came down with mononucleosis and for the weeks she was out, I went to her house, she explained the lessons to me, and I taught the class. If this sounds like a weird dynamic, it wasn’t. All of us knew each other, took all our classes together, played sports together, hung out together. I don’t know why there wasn’t a substitute teacher, but it was a small town and we probably didn’t have a very deep bench.

What completely engaged me was figuring out why one or another of my friends didn’t understand something, trying all kinds of ways to look at the problem, asking what she did think that maybe wasn’t quite right. We were all in it together trying to straighten it out and think it through on each other’s behalf. Believe me, we weren’t making great inroads on cutting edge science—I don’t think we were much past the periodic table—but I was very taken by seeing how people were trying to think, and figuring out how to move their thinking. Then our teacher returned and we went back to our conventional passivity. I didn’t forget how engaging it had been, though.

Professionally, this is still what I do: figure out how to understand what people don’t understand. What are we doing in tough communications that isn’t working out? How can I move people’s thinking, increase their understanding and their skill?

Morris: To what extent (if any) has your formal education proven invaluable to what you have accomplished thus far?

Weeks: My formal education was more and more reading, figuring out what people were doing, what they were trying to do, and, when the plan broke down, how they might move their thinking to what would work instead. In fact, my formal education continues, formally. I just changed sides; now I teach more than I study, but it’s the same questions, the same engagement.

Morris: It has been a few years since our first conversation and so much has happened in the business world since then. One development of special interest to me, a paradox really, is the proliferation of various communication technologies and devices at a time when people seem to feel more isolated, more out of touch, than ever before. What do you make of that?

Weeks: I think there is a current tendency—maybe a real desire—to hold many relationships at arm’s length without losing them entirely. I had dinner with a friend not long ago and we were talking and laughing so intently that we didn’t realize the restaurant was closing. We went on to a bar to continue our conversation and closed that one down, then to another bar and closed it down, too. We stood outside talking longer, but it was cold, so I walked with her to her bike and she walked with me to the corner and reluctantly we said good night. But that’s pretty retro. The people next to us in the restaurant were separately texting. I live in a college city and bars are beginning to go out of business because their clientele are pre-drinking and going to the bar at midnight solely to hook-up and leave. There is lots of posting photos to Facebook and then time spent individually the next day de-tagging them, but the photos seem to be the point, not the time together that they commemorate. Facebook pages look like bouncy, generic, interchangeable Christmas letters. If people feel connected, I’m glad but we may not be using the word the same way. And that’s for social relations.

At work, we’re in the regnum of “touching base”—the shortest of connections before moving on. I don’t know if people feel unusually isolated, but I know they feel busy. I think they are connected, but there’s so little time for other people, and a quick text is first, a connection and second, over. And, of course, new technology is really absorbing, so when what’s new is communication technology, which it often is, the communication part becomes a by-product of the absorbing technology. Closer connections take attention and time, two things in short supply. And I think I’m the one with a problem—shallow connections bore me.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

To read the first interview, please click here.

Holly cordially invites you to check out the resources at these websites:

http://www.hollyweeks.com/index.htm

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/faculty-staff-directory/holly-weeks

http://hbr.org/search/Holly%252520weeks/

The State of Strategy Consulting, 2011

 

Walter Kiechel

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Walter Kiechel for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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Like Satan in the book of Job, I’ve been going to and fro in the earth over the past few months, in my case talking to corporate executives, consultants, and former consultants. Among my questions to them: How are you thinking about strategy these days? Is the highest of managerial arts — or sciences, if you prefer — dead, as some allege? And what’s hot on the corporate rialto by way of consulting work?

Some tentative conclusions:

There is not much of a market for stand-alone strategy studies any more. Or, put another way, trying to base a consulting business on same is a mug’s game. The days when you could make a living responding to companies’ discovery of strategy, as in “Gosh, we gotta get ourselves one of those,” are gone with the 1970s (or maybe the 1990s in the “developing world”). Strategy has triumphed, the installed base is huge, no self-respecting company would be without one.

This poses a dilemma for consulting firms. On the one hand, membership in the top bracket — the lofty heights occupied by the likes of McKinsey & Co. and the Boston Consulting Group — still seems to require a strong strategy credential. Which is why you hear outfits such as Oliver Wyman and Booz Allen & Hamilton advertising themselves on the radio (public, of course) as strategy consultants.

But consultancies clinging too long to a specialization in strategy at the expense of other practice areas now find themselves in trouble. They may have done a swell $2 million strategy study for a client, but then have to watch from the sidelines as a more broadly based firm swoops in to do the $15 million project — a total systems redesign, say, or a corporate reorganization — entailed in implementing the strategy. Marakon, which put value-based management at the core of its strategy concentration, is essentially defunct. Monitor & Co., co-founded by Michael Porter back in the early 1980s, has seen better days.

Meanwhile behemoths such as McKinsey and BCG, to maintain their above-industry-average growth rates and keep their global office networks humming, have broadened what they do and moved down the food chain. McKinsey teams are beavering away in places like the United Arab Emirates and the ‘Stans — Turkmenistan, say, or Tajikistan — but they’re as likely to be doing operations projects as pure strategy work.

The most intense competition between consulting firms is for “whale” engagements. Undertakings with $20 million price tags such as the post-merger integration of a giant pharmaceutical client and its equally humongous acquisition. Or redesigning a company’s entire store system and approach to customers. While BCG or McKinsey will still proudly help a client devise a corporate strategy, in the eyes of many in the industry such projects have become what retailers call “loss leaders” — products you have to offer to get the customer in the door, but not where you make the real money.

Ultimately what the consultancies are competing for are semi-permanent, year-in, year-out relationships with companies rich enough to pay scores of millions annually for help and advice. In this context, as the Olympian firms broaden their offerings, their challenge becomes maintaining their pricing power, their ability to charge strategy-level rates for types of work that consultants from Deloitte or Ernst & Young will offer to do for a lot less.
At real live companies, strategy isn’t dead; it’s embedded in other initiatives. To be sure, you can still occasionally find a company buying a whole-hog, build-me-a-strategy-from-the-ground-up project. Typically such purchasers are emerging from some sort of major corporate unpleasantness — a near bankruptcy, say, or having missed out, Nokia-like, on a ground-shaking technological shift. Or, sometimes related, they have a new CEO with a mandate to shake things up and make her mark.

At most companies, though, the strategy has been established, even institutionalized. One CEO I talked with rattled off a list of undertakings for which he had enlisted consulting help. None sounded to me like company-defining strategic. But when I asked if, for him, strategy was dead, he was close to being offended. “Of course not,” he replied. “For us, our strategy informs every big decision we make — what markets to enter or exit, what acquisitions to make, what products to introduce.” (The very issues he had consultants gathering facts on.)

Foolish me, I came away thinking, underestimating the ubiquity, and triumph, of corporate strategy.

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Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World.  He is based in New York City and Boston. I urge you to check out the book’s website.

“Retail is war without blood”: What Foot Locker’s CEO learned in the Army

Ken Hicks

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Katherine Bell for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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This post is part of an HBR Spotlight examining leadership lessons from the military.

Ken Hicks, the CEO of Foot Locker, formerly the president and chief merchandising officer of J.C. Penney’s, graduated from the United States Military Academy and spent six years in the army just after the Vietnam War. HBR talked to Ken about how his time as a young officer prepared him for a career as a retail executive.

Bell: Tell me about a couple of things you learned from your military experience that have made you a more effective CEO.

Hicks: When I took over my artillery battery, at age 25, I could shoot a cannon better than any of my section chiefs. And I had six guns. The only problem is, I could only shoot one gun at a time. I realized that what I had to do was train my section chiefs to be better cannoneers than I was. Because shooting 18% of the battery isn’t going to be effective. And my job really wasn’t to shoot a cannon, it was to develop an entire artillery battery.

So I learned that you’re very dependent on your people to be their best. You train and develop and motivate them. People think in the army that you tell somebody to do something and they do it, and that’s far from the truth. They actually have more options and pressures that can be very intense. Think about it — if somebody in Afghanistan screws up, they get sent back home. If they don’t, they stay in combat.

To be a successful leader, you have to understand what skills are required and be competent at them, and you also have to have confidence. Sometimes people mistake confidence for leadership, or competence for leadership, but it takes both of them together.

Bell: Do you see any connections between how the military and the retail industry operate?

Hicks: In retail and the military, you’re very dependent on the people at the front or the selling floor. You realize how important the sale associate is. It’s the same thing in the army; you’re very dependent on your privates and specialists, and so you talk with them and learn from them. Six or eight months after I’d left J.C. Penney’s, I was in a Penney’s store looking at some merchandise, and an associate recognized me and came running across the floor to say hello. She remembered me because I’d treated her with respect and listened to her. That’s what you have to do to inspire people. The people on the selling floor, just like the cannoneers, the gunners, and the infantry, are the ones who make everything happen.

Bell: How do you stay connected to frontline employees, besides going out and talking to them?

Hicks: Recognition. I send out a little note card every month to the employees who perform best, thanking them for doing a good job. If you think about the military, people are willing to give their life in defense of the country and their friends, and what do they get for it? They get a ribbon on their chest. Everybody thinks recognition needs to be a big bonus or a promotion. It really doesn’t. What you learn in the military is people do their work because they trust and respect you and they want you to be able to recognize them for that. I send out these cards and the next thing you know, they frame them and put them on the wall in their stores or their cubicles because it’s important to them.

Bell: What else has made you successful as a senior leader?

Hicks: Learning and studying each situation. When I was in the Army I had the opportunity to have lunch a couple of times with Omar Bradley. Here’s a guy from history who led troops across Europe and commanded the war in Korea, and people would always ask him, who is the greatest general you served with? And he would say the greatest field commander was Patton. That’s because Patton did his homework, he studied the map, and he knew where the enemy was going to be and where they needed to go. It’s the same in business. You have to study the numbers and constantly try to understand where the opportunities are and how you can go after them. I’ve got on my wall in my conference room the principles of war. And each of the principles of war apply in business.

For example, mass: don’t spread your troops out, don’t spread your resources too thin. Unity of command: know who’s in charge, who has responsibility and who doesn’t. Security: don’t be surprised, study the competition, know what’s happening. I worked with a retailer who said, “Retail is war without blood.” You study and spend a lot of time understanding the competition’s situation. You learn not to overreact.

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Katherine Bell is deputy editor at Harvard Business Digital, the online division of Harvard Business

Katherine Bell

Publishing. She has worked as online managing editor at America’s Test Kitchen, as web director for British celebrity chef and cookbook author Delia Smith, and as director of content at PlanetOut.com in San Francisco. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares and Best American Short Stories 2006 and she is the author of the book Quilting for Peace. She’s also taught at the University of Iowa and in Lesley University’s MFA program.

Robert I. Sutton on why a great boss is confident, but not really sure

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Robert I. Sutton for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here

Robert I. Sutton.

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Recently, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe [click here]. Now I’m following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the sixth belief: “I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.”

My favorite track on Tom Petty’s 2006 album Highway Companion is a song called “Saving Grace.” About halfway through, he closes off a verse by singing: “You’re confident but not really sure.” That’s a state of mind that sounds paradoxical, but at times it really is true. In fact, it’s the essence of what developmental psychologist John Meacham called the “attitude of wisdom.” And it’s a good description of some bosses I know, who strike a healthy balance between knowing and doubting. 

Meacham’s insight, which was developed much further by one of my intellectual heroes, organizational psychologist Karl Weick, was that the people we consider wise have the courage to act on their beliefs and convictions at the same time that they have the humility to realize that they might be wrong, and must be prepared to change their beliefs and actions when better information comes along.
When I first became enamored with wisdom after reading Weick’s writings (perhaps eight years ago) I heard a great conversation about it at a conference put on by Harvard Business School Publishing in Silicon Valley. There, I heard innovation guru Clay Christensen and HBSP editor Walter Kiechel interview long-time Intel CEO Andy Grove [click here.], who had recently relinquished that title and become Chairman. I took careful notes and then a few weeks later went back to the organizers to request a transcript, which they were kind enough to send me. Grove gave his own testimony to this notion of “Confident but not really sure.” I’ve edited this for length (see the whole thing and more of my thoughts on it here), but here’s what he advised:

None of us have a real understanding of where we are heading. I don’t. I have senses about it. But decisions don’t wait, investment decisions or personal decisions and prioritization don’t wait, for that picture to be clarified. You have to make them when you have to make them. So you take your shots and clean up the bad ones later. I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.

This balancing act between confidence and doubt is a hallmark of great bosses. The confidence inspires people to follow them and believe in them, but the doubt helps ensure they get things right. They are always listening and watching for evidence that they might be wrong, and inviting others to challenge their conclusions (albeit usually in private and in “backstage” conversations).

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life. His new book is Good Boss, Bad Boss, forthcoming from Business Plus.

Narcissism, Partnership and Strategy

Walter Kiechel III

Here is an excerpt from article written by Walter Kiechel III for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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As the great Nebraskan Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz, Omaha, 1899) used to sing, “There may be trouble ahead…” An article in the latest issue of Academy of Management Learning and Education reports that over the past 25 years college students in the U.S. have scored steadily higher on tests for narcissism. Professors Bergman, Westerman and Daly note that “the mean narcissism score of 2006 college students on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) approached that of a celebrity sample of movie stars, reality TV winners and famous musicians.”

Fabulous. If that weren’t bad news enough, “Narcissism in Management Education” (Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2010, Vol. 9, No. 1, 119-131) also cites research indicating that “narcissistic tendencies such as materialistic values and money importance tend to be particularly evident in business students.”

Most studies of narcissists in business focus on their usually awful eventual effect on co-workers. To ride along with them can be energizing, even inspiring at first, but frequently ends in tragedy. As I was reminded last week when I caught one of the last New York performances of Lucy Prebble’s “Enron,” which pretty much reduces that company’s rise and fall to a story about Jeff Skilling’s increasingly delusional hubris. (A hit in London, the play bombed in Babylon on the Hudson, which already has enough challenges to its own hubristic tendencies these days.)

In a terrific 2001 HBR article, Michael Maccoby argued that a “productive narcissist” can be good for a company — setting out a vision, rallying the troops to achieve it. (As examples he cited Jack Welch and George Soros.) But in my observation, narcissism in strategy-makers almost always represents an invitation to disaster.

This for at least two reasons. Narcissistic executives usually create around themselves a miasma of distrust. They take credit for other’s work, value no one else’s ideas as highly as their own, and are so busy looking after No. 1 that they can be oblivious to the welfare of others. This makes it tough to develop a strategy in consultation with colleagues, who usually know more about vital details of the competitive situation than the Great One. And even tougher to actually carry the strategy out, except under the narcissist’s lash, which most talented people quickly lose a taste for.
The more fundamental problem may be that with sufficient feeding of their grandiosity, narcissists deteriorate in their ability to do what psychologists call “reality testing,” being able to spot the difference between the movie they’re playing in their heads (guess who the star is) and what’s actually going on in the world.

The classic posterboy for this syndrome: John De Lorean, father of the Pontiac GTO, who when he wasn’t hanging out with movie stars or marrying again was going to set the automotive world on fire with the De Lorean Motors gull-wing doored DMC 12. The entrepreneur’s arrest for drug-trafficking — allegedly to raise money for his failing company — put the finishing touches on that endeavor; even though he eventually beat the charge, he would spend the rest of his days bouncing down the stairs, eventually into personal bankruptcy.

In the face of what may be a rising tide of MBAs with, how shall we say, narcissism issues, and the chance that some may climb into strategy-making positions, the news of Britain’s new coalition government comes as all the more intriguing. Here you have two politicians, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, heads of rival parties, who, admittedly under serious pressure, manage to quickly form a partnership that has at least some observers suspecting that the country may have lucked into a governing solution better than any one party could have afforded.

For all the usual bromides about how “you can’t run a company by committee” and “you gotta have clear lines of authority,” partnerships have worked remarkably well in running a few fabled companies, including in setting their strategy. The modern Walt Disney Co. was at its best when Michael Eisner was complemented by Frank Wells. Coca-Cola’s patrician, aloof Roberto Goizueta wouldn’t have accomplished nearly as much without the consummately personable Donald Keough presenting a smiling corporate face to the world. Some of us wonder whether Goldman Sachs would be in the doghouse it is today if it had stayed with its tradition of two-headed leadership — John Weinberg teamed with John Whitehead, Robert Rubin with Steve Friedman. Astaire wasn’t the only Nebraskan who appreciated the value of a good partner — to every Warren Buffet, his Charlie Munger.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. He is based in New York City and Boston.

The “strategic imperative not to hire anybody”

Walter Kiechel III

Here is an excerpt from article written by Walter Kiechel III for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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My lunch companion arrived fifteen minutes late. “My phone has begun to ring again,” he explained, “which is a good sign for the economy.” Once a big-league strategy consultant, he now has a firm that advises CEOs on how to increase the value of their companies. “They’ve decided that we’ve touched bottom, or they wouldn’t be talking to me,” he said. “They’re starting to think about growing their businesses again.” Welcome news, but not what followed.

“But boy, I don’t see employment coming back, not for years. My clients were amazed by how much productivity they could squeeze out of their people in the downturn. They’re not going to start hiring again — well, maybe temps or contract workers, but not regular, full-time employees.” As if to punctuate the thought he added, chillingly, “In fact, the CEOs are mad at their middle managers for not having eliminated more jobs earlier.”

Asperity toward their colleagues aside, his clients are, in a narrow sense, doing exactly the right thing. If the modern history of corporate strategy teaches us anything, it’s that you have to keep cutting costs, systematically, never-endingly. This even at the same time you may be innovating, launching new initiatives, growing. Strategy’s recent history reinforces the point by demonstrating that any advantage you enjoy now is competed away faster than ever.

Smart companies have picked up on this aspect of fiercening capitalism. As Paul Vigna and John Shipman reported in a Jan. 25 Wall Street Journal article titled “Corporate America on a Diet,” even as Intel has resumed “enviable profit growth,” it’s keeping its work force at 2003 levels.

The trend dovetails nastily with changes underway for a long time, but up until recently not so unpleasantly evident. Our manufacturing sector sheds jobs not so much because those devils overseas are grabbing them, but rather because of technology-driven productivity gains. As Shoshana Zuboff pointed out a couple decades ago, the representative factory worker of the future will be a woman standing in an air-conditioned glass booth, monitoring gauges, whilst all about have fled, or been job-eliminated.

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It used to be a joke among some of my conservative friends that there were two kinds of problems in this world. Problems that should be left to the free market to decide, and unimportant problems. Free markets may have begun to work again, albeit grudgingly sometimes, for companies seeking to buy, sell, and raise capital. But those glorious free-market mechanisms didn’t work particularly well for credit default swaps or collateralized debt obligations, and we bailed them out in the interest of the larger good. Our friends, neighbors and loved ones who can’t get jobs are the larger good. The supposedly self-regulating market mechanisms clearly aren’t working for them. We need a nationwide crusade on their behalf, both governmental and private, even if it means surrendering some of our hallowed belief in the supposed power and ultimate goodness of the free market.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. He is based in New York City and Boston.

Walter Kiechel III on C.K. Prahalad and Strategy as Boundaryless Aspiration

Walter Kiechel III

Here is an excerpt from article written by Walter Kiechel III for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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C.K. Prahalad manifestly qualified as a High Lord of Strategy, Second Generation. News of his death saddened me, and set me to reflecting on the themes running through his work over four decades.

This isn’t as easy an exercise as it is with many other management thinkers, including some great ones. Does it strike you, as it does me, that many a business author writes the same book over and over? Not Prahalad. As he told Adi Ignatius, he liked to move on to the next project, leaving it to a collaborator or someone else to further develop their latest idea.

And his range of subjects was wide. Until I read his C.V. on the University of Michigan site, I’d forgotten that his first two books, back in 1974, were on healthcare management.

Others have, I’m sure, done a more thorough study of his work. But as a student of his contributions to strategy, I keep hearing a few recurrent notes in his writing. The dominant theme is what I’d call “boundaryless aspiration,” or, more precisely, a summons to think beyond conventional boundaries, geographical or intellectual. (Funny, the klutzy title of this post was running around in my head even before I read the blog by Ron Ashkenas recalling how Prahalad had graciously written the introduction to The Boundaryless Organization.)

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Prahalad’s book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid may be the biggest boundary buster of them all. In it this son of south India called on large multinational companies to see beyond their historical notions of geography, market attractiveness, and corporate purpose. This not out of some pallid do-gooder motive, but because huge, inspiring opportunities awaited them in the dusty villages and crowded cities of the developing world.

Through most of its intellectual history, strategy has been a pretty cold-blooded discipline — the pursuit of often disillusioning realities born of ruthless empiricism, a matter of devising microeconomic models to understand what was going on, then level-headedly calculating how competitive advantage was to be achieved. Truth to tell, sometimes as I read C.K.’s work it seemed to me he rather stinted on the analytic and quantitative, sacrificing this to the hortatory and inspirational. (In our conversations, which I remember fondly, the hortatory, sometimes bordering on the didactic, had a way of winning out.) But then, he was calling on us to look up and through such high windows, past our usual sense of limitations, beyond the tired dualities that keep us mired down here, well short of what he could see.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. He is based in New York City and Boston.

Walter Kiechel III on the power of strategic “pull”

Here is an excerpt from article written by Walter Kiechel III for the Harvard Business blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

Strategy by Any Other Name

A friend who books speakers for business events tells me strategy experts aren’t much in demand these days; indeed, they haven’t been for years. (Except in Japan.) Until recently audiences still sought out thinker/talkers on innovation or leadership. Of late, though, the rabble has ears only for economists or the occasional journalist who can shed light on the Global Financial Crisis (and perhaps wave a pitchfork in Wall Street’s direction).

So much for us who wear the big “S” on our sandwich-boards. You may, if you’re so inclined, shed a tear for us wallflowers, but weep not for our underlying subject. While I’m thoroughly biased, it strikes me that strategy shows up all over the place in contemporary management literature, albeit sometimes under different cover. It’s not exactly a case, per Jerry Lee Lewis, of “He’s walking in my tracks, but he can’t fill my shoes.” More that the latest marching bands are parading down strategy’s road, and lengthening it, but under banners bearing new devices, not the tattered regimental colors of old.

Take Mark Johnson’s Seizing the White Space or the precursor, McKinsey-Award-winning article in HBR, “Reinventing Your Business Model,” by Johnson, Clay Christensen, and Henning Kagermann. Johnson’s four-box framework for a business model contains all the key elements of a strategy — customers, costs, and competitors — plus some features that look like a recapitulation of strategy’s history.

The “customer value proposition” analyzes the job your product or service will be doing for your customers. Johnson’s “profit formula” squarely addresses your “cost structure” but also has, in its “revenue model” subcomponent, a nod to market share, which means thinking about your competition. To any student of strategy’s history, Johnson’s “key resources” quadrant will immediately recall Birger Wernerfelt’s resource-based view of the firm, and maybe its more popularized incarnation, core competences, courtesy of Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad. And if those weren’t flashbacks enough, the fourth box in Johnson’s framework, core processes, should evoke lots of memories of the late 1980s and early 1990s when strategy seemed all about competing on capabilities.

None of this is to take away from the originality of Johnson’s work, but only to say that he and his HBR co-authors are building on the original paradigm of strategy. Which is what you’re supposed to do with a paradigm. In a few pages of his book, Johnson invokes the glorious history of strategy, including Alfred Chandler’s famous observation that strategy follows structure. And this in service to reminding us of an ever-important piece of wisdom, namely, not to confuse a mechanical strategic-planning process with the actual creation of strategy. Modern strategy has always been disruptive; its partisans will applaud the ambition to reinvent one’s business model.

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To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. He is based in New York City and Boston. You are welcome to visit http://lordsofstrategy.com/.

Interview: Walter Kiechel III

Walter Kiechel III

Kiechel is the author of The Lords of Strategy. The book reflects much of what he has learned in three decades of reporting and writing on business, including over 100 interviews—a few stretching over days—for this work alone. In recent years he combined research on The Lords with occasional part-time jaunts as an editor at large for Harvard Business Publishing, helping the company in its perpetual quest for new ideas, authors, and business opportunities. Until January, 2003, Kiechel served as editorial director of Harvard Business Publishing and senior vice president in charge of its publishing division, with responsibility for the Harvard Business Review; HBS Press, the company’s book-publishing arm; the newsletter unit (which he helped start in 1996) as well as HBP’s video, reprints, and conference businesses. From early 1997 until his appointment as editorial director in March, 1998, he was publisher of HBR.

Kiechel spent most of his early career at Fortune magazine, where generally he had a wonderful time. After beginning at the magazine as a reporter in 1977, he rose to become its managing editor, the top editorial position, in 1994. As assistant managing editor (1988), executive editor (1992), and finally M.E., he crafted a strategy for the magazine as a journal of “ideas, strategies, and solutions for decision makers.” Through most of the 1980s, Kiechel was editor in charge of Fortune‘s coverage of management. Now and then he’d take a break to write cover stories including “Corporate Strategy for the 1990s” (1988), “The Workaholic Generation” (1989), and “How We Will Work In the Year 2000″ (1993). For 12 years he also wrote a regular column, “Office Hours,” on managerial technique, psychology, and sociology. In 1988, a collection of these pieces was published by Little Brown as a book titled Office Hours: A Guide to the Managerial Life. He has done daily broadcasts on “The New Economy” for the CBS Radio Network and hosted the not-much-lamented Fortune Week television program on CNBC.

Kiechel received JD and MBA degrees from Harvard University, and is a member of the New York bar. He got his undergraduate education at Harvard University as well, where he was awarded an AB degree with honors and elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From 1968 to 1973, he served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, spending most of the time on sea duty aboard destroyers, an adventure he still relishes.

Morris: Before discussing The Lords of Strategy, a few general questions. First, I am curious to know what you consider to be the most significant changes, during the last decade, in business education at institutions such as HBS, Kellogg, Wharton, Ross, and Haas.

Kiechel: The most important change, and it’s been going on for at least three decades, is the increasing “professionalization,” if that’s a word, of the faculty. By professionalization I mean the tendency of faculty members to have Ph.D.’s in their academic specialties, and for these specialties to be ever more narrowly defined. The higher-rated schools may have chief executives in residence or retired execs on three-year teaching fellowships, but the days when most faculty members had considerable prior experience as businessmen or women—those days are mostly over.

This has made for faculty members that have a lot of intellectual candlepower, often to the point of being able to command the respect of professors of economics or psychology elsewhere in their universities. It’s not as clear that the new-style faculty are as in touch with people and companies out there actually doing business. One thing I heard in the reporting for my book, from practitioners, consultants, and academics alike, was that practitioners were finding less and less useful what the business schools were doing by way of cutting-edge thinking of strategy.

At Harvard Business Publishing, at least when I was there through about 2002, we heard from junior faculty at Harvard Business School that their faculty mentors were discouraging them from publishing in Harvard Business Review, which is aimed at practitioners, until they had achieved tenure. Before then it was more important for them to publish in scholarly journals — The North Frisian Journal of Marketing Stochastics, to take a completely made-up example. How many marketing executives do you suspect read the North Frisian Journal?

Morris: In your opinion, what is the one area of business education at these and other institutions in which there remains the greatest need for improvement? Why?

Kiechel: The business schools could do a better job teaching face-to-face management, the actual work of organizing and helping along the efforts of others in the organization. The more quantitative disciplines—finance, even strategy—have gotten more attention, often more research dollars. Areas like organizational science or, even mushier, leadership have had more trouble settling on what it’s important to teach, and how. It’s rather like strategy itself, which as I argue in the book, has had trouble through most of its history figuring out how to incorporate people, their motivation and ability, into its calculations.

Morris: In an issue of Fortune magazine (March 22, 2010), there is an article in which Brian O’Keefe examines the ferocious competition to hire military officers whom he characterizes as “a new elite generation of business leaders.” As someone who once served on active duty as an officer in the U.S. Navy, how do you explain why companies such as Walmart*, PepsiCo, and GE are so eager to hire these men and women?

Kiechel: Companies are always looking for screening devices to use in making their selection processes more efficient—“Does Candidate X have an MBA? An accounting degree?” Service in the military is obviously one such screen.

But I think the reasons outfits like PepsiCo and GE have adopted this particular screen go deeper than that. The literature on leadership is all over the map. You can read the entirety of Bass and Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership, which covers most of the research on the subject since the 19th century, and come away thinking that nobody in the field agrees on anything. But one practical point many experts will attest to is that if you want to develop someone as a leader, give them lots of responsibility early in their lives and careers. The military does that. I can remember being officer of the deck on a destroyer, on watch and in charge at two in the morning as we plowed through the Mediterranean while 300 shipmates slept below decks. I was 25 at the time. I don’t know how much of a leader I ever became, but the experience certainly brought home to me a sense of responsibility for others.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Walter Kiechel III on how to “Keep Small Bites from Killing Big Innovations”

Here is an excerpt from an article written by Walter Kiechel III for the Harvard Business blog. To check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

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Modern corporate strategy provides a few insights with which to fight against corporate death by a thousand small bites:

1. Use a company-wide framework as a “sorting hat” for businesses and opportunities. The growth-share matrix was the original powerhouse here. You remember: businesses sorted into categories like star or dog according to their market share and growth prospects. It armed top management with a tool for rejecting demands by big, profitable divisions — cash cows like, oh, say, Windows — for investment money that could be better spent on new businesses with brighter futures.

2. Understand that you’ll probably need an effort from the top to keep the innovation pipeline full. Your current divisions aren’t going to propose new products that will upset their apple carts. For potentially game-changing new offerings, you may have to go outside and buy a start-up, as P&G has begun to do, or build it from the ground up, with hot-headed talent recruited from within or without.

3. Prepare to be dictatorial. Whatever else you think of Steve Jobs (would you want to work for the guy? how much abuse are you prepared to take?) he seems to perform the function of clearly deciding for Apple what it’s going to focus on. Ralph Lauren, the well-tanned man himself, plays the same role in his empire of Reconstituted Wasp Elegance. If your own enterprise is already beset with competing special interests, their teeth sharpened to take bites out of the next big idea, have your lion-tamer’s whip at the ready, poised to snap shut a few jaws.

Walter Kiechel III is the former Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing, former Managing Editor at Fortune magazine, and author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World. He is based in New York City and Boston.