I wonder if the editors of the January-February, 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review connected the dots among their articles. As a reader I did. “The 100 Best CEOs in the World” is the cover story for an issue that also includes the article “Strategic Leadership: The Essential Skills.” Too many CEOs and their C-Suite teams invest too much of their time in operational management. They fail in the role only they can perform: designing a winning portfolio of business models and the hard-to-copy company capabilities, processes, culture, and ecosystems that they leverage. Strategic leadership is all about this work. I am not saying that operational work is unimportant. Indeed, it is vital. No customer will pay your business for inefficiency or quality issues, and competitors will likely use them to seize advantage. But the leadership team’s role is to establish the measurements,…
A sad “Kodak moment” business model failure
Louis Pasteur — “Chance favors the prepared mind.” This quote motivated Bill Welter to co-author The Prepared Mind of a Leader: Eight Skills Leaders Use to Innovate, Make Decisions, and Solve Problems (Jossey-Bass, 2006), a thoughtful leadership book. Bill’s also principal of Adaptive Strategies, a small business that specializes in the application of critical and strategic thinking for business through workshops, strategic thinking behavior programs and one-on-one coaching. And, as I write on the day after Steve Jobs’ sad passing, I am sure Bill would agree that Jobs modeled the attributes Bill wrote about. (See below.) From The Prepared Mind of the Leader Observing. Seeing beyond the obvious Reasoning. Moving from the known to the undetermined Imagining. Envisioning the future before it arrives Challenging. Pushing for higher and deeper thinking Deciding. Choosing with consequences in mind Learning. Keeping a developmental mindset Enabling. Exercising…