Heard on the Street - Discovery Driven Planning Changes Leadership Decisions - at Harvard, no less!
One of our dear colleagues at Wharton happened to be teaching at a conference up at Harvard Business School. He was kind enough to report the following exchange to us:
Dear Mac -
I just came back from a long conference at HBS that included a lot of business people and HBS alumni. The discussion came up about best advice for pushing their leadership team, and one of the business people said, “Well, this discovery-driven planning program that I participated in taught me that I needed a new CFO because the one I had wasn’t flexible enough. So I’d recommend that.”
Our friend continues: “As you might imagine, the HBS moderator didn’t follow up that line of discussion.”
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- Posted Rita McGrath on June 04, 2009
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Plan on paper, not with live ammunition
John Caddell, in a recent review notes that when using Discovery Driven Growth principles, planning should happen on paper, rather than in ways that are expensive and potentially risky. Hear Hear!
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- Posted Rita McGrath on April 21, 2009
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Discovery Driven Growth Going to India
In a nice comment on some of the core ideas in Discovery Driven Growth, a blogger from the Hindu Business Line describes a point we make in the book as useful. That is that you are better driving your projects from key decisions points rather than date milestones. The reason it matters so much, we have argued, is that when something is very uncertain, predicting dates can be nearly impossible, You usually can, however, anticipate the next major checkpoint and plan towards that. If people are given permission to replan at such key points, we suggest, there will be less escalation of commitment to failing courses of action and faster progress.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on April 10, 2009
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Mind-mapping to accompany our article on rethinking your business
Among other interesting news this week, which included the publication of a book review in Wharton at Work, is the appearance of our co-authored article on how to rethink your business during uncertainty in the Sloan Management Review. . It must have been timely, as Chuck Frey elaborated on the ideas on his blog.. What I found really interesting is his suggestion that in addition to the normal managerial toolkit, that mind-mapping and visualization techniques could prove helpful in trying to map out the assumptions in a business.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on April 05, 2009
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Be unafraid to change your mind - when new data come in
One of the core tenets of a discovery driven approach to decision-making is that under conditions of high uncertainty, striving to be “right” can lead you very much astray. Being right, in the sense of being able to predict what is likely to happen makes a lot of sense when you have a platform of experience to go on. It makes no sense when conditions change frequently, or there is much that is unknown. Under those circumstances, you need flexibility and the capacity for ‘intelligent failure’ rather than a mindless determination to stick with a plan that may no longer be relevant.
As my assistant, Anne M. Ferguson pointed out to me, Jack and Suzy Welch are of the same opinion. In one of their recent columns entitled “Fear of Flip Flopping” they point out that one hallmark of a good leader is the ability to revise their points of view as conditions change. The example they use is a legend in business school parlance - the decision to abandon GE’s famous “Be #1 or #2 in every market that we serve or “fix, close or sell” the businesses that couldn’t cut it. They describe a “eureka” moment at one of their famous management courses in which executives realized that this mantra was actually constraining GE’s growth by causing its managers to define their markets narrowly enough to make the market share numbers. Once they relaxed this requirement, managers were better equipped to look at adjacent markets in which GE did not yet have a strong position and invest to grow there.
The basic message is not to be inconsistent, but to be aware of the assumptions that you are making as you make decisions. As the assumptions change, the decisions might have to as well.
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- Posted Rita McGrath on March 30, 2009
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