Our airplane was at 10,000 meters altitude, in stormy conditions, about to make an approach for landing at Beijing Capital Airport, and suddenly we realized that the pilot and co-pilot were in the rear of the plane talking with the cabin crew......
Actually, this is not true. We were not in a plane, we were in an executive education classroom at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. We were not 10,000 meters up, in stormy conditions, but we were with three corporate executive teams who were about to present their strategic plans to the four key decision makers on their corporate board the next morning; and these were going to be very difficult presentations! And, there were no pilot and co-pilot standing at the rear of the plane talking with the cabin-crew. However, there was myself as Program Director (& Professor), and there was the Program Manager (a former McKinsey consultant), and we were both locked-out of each of the three team rooms during the penultimate moment of a week-long preparation for board approval. At that moment, when everything was riding on what was going on in those three rooms that we were forbidden to enter, I knew that we were going to have a big success!
Everything that we had hoped for was happening. The teams and their respective coaches no longer needed our insights and advice. After working all week on their strategic choices and how they intended to execute them, they now had sufficient confidence to dispense with us and do it themselves. Could any other outcome have been as satisfying? We had made ourselves unnecessary. At that very moment of rejection, when I knew that being asked to leave the meeting rooms was unusual, I also knew that we had accomplished all of what executive education promises: we had provided bright, experienced, managers with the tools and frameworks that allowed them to leverage their knowledge effectively to solve their problems. Our job was done! So the Program Manager and I enjoyed a coffee.
In fact, on the very next morning, the three teams – one of the largest energy distributors in the world, a major player in global construction and the largest food retailer in a Latin American country, each succeeded in their presentations well-beyond what we, or they, had hoped for. It was a leaderless victory: the best kind!
My friend Bertrand Piccard, who was the leader of the team that was the first to circle the earth in a balloon, speaks about being “much more confidently aware, and more creative, despite being completely lost for five days over the Atlantic.” How is it possible to gain confidence while losing control? How is it possible to beat the likes of Virgin’s Richard Branson, in highly-pitched competition, if you’re not in control?
After all, Jim Collins, author of the iconic management book Good to Great, tells us that it is “disciplined people -> disciplined thought -> disciplined action” that leads to “great” rather than “good” performance, and yet here were our participants throwing off the formal signs of “discipline” and taking control of their own fortunes. Were we truly losing control? I don’t think so, not if you learn how to lose control in an appropriate and effective fashion.
While Collins is right about discipline mattering, the discipline that he speaks of does not have to be oppressive or imposed from above; and losing control does not have to mean “abdication of responsibility.” We had instilled a set of proven frameworks for considering the choices that each team faced, established processes for their making those choices and effectively presenting them; and associated them with coaches who helped facilitate their conversations and support their activities. At that point, the most liberating thing that we could do was to trust the teams to allow the processes to guide them in applying their own insights and experiences. Far from being out of control, this whole situation was very much “under control.”
Great impromptu performance in the face of the unknown will be an increasingly important attribute of successful managerial practice in the 21st century; and increasingly this means that it will be impossible to maintain control throughout, if only because we won’t know what to control in advance. However, it is possible to lose control while still keeping it at the same time – if you define what control you are willing to give up, and what control you cannot relinquish. After all, if I am fortunate enough to be working with great talent, I want to give-up some control so that they can fully exercise their talent. At the same time, I am still responsible for achieving the project’s objectives. Think of this as drawing a box around the project: the boundaries of the box determine who owns what. Inside the box are challenges for my talented team to tackle in any way they want. Outside the box is my realm of responsibility. Inside the box is where I choose to lose control; not outside, resulting in my retaining complete control over the objectives, while ceding absolute freedom to my team in how they achieve these objectives. Contradictory? Not any longer, but not easy either.
Effectively losing control requires two elements:
1. clarity of vision, so that everyone understands, explicitly and completely, what the vision of the project is
2. sufficient self-confidence on the part of the leader to let go of control within the box.
That is exactly what we did with these three teams and in the process they became the stars of the show, not us; which is also how it should turn out. After all, when they leave IMD, it is their show not ours, and it is for real!
So next time you see things getting “out of control” with your teams, think twice about whether it is a positive or negative.
Co-creation is the idea of the moment. Wherever I go lately the desire to get closer to customers, stakeholders and suppliers is at the center of everyone's strategic planning. I saw this emphatically driven home recently in the Driving Strategic Innovation program, a collaborative venture between my school, IMD, and MIT's Sloan School of Management, where nearly 60 chief innovation officers came together for a week to discuss trends in innovation. They came from all types of industries, from manufacturing to services, from government to the sciences and from all across the world.
The surprise was that at virtually every opportunity to describe or construct an effective innovation solution, these veterans immediately turned to some type of collaborative arrangement, whether to enlarge their idea pool, control costs or ensure that projects got done on time. They saw co-creating new offerings in association with value-chain partners, either upstream (suppliers) or downstream (customers, or customers' customers), as the smartest way to ensure a good idea's acceptance and commercial success.
What is remarkable about all this is that not so long ago these same professionals would most likely have been concerned only with innovation that occurred within their organizations, things they could legitimately control. After all, that's how innovation was done for most of recorded history. For decades business school teaching on innovation focused on building more effective filters to avoid the pursuit of ideas that wouldn't lead to commercial success. Today it's almost the reverse. We can manage very nicely within our organizations, but we need to work more effectively outside them, to bring the outside in, so that we can shorten the time and distance between those who have the next good ideas and those who can benefit from them. Rather than being preoccupied with filtering ideas, we are hungry to get more and better ideas. We can always filter later.
In my forthcoming book The Idea Hunter, which will be published in April, my co-authors and I argue that to stay ahead in today's world, astute companies and individuals must make the hunt for new ideas continuous and relentless. They need to understand that almost always the more ideas you can work with, the better. In fact, taking this the next logical step, the more minds you can engage in the hunt for new ideas, the better. That has become part of my professional mantra: More ideas are always better than fewer; more minds are always better than fewer. Always, not sometimes. And, of course, the more different minds you can enlist, the greater your chance of finding a really different idea. You will have to make tough calls on not pursing quite a few good ideas out of the many you get, but getting them is more important than worrying about how to filter them. Collaboration has to become a way of life, not an occasional experiment.
Only a few weeks ago I had a chance to try this first-hand. I was engaged in a session where executives at a fast-moving global consumer goods company were concerned about brand-building. They wanted to generate "wow brands," ones that so excite consumers that they create a viral buzz in the marketplace, and they do so repeatedly. Apple, Red Bull and Football Club Barcelona are three examples. They are exciting and energizing, and each has created a tribal level of allegiance among its customers/supporters/fans.
The challenge for this company was to apply lessons from such brands. The wow factor is more an emotional, visceral reaction rather than an intellectual one. Therefore to try to teach people about "wowness" in a classroom way would be far less effective, maybe futilely so, than to invite a target audience into one's planning from the very start, to help define, from distinctive individual perspectives (the audience came from around the world), what "wowness" meant to them and why.
In a sense we were all teaching one another, simultaneously, and co-creating the course as we did. That changed everything. My principal role as a professor was no longer to broadcast the truth but to provide a framework and a vocabulary with which each participant could make his or her own experience part of what became a shared story about what it took to create a wow brand. The results were extraordinary.
Among the biggest lessons we learned were:
--Wow brands dream bigger than others, but if you rely only on corporate insiders for your dreams, you will have very few dreams.
--Wow brands all rely on regular customers to share their dreams so as to create the future.
--Most companies push to customers, rather than inviting their customers to pull. Wow brands enjoy the power of pull from their fully engaged, co-creating customers.
--Every organization needs to appoint someone to be responsible for making co-creation happen; it doesn't happen on its own.
--Co-creation requires the managerial self-confidence to allow outsiders to help plot an organization's future.
--Finally, successful managers need to understand the value of social networking technologies in making sound strategic decisions.
My biggest personal takeaway from the wow brand experience was that, as always, getting more minds engaged in sharing the burden of creating new ideas both made it easier to find those new ideas and also produced much more interesting ideas than if I had tried to do it myself or with a small team. The big challenge, of course, is trust--giving-up absolute control over end results and trusting others to contribute their best to a group effort. The participants, in fact, spoke of "fear" when it came to sharing idea leadership with their value-chain partners, but, in the end, we all agreed that the power of the final results was worth far more than the security of controlling who participated, and when and how.
Co-creation is the way of the future for all corporate innovative activity, and collaboration--which has become one of my school's central values--will be how we go about all of what we do. Remember: More ideas are always better than fewer, and more minds are always better than fewer. Collaboration makes that possible.
Education is too important to be left to educators. At least that's my feeling, and as a professor, I just might know something about this. According to China's Global Times, in a study last year by the International Assessment of Educational Progress in 21 countries, Chinese students ranked first in the world in mathematics, but they were last in imagination and fifth from the bottom in creativity. Which would you prefer? For me, creative people can hire mathematicians—if they need them. But it's much more difficult for mathematicians even to become aware that they need creative help.
At the same time, the Shanghai Daily reports that the patent activity of China's top 500 enterprises is up 13.3 percent from the prior year, yet no one is asking what impact, if any, these patents are actually having. In a recent column in the Financial Times, Tyler Brûlé observed: "I tried very hard to think of Indian, Russian, and Chinese brands that I owned or used, and I couldn't think of any—no Russian design brands in my house, no reservations at any Indian hotels, and no Lenovo laptop in my bag." Granted, brands and innovation are not necessarily synonymous, but there are associations that cannot be denied or ignored.
So, who's to blame? The Global Times suggests that China's education system, with its emphasis on rote learning, is a part of the problem. In fact, IMD's 2010 World Competitiveness Yearbook reports that China's education system has been in decline since 2007 in terms of how well it meets the needs of a competitive economy, presently ranking 44th out of 58 countries—below countries such as Greece (43), Kazakhstan (35), and Qatar (14). Finland, on the other hand, which ranks 1st in this category, is a notable reference point that people speak about with respect to how its educational offerings in engineering, technology, and innovation are having a direct impact on the economic vitality of the country. Do you ever hear the same about China?
LIFELONG THEORIZING
I also would offer an additional candidate for assigning blame, at least as far as business and entrepreneurship goes: having the right faculty is a "must." During my sojourn in China as an academic and as president and dean of the China Europe International Business School, I was frequently struck by the thought that China's scarcest resource might just be "practically experienced" university faculty. Far too many of the Chinese professors I observed in other schools (CEIBS insisted that any faculty had the ability to interact competently with executives) had never actually worked for a living; they were lifelong academics, and everything was "theoretical" for them. This simply does not work if the goal is to transform new ideas into practical solutions. And it is particularly devastating if we are speaking about business schools and their role in preparing a "managerial class" for competing on the world stage.
Nor is this a uniquely Chinese problem. Business schools around the world are having great difficulty finding faculty who have sufficient work experience to be credible in an executive classroom. Far too many of the available faculty have tasted only academic life, and given that management is an art, not a science, the practicality of execution is often as important, or more so, than the strategic choice being executed. You just don't get this in a classroom, and if your professors have never had to make a suggestion work, and if their professors likewise lack such experience, then we have a three-generation problem not likely to be easily solved, if it is even recognized.
Like most industries, the innovative arts have their own distinctive "value chain," and a nation's university system is upstream in that value chain, producing educated talent that is available for employment in a nation's economy. With business schools, the talent is most likely destined for employment as key decision-makers who are in the process of creating the future through new product and service offerings. If that talent is deprived of "practical" experience, as a result of faculty without such experience, there is no doubt that innovation and entrepreneurship will suffer. Imagination will as well. Former GE Chief Executive Jack Welch was once asked when GE will be unable to continue to drive productivity improvements in such old-economy businesses as light-bulbs and railroads. He exclaimed: "That's an absurd question. Productivity is limited only by your imagination." But "informed" imagination, to be sure. What appears to be lacking today, in China and elsewhere, is academic faculty with sufficient practical experience to nurture such imagination in an effective direction.
"CRITICAL THINKING"
Solving this problem is not particularly straight forward. The merit in insisting on PhD education for business school faculty lies in both their capacity to do and appreciate complex research methodologies that allow us to drill below what often amounts to simplistic management "wisdom." This education also encourages "critical thinking," which is important if such scholars are to be able to separate truth and insight from careless analogies and misplaced associations. Yet the price to be paid for attaining such skills is often the pursuit of a purely academic life, without the opportunity to see the management challenge on a distinctly personal level.
My own school, IMD (IMD Full-Time MBA Profile), on the other hand, prides itself on its practicality and has taken as part of its brand-promise the slogan "Real World, Real Learning." This may be iconoclastic in the academic world, but we find that the more than 200 corporate learning partners who come to IMD each year believe this is an essential ingredient for the development of their executive talent. It is hard to believe that such a promise would not also be attractive to China, as well, unless China is content to produce mathematicians to be hired by our managers.
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