by Adam Hartung | Nov 9, 2009 | Current Affairs, Defend & Extend, General, In the Swamp, Innovation, Leadership, Lock-in
Leadership
Why The Pursuit Of Innovation Usually Fails
Adam Hartung,
11.09.09, 04:11 PM EST
It's not what we're trained for as leaders or how our businesses are set up to work.
Forbes published today "Why the Pursuit of Innovation Usually Fails." "Most companies everywhere are struggling to grow right now. With their
revenues flat to down, they're cutting costs to raise profits. But
cutting costs faster than revenues decline is no prescription for
long-term success….."
The article goes on to discuss how from Gary Hamel to Jim Collins to Michael Tracy and Fred Wiersema to Malcolm Gladwell to Tom Peters — managers have been taught to identify their "core" and "focus" upon it. Whatever that core may happen to be, the gurus have said that all you need to do is focus on it and practice and in the end – you'll win.
But unfortunately we all know a lot of very hard working business leaders that focused on their core, working the midnight hours, sacrificed pay and bonuses, and kept trying to make that core successful — only to end up with a smaller, less profitable, possibly acquired (at a low price) or failed business. While the best practices make sense when looking at past winners, reality is that they were followed by a lot of people that didn't succeed. Their best practices give no great insight to being successful. They are of no more value than saying "treat people well, be honest, don't lie to customers, don't break the law, don't get caught if you do, show up at work." Nice things to do, but they don't really tell you anything about how to succeed.
The mantra today is for innovation, but thirty years of these "best practices" now stand as a roadblocks to doing anything more than defend & extend the current business. Only by understanding the objective to defend & extend what already exists can you explain how can one of the world's largest consumer product companies can call Tide Basic an innovation.
Enjoy the read, and please comment!
by Adam Hartung | Oct 16, 2009 | Current Affairs, Defend & Extend, General, Innovation, Leadership, Openness
"Everyone talks about the need for innovation these days, but they especially talk about why businesses are so bad at it." That's the opening line from my newest column "The Myth of Efficiency" at Forbes.com. Today businesses seem to be struggling with innovation – preferring instead to cut costs and pursue efficiency. But we now know that the foundation for cost cutting as a route to better returns is based on faulty – in fact mythical – claims by Frederick Taylor and his devotees of "scientific management." Read this article if you ever wondered about the value of cost cutting compared to innovation – and learn why so many people "default" to actions that never make things better.
My column cites a great New Yorker article entitled "Not So Fast" on the faulty foundations upon which scientific management – and subsequently much of business education – is based. For an even deeper read into the mythical bases of Taylor and his crew pick up a copy of The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong by Matthew Stewart (2009 W.W. Norton) available via the link at Amazon.com.
This is timely, because "Defining talent needs, managing costs central to workforce planning in 2010" is the headline from Mercer's own website about it's recent survey showing that the #1 factor in planning for human capital next year is managing cost!! How are we to grow out of this recession when people are cost obsessed? Especially now that we know cost cutting has no foundation as a basis for improving or sustaining returns? Certainly we now have good reason to challenge conventional wisdom as espoused in books like Cut Costs + Grow Stronger recently published by HBS Press.
If you are confronted with picking between cost cutting or innovating read this article, because your "gut" just might have been developed on faulty assumptions – leading you to make the wrong decision.
by Adam Hartung | Apr 2, 2009 | Uncategorized
Create Marketplace Disruption:
How to stay ahead of the competition
Some companies can’t change in response to market disruptions. Those companies die. Other companies do respond … eventually. They survive, but they see their profits squeezed, their growth flattened. Then there are the long-term winners; companies that create their own disruptions and thrive on change. In Create Marketplace Disruption, Adam Hartung shows how to become one of those rare companies, creating lasting growth and profits.
This book reveals why so many companies behave in ways that are utterly incompatible with long-term success… and why even “good to great” companies are struggling for air. You’ll discover how to reposition your organization away from the Flats and Swamps of traditional Defend and Extend Management and back into the Rapids of accelerated growth. Hartung demonstrates how to attack competitors’ Lock-ins, make their Success Formulas obsolete, and create the White Space needed to invent your own new formulas for success.
Create Marketplace Disruption shows how disrupting yourself is critical to reaping the benefits of market changes, and part of a process that executive and strategies can reproduce over and over again for improved results.
How we got into the mess and how to get out of it
The myth of perpetuity and the dark side of success.
Reinventing success: no more Defend and Extend
Creating your new Success Formulas and keeping the competitively advantaged.
Why “thinking outside the box” doesn’t work
First, get outside the box. Then, think!
Maintaining “The Phoenix Principle” for long-term success
Practicing Disruption until comes naturally.
Book Reviews
Praise for Create Marketplace Disruption:
How to stay ahead of the competition
History of the Book
Twelve years in the making
As professional business consultant with almost 30 years experience, Adam Hartung is all too familiar with a common malady among today’s businesses. Regardless of how much the leaders and organizations are struggling to grow revenues and profits they cannot seem to break out of below-expectation performance. Even when hiring top advisors, consultants and employees, results do not respond as expected. They seem stuck, and unable to make changes which will lead to superb performance.
Why? This question which sparked a more than 12 year analysis to determine the root of—and the solution to—the problem. Geoffrey Moore encouraged Adam to put his findings into a book, which he now endorses on the cover. The principles now covered in Create Marketplace Disruption have been affirmed as “fresh and much needed” by Tom Peters, and “a revolutionary message” by Malcolm Gladwell. Bill Gates’ co-author, Collins Hemingway, considers Create Marketplace Disruption a must read, as he details in the Foreword.
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