Leadership as Architecting: Transforming Organisations into Thriving Ecosystems — with Bill Fischer

Podcast Notes

In this Boundaryless Conversation we talk with Bill Fischer, Professor of Innovation Management at IMD Business School in Lausanne. Bill co-founded and co-directs the IMD program on Driving Strategic Innovation, in cooperation with the Sloan School of Management at MIT and also authors a regular column for Forbes.com entitled “The Ideas Business”.

Together with Bill we’re exploring how incumbent organizations are likely to respond to pressures like plummeting transaction costs and the need to extend their organizational models across boundaries, digging into the cultural, organizational and leadership resistance that this transformation may encounter.

We talk a lot about Haier Group in this conversation, a world-leading pioneer embracing a culture of entrepreneurship and ecosystem enablement.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

More about the Haier model:

• William (Bill) A. Fischer, Umberto Lago and Fang Liu: Reinventing Giants: https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/books/reinventing-giants/
• William A. Fischer: How Haier gives insights into China’s radical transformation — From autarky to everywhere, https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/how-haier-gives-insights-into-chinas-radical-transformation/
• Simone’s take on the PDT blog: “An Entrepreneurial, Ecosystem Enabling Organization — What’s emerging from understanding Haier Group”, https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/an-entrepreneurial-ecosystem-enabling-organization-c35eaf5acd9c
• Corporate Rebels: “RenDanHeYi: The Organizational Model Defining The Future Of Work?” https://corporate-rebels.com/rendanheyi-forum/
• Stuff mentioned in the conversation:
• Charlie Fine, “Nail it, Scale it, Sail it”, https://www.jungle-mountain-ocean.com/about
• Oticon hearing aid company in Denmark, https://www.oticon.com/
• Jos de Blok, founder of the nurse-led organisation Buurtzorg: https://www.buurtzorg.com/about-us/history/
• Stora Enso, the Finish company with roots in the 14th century: https://www.storaenso.com/
• ABB, https://new.abb.com/
• John Hagel’s writings on Edge Perspectives, on ideas of scalable learning and the difference between scalable economy of scalable efficiency, https://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/
• Andy Boynton, Bill Fischer, William Bole, The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10553258-the-idea-hunter

Key insights

The ability to curate relationships among insiders and outsiders is key to organizational transformation that embraces platforms-ecosystems thinking.

Fostering scalable learning is the key game changer for organisations. This applies not only to the people within the company but all entities in the ecosystem. People and organisations will be attracted to an ecosystem where they have the opportunity to learn and improve and express their entrepreneurial intentions and capabilities.

Haier’s revolutionary organizational model Rendanheyi is exemplar in three key aspects:

1. It is part of the old economy rather than a lean startup.

2. It’s large in size, with over 70,000 employees

3. It shows “unimaginable” persistence in the commitment to organisational transformation: it’s been doing it for 35 years.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.