Remaking the Case for Strategy in an Interdependent World — with Martin Reeves

Podcast Notes

In this episode, Simone Cicero is again joined by a special co-host and former guest on the podcast — Bill Fischer — Professor of Innovation Management at IMD Business School in Lausanne.

They talk to Martin Reeves, Managing Director in the San Francisco office of BCG and Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG’s think tank on business strategy and co-author of the book “Your Strategy Needs a Strategy”. Martin is also currently leading research on the post-COVID era, winning the ’20s, competing on imagination, corporate vitality, purpose of purpose, strategy and artificial intelligence, competing on the rate of learning, diversity and performance, innovation strategy, organizational vitality and the humanity of corporations.

The conversation takes a deep dive into what it means for a business to become “ecosystemic” and compete in the 2020s, and about the bankruptcy of the current ways of doing “strategy” in a world in deep and continuous transformation. Martin also speaks widely about the renewed importance of imagination in organizations and about the need to compete on the rate of learning, combining human ingenuity with the power of machines, and much more.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

To find out more about Martin’s work on the topic

• https://twitter.com/MartinKReeves
• Your Strategy Needs a Strategy by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha: https://www.bcg.com/publications/collections/your-strategy-needs-strategy/intro.aspx

Other references and mentions

• Martin Reeves, Fortune 50, October 2019. “How the Fortune Future 50 identifies companies with long-term growth potential”: https://fortune.com/2019/10/21/future-50-best-stocks-for-long-term-growth-2019/
• Martin Reeves , Ming Zeng and Amin Venjara, HBR, June 2015. “The Self-tuning enterprise”: https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-self-tuning-enterprise
• Adam M. Brandenburger, Barry J. Nalebuff, Co-Opetition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0385479506/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_cHC3Eb88TT1DN

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on May 18th 2020

Key Insights

1. Martin reminds us that only 10 years ago, none of the world’s top 10 companies by market capitalization was an ecosystem, while today seven of the largest tech companies are actually two sided digital marketplaces. This constitutes a new chapter in the strategy textbook as the digital ecosystem “has become the peripheral nervous system of the company”, which helped by AI enables faster learning and triggers a shift from static competition based on scale and efficiency to dynamic competition in terms of learning faster than our competitors.

2. Strategy is becoming an increasingly diversified concept with multiple meanings, which Martin now sometimes prefers to refer to as “whatever gets the job done”, where you deploy thought and action patterns which create competitive advantage in a particular circumstance. In ecosystems, where variance is “the secret sauce” that enables rapid learning, seeking full strategic alignment seems to be almost a fool’s quest, since players are not smaller versions of yourself, but have their own legitimate concerns and concepts around strategy.

3. Strategy — or change management more broadly — in ecosystemic organisations involves constant reimagination and renewal in the context of an ever-changing entity and an ever-changing web of relationships. A new organisational “construct” is in the making: as human beings are uniquely advantaged in doing counterfactual thinking and imagination, we need to come up with an organizational construct that frees human beings’ to imagine diversity, while bringing the data revolution and the analytics revolution to change management for routine, correlative learning. Does this entail an epistemological shift? Maybe we’re getting there. Martin refers to: first, an external revolution (technology and digital platforms), then an internal revolution (organisational transformation) and; third, a “mental” revolution, where we seize the full scope of those changes in a profoundly liberating way.

? 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.