Control and Coherence in the New Strategy Playbook — with Rita McGrath

Podcast Notes

Today we’re joined by a true legend in the space of strategy, innovation and management: Rita Gunther McGrath. Rita is widely recognized as a premier expert on leading innovation and growth during times of uncertainty. She is a best-selling author, speaker, and longtime professor at Columbia Business School.

Rita has received the number one achievement award for strategy from the prestigious Thinkers50 and has been consistently named one of the world’s Top ten management thinkers in its bi-annual ranking.

Join our conversation as we explore the positive and negative impacts of inflection points for organizations and markets. We uncover discovery-driven leadership, irreversible versus reversible decisions, responsibility towards local communities as a key principle for organizing value creation, and much more.

This discussion testifies the true depth of the rabbit hole of the future of organizing!

•  Listen to Rita outlining the four elements of the new strategy playbook from min 0:04:34.

To find out more about Rita’s work:

•  Website: https://www.ritamcgrath.com/
•  Twitter: https://twitter.com/rgmcgrath
•  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritamcgrath/
•  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/rgmcgrath
•  Medium: https://rgmcgrath.medium.com/

Other references and mentions:

• Boundaryless whitepaper (2020), New Foundations of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking — Designing Products and Organizations for a changing world, https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/DOWNLOAD-NF
• Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh, The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, 2014: https://www.amazon.com/Alliance-Managing-Talent-Networked-Age/dp/1625275773
• Healthy San Francisco: https://healthysanfrancisco.org/
• Rita McGrath, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen, 2019: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Around-Corners-Inflection-Business/dp/0358022339/
• Peter Turchin, “Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies”, 2016: http://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/intra-elite-competition-a-key-concept-for-understanding-the-dynamics-of-complex-societies/

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 12 January 2021.

Key Insights

1. Four key elements of the new strategy playbook outlined by Rita in the espisode include: i.) the need to be thinking about being in motion rather than stability being the normal thing (being agile); ii.) getting much better at disengaging from things in a healthy way (letting go); ii.) getting smarter about resource allocation, and; iv.) innovation as a proficiency, not only new ideas but also incubation and execution.

•  Listen to Rita outlining the four elements of the new stratgy playbook from min 04:34.

2. Decision making and value creation in a post-industrial world is about realizing that “ increasingly value is moving from product, features, ownership to interactions, transactions, community, and experiences”, as highlighted by Rita in the conversation. In this context, it is wise to push decision-making rights as close to the stimulus from outside the organization as possible, and align incentives around what’s actually a good outcome for the organization. Applying “process and context controls” can help to recude the need to impose overly specific rules that may hamper autonomy and agility and leaders’ ability to manage “black boxes”.

•  Listen to the discussion on decision-making from min 10:29 and at min 46:23 for her take on value creation in the future of organizing value.

3. According to Rita, “we have allowed complexity to occur without really comprehending what the consequences could be” and “sleepwalked our way into allowing these companies to monetize and in many cases weaponize personal data, for the benefit of a business model that, to me, is socially a very dubious thing”. In this context, Rita suggests that putting breakers may be one way to slow down evolutions spiralling out of control, like social media induced violence, just like Twitter and Facebook decided to do when “deplatforming” calls for violence. We also need to become better at looking at systems as a whole; a nut Rita is currently trying to crack in her work.

•  Listen to ideas around complexity and social media from min 39:30.

? Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale 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.