New Business Book Summary Available for Bringing Strategy Back

Reverse innovation is the idea that many innovations originate in developing countries and trickle up to wealthier nations. In this fashion, the future of true growth and innovation will come from Asia, the Middle East, and the like. In Bringing Strategy Back, Jeffrey Sampler explores how companies in the East that are accustomed to chaos and turmoil are proactively responding to change. In order to succeed in today’s constantly shifting marketplace, companies in the West must learn from those in the East and ditch their traditional, reactive approaches to dealing with unexpected global turbulence.

New summary available for The Strategist

Entrepreneurs, business owners, and company presidents have big dreams. Dreamers often birth successful businesses, make countries great, revolutionize the marketplace, and in many cases, improve the quality of life for each generation. Entrepreneurs are trailblazers and often leaders, but they are not necessarily strategists. When leadership changes, it can mean the end of a company’s era, unless the next generation of leaders learns the secrets of becoming the strategists for their businesses. In The Strategist, Cynthia A. Montgomery offers insights into how leaders can become strategists, build successful companies, and create unique, valuable services that can stand the test of a downward economy and changing times.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Strategic Marketing

Thanks to changing customers and a changing business environment, marketing techniques also need to change in order to be successful. Although it is no longer at the front end of the sales funnel, marketing is increasingly becoming a strategic partner in driving improved business results. In turn, these results are becoming more and more dependent on understanding and serving customers in innovative and thoughtful ways. HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Strategic Marketing provides valuable insights into the changing landscape of the marketing function, as well as practical steps for reinventing their marketing processes to better serve customers and drive profitable growth.

HBR's 10 Must Reads On Strategy

Strategy forms the foundation of all successful companies, but developing an effective strategy and successfully executing it is a challenge for many. HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Strategy brings together articles written by business thought leaders that focus on key issues related to all aspects of strategy. By reading these pieces, leaders will gain insight into how to deal with the different facets of setting strategies and making them a reality.

Finding Synthesis in Dealing with Dilemmas

Finding synthesis and creating options are the two "pillars" of dealing with dilemmas. Finding synthesis means going beyond analytics and thinking outside the box to form new solutions and perspectives, rather than making straightforward choices.

Let's take a look at German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Thesis refers to the prevailing view or common wisdom.

But it typically carries disadvantages that cause others to develop an opposing viewpoint, or antithesis. While this may solve the original disadvantages, it typically brings new ones, creating a dilemma between thesis and antithesis.

At this point, however, there is not an either or choice. A synthesis can be arrived at, generating a new thesis.

Consider again the top down or bottom up dilemma between the financial and business process perspectives. There is the traditional "thesis" that upper management should set strategic objectives and that the rest of the organization should become aligned with them.

This centralization allows for more uniformity, economies of scale, and greater control but has the disadvantages of reduced flexibility, a reduced focus on changes in the market, and a lack of empowerment for middle management to find alternative solutions to opportunities or problems. Out of this comes the "antithesis" of decentralization, a bottom up approach that brings the decision making power closer to market opportunities and allows for more agility and growth.

But this may bring the disadvantages of fragmentation and higher costs from inefficiency. The two approaches appear to be mutually exclusive; the advantages of the thesis are the disadvantages of the antithesis.

But perhaps synthesis can be achieved with standardization. A standard is a "a uniform approach for people to apply in different situations."

Standards can help maintain some uniformity while still empowering people to tailor solutions to specific situations. Standardization becomes the new thesis which will eventually be challenged by a new antithesis.

For instance, how should a company deal with exceptions in a standardized environment? Will standardization stifle innovation?

A new synthesis will have to be developed.

Resolving the dilemma of value or profit requires the same kind of thinking. If business is thought of as a zero-sum game in which the customer's gain in value is the company's loss in profit, the dilemma will never go away.

What needs to be found is a synthesis of how profit can be made while also giving value to customers and others in the value chain. For example, Apple's iPod is a synthesis of the you-and-me dilemma between the customer's value of free downloadable music and the industry's need for profitability.

On one hand, Apple considered that embracing the trend of free downloadable music might create customer value and might allow it first-mover advantage in the market, but it was not clear how to compete with free. On the other hand, trying to maintain the industry's existing model would keep profitability and control of the end product, but it risked creating greater numbers of unsatisfied customers and becoming a market casualty.

Again, the choices appear to be mutually exclusive, but Apple challenged the assumptions to find the "and." How could the trend be maintained and be used to generate profit? The company noticed that free mp3 files were not always high quality and were often difficult to put onto mp3 players.

Apple found synthesis by 1) integrating hardware and software with its iPod and iTunes store to meet the needs of the demand chain and 2) by making music highly available through distribution contracts on the supply chain. By uniting integration and distribution, they were able to charge a modest price for each track and make a profit.

Value and profit were both achieved. Finally, the inside out or outside in dilemma (the tension between the back office and front office) must also utilize some kind of synthesis.

Organizations cannot really choose one or the other; they must be both efficient and effective, focused on streamlined business processes and meeting customer needs. One strategy companies have used to synthesize these competing demands is through mass customization principles, where each transaction is customizable and customers have greater self-service abilities.

This article is based on the book "Dealing with Dilemmas." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Leader Detoxification: Strategies for Transforming Toxic Leaders and Organizations

The best solution for toxicity problems is transforming toxic leaders through detoxification. Author Alan Goldman describes detoxification as "the umbrella term for directly addressing dysfunctional decisions, policies, oversights, miscalculations, avoidance behavior, and leadership and follower behaviors that contaminate employees and operations."

Detoxification is a complex process that involves both leaders and their organizations and is a "process that calls for coaches and consultants who are able to identify the multiple sources and players that contribute to toxicity within a system." Without assistance, leaders should refrain from attributing the cause of dysfunctional behavior to a single event or person.

A troubled leader may wield an extraordinary level of toxic influence; however, the detoxification process often uncovers multiple and interdependent sources. Even the most poisonous acts may be symptomatic of orders dispatched from the top of the organizational hierarchy making the source of toxicity less obvious at first glance.

In fact, blaming the most visible and obvious cause and perpetrators and responding slowly to dysfunctional behavior are actually ways to accelerate toxicity and make it extremely difficult to address internally. Goldman says, "The shock and dismay expressed by clients who identify their organizational pain as already reaching into the lymph nodes of their operations is testimony to the need for a detoxification process that incorporates affective coaching and consultation."

The most successful consultations result in collaborations between internal or external consultant and organization, and stimulate positive transformations of both the toxic leader and the company. There are deficits and negative organizational behaviors that must be overcome by toxic clients in order to reach a state appropriate for a positive transformation.

There can be numerous roadblocks, rationalizations, pseudo-interventions, ulterior motives, and acts of sabotage and resistance that can undermine the best of intentions. Organizations that suffer from high levels of toxicity are immersed in systems of deficit thinking and behavior that affect leadership, human capital, operations, and policies.

When deficient systems engulf the workplace, negative organizational behavior becomes the rule. A myriad of dysfunctions can affect relations between leaders and subordinates, research and development, work teams, and customer service, and result in a toxic system.

These can include prolonged conflict, sabotage, the abrupt hiring of mercenary CEOs, and savage overnight re-structurings. These acts all constitute extreme deficits and are on the short list of prime sources of toxicity in many organizations.

This article was based on the book "Transforming Toxic Leaders" by Alan Goldman. The book summary is available on the Business Book Summaries website.