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Seeing Around Corners: Be Present at the Edges of Your Business (Best Practices 5-8), with Rita McGrath, Professor of Business Strategy, Columbia Business School, and Author, Seeing Around Corners
5. Get out of the building.
Someone I really admire for his ability to understand what’s happening in terms of cycles of competition and new technology and so forth is Steve Blank. So Steve is a very successful multiple serial entrepreneur. He teaches at Berkeley and at Columbia, and he teaches a course called the lean launchpad. And one of his phrases, I just think should be printed on everybody’s desk, which is, There are no answers in the building. And yet what I see when I look at how executives genuinely spend their time, there’s an awful lot of them that are on email. They’re on the phone, they’re in meetings morning, noon, and night. And they kind of forget that that’s not where their customers are, that that’s not where competitive dynamics are going to play out. That’s not where new technology’s happening. So the question I would have your listeners ask themselves is, When do I make time to get out of the building?
6. Incentivize future-forward thinking.
One of the unanticipated consequences of a lot of organizational rewards systems is that they tend to reward people focusing on lagging indicators instead of focusing on leading indicators. Now, why that’s a problem is, if you think about what we’re trying to create when we’re looking around corners, we really want to be driving our organizations to be more responsive to the future. So by definition, a leading indicator tells us something about what is to come. And yet, if you look at an awful lot of corporate incentive systems, it’s all about profits or revenues or you know, things that are great, but they’re lagging indicators, right? They’re evidence of the outcome of something that already happened.
7. Avoid denial.
Oftentimes the signals are there that something really is about to change, but people just don’t want to hear it. I’ll use Blackberry as a case in point. In 2008, Jim Balsillie their CEO was interviewed about what he thought about, what he thought about the iPhone, what he thought about those technologies. And he was basically dismissive. And the prevailing wisdom at Blackberry at the time was, iPhone is just going to expand choice for consumers. That’s great, but no business is going to use it. And you know what, in the beginning, they were absolutely right. iPhone security in the early, early days of the very first models wasn’t robust enough, wasn’t that good for business. But I think what Balsillie and his colleagues overlooked was that wasn’t going to stay the same forever. You know, I mean, if you’re capable as a technologist of identifying that something isn’t working, you’ll work to make it better. And so security got better and better and better. And eventually they did cross the line into being preferred devices in business. That’s the moment when the inflection point comes home. So being in denial that anything could happen is sort of an interesting problem that corporate leaders really have to combat.
8. Talk to the future that is unfolding now.
A final practice is to live with what the science fiction writer Henry William Gibson said. What he said was, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” So if you think about anything that has come to fruition as a real inflection point in business, it’s been evolving for a long time. And there are pieces of it that have been, you know, moving along. I mean, the very first review of Amazon was written in the summer of 1995, right after the company was founded. And in this Fortune article, you heard descriptions of what we now know to be reality. You know, packages are going to come flying through the air and maybe it’s not drones yet, but certainly door to door delivery of just about anything. But back in 1995, we didn’t have high speed internet. We had dial up modems only about 20% of households even had a home computer.
So a lot of the pieces of the ecosystem were missing to make it a real inflection point. Right? Now here we are almost 20 years later and it’s obvious to everybody what the internet does to commerce, but you need to look at those early places where you’ll start to see it. So that could be other countries kind of ahead of us and behaving differently. It could be looking at what younger people are doing. So something I’m fond of saying, you know, is if you want to understand what the 20 year olds of 10 years from now are going to be like, well, guess what? They’re all alive and well, and today they are 10. So when did you last talk to a 10 year old about things like their media consumption habits or how they play or how they interact? And I’m not saying, again, it’s predictive. I’m not saying it’s predictive, but it’s illustrative. It’ll show you a little glimpse of what the future might be like. And that’s an important aspect of opening your mind.