Strategy

Interesting article in the NYT "Bits" section about Facebook having an inside track on emerging trends:

When the company saw a staggering spike of Instagram photos flowing into Facebook, it knew it had to act quickly. It bought the photo service for $1 billion before Twitter or Google could make a move.

Facebook can also use its superpower to experiment with who wins and who loses online. This was evident on April 24 when Facebook started highlighting a number of apps, including Socialcam and Viddy, both new video-sharing services that had been growing modestly. Each had a few million users. Just one week after Facebook began highlighting these apps, Viddy and Socialcam had close to 20 million active users.

Now this looks partly like an "honest, it isn't a bubbletime thing" justification of the Instagram purchase, but it is true that Facebook will see emerging trends on its ecosystem first, and to an extent can drive success:

Facebook has so much power online that they have the ability to buy something at a low price and then make it go high by directing traffic accordingly,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Sociologically, this is called the Matthew effect, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” (He notes that the term comes from a line in the Gospel of Matthew.) In other words, Facebook can create its future.

But that is true of Google search as well, so no doubt we will soon have an army of white and black (and other colour) hatted Facebook Engine Optimisers. But, as Google found, with great power comes great legislative probing:

Facebook may need to worry that competitors don’t see evidence that it uses its power unfairly. Eric Talley, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that although Facebook could be accused of market manipulation or anticompetitive practices, the company could defend itself by saying that others monitored the same data and that Facebook simply did the job better.

He said that Facebook might also have to worry that if it highlights content from companies it owns, it could face antitrust claims with the Doctrine of Tying.

Also, I think there is something that the article didn't cover - by definition, Facebook sees the world through a Facebook coloured lens. And just as a google coloured lens didn't (and still can't) clearly see social networking, a Facebook coloured lens won't see the New new things that do not use a Facebook style ecosystem.

A few years ago we collaborated in a piece of work for NESTA on the extraordinary innovation that US companies formed in the Depression showed. It seems that being born and surviving in that cauldron gave them an extraordinary resilience. Hewlett Packard (HP) was one of them, and was mentioned (along with quite a few of the other Depression era companies) in the 1982 book In Search of Excellence. Sadly along with many others, inclusion in that book was a sort of death knell.

HP has had a tough last 15 years or so, and has had a succession of unfortunate CEO choices. Now its just been confirmed that Meg Whitman (ex eBay) is the new CEO - AllThingsD:

The board of HP, which has had its own series of blunders in recent years, is hoping Whitman can help turn that around, especially as its competitors — such as Oracle, IBM and others — increase the pressure.

Whitman herself will need a lot of help. She has had a successful career in the consumer Internet space, but has little experience in enterprise and hardware, which are at the heart of HP’s big businesses. Among the most immediate issues to deal with: Coming up with a clear strategic plan; reevaluating Apotheker’s move to spin off its consumer PC business and shutter its webOS device development; reassuring rattled employees and restoring morale; and, most of all, calming disgruntled shareholders and getting the stock moving in an upward direction.

Other than that, Mrs. Whitman…

Good luck....she will certainly need it! Will this end a run of unfortunate CE choices? I'm not particulalrly optimistic as apart from her (in)experience in this space, this is a long mismanagede company in a decining industry, to pull out of and it seems to me that the HP board - which surely must be seen by now as a major liability - is still in situ. Still, if a biscuit hustler* could pull IBM around, there is hope for HP.

*I haven't done any research on this, but I wonder if there is a higher success rate for bringing in CEOs from outsuide the industry - I have certainly found it works well at middle and senior management level.

Steve Jobs resigned today as Apple CEO,for a new position as chairman. He said that:

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

Stock markets have fallen, hair has been rent, and TechWorld is in mourning as if he had already died. He is ill, but news of his death is somewhat exagerrated. And senior guys move on,it happens.So why the sturmand drang?

I think MG Siegler at TechCrunch is right when he says:

The root of this lies in the emotional ties that people have with Apple products. And that fact that we’re shifting towards a world where having contact with at least one Apple product on a daily basis is the norm. It may be an iPod, it may be a Mac, it may be an iPhone, it may be an iPad. It may even be an Apple TV.

And that was Steve Jobs' genius. Computer OS User Experience was crap until the Mac. Internet Mobile experience was crap until the iPhone. Tablets were crap until the iPad (though let us not forget that There Comes A Time in technology - the Newton was hardly a soaraway success)

That is what Apple needs to continue - that constant, fanatical, putting the customer first. And that is all that anyone else needs to to do match Apple. The time has never been better to take them on.

Doing it, of course, in large risk-averse cover-my-arse corporate heirarchies is another matter altogether. Just ask Nokia. And that is why the only position you can make the change from, that you can knock all the heads together from, is the top job.

Interesting observation in the NYT re the increasng speed of killing one's mistakes:

Seven weeks after it was put on sale, Hewlett-Packard killed its TouchPad tablet, the company’s competitor to Apple’s iPad. Hewlett-Packard killed the TouchPad after 48 days, cut the price and created a buying frenzy.

Last year, Microsoft pulled the plug on its Kin mobile phones only 48 days after they went on sale.

In recent years, technology companies have been cutting their losses with increasing speed. Google proudly released Wave, its platform of collaborative work tools, to the general public in May 2010. It canceled Wave 77 days later. Palm announced its first tablet, the Foleo, on May 30, 2007. By Sept. 4, the company halted development and the product was never sold.

This is a change from a few years ago and is apparently due to Apple:

When Microsoft released the Xbox 360 in 2005, there were widespread reliability issues and the console faced serious competition from the Nintendo Wii, yet the company stayed the course, and now the Xbox is one of the best-selling video game consoles of all time. That kind of tenacity seems to be in diminishing supply.

Some analysts trace the origin of this blockbuster-or-bust mentality to Apple. Each release of the company’s popular iPads and iPhones crosses over into being a mainstream media event. Al Hilwa, an analyst at the research firm IDC, described the accelerated lifecycle of high-end hardware as “Darwinian.”

Are other companies misreading the game plan though,and thus making wrong decisions? When we did the TEDxTuttle II session, Dr Caroline Wierz of Cass Business School explained that Apple spends a lot of time and effort winding up the market before any launch, so there is a pent-up demand at product release and thus the product appears to achieve its market penetration levels very fast (Pre-Hedonic Buzz marketing, I believe it is called) and thus makes the competition think the game is over.

Halwa also thinks Social Media has exacerbated the speed of the post-launch feedback loop:

The crush of tech bloggers and Twitter-using early adopters who chronicle every bit of news — good and bad — about new phones and tablets also raises the stakes around how well new products perform in the marketplace.

“You know pretty quickly, and in a very public way, whether a product is successful or not,” said Mr. Hilwa.

However, this is not necessarily all good news- Dr Wierz went on to talk about how Social Media was probably having a measurable impact on movie success on the first weekend of release as early moviegoers gave the thumbs up - and down - for later attendees.

We think there is something in this - if it is true for movies, why not for consumer tech too?

This also ties in with other work we have done recently, where we have found that the reputation for customer service for existing customers - now that it is all over the web - increasingly impacts the buying decision of new customers. We think its the same dynamic in operation here.

So Apple's real skillis not just the Pre Hedonic Buzz, but also making products that people love to have without a lot of iteration.

That sweet, simple story of Twitter's founding always seemed to me unlikely (having watched Boardroom egos for 15 years or so) so it was with no great surprise (but much relish) that I read about The Real Story yesterday - it was quite entertaining, but it also followed a quite familiar model:

- Original startup doesn't work, pressure on to find a New Thing
- Actual Inventor of New Thing gets shafted
- Boardroom bustups between The Money and The Vision
- Hiring a tough COO to sort it all out while the founders and funders fought.

Much more normal then - but it does sort of confound the classic VC mantra that The Team is the Big Thing - Fortune:

There's no shortage of drama at Twitter these days: Besides the CEO shuffles, there are secret board meetings, executive power struggles, a plethora of coaches and consultants, and disgruntled founders. (Like Williams. The day after Dorsey announced his return to the company -- via tweet, naturally -- Williams quit his day-to-day duties at the company, although he remains a board member and Twitter's largest shareholder, with an estimated 30% to 35% stake.) These theatrics, which go well beyond the usual angst at a new venture, have contributed to a growing perception that innovation has stalled and management is in turmoil at one of Silicon Valley's most promising startups, which some 20 million active users rely on each month for updates on everything from subway delays to election results -- and which a growing number of companies, big and small, seek to use to market themselves and track customers.

In this case, the combination of right product, right market, right time has totally trumped Founder fallout. Fortune's view is that the service is slowing down now, and they need some grown up managers:

Twitter doesn't lack talented engineers, potential paying customers, or loyal users -- and it certainly has plenty of money in the bank: It has raised more than $360 million from such heavyweights as Jeff Bezos and Kleiner Perkins. The problem is a board and top executive team that don't always appear to have control of its wide-ranging cast of characters, including founders who have attained near-celebrity status (another co-founder, Biz Stone, is a regular on NPR, and earlier this year Dorsey was profiled in Vanity Fair), headstrong and divisive managers, and investors used to getting their way.

And yet, and yet - it continues to grow outside teh US, there is still nothing quite like it flexibility wise and its got a lot of runway left to figure oyut its next move - despite measuring management time in revolutions per minute.... maybe its the exception that proves the rule of management team uber alles, but to me its a damn good indication that if the mousetrap truly is better, the world will beat a path to the door.

The story is a salutary lesson for any wannabee startup CEO, should be required reading after The Prince

We wrote the following in January about how Google should start to fix itself:

(i) Big companies ARE big and complex - you can break it up and make all the units autonomous but they will then replicate lots of functions, not co-ordinate and even act against each other units. Keep it all together and you get a slow behemoth. Key is to differentiate complementary businesses from ones that are islands and diversions. Some of the stuff Google does is not really search (Mobile OS Software, AI Cars), and there must be an argument that those can be done in pretty independent units.

(ii) Not saying that Larry Page himself is part of the problem, but I suspect (based purely on observation of many large corporates) - in diametric disagreement with the Business Week article, that some of the old hands may be, especially if there are stovepipes run by very powerful barons..

(iii) However,the other thing I have heard from more than one friend at Google is that it has slowly filled up with corporate weasels (the people who are great at managing up, poor at leading teams, very political, and often useless - but these people can create havoc and waste a lot of other people's time). All companies have this of course, but it sounds like Google has a bad infestation right now.

Well! Since then Eric Schmidt has been de-ranked, and now the shake-up that Larry Page is putting Google through has the potential to do just these things - it looks like he is shaking up the senior management, and has had the b*lls to make possibly unpopular changes - and is moving to more independent units. I just hope that he also culls the weasels.

I even think the bonus on hitting Social targets is a good play (others do not), in that in large organisations what you don't reward doesn't get done, and so this is a "strong" tell in game theory - it's not just a "we will support social" corporate statement, it has an "if you don't there are penalties" element. It makes it harder for those who would block it to gain traction and helps the enthusiasts/change agents.

The hard thing now is to re-integrate the business after all the changes - a good organisation change can free up a lot of energy if it gets enough of the drones out, a bad one causes chaos. So far my Googlesources are uncertain, but the next few weeks will be key.

Google is mandating its people "get" social and is basing a % of their bonus on it*. For the young 'uns, and those with faulty memories, here is an excerpt of Bill Gates' "Internet Tidal Wave" memo of 1995 (the date at which Microsoft de facto declared it was Yesterday's Man - and its products improved markedly ), with "Microsoft" and "The Internet" or the "Web"replaced with "Google" and "Social Networks" where appropriate. Plus ca Change......

The Internet Today

.......

Another unique aspect of the Social Network is that because ..... it is growing so fast, it is the only “public” network whose economics reflect the latest advances in communications technology. The price paid for corporations to connect to Social Networks is determined by the size of your “on-ramp” to the Social Network and not by how much you actually use your connection. Usage isn’t even metered. It doesn’t matter if you connect nearby or half way around the globe. This makes the marginal cost of extra usage essentially zero encouraging heavy usage.

Most important is that the Social Network has bootstrapped itself as a place to publish content. It has enough users that it is benefiting from the positive feedback loop of the more users it gets, the more content it gets, and the more content it gets, the more users it gets. I encourage everyone on the executive staff and their direct reports to use the Internet. I’ve attached an appendix, which Brian Flemming helped me pull together that shows some hot sites to try out. You can do this by either using the .HTM enclosure with any Internet browser or, if you have Word set up properly, you can navigate right from within this document. Of particular interest are the sites such as “YAHOO” [FACEBOOK] which provide subject catalogs and searching. Also of interest are the ways our competitors are using their Websites to present their products.

Amazingly it is easier to find information on the Social Network then it is to find information on the Google Network. This inversion where a public network solves a problem better than a private network is quite stunning. [Ed - we would transpose those now....]. This inversion points out an opportunity for us in the corporate market. An important goal for the Office and Systems products is to focus on how our customers can create and publish information on their LANs. All work we do here can be leveraged into the HTTP/Social Network world. The strength of the Office and Windows businesses today gives us a chance to superset the Web. One critical issue is runtime/browser size and performance. Only when our Office – Windows solution has comparable performance to the Web will our extensions be worthwhile. I view this as the most important element of Office 96 and the next major release of Windows.

One technical challenge facing Social Networks is how to handle “real-time” content – specifically audio and video. The underlying technology of the Internet is a packet network which does not guarantee that data will move from one point to another at a guaranteed rate. The congestion on the network determines how quickly packets are sent. Audio can be delivered on the Social Network today using several approaches. The classic approach is to simply transmit the audio file in its entirety before it is played. A second approach is to send enough of it to be fairly sure that you can keeping playing without having to pause. This is the approach Progressive Networks Real Audio (Rob Glaser’s new company) uses. Three companies (Internet Voice Chat, Vocaltec, and Netphone) allow phone conversations across the Internet but the quality is worse than a normal phone call. For video, a protocol called CU-SeeMe from Cornell allows for video conferencing. It simply delivers as many frames per second as it sees the current network congestion can handle, so even at low resolution it is quite jerky. All of these “hacks” to provide video and audio will improve because the Social Network will get faster and also because the software will improve. At some point in the next three years, protocol enhancements taking advantage of the ATM [ATM - remember that.... ] backbone being used for most of the Internet will provide “quality of service guarantees”. This is a guarantee by every switch between you and your destination that enough bandwidth had been reserved to make sure you get your data as fast as you need it. Extensions to IP have already been proposed. This might be an opportunity for us to take the lead working with UUNET and others. Only with this improvement and an incredible amount of additional bandwidth and local connections will the Internet infrastructure deliver all of the promises of the full blown Information Highway. However, it is in the process of happening and all we can do is get involved and take advantage.

I think that virtually every PC [and laptop, tablet, smartphone...] will be used to connect to the Social Network and that the Social Network will help keep PC [et al] purchasing very healthy for many years to come. PCs will connect to the Social Network in a variety of ways. ....[snip of 14.4 kbps modem discussion, replace with xDSL, 3G, 4G, Wifi etc].... Eventually you will be able to find the name of someone or a service you want to connect to on the Social Network and rerouting your call to temporarily be a point-to-point connection will happen automatically. For example when you are browsing travel possibilities if you want to talk to someone with expertise on the area you are considering, you simply click on a button and the request will be sent to a server that keeps a list of available agents who can be working anywhere they like as long as they have a PC with ISDN [ or even ADSL ]. You will be reconnected and the agent will get all of the context of what you are looking at and your previous history of travel if the agency has a database. The reconnection approach will not be necessary once the network has quality of service guarantees.

.......

etc etc (by the way, Gates still seems prescient today - I see that Facebook investor Accel is investing in Hollwood because Facebook is "going to be big" in movies)

Anyway, you can read the complete Gates' Memo of 1995 over here at Wired, and watch history repeating itself in glorious Web-O-Vision.

*Given Google's past performance it may just be a way of paying lower bonusses (More seriously, its probably an attempt to change the internal culture by putting money on it)

It is - RWW:

We believe that Google will preview a major new social service called Google Circles at South by Southwest Interactive today. Update: Google has now officially denied that Circles will launch here, but not that it exists. Others, including Tim O'Reilly, have also now confirmed that they've seen it and that it's awesome. If what we've heard is correct, the service will offer photo, video and status message sharing. Everything users share on Circles will be shared only with the most appropriate circle of social contacts in their lives, not with all your contacts in bulk. Circles may be shown off at an event co-hosted tonight by the ACLU, an organization focused on privacy and the liberties it affords. It may not be a big public launch yet, but it's clear that this is a major product in the works at the very least. Please see below the fold for what I hope will be the final update on this for now.

The service has been developed with extensive participation by Chris Messina, the co-creator of numerous successful social and software phenomena online, from BarCamp to Hashtags and much more. Messina declined to comment for this story. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of the photo editing service Piknik that Google acquired last year, is working on Circles as well.

Oh No it's Not - AllthingsD:

After a report emerged this morning of a new social network focused on nuanced sharing called Google Circles, the company said it was not launching anything this week at the high-profile South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, Texas. Moreover, such a product is not even under development, according to the people supposedly developing it. Google’s Chris Messina, who had been pegged as one of the leaders of Circles, told me today in an interview that he “didn’t know what [the story] was talking about.”

He and others from Google, speaking with NetworkEffect at a Google developer event in Austin, said the company is not launching its own social network. As in: Not today, and not anytime soon.... ....While the search giant is thinking about how to better understand the subtleties of social relationships and may build such functionality into its various products, as it makes them more social, said Messina and others, Circles is not a product currently in development. Tim O’Reilly, the well-known technology pundit, had seemingly confirmed the existence of Circles by tweeting “I’ve seen google circles, and it looks awesome,” after ReadWriteWeb published a description this morning. O’Reilly later deleted the tweet and clarified to NetworkEffect via email:

“It’s not a product, per se, and it’s not a new social network. Just some research-y thinking about how you could better manage social data. Exactly what Chris said. I got fooled by the RWW story into thinking that they’d turned it into something they were going to announce. There’s no story here. Just some labs stuff.”

.....

But the comment seemed to be about the timing of such a launch, not the product itself. And with so much anticipation around whatever Google does in social, a non-denial seemed almost confirmation.

This sequence of events makes me think something is in the wind (and someone let a bit too much cat out) - and heck, why not, given the Social Bubblenomics at the moment - all Google has to do is launch a social network that doesn't actually suck and get some traction and I reckon their valuation will see quite the disproportionate rise. Also, it's an interesting time to launch against Facebook (and Twitter) as they are both becoming ever more intrusive on their communities to make profits whereas Google could probably fund a fairly humane SocNet for quite a while. To a large extent the Facebook et al bandwaggons depend on getting a red hot IPO story. Not so easy if the Big G is launching against you....sorta like Microsoft launching IE before Netscape IPO'd.

Some people do know Santayana's law..... "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"

McKinsey on "10 ways to stress test your strategy" - which McKinsey says very few companies get much more than 4/10. Below are quick summaris plus my commments:

Test 1: Will your strategy beat the market?

All companies operate in markets surrounded by customers, suppliers, competitors, substitutes, and potential entrants, all seeking to advance their own positions. That process, unimpeded, inexorably drives economic surplus—the gap between the return a company earns and its cost of capital—toward zero.

One of my major criticisms of so much "Mangaement Consulting" I have seen is that it is static, ie it recommends company A takes action X - and doesn't consider what the competition will do in response.


Test 2: Does your strategy tap a true source of advantage?

Know your competitive advantage, and you’ve answered the question of why you make money (and vice versa). Competitive advantage stems from two sources of scarcity: positional advantages and special capabilities. Positional advantages are rooted in structurally attractive markets. By definition, such advantages favor incumbents: they create an asymmetry between those inside and those outside high walls. Special capabilities, the second source of competitive advantage, are scarce resources whose possession confers unique benefits.

Can't disagree with this - my observation is that most companies find it politically very difficult to look at these topics in any unbiassed way, and tend to overestimate ther advantages


Test 3: Is your strategy granular about where to compete?

The need to beat the market begs the question of which market. Research shows that the unit of analysis used in determining strategy (essentially, the degree to which a market is segmented) significantly influences resource allocation and thus the likelihood of success: dividing the same businesses in different ways leads to strikingly different capital allocations.

This is a fundamental tenet of our approach - break the market into smaller subsets and understand those - but so many companies tend to look at the market in very simplistic ways


Test 4: Does your strategy put you ahead of trends?

The emergence of new trends is the norm. But many strategies place too much weight on the continuation of the status quo because they extrapolate from the past three to five years, a time frame too brief to capture the true violence of market forces.

Add to this that very few test for scenarios that look at alternative futures - I am not taiking about "Black Swans" (very large, rare events) but just alternative but very possble trends.


Test 5: Does your strategy rest on privileged insights?

Data today can be cheap, accessible, and easily assembled into detailed analyses that leave executives with the comfortable feeling of possessing an informed strategy. But much of this is noise and most of it is widely available to rivals. Furthermore, routinely analyzing readily available data diverts attention from where insight-creating advantage lies: in the weak signals buried in the noise.

True, but the problem with scratching over data for weak signals is that you can see so many of them. This is where scenarios have a big impact, especially if one can modekl the industry value chain and understand where the big levers/big dislocations lie - ie it is better to search for weak signals already knowing where the real sensitivities are.

Interestingly, they found that:

.....only 14 percent of surveyed executives placed novel insights among the top three strategic influencers of financial performance. One likely explanation: the widespread availability of information and adoption of sophisticated strategy frameworks creates an impression that “everyone knows what we know and is probably analyzing the data in the same ways that we are.” The danger is obvious: if strategists question their ability to generate novel insights, they are less likely to reach for the relative advantages that are most likely to differentiate them from competitors.

Test 6: Does your strategy embrace uncertainty?

A central challenge of strategy is that we have to make choices now, but the payoffs occur in a future environment we cannot fully know or control. A critical step in embracing uncertainty is to try to characterize exactly what variety of it you face—a surprisingly rare activity at many companies. Our work over the years has emphasized four levels of uncertainty. Level one offers a reasonably clear view of the future: a range of outcomes tight enough to support a firm decision. At level two, there are a number of identifiable outcomes for which a company should prepare. At level three, the possible outcomes are represented not by a set of points but by a range that can be understood as a probability distribution. Level four features total ambiguity, where even the distribution of outcomes is unknown.

My experience of most companies' strategies is the opposite - they embrace overoptimistic certainty, and to try and introduce any form of grey is politically unacceptable. Signing up to "the numbers" is all important.


Test 7: Does your strategy balance commitment and flexibility?

Commitment and flexibility exist in inverse proportion to each other: the greater the commitment you make, the less flexibility remains. This tension is one of the core challenges of strategy. Indeed, strategy can be expressed as making the right trade-offs over time between commitment and flexibility.

The important thing here is to look at option theory, and also to understand which decisons are easily reversible.

Test 8: Is your strategy contaminated by bias?

It’s possible to believe honestly that you have a market-beating strategy when, in fact, you don’t. Sometimes, that’s because forces beyond your control change. But in other cases, the cause is unintentional fuzzy thinking.

Behavioral economists have identified many characteristics of the brain that are often strengths in our broader, personal environment but that can work against us in the world of business decision making. The worst offenders include overoptimism (our tendency to hope for the best and believe too much in our own forecasts and abilities), anchoring (tying our valuation of something to an arbitrary reference point), loss aversion (putting too much emphasis on avoiding downsides and so eschewing risks worth taking), the confirmation bias (overweighting information that validates our opinions), herding (taking comfort in following the crowd), and the champion bias (assigning to an idea merit that’s based on the person proposing it).

One could write an essay on corporate overoptimism, it's not just behavioural science, there is a dynamic, an arms race of "more toadying than thou", that drives a continuously reinforcing cycle of optimism in so many companies


Test 9: Is there conviction to act on your strategy?

This test and the one that follows aren’t strictly about the strategy itself but about the investment you’ve made in implementing it—a distinction that in our experience quickly becomes meaningless because the two, inevitably, become intertwined. Many good strategies fall short in implementation because of an absence of conviction in the organization, particularly among the top team, where just one or two nonbelievers can strangle strategic change at birth.

Or, more typically, enough means are not allocated to the right people to ensure that the Ends are accomplished


Test 10: Have you translated your strategy into an action plan?

In implementing any new strategy, it’s imperative to define clearly what you are moving from and where you are moving to with respect to your company’s business model, organization, and capabilities. Develop a detailed view of the shifts required to make the move, and ensure that processes and mechanisms, for which individual executives must be accountable, are in place to effect the changes. Quite simply, this is an action plan. Everyone needs to know what to do. Be sure that each major “from–to shift” is matched with the energy to make it happen. And since the totality of the change often represents a major organizational transformation, make sure you and your senior team are drawing on the large body of research and experience offering solid advice on change management—a topic beyond the scope of this article!

And ensure that the systems, measurements and rewards incentivise people - so often these things are treated as independent of (and become antithetical to) the change that is desired.