Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R. (2015), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 43 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-07-2015-0061

Editor’s letter

Article Type: Editor’s letter From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 43, Issue 5

The articles in this issue opine on two big subjects – strategy and innovation – and then report on the dynamic process of their interaction. The articles and their distinguished authors are:

This masterclass by Robert J. Allio, “Good strategy makes good leaders,” answers the questions, What’s the current state of leadership theory? Is there anything new? This veteran practitioner and somewhat jaded observer scanned the idea marketplace for Strategy & Leadership to identify any breakthroughs in the quest for insights into the field of leadership – who are the leaders others should emulate, what’s the evidence that their methods are best practice, how did the acclaimed exemplars get to be leaders and what can we learn from their stories? After reading several of the latest advice books, his conclusion is: forget leadership – it’s strategy that matters!

In his article “Agile: it’s time to put it to use to manage business complexity,” Stephen Denning reports that Agile, the horizontal ideology of worker enablement, and its radical management methodologies, such as Scrum, have a reasonable prospect of being more than just an operational process for software development. Agile and Scrum can deal directly with current business issues by giving an authoritative voice to the customer and giving competence a preeminent role over authority. And they can be scaled almost infinitely. Once executives understand how Agile and Scrum work, they will realize they can use the same management expertise to manage the mounting complexity of the rest of their business. In effect, Agile and Scrum represent a major management discovery. And don’t miss his CEO advisory: “Updating the Agile Manifesto.”

“The three laws of business combinations: how to create value by remixing assets,” by Benjamin Gomes-Casseres, explains the methodology of remix strategy – the mixing of resources, assets and capabilities of one organization with those of another to achieve competitive advantage. Successful business combinations – those that turn out to be a profitable use of resources – all follow three laws. In brief, they are: all business combinations must have the potential to create joint value, must be governed to realize this value, and must share value in a way that provides a reward to each party’s investment.

In this interview with innovation researcher Linda A. Hill, “Continuous innovation: unleashing and harnessing the creative energies of a willing and able community,” S&L Contributing Editor Brian Leavy asks her what is preventing companies from learning how to move beyond an ability to score an occasional innovation win, and establish a fully institutionalized dynamic competence, capable of generating innovations continuously? This is a challenge that few to date have mastered, and it is the one that a team of academics, practitioners and researchers lead by Hill addresses in the recent book, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

In their article “How leading organizations use big data and analytics to innovate,” IBM researchers Anthony Marshall, Stefan Mueck and Rebecca Shockley explain how leading organizations are investing in innovation that leverages the ever-growing opportunities to collect new data, combine external and internal data and apply big data and analytics to outperform competitors. To understand how the most successful organizations innovate, they studied 341 respondents’ usage of big data and analytics tools for innovation. The researchers asked about innovation goals, barriers to innovation, metrics used to measure innovation outcomes, treatment and types of innovation projects and the role of big data and analytics in innovation processes. Three distinct groups emerged: Leaders, Strivers and Strugglers. The Leaders’ best practices are detailed.

In his case “Häagen-Dazs in Japan: leading brand renewal,” Kenneth Alan Grossberg, Director of the Waseda Marketing Forum, Waseda University, recounts how, as recently as 2009, Häagen-Dazs Japan ranked as the No. 1 Most-Liked Brand in the Nikkei Brand Japan survey. But market data told a different story. After a rousing startup in 1984, the joint venture had its best sales year in 2007, thereafter suffering accelerating declines. So by 2010 there was a critical need to revisit what the ice cream brand had been and how it could be revitalized in the Japanese market. Clearly, even a strong consumer brand needs to refresh its strategy now and then, and it takes leadership qualities to get innovative strategic initiatives past the gatekeepers who are best at monitoring the status quo but not quick to sense the need for change.

Good reading!

Robert M. Randall

Editor