Citation
Randall, R. (2014), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 42 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-08-2014-0060
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Editor’s letter
Article Type: Editorial From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 42, Issue 5
For this issue, we asked some of the leading observers of strategic management practice to foresee how organizations must evolve to cope with the brave new business world of tomorrow. They envision:
A constantly mutating, digitally driven interchange of commerce where everyone is connected to everyone and success depends on ecosystem management and partnerships.
Increasingly, a critical corporate competency will be the capability to rapidly produce and scale-up continuous customer-focused innovation of products and performance.
In the new Creative Economy, financial metrics will have to be applied with a mindset that values market-making innovation above investments in efficiency.
New tools will provide guides for anticipating how disruptive innovation will be received. For example, leaders will be able to see the future more clearly by adopting new scenarios planning techniques that track the conversational narratives of commercial and public conversations to help predict the course of trends – for example, whether life-changing technologies like fracking or human genetic enhancement will ultimately be adopted or rejected.
Design companies will increasingly experiment with business models that enable them to co-create with customers and exceptional individuals, thus tapping talent and resources from far and wide. This democratization process will likely quicken the pace of disruptive innovation.
I strongly suggest that you listen to what these exceptional authors have to say:
Interview: Robert Sutton
The new excellence: spreading constructive beliefs from the few to the many
Brian Leavy
“We started out being inspired by organizations that strive to create and spread customer-focused innovation … We proceeded to try to understand what it took to spread such goodness from ‘the few to the many’ without screwing things up in the process.”
The next digital transformation: from an individual-centered to an everyone-to-everyone economy
Saul Berman and Anthony Marshall
“In the future, organizations will operate in ecosystems of converging products, services and industries … Organizations will only be as relevant as their ability to deliver the best experience through the right partnerships.”
Masterclass
Metrics for the emerging Creative Economy
Stephen Denning
“Making money and corporate survival now depend not merely on pushing products at customers but rather on delighting them with continuous innovation so that they want to keep on buying … Among the most important challenges for leaders is how metrics and analytic tools will help or hinder the transition to the Creative Economy.”
Stories that drive the future: how narratives can improve scenario planning
Steven H. Kenney and Bryan A. Pelley
“Much of the scenario-based planning work we’ve observed fails to account for the web of belief systems that powerfully shape the ways future conditions and trends are created and acted upon … We believe that understanding narratives provides planners and leaders an exceptional ability to anticipate with confidence the actions that can drive the real world toward one scenario or another.”
Case
Co-creation in design: how the UK company Own Label combines openness and ownership to manage talent
Thorsten Roser, Robert DeFillippi and Julia Goga-Cooke
“This case study of a fashion-design company shows how a co-creation initiative produces competitive advantage by nurturing creativity, expanding the company’s innovation capabilities and enabling it to engage with both taste-making customers and designers from anywhere in the world … What makes co-creation in design-intensive industries a disruptive approach is the democratization of the process by which design choices are made.”
Good reading!
Robert M. Randall, Editor