Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2011), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 39 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2011.26139aaa.002

Editor’s letter

Article Type: Editor’s letter From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 39, Issue 1

I’d like to call your attention to a few of the truly valuable lessons to be found in the articles in this issue.

For example, in “Lessons to jumpstart disruptive innovation” Strategos consultants Peter Skarzynski and Jorge Rufat-Latre warn executives that in many markets, the current recessionary environment favors disruptive innovation – products or services that offer a new combination of features and lower cost. Their message is that companies that retreat from innovation initiatives in a downturn are at increased risk of being ambushed by disruptive competitors. Two of their eye-opening suggestions for how to become a game changer deserve a serious and fulsome top management discussion:

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  Linking incremental and breakthrough innovation efforts by focusing on a single, shared aspiration.

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  Using opportunities for disruptive innovation to inform strategy.

Additional insights to fuel a discussion of your innovation strategy by your management team can be gleaned from “Innovating by ‘doing both’: Cisco manages contradictions that drive growth and profit,” Alistair Davidson’s interview with Inder Sidhu, Senior Vice President Strategy and Planning for Worldwide Operations at Cisco. Sidhu explains how Cisco assesses new business initiatives and innovation opportunities. His advice: “Organizations need to actively manage three sources of change in their organization – sustaining change that improves the existing business, disruptive change that needs to be developed outside the core business and externally sourced change that can be spun into the business.”

More good advice on coping with market discontinuities can be found in “How top performers achieve customer-focused market leadership” by Carolyn Heller Baird and Cristene Gonzalez-Wertz. IBM research indicates that three categories of market leaders are likely to emerge by 2012: customer insight leaders that optimize data analysis, transform it into something useful and create measurable value; digital channel leaders that harness new methods of creating value through customer interactions and new products, services and business models in an always-on digital world; new era leaders that incorporate the best practices of each.

In recent issues Strategy & Leadership has presented a number of radical ideas for enhancing the customer value proposition. Now, in “Time-value economics: competing for customer time and attention” Adrian C. Ott explores the concept of time-value economics and presents two techniques – the Time-ographics Framework and the Time-Value Tradeoff equation – that offer innovators and marketers a provocative new perspective on developing new products or new ways of engaging time-starved customers.

Finally, I strongly recommend readers pay close attention to the process that undergirds the imaginative reporting in “The evolving Internet in 2025: four scenarios” by Enrique Rueda-Sabater of Cisco and Don Derosby of Global Business Network. They have created a set of divergent stories about the future – to help executives explore and prepare for possible futures of the Internet – and based them on a well-researched, carefully structured foundation. Many management teams will want to consider how their firm’s current business model would likely fare in the distinctly different scenarios.

Good reading!

Robert M. RandallEditor