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Interview with Mark W. Johnson, Innosight co-founder and former consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton,an authority on the application of disruption theory. ]His latest book, Lead From the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking into Breakthrough Growth, co-authored with Innosight partner Josh Suskewicz, addresses the challenge of how to strategize for the beyond-the-core breakthrough initiatives which will be key to sustaining future growth.

His interviewer is Brian Leavy, emeritus professor of strategy at Dublin City University Business School and a Strategy & Leadership contributing editor. The interview focuses on Future-back thinking and a set of allied processes that can help leaders think further out than the three to five years that most set as their planning horizons. Then they can identify the threats and opportunities that await them and envision their best path forward.

Future-back thinking and planning begins with exploring and envisioning–actively, intensively and imaginatively immersing yourself in your organization’s likely future and then determining what you must do to not only fit into that environment but to actively shape your enterprise to thrive in it.

Future-back thinking is geared to discovery, so it is…what you use when you need to develop a market-creating innovation or new business model to fill a projected gap–to explore, envision and then chart out a new path.

The lesson for leaders: when programming a breakthrough strategy, you need to formalize the roles and responsibilities of the senior leadership team as its champions and overseers, set up an organizational model that will protect those teams from the countervailing influences of the core and ensure that the initiative is managed with an explore, envision and discover approach.

This Masterclass considers the lessons of two recent important books have contrasting but complementary insights to offer to company leaders and strategists on how to improve the odds for developing successful innovations in response to game changes in markets.”

In Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’s Business While Creating the Future (2017), disruptive innovation experts, Scott Anthony, Clark Gilbert and Mark Johnson offer corporate leaders a “dual transformation” template for simultaneously repositioning the traditional core business in the face of disruptive change, while also creating new businesses to harness the growth potential typically unlocked by such disruption. In The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation (2017), innovation guru, David Robertson, and his collaborator, Kent Lineback, offer companies a “third way” for coping with historic market inflections by innovating around a core product to make it more compelling, rather than having to choose between attempting the radical or incremental innovation of the product itself.

The most powerful message that both books featured in this masterclass have to offer is that while it may be true, as they go on to observe, that large companies can’t innovate faster than the market, they can learn “to innovate better than the market,” through more imaginative use of legacy products, platforms and assets.

A “third way” to cope with market disruption is based on innovating around the core product, by surrounding it with a set of complementary innovations, rather than re-featuring the product itself. All of the complementary innovations operate together with the product “as a system or family to satisfy a compelling promise to the customer.”

Both Dual Transformation and The Power of Little Ideas, present different, but far from mutually exclusive, innovation strategies that can help many more great companies to survive disruptive competition.

The purpose of this paper was to undertake a review of selected adult safeguarding policy and guidance documentation to establish the level of guidance provided in relation to financial abuse; identify similarities and differences between the guidance given to professionals working in different contexts; and report gaps or inconsistencies in the guidance given.

Qualitative documentary content analysis was undertaken to identify key issues and themes in documents selected from 25 local authorities in England.

Little variation was found in the content of the documents, which were all heavily influenced by “No Secrets” guidance. The victim and perpetrator were largely invisible and there is no reference to the possible medium to long‐term impact of abuse on individuals. There is no research evidence underpinning the use of the notion of “significant harm” when used in the context of adults. In addition, there is no means of comparing safeguarding decisions across different local authorities to evaluate consistency of decisions and outcomes.

The lack of any mechanisms to compare safeguarding decisions and outcomes across local authority areas is a serious limitation of the way safeguarding works. Also, the failure to address the aftercare and support of victims means they are left to manage the psycho‐social consequences.

Safeguarding boards should evaluate the outcomes of interventions in a standardised way to enable comparison. They should also do more to ensure the longer‐term wellbeing of victims.

The paper raises awareness of elder financial abuse.

This is the only policy review that focuses specifically on financial abuse.

IT is seldom that I can bring myself to write anything for publication, and as I had a longish article on “The education of librarians in Great Britain” printed as recently as 1964 in the Lucknow Librarian (which is edited by my friend Mr. R. P. Hingorani) I had not contemplated any further effort for some time to come. But as THE LIBRARY WORLD evidently wishes to cover all the British schools of librarianship it would be a pity for Brighton to be left out, even though, coming as it does towards the end of a gruelling series, I can see little prospect of this contribution being read. Perhaps, therefore, I need not apologise for the fact that, as my own life and fortunes have been (and still are) inextricably bound up with those of the Brighton school, any account which I write of the school is bound to be a very personal one.

THE Fifty‐First Conference of the Library Association takes place in the most modern type of British town. Blackpool is a typical growth of the past fifty years or so, rising from the greater value placed upon the recreations of the people in recent decades. It has the name of the pleasure city of the north, a huge caravansary into which the large industrial cities empty themselves at the holiday seasons. But Blackpool is more than that; it is a town with a vibrating local life of its own; it has its intellectual side even if the casual visitor does not always see it as readily as he does the attractions of the front. A week can be spent profitably there even by the mere intellectualist.

SPRING is now well with us, and it is not easy to prophesy what effect the great war will have on our profession, indeed it is impossible to forecast anything whatever about it. So far as libraries are concerned, there are abundant evidences that some librarians have been able to seize the opportunities the time affords them. An interesting example of this is a duplicated list issued by the Bristol Public Libraries offering to readers the titles of the books which in his capital little volume Books and You Somerset Maugham has recommended. It is a pity that the book referred to, which is a small volume of about 80 well‐spaced pages, costs 3s. 6d. Had it been published at 1s. we should recommend that every library should purchase one copy for every five hundred of its readers; and although this would be a large number it would be a thoroughly justifiable purchase, because Maugham, following of course personal standards as every writer must, has selected books which in his own opinion—and his is an opinion of no mean value—are of first hand excellence. In bringing the titles before the public in the way Bristol Libraries has done, Mr. Ross has done a service which most librarians are trying to do in some way or other, but is particularly effective in this particular case. Other libraries are putting out lists of war books, of gardening books, of cookery books and, indeed, on all sorts of practical subjects dealing with the war effort.

THE IFLA Conference—or to be more precise—the 34th Session of the General Council of IFLA—met at Frankfurt am Main from the 18th to the 24th of August, 1968. Note the dates, for they include the 21st of August, the day when the delegates heard, as did the rest of the world, of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Until then the Conference had been proceeding happily, and with the smoothness inborn of German organisation. During and after that date, a blight was cast over the proceedings, and although the Conference carried out its formal and informal programmes as planned, concentrations were disturbed as delegates sometimes gathered round transistor radios, their thoughts on Eastern Europe.

There is no need to elaborate on the key position that petroleum has in our lives today. Everyone who reads this article is aware that it is the most important raw material energy resource in the United States at present. It will remain important for some time to come. Most readers are also aware that petroleum is the basic starting material for many industrial chemicals; but some may need to be reminded that it is, in fact, the principal raw material from which most of the synthetic chemical products made in the United States ultimately derive.