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Investors balked when JP Morgan Chase bank planned to spend heavily on technology. They understood that to succeed in digital, JPM needs to base its strategy on what unique benefits customers will get now and in the future from its digital banking services.

JPM must rethink how banking can be re-invented to improve customers’ lives, using the new capabilities of digital.

Because of its lack of a customer focus, JPM’s market capitalization is not only growing more slowly than the tech giants, it is growing even more slowly even than the average S%P 500 company.

The lesson is that companies with a customer primacy mission statement and a supporting, well designed investment strategy, out perform their peers.

The article links customer primacy mission statements, future oriented tech investment strategies and successful corporate growth.

A report on a management conference with a notable history of showcasing world leading firms—the Global Peter Drucker Forum—which met in the Imperial Palace in Vienna Austria for its eleventh annual get-together, this time on the overall theme of “the power of ecosystems.”

The report presents the highlights of the presentations by a number of the top leaders of the world's leading companies, all of which are experimenting with new ways of transforming management to foster innovation.

The most important things about ecosystems are their stability, their inter-operability and their ability to adapt to and accept change.

In a world where the life expectancy of competitive advantage was getting shorter, innovation and strategy—once very separate—are joining hands.

The report encourages managers at all levels to pay attention to the management experiments going on at leading firms which are adopting the ecosystem model.

If leaders really want to change people’s minds and enlist them in existential endeavors, they need an understanding of the dynamics of persuasion and the craft of leadership storytelling.

Stories that do change minds and inspire different behavior tend to have a particular narrative pattern. The author offers a set of key elements.

To inspire customer-focused, continuous innovation, leadership storytelling has untapped potential.

Leadership storytelling, when done right, at least gives company change agents a fighting chance of success.

The ongoing reinvention of management to transform workplaces of the 20th century into the lively centers of inspiration and creativity that are needed for the creative economy of the 21st century necessitates the elevation of change-agent storytelling to the central place in leadership that it deserves. The author offers a primer.

Soon leaders in many top-down managed organization may face the necessity of undertaking a company-wide Agile transformation.First adopted by digital innovation teams, the Agile mindset is spreading to middle management operations and top level leadership initiatives in many established organizations.

A guide to the ten stages of implementing an Agile mindset and practices through out an organization are detailed.

For traditionally managed hierarchical organizations, the transformation will include radical shifts in power, attitudes, values, mindsets, ways of thinking and ways of interacting with stakeholders—customers, employee talent, shareholders and partners. The goal is to enable the organization to generate instant, frictionless, intimate, incremental, risk-free value at scale, and to gain the financial rewards that flow from that capability.In the race for such outcomes, rigidly hierarchical firms are at a disadvantage.

The idea of Agile itself will continue to evolve as it is adapted by the organization. The process is not a matter of crafting a plan and then rolling it out across the organization. It’s not a mechanical eight-step program. It requires continuously adapting the idea to the circumstances of the organization. As the organization and everyone in it adapts the Agile approach to their own context, each individual needs to own it.

This map of the Agile implementation process enables top management and Agile champions to envision how to prepare an organization to change to a customer-focused, business that operates with Strategic Agility.

Agile is the umbrella term for a family of management practices, which include Scrum, Kanban, and Lean. To investigate Agile management as it was being practiced in large firms, in 2015 Scrum Alliance, whose mission is “to transform the world of work,” launched a Learning Consortium for the Creative Economy (LC), composed of a group of firms that included Microsoft, Ericsson, Magna International, Riot Games and others.

The group conducted site visits to learn from each other’s experiences with Agile. The questions to be explored included: To what extent are Agile management practices in fact occurring at scale in old and new firms? How effective are these management practices? Is it possible for the whole firm, particularly older firms with entrenched bureaucratic cultures, to become Agile?

The LC found that Agile management is already taking hold in large-scale implementations in both new and old firms. The LC observed that some firms were implementing Agile for large-scale, complex business challenges in areas beyond software, including operations where reliability is an issue.

Agile was seen as a different way of understanding and acting in the world. The successful firms were “being Agile,” not merely “doing Agile” within their existing management framework.

In the world of Agile management, delivering value to customers is the goal of every individual in the organization. Profits are seen as the result, not the goal. The Learning consortium sites visit offer managers an opportunity to study this philosophy in practice.

The article offers a clear and succinct account of the Amazon approach to Agile management (though it doesn’t call it that, and offers best practices to enable others to learn how to think–and act–like Amazon.

The article draws on the insights and experiences of John Rossman an Amazon senior manager who was an effective innovator for the company.

Amazon has a distinctive approach to implementing the three principles of Agile: 10;∙9; Customer-obsessed. 10;∙9; Small is beautiful. 10;∙9; Networks.

Customer obsession at Amazon is enabled and driven by customer-driven metrics.

Drawing on his experience innovating for the company, John Rossman describes in detail how Amazon created an environment with very different values and behaviors, an approach that employs the principles of Agile management.

Because too many firms are stuck on the treadmill of producing quarterly returns, often to be achieved through financial engineering, a new management mindset is needed set them to exploring new opportunities through innovation.

A new kind of management is emerging–called the Agile model– in which firms emphasize searching out opportunities, finding solutions through rapid experimentation, and achieving agility through decisiveness.

In organizations that have implemented the Agile model Agile, the distinction between exploration and exploitation tends to blur and even dissolve. Those involved in exploitation are also continuously looking for ways to improve performance. Those involved in exploration and development are continuously seeking ways to deliver value to customers sooner

Agile managements are learning to shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning, where everyone is driven by the need to learn faster and accelerate performance improvement

This overview of how explains how all members of a organization–from the CEO to the front-line worker–will need to be involved in the implementation of the Agile model.

The author offers The Principles, Processes, Practices (PPP) Worksheet, an analytic tool that can help firms diagnose their current status in relation to the transformation from 20th Century to 21st Century management.

The author posits that there are currently two strikingly different ways of running a corporation in a coherent and consistent fashion. The predominant mode of 20th Century management refined over the last 50 years has the goal of maximizing shareholder value. 10;By contrast, for 21st Century management–the pioneering mode of Agile enterprises and of leading Silicon Valley firms, the goal leads to principles and processes that enable agility. The principles and processes help firms mobilize talent to create instant, intimate, incremental value for customers. 10;

The Principles, Processes, Practices (PPP) Worksheet an be applied either to the entire organization or to any part of that organization, such as the leadership team, or any department, or any team, at any point in time.

Leaders using the PPP worksheet will become, in effect, what Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations, calls “a high tech anthropologist” probing what is going on.

This is the first description of a potent analytical tool that can help a firm plan and implement a management transformation to 21st Century Agile practices.

The authors reviews the leadership responsibilities involved in managing an organization that practices Agile management.

Outlines the best practices of major corporations that have adopted Agile processes both for teams and C-suite leadership.

Agile leaders spend less time reviewing the work of subordinates. They add value by adapting corporate strategies, leading critical agile teams, spending time with customers, mentoring individuals and coaching teams.

It is the C-suite leadership’s responsibility to establish and maintain a hierarchy of competence rather than a bureaucratic hierarchy of authority.

Describes how top management at some of the world’s largest and most successful corporations are adopting Agile practices to spur innovation and promote continuously adding customer vale.