Is the Edge Really the Destination?

That is really insightful, brilliant stuff coming in that article from top brains in strategy. But permisionless corporations may need permission for that.

I think there is more to it.

Pushing decisions to the edge isn't in and of itself useful.

Going back to Von Clausewitz and (his mentee) Von Moltke, strategic success is about having a good strategy but really about execution, execution and understanding execution. Especially the bit about no battle plan survives its first encounter with the battlefield.

I am an average chess player and you are a grandmaster, but if I move twice for your every move I win every time. Now imagine I also harvest the cumulative/optimum IQ and knowledge from my organization to inform my agile moves. The bonus is that engagement that allows you to do that is motivational and helps retain talent.

Business is not chess. The point here is that informed decision agility might be a leading sustainable competitive advantage. Designing decision systems for agility is what matters not pushing them to the edge.

Eliminating decisions is actually key to streamlining. Early on, at a huge tech company I joined, where I was in the top 1.5% of the top 1% in the hierarchical grade structure I stapled myself to an approval for a $250k item and it had 42 approval steps including the same person three times and my boss. In contrast running tech at a huge FS firm if it was under $25M and budgeted it didn't need any other approvals than mine. Yes, I stole that stapling thing from former Prof HBS and affable genius John Sviokla.

Tech is pushing that way and transparency helps move things to the edge but the real fulcrum is top-down leadership enabling agility through a structure that supports rapid, effective decision-making. Being inside the operational cycles of my enemy matters. I am not advocating top down decision making I am saying having an environment for agile decision making has to be intentional and needs 'permission', support and direction from the top to be real.

This must include the behavioral and organizational structures. If you are unaware what behavioral structures your firm has are you have another stack of problems. IT is a good example of the headwinds this faces. I once inherited an IT shop with 14k staff in 13 layers of management., yes 13. I led the IT strategy development for a global 10 firm where architectural decisions were made without the architecture team, the development folks just did it themselves, very badly.

The big hurdles from the board on down are around embracing an innovation culture and pushing agility as a competitive advantage. That means celebrating effort/experiment that fails and getting past action versus plan frameworks. yes action versus plan frameworks that hierarchical , silo-ed companies live by. It must also be beyond lip service.

Having really quick decision-making at the edge for your non-agile supertanker of a company heading the wrong direction in stormy seas doesn't matter.

Boards should kill the primacy of action versus plan. They should ensure smart linkage from strategy to the mission to task to talent to structure and proactively manage Rhetoric vs Reality. Structure is command and control and org which in action is where your culture lives.***

Having said all that, lousy strategy can't be saved by good execution, decision agility or permisioned edges and failure to proactively manage that chain makes a good strategy fail.

This is all the more important in times of huge tech /market change, i.e. like now re: the 4th Industrial Revolution and the other 10 change waves in progress.

Happy Holidays...

*** Beyond that, all managers should understand they have three basic jobs and own the related decisions, all status reports should start with H, L and I. I explain that in my book, which is an evolution of interactive guest 'lectures' at HBS, Booth, Naval Postgraduate School, Georgetown, Cornell, RPI and several boards/C-Suites. It is all field tested/proven stuff. The problem is it isn't nearly done, maybe Q1.

Lastly, Adm. Mahan has as much to teach us about decision making leadership as the above Prussians, especially in an information-intensive, AI and Edge Compute infused world but again, that will be in the book.

Rita McGrath ?sa Tamsons ? Esther Aguilera Anna Catalano ? Wendy Howell MR Rangaswami Bryan MacDonald Amanda Mackenzie Amanda Reed John Seely Brown Johnson Idesoh Juan Santos Nick Beucher Ryan Vega MD, MSHA Herman Bulls Timothy Grayson Timothy Chou Nick Dew Nicholas Dirks Albert "Al" P. Pisano, Ph.D. Walter Parkes Aaron Grosky Ankur Agarwal Jennifer S. Gamiel Gran Stuart Evans Christoph Sonnen Emily Glazer Geraldina Iraheta Lord Victor Adebowale CBE Jonathan Reeves Prof. Jonathan A.J. Wilson PhD DLitt Marshall Davis Jones Ram Charan Emmet B. Keeffe III David Chun John Sviokla Chunka Mui