Excerpts From My Recent Conversation With Management Guru Ram Charan:

I had the privilege of sitting down with renowned management guru and author Ram Charan during the WOBI World Leadership Forum. Ram shared his insights with me on several topics, from how countries like Suriname, Guyana & Colombia can make the quantum leap from a resource based economy to a knowledge based economy, to digital disruption: a topic he addressed in his books Global Tilt and Attacker’s Advantage. It was a real privilege for me:

Loren Moss: In your book Global Tilt, you talked about how the very things that make a business successful at changing, you challenge the reader to look past core competencies and to look outside in and future back. So, I have a pretty good understanding of what core competencies are, but what does it mean to look outside in, or future back?

Ram Charan: Yeah, yeah, so the competence is number one, that you create internal mechanisms to sense—use antennas, to sense what new trends are coming. You survey today: who is creating something new? Will that become the future? We don’t know, but you try to figure out who’s creating it, and that tells you “outside in.” That tells you if that particular new thing does become big, then you have future back so if you get my book, Attacker’s Advantage the first three chapters are on it.

Loren Moss: That’s interesting because we see—Yesterday it was announced that Intel who completely missed out, and they admit that they missed out on mobile phone technology; they didn’t take that seriously or make chipsets for that; now, with 5G coming they just announced an alliance with the Taiwanese maker MediaTek, and they are taking seriously the next 5G not so much in traditional cell phones but in devices because the idea now as you know with 5G is that there will be no more need for ethernet; every device is connected wirelessly rather than: there are mobile devices and there are desktop devices…and so it looks like where they may be missed an iteration of the future, of evolution, at least in their sector of technology, they have learned their lessons and they’re saying let’s not get caught behind like Blackberry did for example or Nokia did, and it sounds like what you’re saying is “make sure that your company is the disrupter not the disrupted…or is that different?

Ram Charan: No, no, this is very good, so I happen to know what you’re saying about Intel. Intel’s CEO was a non-technology guy.

Loren Moss: This is after Andy Grove. More recently.

Ram Charan: Andy Grove’s successor was a professor, manufacturer. His successor was an economist by background. He was an assistant to Andy Grove. He was not a technology guy. He missed it. Then came another one, and he had his personal problems, he got fired. Now you have Bob Swan, who was a CFO back then, and he took a year to see whether he wants that job and now he’s trying to catch up.

Loren Moss: Is that dangerous? Because Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, these guys were technology people, they were excellent at business when they came out of Fairchild, they knew the technology. You know Jobs, Steve Jobs is famous for not being an engineer, but he was technologically competent. A lot of people now have doubts about that current leadership saying that if that’s a company that stakes its claim on product leadership, there have been no new products since Jobs’ death. And…

Ram Charan: No, be careful....

To read the entire conversation please click here!