How to Get an MBA Class's Attention on a Saturday Morning
Pete Domican
I use strategy and change consulting skills together with extensive cross functional and cross industry experience to help businesses plan and manage change.
Every year for the past 4 years, I’ve done a guest lecture at UCL to an MBA class on ‘The Limitations of Strategy and Radical Uncertainty’ which is a fancy way of saying ‘why do successful organisations still die?’?
The main thesis remains the same but I tart around a bit with the narrative, the slides and the exercise I give to the students. Here’s three short thoughts that have emerged in the last couple of weeks while I’ve been preparing this year’s lecture.?
Humans v Technology
We’re nearly one quarter through the 21st century, in the midst of huge technological change and yet we’re still wedded to the 20th century in many of our social constructs. Health, education, our ways of working are all more geared to the challenges of the 20th century vs our own. To take full advantage of these new technologies requires a radical overhaul of these systems.
The Finity of Resources
Our economic and technological expansion in the 19th and 20th century was based on producing new things with a limitless supply of raw materials as long as we could extract and process them. We are now in an era of increasingly limited supply of raw materials and our current ability and willingness to recycle/repair is extremely rudimentary.?
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Global Problems
Our major problems are global in nature i.e. the effects of climate change, pandemic, antimicrobial resistance yet we are struggling to reach agreement even at a national level. Covid-19 showed that the ability to make considered decisions for the common good is being hampered by a failure to agree on what the common good is and what trade offs we are prepared to make.?
Common Themes?
As with our discussions on AI, we can see that new technology promises huge benefits but that those benefits rely on the appropriate safeguards and agreement on their use and reconfiguring our society to best take advantage of those benefits.?
On that basis, organisations and their leaders will need to be used to operating and making big decisions in a perpetual state of radical uncertainty. And, if that doesn’t get the attention of a class of MBA students on a Saturday morning, I’m not sure what will.?
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1 年That is a brilliant summary Pete Domican. May I add Resistance to Change as an overarching theme?
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1 年"Our economic and technological expansion in the 19th and 20th century was based on producing new things with a limitless supply of raw materials" Actually all that time everybody hyperventilated about resources being scarce and just about to be exhausted :-), either iron or coal or oil or copper etc. and yet right now lots of mines which were exploited in 1900 are abandoned because they are less productive than newer mines. Example: https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/theodore-roosevelt-conservation-as-a-national-duty-speech-text/