Overtime Issue #7: Master strategic thinking
This is Big Think Business Overtime – our top three releases each month worthy of your time. Get advice directly from the people who have been through it.
Worth Watching
6 key abilities of strategic thinkers (you can learn them)
with author Michael Watkins
Strategic thinking has always been a critical skill at the top: Leaders must be able to recognize emerging challenges and opportunities, establish the right priorities, and critically mobilize their people to adapt to the many changes that are going on.
Michael Watkins, author of The 6 Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, has defined six key mental disciplines that underlie our ability to recognize, prioritize, and mobilize.?
Want to become the smartest person in the room and a better leader at work? Implement these six core skills to master your mind.
Worth Reading
5 proven CEO strategies for riding any wave of innovation
Nothing is ever one-dimensional. And leaders in the current business landscape would do well to remember, innovation is both a challenge and an opportunity. Moore’s Law claiming that computers, and computing power in general, is advancing at double the pace every two years is looking decidedly slow from where we’re standing now. Two years ago can seem akin to the dinosaur era as rapid technological advancements transform industries at a pace unseen before.?
As this unprecedented pace continues to pick up speed (and though much maligned as an overused adjective these days, “unprecedented” is the only descriptor we can use with any accuracy when speaking of technology in 2024), business leaders find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place.
The rock is the urgency to adapt. Yesterday. But the hard place is the high failure rate of digital transformation projects. I can think of no scarier scenario to keep an executive team awake at night. Studies show that up to 70% of digital transformation initiatives fall short of their objectives. This high failure rate not only wastes expensive resources, but also has the potential to leave organizations eating their competitors’ dust. In other words, left behind.
So the challenge every business leader has to rise to is not contained exclusively in the quest to keep up with technology. It’s far more complex than that. The true challenge is how to identify the right opportunities and execute them to stay ahead. The right tools are needed. But to thrive in this new era, more than the right tools are required.
Business leaders need a strategic approach to leadership that emphasizes:
This article explores key practices that successful leaders and companies use to spot and ride the next wave of innovation.
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Worth Listening
Afraid of DEI? Start here.
register to watch the panel discussion live.
Learn practical ways to build a culture of trust and open dialogue at your organization. Gain real strategies for building an inclusive workplace with inclusive leaders, from top DEI experts. This will be a virtual panel discussion with Chloé Valdary, Ruchika T. Malhotra and La'Kita Williams, with time for audience Q&A.