What to do to be more dynamic and adaptable

I blame Aidan McCullen for this. He featured this book on one of his podcasts. The "Corporate Explorer Fieldbook: How To Build New Ventures In Established Companies" does what it says on the tin. It is a field book for innovators and intrapreneurs. It is not dissimilar to my book about books (a summary of 24 books about innovation and transformation). However, it is more practical. The book echoes all the lessons from the 24 books.

How to

How not to fail at the moments of industry transition. What to do to be more dynamic and adaptable at these critical points? And how to execute these changes? How to tackle organisational inertia. How to create structural ambidexterity. How not to be a hostage to the past.

Strategy first

It starts with strategy. Strategy plans often fail at the most basic level. They rarely talk about the significant challenges companies face or present a point of view about how to win. You need to develop a strategic manifesto that explains the firm's strategic ambition, the implications for the core business strategy, and the opportunity to explore beyond the core. More importantly, it is a statement that every senior team member can stand behind and explain to their teams. It is the North Star that provides an organisation with a clear answer to the "big why" question that informs all other growth and transformation efforts. The strategy manifesto also gives aspiring innovators a "license to explore."

Components of a strategy manifesto

Context (250–300 words)

• History. Evoke pride by referencing a shared experience of success.
• Change. Recognise the shifting reality in these markets.
• Question. Formulate an implicit or explicit "troubling" question to which this document will answer. "Can we be a winner in the next generation of our markets, or is defence our only game?"
• Answer. Provide a succinct statement of the senior team's point of view.

Challenge (500–600 words)

• Market Change. Describe shifts in customer preferences, market dynamics, and competitor activity.
• Innovation. Name the most important technologies or capabilities that could disrupt your markets.
• Opportunity. Explain why market changes and innovation are opportunities for the company.
• Threat. Explain the logic for concern about the emergence of a disruptive threat.
• Consequences. Make the potential positive and negative consequences as tangible as possible.

Ambition (300–400 words)

• Emotional hook. Give people something to believe in that elicits an emotional connection.
• Logic. Provide a rationale for the strategic decisions.
• Aspiration. Set a tangible goal equal to the scale of the opportunity or threat of disruption.

Strategic Choices (700–800 words)

• Core business objectives.
• Set specific end goals for what you will achieve in two to three years.
• Explore hunting zones and pick a maximum of three.
• Describe where you see the areas of the greatest potential for the future growth of the business.
• Portfolio. Outline how you will allocate resources across different parts of the business to achieve the ambition.

Execution (500–600 words)

• People and culture.
• Explain how employees fit in, what they can expect,
• Innovation. Outline the process for managing the flow of ideas into incubation projects.
• Organisation. Describe any specific organisational units that will be created to manage the growth strategy.
• Capabilities. Give specifics about how you will meet the need for additional capabilities outside the firm's traditional strengths.

Next steps (250–300 words)

• Leader. Name the leaders responsible for the different aspects of the strategy.
• Milestones.
• Personal action. Include some immediate actions for the readers of the manifesto.

Creating a manifesto

To create a manifesto, you need to develop a point of view, assemble the facts, explore, engage, disagree, create the diversity of opinion and thinking, map the landscape, set the criteria, assess the possibilities, know the (mega) trends, talk to customers, and make sure it fits while avoiding toxic assumptions and inside‐out thinking. We are all limited by the patterns of thinking and behaving that have taken root in our organisation.

Apply different frames

You need to change your mental model by asking? "blasphemous questions." Find out the? "hidden" assumptions and beliefs in our industry and within our organisation. Are any of these are toxic to the future? If you are to create new wealth in new ways in the future, what do you need to think and do differently? You also need to go beyond being customer‐led. Customers are also limited by their ability to imagine only what's possible. Apply anthropology and put yourself in the shoes of the customer . ?Look for the unarticulated need. Look for the abnormalities. Go for active serendipity . Learn from other industries.

Jobs‐to‐be‐Done

Understand why people buy products and services in the first place. Jobs‐to‐be‐Done (JTBD) theory states that people buy products and services to get a "job" done. Defining a market by customer outcome. Products don't have JTBD; people do. It should become a constant in the product/market fit equation, not a variable. It should not change as the study of that market unfolds.

• It is stable over time.
• It is unambiguously defined, making it distinguishable from any other markets.
• It does not assume a product or a solution. Instead, it is defined as a problem.
• It points to targets for value creation, clarifying which group of people to focus on.
• It makes discovering customer needs quicker, more effective, and less costly.
• It reveals all sources of competition, making disruption and other unpleasant surprises less likely.
• It is relevant to and aligns with the entire organisation, including sales, marketing, product development, etc.

Change

What excites Corporate Explorers is an insight that something is changing. They spot early warning signs that the happy status quo may be at risk. They screen opportunity. There are three killer questions to screen an opportunity: Is there a sufficient opportunity to make it worth pursuing? Is the end user experiencing "hair on fire" enough pain to motivate them? Do you have an ownable claim to being the provider of a delightful solution?

Other tips

• Define the enemy. Every story needs an antagonist.
• Who is frustrated? Personalise the frustration and give it a subjective identity that people can relate to and understand as a potential viable audience for the solution.
• What is our hero? Every story needs its Luke Skywalker, who will resolve customers' frustration.
• At Amazon, managers who want to propose new business ideas must complete a PR/FAQ. Read "Working backwards "?
• Apply storytelling .?
• Set an impossible goal.
• Envision your ideal outcome ten years from now.
• Future frame using long-term trends
• Define what needs to be true.
• Find an unorthodox path.
• Apply an abandoned innovation: Your organisation has a junkyard filled with failed innovations.
• Prioritise your ideas. Sort them on a two‐by‐two matrix—easy or difficult, high or low impact. Map the winning moves and the crazy ideas. Please read "Zones to Win ".
• Document your idea portfolio.
• Map the maturity gap. Build a plan that anticipates what capabilities, capacity, and customers you need to combine to deliver your value proposition to the end user.
• De-risk by rapid experimentation.
• Map the assumptions.
• Create an innovation ecosystem.
• Do not apply traditional key performance indicators (KPIs) in the early stages.
• Define success metrics for each stage.
• Define your progress metrics.
• Set kill criteria
• Separate explore from the core.
• Map the key stakeholders.?
• Build a movement and a community.
• Create a coalition of the willing.
• Everything is culture. Create a culture cabinet.

Books and quadrants

The book reminds me of "The start-up way " ?and again "Zones to Win ", particularly as the book moves into what it calls ambidextrous organisation quadrants.

Quadrant I: Not Strategically Important and Not Operationally Related

Quadrant II: Operationally Related but Not Strategically Important

Quadrant III: Strategically Important but Not Leveraging Existing Assets and Capabilities

Quadrant IV: Strategically Important and Able to Leverage Core Capabilities

Set up an exploratory unit

You need to give the Explorer autonomy to operate outside existing corporate rules while remaining close enough to the core business to leverage corporate assets to scale a fledgling business. There are five elements to designing an organisational approach for an exploratory unit:

1. Purpose. What is the explore unit expected to achieve; what is its ambition?
2. Decision making. How will the organisation make decisions about capital and resource allocation?
3. A team. How do you structure the unit and recruit a winning team?
4. An operating model.
5. Resource allocation and budget autonomy. Budget autonomy and multiyear commitments are at the top of any Corporate Explorer's list. Corporate Explorers need funding committed over multiple years far more than they need a specific dollar amount.

Statistics

The book ends with some interesting statistics (based on 7,000 executives):

• 94% believed that culture was important for business success.
• 19% believed that their organisation had the right culture?
• 96% believed that some change to the culture was needed
• 15% of companies said that their culture change efforts have been successful.
• In 89% of the successful change efforts, the CEO was the champion and provided the time and resources needed to make it successful.

Bookbuzz

Finally, it is an advertisement for Bookbuzz . A methodology for holding conversations in what we call a zone of productive or constructive tension. The zone where there is sufficient candour to name the most important issues and then work on them openly, no matter how contentious they might be. Conversation that makes it possible to include the high‐tension topics.

Talk

If you want to discuss this or any other topic, feel free to book an appointment with me here .