Friday Features: 19-July-2019
Friday Features - a weekly selection of useful insights from business schools, consulting firms and publications to help you Unleash Your Leadership
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BY Helen Lee Bouygues via Harvard Business REVIEW
Too many business leaders are simply not reasoning through pressing issues, taking the time to evaluate a topic from all sides. Leaders often jump to the first conclusion, whatever the evidence. Even worse, C-suite leaders will just choose the evidence that supports their prior beliefs. A lack of metacognition — or thinking about thinking — is also a major driver, making people simply overconfident
BY Matt Villano via Stanford Business Insights
Imagine a container ship. They’re heavy — many can carry more than 10,000 intermodal containers and tip scales at upward of 150,000 tons. They’re huge — most measure more than 1,200 feet long. At top speed, the ships move fast but are incredibly difficult to shift course.
Big companies are like these ships. They’re heavy — often with massive overhead, multiple locations, and thousands of protocols. They’re huge — with budgets in the billions or multimillions, and tens of thousands of employees. Not surprisingly, change is difficult for these behemoths, as well.
But every big company strives for these shifts, or risks obsolescence
BY Sam Bourton et AL. via MCKINSEY QUARTERLY
AI can be a huge help to the leader who’s trying to become more inwardly agile and foster creative approaches to transformation. When a CEO puts AI to work on the toughest and most complex strategic challenges, he or she must rely on the same set of practices that build personal inner agility. Sending AI out into the mass of complexity, without knowing in advance what it will come back with, the CEO is embracing the discovery of original, unexpected, and breakthrough ideas. This is a way to test and finally move on from long-held beliefs and prejudices about their organization, and to radically reframe the questions in order to find entirely new kinds of solutions.
BY Peter Dent et al. via Deloitte Insights
Despite the perception that crises are becoming more frequent, a 2018 Deloitte study finds that organizations’ confidence exceeds crisis preparedness.
BY Maynard Webb via FastCompany
Make sure your recruits know this is a big job that requires rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. Give them a sense of how challenging it will be. Look for folks who are willing to do nontraditional things. Value candidates who like to jump out of their comfort zone. Search for patterns where they did turnarounds or created something from scratch, people who are energized by building, rather than enjoying the fruits of their labors once things are more established.
We hope you enjoyed reading this issue of Friday Features as much as we did putting it together. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please do write in.
Narayan Kamath
