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Strategy

Strategy Needs Creativity

Adam Brandenburger | page 080

When business school students are taught strategy, they dutifully study mapping the five forces, for example, and drawing a value net, but they know that game-changing strategies come from somewhere more creative.

To generate groundbreaking strategies, executives need tools explicitly designed to foster creativity. A number of such tools already exist, often in practitioner-friendly forms. They take their inspiration more from how our thought processes work than from how industries or business models are structured. Thus they can help strategists invent a genuinely new way of doing business.

The author explores four approaches to a breakthrough strategy: (1) Contrast. Identify—and challenge—the assumptions undergirding the status quo. (2) Combination. Connect products or services that seem independent from or even in tension with one another. (3) Constraint. Look at limitations in an organization and turn them into strengths. (4) Context. Consider how a similar problem was solved in an entirely different context—surprising insights may emerge.

HBR Reprint R1902C

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managing change

The Collaboration Blind Spot

Lisa B. Kwan | page 088

Leaders are well aware of the central role that cross-group collaboration plays in business today. So in planning for collaborative initiatives, they think carefully about logistics and processes, incentives and outcomes. And that makes perfect sense. But in doing so they forget to consider how the groups they’re asking to work together might experience the request—especially when they are being told to break down walls, divulge information, sacrifice autonomy, share resources, or even cede responsibilities. All too often, groups feel threatened by such demands: What if the collaboration is a sign that they’ve become less important to the company? What if they give up important resources and responsibilities and never get them back?

This is the “collaboration blind spot.” To make sure collaborative initiatives are successful, leaders must first identify threats to group security and take steps to minimize them and discourage defensive behaviors. Only then should they focus on process and outcomes.

HBR Reprint R1902D

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Operations

Operational Transparency

Ryan W. Buell | page 096

Conventional wisdom holds that the more contact an operation has with its customers, the less efficiently it will run. But when customers are partitioned away from the operation, they are less likely to fully understand and appreciate the work going on behind the scenes, causing them to place a lower value on the product or service being offered.

To address this problem, managers should experiment with operational transparency—the deliberate design of windows into and out of the organization’s operations to help customers understand and appreciate the value being added.

Witnessing the hidden work performed on their behalf makes customers more satisfied, more willing to pay, and more loyal. It can also make employees more satisfied by demonstrating to them that they are serving their customers well. However, managers should be aware of certain conditions in which transparency can backfire.

HBR Reprint R1902H