HBR: “The era of volatility requires that companies integrate capabilities for prediction, adaptability, and resilience in a manner uniquely tailored to their circumstances.”On prediction: “This capability involves generating beliefs about the future of your industry with enough precision and conviction to create opportunities for competitive advantage. For example, leaders may not know the full contours of the coming geopolitical landscape, but they’re sure to face a more fractured world of sharper rivalries, and that reality will shape parts of the macroeconomy. Companies must constantly work at developing scenarios, testing them against their risk and reward potential, and selecting a strategy that will adjust their exposures over time. The more asset-intensive a company is or the more fast-paced its competition, the more it will need good predictive capabilities. Private equity firms, for example, need superior prediction capabilities to generate detailed investment theses: A particular investment will produce a specific rate of return if and only if A, B, and C are all true. Most energy companies also require strong prediction capabilities, as do some leading telecom companies.”
Howard Friedman: “Generative AI [gen AI] and some of the incredible capabilities we’ve seen in the past few years are really mind-blowing. An important consideration that I advise for all business leaders is to think about the problem you are solving. Don’t get so excited about the latest and greatest tool. Instead, think about the issue you’re trying to address. What do you want to make a success of? Are you trying to look at a problem from a revenue or cost point of view? Approach it systematically. If it turns out that gen AI provides you a game-changing solution, great. Don’t start with the answer. Start with the problems first, then see what the answers are. Often, the best answers start with some basic analytics and then bring in advanced modeling or the latest tools that are out there.”
Andrew McAfee: “The reason why The Geek Way focuses on aspects of a company’s culture is because I came to believe that in industry after industry, it’s not the technology tool kit that separates really high-performing companies from the also-rans. It’s not like Silicon Valley has all the patents on AI and they’re not sharing them with the rest of the economy. It’s not like they’re the only ones who understand platform business models or the power of big data. Every management team I talk to understands that. Yet the companies that can succeed with exploiting the technology tool kit are pretty concentrated. They tend to come from one pretty small region in the country. They tend to center in a few industries, although that’s changing very rapidly. So my story about what is separating the companies that can harness all these amazing technologies from the also-rans is not a technology-based story. It’s a story based on the kinds of practices, the kinds of norms in place in a company that allow it to profit from whatever new technology comes along. One of my conclusions is that the technology tool kit is going to continue to expand and change and surprise us in the years going forward. Because the geeks have figured out how to build a company that can accept wave after wave of technology and harness it, the geeks are going to continue to pull ahead from the competition as the technology tool kit expands and becomes more powerful.”
WSJ: “The novelty of gamified training is a double-edged sword. While games may be a more engaging way to gain knowledge, some employees may perceive them as being too fun to focus on during working hours. After all, nobody wants their manager to think they are playing around when they are supposed to be focused on work. Therefore, it is important for leaders to set an example by logging onto these platforms themselves during work hours. In doing so, they make clear that playing on the job isn’t just tolerated by management but encouraged. By embracing gamified training, leaders can influence hesitant employees to do the same, while also enhancing their own knowledge. At KPMG, we found that the offices with the highest partner-participation rate in the training increased fees collected from clients by as much as 19% more than offices with lower partner-participation rates.”
Howard Baetjer: “In a world of endless possibilities but limited resources with which to try out these possibilities; in a world where many people have business ideas, but it’s not clear which of those ideas are good ones; in a world where no single person even knows how to make a pencil, much less predict what new products, processes, and technologies will best serve people’s needs a year or five years from now – in such a world, we need some means of sorting out the good ideas from the bad, for discovering which products and processes actually do serve us better than others. We need free markets because they give us such a means of discovery: profit and loss.” [via CafeHayek]
