“Weekly Picks” (April 29th)
Here are our weekly picks of articles on Strategy Execution for the week ending Thursday, April 29th. Enjoy!
MANAGEMENT INNOVATION
Try this NBA strategy to help manage hybrid work by Tim Sanders
Interesting article that starts by highlighting how the NBA champion Toronto Raptors used bench players to rest and preserve Kawhi Leonard throughout the 2020-2021 season. The authors use this analogy to talk about how corporations should leverage variable talent to preserve their best people. They suggest building a “virtual talent bench” of strong utility players/partners that can relieve the pressure at any given moment.
STRATEGIC CLARITY
[no recommendation this week]
PREPARED MINDS
11 Sources of Disruption, Interview with Amy Webb by Karen Christensen
This article suggests that disruption stems from 11 sources of macro change. To stay agile, organizations should pay attention to the early signals of change in these areas. The author advises that a cross-functional team be assigned individually to each source and meet periodically (online or offline) to share what they are finding. In this way, the team can identifying trends as well as consider what decisions might be impacted in the organization.
CULTURAL COHESION
It’s Not a Leader’s Job to Motivate by George Bohan
Love the simplicity of this short post. Employees do not come to a job unmotivated. They become disenfranchised when the culture of the organization inhibits their performance, their participation, etc. After the author shares a sampling of these core attributes, he then suggests that we consider this challenge to be an organizational issue and not simply a management issue. We can all initiate the needed change, but the organization needs to be crafted in such a way to allow people to leverage their motivation when they come to work each day.
RESOURCE FLUIDITY
[no recommendation this week]
ENABLING TECHNOLOGY
Creating Valuable (and Trusted) Experiences With Digital Personas by Sanjay Podder, Shalabh Kumar Singh, Neville Dubash, and David Light
Here is an article that upholds the beneficial side of digital personas. The authors lay out guidelines for how to productively leverage the same technologies that create “deepfakes”. It remains to be seen how society will adopt these business “doubles”.
