“Weekly Picks” (June 17th)

Here are our weekly picks of articles on Strategy Execution for the week ending Thursday, June 17th. Enjoy!

MANAGEMENT INNOVATION

What comes next? The Resurgence of Innovation Hubs for Business & Industry by YBF Ventures (YBF Ventures – Medium)

In the classic struggle to foster corporate innovation, we are faced with the need to both exploit our current business model (or products, etc…) as well as to explore new paradigms. However, it is hard to do both well within the same wine skin! Therefore, we seek ways to create skunkworks projects. This article suggests that an innovation hub is the way to make innovation a permanent and recurring part of your business ecosystem. It goes on to share the advantages of doing so while citing well known examples of such hubs.


STRATEGIC CLARITY

Getting tangible about intangibles: The future of growth and productivity? by Eric Hazan, Sven Smit, Jonathan Woetzel, Biljana Cvetanovski, Mekala Krishnan, Brian Gregg, Jesko Perrey, and Klemens Hjartar (McKinsey & Company)

Appreciated this article and its focus on how intangibles are being purposely harnessed to develop core capabilities that differentiate a business for its customers. Those companies investing more in intangibles (innovation capital, digital and analytics capital, human and relational capital, and brand capital) are growing faster than those that do not. What intangibles is your business focused on developing?


PREPARED MINDS

Understanding Skills Scarcity in An External Market — Part 1 by Ying Li (IBM Data and AI – Medium)

This is a simple read on identifying and mapping the strategic skills needed in your business against the scarcity of supply of those same skills in the external market. By gaining this awareness, you can plan accordingly. It’s not brilliance, but it is a key to strategy execution!


CULTURAL COHESION

Can Your Business Concentrate? by Dr Richard Shrapnel PhD (Dr Richard Shrapnel PhD – Medium)

I thought this short post was a nice twist on how both good strategy + good culture influence performance! The article asks a catchy question (the title), and then, it walks through a handful of things (strategic and cultural) that need to be in place to help employees to focus on and engage in what’s important.


RESOURCE FLUIDITY

Incorporating ‘Futures‘ Foresight Into The Process Of Strategic Planning by G. Woodling and W. Jones (Futurealities Limited – Medium)

Here is an article about getting your corporation’s head up to sense the environment, so you can iteratively detect, discuss, & align around a set of commonly held assumptions about the future. I love all articles that challenge teams to understand one another and to share understanding transparently.


ENABLING TECHNOLOGY

These immersive, virtual 3D models are helping plan the infrastructure of the future by Ian Koeppel (Fast Company)

I may be the last to grow tired of “digital twinning”. This is the ability to construct a digital double of a physical or business environment, so you can model and run scenarios to create designs and/or improvements to systems. The technology is here. This article talks about the use of this approach in various aspects of city planning.

About George Veth

George Veth is a consultant in the areas of strategy execution and initiative management. Most recently, he has been leading a cross-boundary collaboration program with teams from cities across North America and Europe. He lives in Cambridge, MA, and runs a nonprofit SME Impact Fund in East Africa. His subject matter interests are organizational culture, management [system] innovation, and public value management.