“Weekly Picks” (June 3rd)

June 4, 2021

Here are our weekly picks of articles on Strategy Execution for the week ending Thursday, June 3rd. Enjoy!

MANAGEMENT INNOVATION

Built For Speed by Joe Perfetti (Duke Corporate Education)

I’m intrigued by FCT (financial cycle time) – especially if it is truly a measure of how fast a company can sense and respond to its environment. The article draws some parallels to productivity. Being fully transparent, I’m not close enough to the topic to gauge the worthiness of FCT or PCT (production cycle time)! However, I have corporate colleagues who are working to benchmark business unit productivity. It’s messy. I need to learn more about this topic – and this post has piqued my interest.

STRATEGIC CLARITY

Why Good Arguments Make Better Strategy by Jesper B. Sørensen and Glenn R. Carroll (MITSloan Management Review)

Being a true believer of both dialog and leveraging shared visual constructs to build alignment within teams and organizations, I fully endorse the ideas and thinking of this article. I do, however, wince a bit when the term “strategy map” is used with no mention of Norton & Kaplan. With that said, I like the article.

PREPARED MINDS

The Business Case For Futures Intelligence by Cathy Hackl (Cathy Hackl – Medium)

The term “Futures Intelligence” is so apropos for the work of sensing both the environment and the trends that lay ahead of an organization. The constant scanning of the environment for risks, opportunities, or pending discontinuities is increasingly important in our AVUCA world. In this article, we get a simple reminder with a catchy term!

CULTURAL COHESION

The digital-ready workplace by Peter Evans-Greenwood, Rosemary Stockdale, and Tim Patston (Deloitte.)

This is a very interesting article on workplaces (physical, personal digital, shared digital) and the attributes found in productive shared digital workplaces. I believe that this latter question about the attributes of a productive shared digital workplace is essential to the future of work, and I think this article is just the beginning of a much larger dialog on how we foster not only shared digital workplaces but, also, hybrid workplaces.

RESOURCE FLUIDITY

[no recommendation this week]

ENABLING TECHNOLOGY

[no recommendation this week]

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.