Editor’s letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2009), "Editor’s letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 37 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2009.26137baa.001

Editor’s letter

Article Type: Editor’s letter From: Strategy & Leadership, Volume 37, Issue 2

This issue offers a variety of new tools for driving change and also highlights the needed leadership skills.

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  Robert J. Allio kick starts the issue with his provocative article, “Leadership – the five big ideas.” He summarizes the key skills and character traits leaders need to cultivate and practice if they are going to successfully enable their organizations to change fast enough and imaginatively enough to survive.

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  Norman T. Sheehan and Ganesh Vaidyanathan offer change managers a new tool for revitalizing their business in their interesting article, “Using a value creation compass to discover ‘Blue Oceans.’” The authors show how offerings can be developed for new markets by bundling attributes attractive to new customers based on three types of value logic – industrial efficiency logic, network services logic, knowledge intensive logic.

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  Before managers attempt a major change strategy they should read “How to distinguish smart big moves from stupid ones” by IMD researchers Paul Strebel and Anne-Valérie Ohlsson. To avoid a corporate disaster and increase the chances of a smart and ultimately successful big move there are six critical questions that must be answered honestly and unequivocally by managers.

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  Key to the change process is a thoughtful consideration of a number of distinctly different futures and what an organization would have to do to prosper in each of them. “Exploring and learning from the future: five steps for avoiding strategic surprises” by Monitor 360 consultant Doug Randall sees scenario planning as a unique opportunity to make sense of how world change may play out and to become involved in creating the future that you want.

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  Here’s a big surprise for would-be change masters. Though many firms are considering a strategy of co-creation of value with customers this year, a key question is where do they start? Most firms are going to have to revolutionize how they listen to and share information with employees and customers. In his article “Leading the transformation to co-creation of value” Venkat Ramaswamy, an internationally known thought leader on this topic, shows that becoming a co-creative organization requires changing the relationship between the institution of management and employees, and between them and co-creators of value–customers, stakeholders, partners or other employees.

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  And for all the corporate leaders who think they can wing it when it comes to change management, here’s proof that there’s a better way. In their article “Stop improvising change management!,” which reports findings from IBM’s 2008 Making Change Work study, Hans Henrik Jørgensen, Lawrence Owen and Andreas Neus found that a consistent and structured change management approach yielded significantly greater benefits than an improvised one. And they have data on what practices work for the Change Masters.

Good reading!

Robert M. RandallEditor