Serial Innovators E-Book

Claudio Feser

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 318

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

"The average life expectancy at "birth" of a firm is roughly 15 years, and only one out of twenty lives longer than fifty years.

Firms are born, they grow, then they struggle to keep up with changing markets. Slow adapters often become big losers, fall by the wayside, and die. Serial Innovators studies the factors affecting the aging of firms, particularly those that slow down their ability to adapt to changes in the marketplace. The book reviews recent findings in relevant academic fields—behavioral economics, psychology, neuroscience, organizational science, network theory, anthropology, sociology, and strategy—to understand how firms, as they grow, develop rigidities that prevent change.

It develops a model of organization that is adaptive, innovative, and can create significant value for its stakeholders for long periods of time".

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Endorsements

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Prologue

Introduction

Part I: The Ephemeral Nature of Firms

Chapter 1: Meet Carl Berger

Chapter 2: Corporate Life Cycle

Schumpeter's Ghost

The Corporate Life Cycle and Aging Firms

Part II: Individual Rigidities

Chapter 3: To Err Is Human

Not That Smart, Not That Informed, Not That Selfish

Rules of Thumb

Mental Biases

Addressing the Rigidities of Bounded Rationality

Chapter 4: The Greatest of All Time

The Theory of Self-Efficacy Beliefs

A Positive for Organizations

Pathways of Self-Confidence

Developing Self-Efficacy

A Health Warning

Implications for Management

Chapter 5: Rewiring Brains

The Human Brain

Neurons and Neuroplasticity

Plasticity, Learning, and Behavioral Change

Large-Scale Rewiring of Brains

Part III: Organizational Rigidities

Chapter 6: Long Live Bureaucracy!

Why Organizations Exist

Chaos or Bureaucracy

A Matter of Interdependencies

Large and Complex Modern Organizations

Building Tomorrow's Global Organization

Chapter 7: In Brain We Trust

Story-Telling and Spirituality as Neurological Phenomena

Why Our Brain Develops Religion

Unleashing Spirituality in Business

Insights on Company Ideologies

Chapter 8: What We Value

Understanding Corporate Culture

Subcultures

Using Culture to Reduce Need for Deep and Dense Hierarchies

Execution and Learning Culture

Transforming Culture

Chapter 9: What Not to Pay For

The Limits of Monetary Incentives

Effective (and Inexpensive) Nonmonetary Incentives

Building Effective Incentive Systems

Chapter 10: Fast Learners

Defining Capabilities

Capabilities as a Constraint to Adaptation

Building Capabilities Fast

Part IV: Serial Innovators

Chapter 11: The Secrets of Serial Innovators

Cultivating the Desire to Make a Difference

Building a Team of Learners at the Top

Positively Framing the Vision and Strategy

Building on Self-Managed Performance Cells

Promoting the Firm's Drive to Perform and Grow

Building Capabilities to Quickly Develop New Assets and Skills

Cultivating a Culture That Fosters Execution and Promotes Challenge

Chapter 12: Beyond Business: The Medici, Oxford, and the Catholic Church

Chapter 13: Legacy through Leadership

Afterword

Appendix A: Analysis of the Top 50 U.S. Firms of 1960

Appendix B: Corporate Aging and Survival

Appendix C: Key Questions for Transforming Your Firm

Understanding of Context

Company Purpose

Top Team Composition

Positive Context

Organization

Performance Management Systems

Leadership Development

Capability Building

Corporate Culture

References

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Index

Additional Praise For

Serial Innovators

“Serial Innovators deals with the fascinating problem of corporate aging and survival. Older firms have lower profitability and higher costs, they command smaller market shares, and have poorer governance, on average. The puzzle is why they are unable to reinvent themselves. Unlike many earlier books addressing this issue, Serial Innovators reviews the insights generated in various academic fields and uses that information to offer solutions. The result is a truly inspiring read.”

—Claudio Loderer Professor, Institut für Finanzmanagement University of Berne, Switzerland

“Serial Innovators is a book about the leadership legacies that help firms create lasting value. It is two books in one: a book about the firms that survive for long periods, how they innovate, and how they adapt to changing markets; and also the fascinating story of a new CEO and his efforts to lead his firm through new challenges and to keep his life in balance. It is about how leaders can become better leaders. Nothing more important to read these days.”

—Mario Greco Chief Executive Officer, General Insurance Zurich Financial Services Ltd

“One of the great mysteries of business and economics is why high performance is so fleeting. Why, like empires, do companies rise to great success, and then fall when they fail to adapt to changes in their environment? In this engaging book, Claudio Feser sheds new light on this age-old question. He finds that there are a few companies—serial innovators—that beat the odds, bounce back from adversity, innovate, and adapt to ever-changing markets. A must read for business leaders in any industry.”

—Eric Beinhocker Author, The Origin of Wealth

“How often do you read a book that is academically thorough, utterly practical, entertaining, and inspiring? Drawing on a wide range of research, Serial Innovators tells the story of a young CEO going through both a personal and a company transformation. It is a story of leadership. It is a story of legacy. It is a story of life.”

—Thomas Gutzwiller Professor, Executive School of Management, Technology and Law University of St. Gallen

“Companies are like biological organisms. They are born, they grow, they mature, they age, and they die. For most companies, this cycle is extremely short—a few years. For some it’s about a generation. But only a few achieve a cycle that mirrors the human life span. This book is about what makes companies go stale and what to do about it. In my capacity as chairman of getAbstract, I’ve read thousands of business books. This one is unique. Feser is not only a brilliant business thinker, he is also a great storyteller. Read this book and you will be enlightened.”

—Rolf Dobelli Chairman, getAbstract and Author, Die Kunst des klaren Denkens

“Creating shareholder value is not the only ‘raison d’être’ of corporations, firms, and businesses. Companies should positively impact society and make the world a better place. It’s about making life better, safer, and healthier. And it’s about people and leaders going through personal and professional transformation. This book provides invaluable insights on how to build companies that succeed in today’s global, complex, and fast-changing markets.”

—Bruno Pfister Chief Executive Officer Swiss Life Holding Ltd

“This work draws on an unusually wide set of disciplines—new and old—to shed light on the behavior of organizations and their leaders. Embracing complexity and unpredictability—rather than assuming them away—Serial Innovators is a renaissance person’s guide to leadership and institution building.”

—Bill Huyett Director, McKinsey & Company and Co-Author, Value

Copyright © 2012 by McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Feser, Claudio. Serial innovators : firms that change the world / Claudio Feser. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-118-14992-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-17404-3 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-17405-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-17406-7 (ebk) 1. Technological innovations. 2. Creative ability in business. I. Title. HD45.F435 2012 338′.064–dc23 2011029125

To Evelyne, Dario, and Alessio

Foreword

From time to time—not very often—a book about business offers a genuinely new perspective on issues that confront us all. Serial Innovators is such a book.

Companies are facing a number of challenges: a dynamic market environment with ever increasing competitive pressure; increased shareholder, employee, and community expectations; activist demands; and more severe regulatory requirements. Keeping a large and global organization innovative and adaptive in such a context requires a great deal of professional competence and drive, an understanding of market opportunities and threats, and an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the organization and of oneself.

Business always implies risk taking, which in turn implies the danger of failing. This means that companies and their leaders are inherently exposed to patterns such as overconfidence, denial, or projections.

One may expect that these defense mechanisms occur only in companies in crisis and not in times of great success. But when there is praise from all sides and no shortage of recognition, companies and their leaders may fall victim to losing their sense of reality. Successful, admired, and praised organizations can easily become self-centered and isolated from external information. Rather than remaining realistic and aware of the fragility of success, their leaders may take praise and admiration at face value, egos get inflated, and expectations exaggerated, which sooner or later inevitably lead to failure.

Serial Innovators draws on a wide range of academic research and practical experiences to provide a fact-based analysis of the processes when organizations lose their ability to innovate in an ever-changing context, and develops insights on how company leaders can build organizations that can blossom and sustain growth in today’s dynamic and challenging markets.

Serial Innovators is also the story of Carl, a young CEO, faced with the challenges of managing a large and increasingly complex organization. It is a story that opens a window on a world that most people never see: the world of those who lead, under constant pressure, and in a world full of opportunities and risks. They have to be able to make decisions based on incomplete information and sometimes contradictory pressures; they have to act while possibly still having doubts, and they must be able to make difficult people choices. Leaders, however, also have the unique privilege to shape an organization, formulate its mission, create alignment, and instill the passion; they can project self-confidence and energy to improve the lives of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of people based on the firm’s scale and capabilities.

Serial Innovators is a thoughtful and compelling book distinguished by the breadth and depth of its scope. The choice of academic references is extensive and links well with the real-life choices that a company leader has to make in shaping the organization that he leads, based on analytical thinking. The author, Claudio Feser, draws from extensive personal experience and offers food for thought for all those with leadership positions—in business and elsewhere.

DANIEL VASELLA, MD Chairman, Novartis AG

Prologue

This is an extraordinary book. It addresses head on the most critical question facing us. That question is: “How can the organizations we create and populate deliver benefits for customers, shareholders, employees, and society?” This is not a question limited to the interests of business people. The answer to this question will determine the rate of human progress and the health of our societies for us and our children.

The greatest human invention is the ability to organize; the ability of a group of people working together toward a common goal to surpass the dreams of individuals. Innovations such as mass production, large-scale agriculture, the Internet, the sequencing of the human genome would simply not be possible without our ability to cooperate through organization. For that matter, neither would be policing, charity, or government itself. Our ability to create society rests on our ability to organize.

Claudio Feser gets to the heart of this question. What does it take to build organizations that succeed for long periods of time? And what stops us? He confronts the dark reality below the potential. Most organizations fail. They fail to engage their customers. They fail to develop their people and they fail to deliver for their shareholders. Most organizations are short-lived. Set up to achieve a goal, to deliver on a task, they grow and develop. But then eventually they age and die. In a process that resembles a super-fast version of the Darwinian evolution of species, their position in the world is taken over by younger, more nimble, more vibrant organizations. History is full of organizations that were once admired global leaders but now no longer exist, and have been replaced by younger, more dynamic competitors: British Leyland, Lehman Brothers, Digital Equipment Corporation, Enron, to name but a few. And this process of the fall of large, established, often admired organizations and the rise of new ones seems to be accelerating. According to a study by Foster and Kaplan of McKinsey & Company, in 1955 a company in the S&P 500 Index stayed in the index for an average of 45 years, and in 1975, for just 26 years. In 2009, the average was estimated to be just 17 years. Could it be that large and admired firms already carry in them the virus that will eventually lead to their decay?

This seems odd. Why would admired, world-class organizations that genuinely understand their industries, have access to the best technologies, employ the best talent, possess the best assets, have the best capabilities, systematically lose out to organizations that have none of that? How can it be that small, inexperienced newcomers systematically beat large, established, experienced, potent, world-class organizations? Why—in the world of organizations—does David beat Goliath over and over again? And why ever more quickly?

Serial Innovators offers answers to these questions. Building on recent advances in science, it dives into the psychology of the human being and of organizations to explain why organizations develop rigidities that prevent them from adapting and innovating in times of change. And building among others on Beyond Performance by Scott Keller and myself, it develops insights and perspectives on how to build organizations that not only perform, but are also healthy: organizations that have the ability to continuously adapt and renew themselves. It also shows how the leaders of organizations play a pivotal role in ensuring that organizations stay healthy, young, nimble, and innovative, and how—in doing so—leaders can build enduring legacies.

Written as a fable about a young CEO going through both a company and a personal transformation, Serial Innovators is not only a story about innovation and adaptation, it is a story about leadership and legacy. More importantly, it is a story about life.

COLIN PRICE Leader of McKinsey & Company’s Organization Practice

Introduction

The performance pressure on company leaders today is enormous. It is tough to stay at the top. Leaders work hard focusing on profitability and value creation.

Yet, despite all their efforts, value creation by most firms is short-lived. In fact, the whole life cycle of most firms is not very long. The average life expectancy of a firm is roughly 15 years, and only 5 out of 100 live longer than 50 years. Set up on the back of an innovative idea, firms grow and develop, and sometimes they blossom into admired, world-class organizations. But eventually—as if they were biological organisms—they age and die. There is a large graveyard of defunct firms, including household names such as Texaco, Union Carbide, RCA, General Foods, British Leyland, Pan Am, Uniroyal, Bethlehem Steel, Westinghouse, Commodore, Lehman Brothers, Trans World Airlines, Digital Equipment Corporation, Polaroid Corporation, WorldCom, and Enron.