Ann Badillo Leadership

21st Century Leadership | Ann Badillo Manifesto

Weak Signal Research

Definition of a  weak signal

A  weak signal is typically a small innovation or disruption that has the potential to grow in scale and geographic distribution. A  signal can be:

• a new product,
• a new practice,
• a new market strategy,

• a new policy,
• a new technology,
• a new event,
• a local trend,
• an organization,
• a recently revealed problem or state of affairs.

In short, a weak signal is s something that catches our attention at one scale and in one locale and points to larger implications for other locales or even globally.

Weak Signals are useful for people who are trying to anticipate a highly uncertain future. They tend to capture emergent phenomenon sooner than traditional social science methods and turn our attention to possible innovations before they become obvious. Unlike indicators, they often focus our attention at the margins of society rather than the core. In this way, they are more likely to reveal disruptions and innovations.

How to Balance Power and Love-- Adam Kahane

Scenario planning and social change expert Adam Kahane suggests that to master large and difficult challenges, leaders need to learn to act and empathize simultaneously.

Adam Kahane’s book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2010) opens with a quote from one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speeches, his last presidential speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “Power without love,” said King, “is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”

See strategy + business article by Art Kleiner

How to Balance Power and Love.

Business Model Generation--Alex Osterwalder

 

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HBS--Marketing Your Way Through a Recession

Harvard Business School Professor John Quelch 8 point strategy.Companies should bear eight factors in mind when making their marketing plans for 2008 and 2009:

1. Research the customer. Instead of cutting the market research budget, you need to know more than ever how consumers are redefining value and responding to the recession

2. Focus on family values. When economic hard times loom, we tend to retreat to our village.

3. Maintain marketing spending. This is not the time to cut advertising. It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times.

4. Adjust product portfolios. Marketers must reforecast demand for each item in their product lines as consumers trade down to models that stress good value, such as cars with fewer options.

Briefing Links from Confronting the Chaos and Uncertainty

Briefing Links from Open Coaching Call: Confronting the Chaos and Uncertainty. October 14, 2008

"Relax, it's only uncertainty. The real mark of a leader is confidence with uncertainty--the ability to admit to it and deal with it."

Seven Leadership Skills to Accelerate Your Business Results:
Managing in complexity, uncertainty and change
White Paper: Download SevenLeadershipSkills.Badillo.pdf
http://www.annbadillo.com/leadership/2007/03/seven-leaders-1.html

Rate of change
http://www.annbadillo.com/leadership/2007/05/leadership-comp.html

Managing Uncertainty and Chaos

• Develop Multiple Futures and Scenarios
• Scan and Look for emergent properties
• Become a Systems Thinker
• Collaborate

Leadership Competencies

• Get comfortable with Uncertainty. Master it. Agile, Adapting, sensing
• New Processes and Systems are needed. Learn and Master them.
• Authentic Leadership. Be Present. Good listening.
• Assurances

Practices for the Inner Leader: Power of contemplative practices
http://www.annbadillo.com/leadership/2008/10/the-power-of-co.html

Mother Lode Post

Here are some links to further describe in detail some of the models, concepts and thought leaders I presented. Please feel free to post any comments as to what resonates with your work, practice and clients.

Upturn Thinking in a Downturn

Why it’s important not to lose site of long-term goals during a recession. A case study about Lucent from Strategy + Business.

All industrial corporations face downturns and periods of retrenchment. Successful strategists promote upturn thinking even during the deepest downturns. Techniques such as crafting an upturn SWAT team, implementing long-term strategic planning, and requiring upturn thinking during restructuring help companies develop their own Marshall Plan to stay one step ahead of competitors when better times return. 

Why Don't Managers Think Deeply?

Jeffrey Immelt, GE's CEO, has received a lot of publicity recently for fostering "imagination breakthroughs" by encouraging managers to think deeply about innovations that will ensure GE's longer-term success. He has vowed that he will protect those working on the breakthroughs from the "budget slashers" focused on short-term success. Questions that this effort raises include: (1) Why so much publicity? (2) Isn't "deep thinking" what leaders are paid to do? and (3) Why do these kinds of effort require so much protection?

In their new book, Marketing Metaphoria, Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman suggest some answers to the questions. In decrying the lack of what they call "deep thinking" among managers and especially those responsible for marketing, they suggest some things that get in its way.

Among them are:

(1) reluctance to take risk, especially when short-term performance is at stake,

(2) the fear of disruption resulting from "thinking differently and deeply,"

(3) the potential psychological cost of changing one's mind resulting from deep thinking

4) the lack of information providing deep insights on which to base deep thinking.

According to the Zaltmans, while nearly all research techniques commonly used today probe humans only at their conscious level, the subconscious (offering deep insights) really determines behavior, and that explains why humans don't behave as they say they will, whether in buying or other behaviors. As a result, for example, four in five product introductions perform below expectations.

The Zaltmans expand on ideas they have been studying for some years, namely that strategies of all kinds can be based on insights gained from listening in a disciplined way for metaphors that relatively small numbers of people (consumers, managers, public servants, etc.) use in the course of extended, probing interviews.

In these interviews, the object is to use "surface metaphors," like "I am drowning in debt," to identify "metaphor themes," like "Money is like liquid," and the associated "deep metaphor," in this case "resource." They claim that just seven deep metaphors—balance (equilibrium), transformation (changing states or status), journey (as in life), container (keeping things in and keeping things out), connection (feelings of belonging or exclusion), resource (providing survival), and control—describe 70 percent of our inner feelings.

The objective is to find deep metaphors that individuals share in common (a true market segment or a basis for resolving a confIict) rather than differences. If we would just take the time to explore them we would be able to realize such things as more substantial, farsighted, successful new product introductions (such as the hybrid auto ten years ago at Toyota); more successful conflict resolution; and more significant innovation, à la GE, in general.

This raises several questions:

Have the Zaltmans hit on a basic problem of leadership and management today?

Are there appropriate responses other than the one that GE is pursuing?

What is your organization doing to combat the absence of deep thinking in decision-making?

What are you doing to combat it in thinking about your own life inside and outside the organization?

What do you think?

To read more: Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay H. Zaltman, Marketing Metaphoria:  What Deep               Metaphors Reveal About the Minds of Consumers (Boston:  Harvard Business Press, 2008); Gerald Zaltman, How Customers Think:  Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market (Boston:  Harvard Business School Press, 2003)

What is group genius?

The ability of a group working iteratively and collaboratively to seek, model and put into place higher-order solutions. Time compression, systemic work-flow, dynamic feedback, individual creativity and collective  creativity are core features of group genius.