Rita McGrath

Companies that are blindsided by changes in their environment or disruptions in their competitive space have one thing in common: Their executives and decision-makers somehow got disconnected from the “edges” of the organization—where small changes start brewing before their implications are obvious to everybody. So too, when a big opportunity is missed or dismissed. Why, for instance, did Microsoft initially miss something like five major shifts in underlying technology as it tried to defend its Windows franchise, and why is it regaining relevance now? In this session, we will practice thinking about how you can truly get beyond the day to day and “see” around corners.

You will learn:

• Eight simple practices that you can put into place immediately to improve your ability to create insight (and why they work)
• How to reorient your time to accommodate these practices with a simple exercise of reallocating one hour per week
• How to support each other in using the practices and sharing what you are learning

Why you need to rethink your strategy in a post-advantage world.

We’ve all seen the story play out. A company experiences phenomenal success, their CEO makes the cover of notable business publications, and business writers use them as examples for the rest of us. Then, somehow, the firm gets into trouble. Competitors capture their customers, margins shrink, investors grumble, activists turn up, the CEO, or a succession of CEO’s, are shown the door, and, eventually the company disappears or becomes irrelevant. A root cause, McGrath argues, is the pervasive belief that a competitive advantage, once established, is enduring. This belief leads to complacency, inward focus, loss of customer engagement and a stifling of innovation. Instead, smart strategists leave old assumptions at the door and pursue opportunities to establish and exploit transient advantages.

You will learn:

• Why too much stability can be your enemy – and how to embrace continuous reconfiguration
• Why existing metrics will lead you astray – and what you should be measuring instead;
• Why healthy disengagement from a fading business is one of the most important practices to get right
• Why believing your most important competitors are others in your industry is a trap
• Why innovation is not optional
• How to lead when command-and-control doesn’t work
• How to manage talent in a ‘tour of duty’ context

How to find the fastest, cheapest way to get the insights you need.

You have what you think is a great idea to pursue an attractive new opportunity. Before you can make progress, though, you are hit with a barrage of questions that you have no way of answering. “What will the ROI of this venture be?”; “how long will it take to launch”; “how will it affect our existing product lines?”. If you’re like people in many organizations, you will dutifully put together a conventional business plan, with details about the idea, spreadsheets that project what the financials could look like and GANTT or similar charts laying out the project timeline. And even as you are doing all this, you know in your heart of hearts that this is more a quantification of fantasy than it is likely to bring your idea to life. There is a better way.

In the seminal work that formed the basis for the Lean Startup movement, McGrath describes how to create a plan for a new venture that gets you to early answers fast, by focusing on the most critical assumptions that you need to convert to facts. It’s disciplined, but it’s a discipline that comes straight out of the entrepreneurial mindset.

You will learn:

• Why people make so many costly mistakes in high-uncertainty situations
• How to define success so that you can specify what must be true to achieve it
• How to avoid being unrealistic about what your venture might be able to achieve
• How to break a large, complex, project down into manageable checkpoints
• How to compare different potential business models
• How to think in terms of cost to learn rather than total project budgeting

Talking about innovation is all the rage. Unfortunately, successfully innovating at scale is rare. Indeed, a recent McKinsey study reported that only about 6% of companies in a survey they conducted were satisfied with their innovation efforts, and many did not understand why. In this eye-opening and entertaining talk, McGrath, author of Discovery Driven Growth and The Entrepreneurial Mindset explains the most common ways in which organizations sabotage their growth efforts and how they can move toward the creation of a genuine innovation proficiency. The processes of ideation (getting great ideas), incubation (finding product/market fit) and acceleration (ramping up to join the corporate parent) are all essential, yet most organizations focus only on the first. McGrath can also share the Innovation Maturity Scale assessment, a diagnostic tool which interested companies can use to assess where they are and develop a roadmap for how to improve.

You will learn:

• What are the five practices guaranteed to ensure that your innovation process is dysfunctional and how to fix them;
• Why three distinct leadership roles are essential for driving innovation;
• How to stop letting conventional business metrics interfere with the innovation process;
• How to create the right incentives to promote innovation;
• How to structure the innovation governance process;
• How to create a common language for talking about innovation