Below is a selection of blog entries from Rita Gunther McGrath's blog: The Discipline of Strategic Growth.
A January 30, 2012 article by Financial Times on the subject quotes Rita McGrath: “Innovation needs to be treated as material and systematic, not an on-again-off-again process,” says Columbia Business School’s Ms McGrath. The vested interests inside corporations arrayed against disruptive change can be powerful. To read the entire article, click here. read more...
Just back from Davos! Tomorrow, Columbia Executive Education will be hosting a complementary webinar on an article that is in this months' Harvard Business Review on growth outliers. The webinar will explore the seemingly contradictory practices that these firms use to create an enviable ten-year track record of success. To sign up, click here.
read more...I am in Davos at the World Economic Forum where I facilitated a session on Entrepreneurship and Intelligent Failure. View my impressions here on YouTube.
read more...In another fascinating session at the World Economic forum, Barabasi who is a distinguished Professor of Physics at Northeastern, presented some of his work on how one can 'control' a complex system. We all know that our traditional command and control approaches fail utterly when a system's complexity increases. Instead, if we want to drive a system from an intial state to some other final state, we do better by influencing critical nodes. He used the analogy of driving a car - once you have the brake, steering wheel and acceleration system sorted out you can drive it without having to know all the complexity that lies underneath.
You can find links to his work at this… read more...
This morning, I moderated a panel on "Managing Complexity with the Santa Fe Institute at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. One of the featured thought leaders was Stephanie Forrest, a computer scientist who is among the world's leading thinkers on the topic of cyber crime and how to fight it. She makes a fascinating suggestion - that by fostering consistency and homogeneity in our systems, they are hugely more vulnerable to single attacks. Instead, she's working on developing systems in which the interfaces and functionality of various systems is the same, but within the system unique programming makes it difficult for a single virus to propogate across multiple systems, mimicking in some ways the way the immune… read more...
MSNBC interviewed Rita McGrath about the Kodak Eastman Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing: "It’s really up in the air at the moment," said Rita McGrath, a professor of management at Columbia Business School and an expert in company growth and innovation. "There was this last ditch, hail Mary effort to sell the patents to generate enough cash to keep the place from cratering. Now that that’s happened, it’s an opportunity for a fresh look. If a new leader comes in who can do something really remarkable with the technology they have, then the employees might have a new place to go to." For the entire article, click here. read more...
CIO Insight named Rita McGrath as one of seven most disruptive thinkers of all time, acknowledging her co-introduction (with Professor Ian MacMillan) of the concept of "discovery-driven planning," which encourages testing critical assumptions and adjusting plans based upon what is learned. To read the entire article, click here. read more...
In my blog over at the Harvard business review web site, I noted that industry boundaries are blurring and that this can lead to serious strategy miscalculations. Several people wrote in to say that they thought the 'jobs to be done' perspective offered a better vantage point. Couldn't agree more!
read more...The India Times writes..."In an article titled How the Growth Outliers Do It in HBR's latest issue, its author Rita Gunther McGrath searched for listed companies that have grown by at least 5% each year over a 10-year period ending 2009. The results showed that only 10 companies - three from US, two each from India and Spain, and one each from Japan, China and Slovenia - grew their net profit by at least 5% during the 10-year period. And only five grew both revenues and net profit every year." To read the entire article, click here.
The Indian Express writes..."According to research conducted by Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor at Columbia Business School,… read more...
This is an article about an exceptional group of companies - publicly traded, with market cap as of 2009 of over $1 Billion USD - who were able to grow their net incomes by at least 5% a year for a total ten-year period. In it, I find that they combine remarkable stability with remarkable change. The first 500 readers to click on the link below will be able to access a free .pdf file of the final published article.
Click here to receive the download.
If you missed it, email me and I'll have a hard copy sent to you.
Happy New Year!
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