People, too, Can Eat Strategy for Breakfast

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.  Attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker, the line became popular in the middle of the last decade when Mark Fields, President of the Ford Motor Company, posted it in his war room.  The company’s culture warranted sustained attention from his leadership team, Fields was saying, otherwise it could make their strategic planning and priorities meaningless.  Even more fundamentally, implicit in Fields’ posting was the message that leaders could address and actively shape their organizational culture for the better. 

How to foster that strong, positive and creative culture has always been the real question.  Changing beliefs, changing behaviors, and providing common goals are among the general approaches that leaders have adopted when wanting to create a culture in specific contexts.  Yet all of these must begin, quite simply, with the people in a team or organization – and it is often in leading those people, and the talent they bring, that the strongest and most creative cultures are built.

I recently had the opportunity, with the Berlin School Executive MBA program, to visit an outstanding example of talent leadership: the UFA Lab – a Content Lab based in Berlin and also in Cologne.  The Lab is part of UFA, one of Germany’s oldest and most distinguished entertainment brands, with an artistic heritage of films. UFA is part of FremantleMedia, represents a group of dynamic production companies, and is owned by the conglomerate Bertelsmann. 

The Lab retains exceptional autonomy, however, to pursue revenue-neutral projects and enter into imaginative partnerships to explore opportunities and innovation in the shifting digital media and communications marketplace.  Indeed, as the following graphic makes clear, the Lab has emerged over the last three years as a platform for the digital entertainment industry, developing interactive entertainment with some of the most creative organizations in the world, including YouTube/Google, Apple and Nintendo, as well as German start-ups like Couchfunk and movinary.

The outcomes of such collaboration have included a host of innovative new media projects, productions, and events.  Consider Rescue Dina Foxx!, a transmedia project joining broadcast television drama with online video content and gaming to produce an interactive captivating thriller for audiences to solve. Produced with German broadcaster ZDF and teamWorx in 2011, the carefully designed project generated both actual and online communities to investigate a fictional murder.  While an engrossing and interactive thriller, the project also smartly employed multiple media tools and platforms to explore with viewer-participants contemporary issues around digital identity theft. It’s Germany’s biggest-ever alternate reality game. Watch the full trailer.

While the UFA Lab has leveraged its place within Bertelsmann to forge imaginative collaborations with major global partners and to pioneer innovative media and entertainment productions, other drivers of their success are more human scale.  Speaking to Jens-Uwe Bornemann, the UFA Vice President Digital Ventures & Innovation who founded and leads the UFA Lab, and some of his senior producers, it quickly becomes evident how crucial to the Lab’s success have been the personal interactions in the space on Mehringdamm in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, in Cologne, and through individual connections beyond, including in London and New York.  One of the clear takeaways of a visit, in fact, is that Bornemann’s flexible project-based business design and open leadership of such diverse and cross-functional talent, who often reside in different sites and sometimes organizations, have been indispensable to the UFA Lab’s consistent creative productivity.

Legendary adman Jay Chiat once famously said, “How big do we get before we get bad?”  That is still a useful maxim for many agencies and firms wanting to remain nimble and adaptable.  More recently, a current legend, R/GA’s Bob Greenberg, offered the following variation: “How diverse are we going to get before we get good?”  Such recognition of the power, even necessity, of successfully deploying diverse talent marks a critical priority for leaders of creative production, teams and wider communities today. 

Diversity, of course, is about people and their different experiences and outlooks, ideas and perspectives.  It’s also about how leaders guide those people toward shared goals.  Culture, after all, is crucially about people and the values, beliefs, and goals they share.  Effective leadership, like that of the UFA Lab, continually enables and inspires people by envisioning the opportunities that those with shared belief and collective effort can explore and achieve.  Without such leadership and its catalyzing effects, diverse talent can remain dispersed, disorganized, and chaotic.

Culture still eats strategy for breakfast.  But so can people, particularly in creative businesses, if they are not empowered to pursue shared priorities and achieve common goals.  With the increasing diversity of talent brought to bear today in teams, projects and organizations, there’s perhaps no greater challenge – and opportunity – for creative leaders than to enable and inspire their people. 

Beyond Numbers of Doom: Effects of Film #Piracy, including Economic Benefits, Industry Re-structuring, and #Creativity?

Two fascinating pieces by @CarlBialik about efforts to better understand the effects of film piracy appeared in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.  

"Studios Struggle for Focus on Film Pirates' Booty," details how film studios, primarily through its industry association, the MPAA, is working to update the research basis of their insistent claims of the harmful effects of film piracy on the industry.  In recent years, the conclusions of two 2006 studies that estimated roughly $6.1 billion was being lost by the industry (and $20.5 billion lost by the overall U.S. economy) annually to piracy have been repeated and even used with multipliers to generate larger subsequent estimated losses.  The MPAA is pulling back from citing that number and seeking to collaborate with researchers, many academic, to assess more accurately the complex effects of piracy.  This is a welcome if guarded step by the industry, particularly in that it includes sharing some internal data with outside researchers.

"Putting a Price Tag on Film Piracy" is a separate blog post in the Journal by the same author, Bialik (their Numbers Guy).  In it, he delves more deeply into some of the challenges of trying to fix a single number to capture the effects of piracy on the industry.  These include the rapidly changing film and wider entertainment marketplace, the notoriously secretive nature of industry financial reporting, and the elusively varied practices of piracy itself.  Not surprisingly, identifying the financial costs of piracy remain the primary objective of much of this research.

Yet at the end of the blog post, several other "related research questions" are identified.  In many ways, looking ahead and more broadly, these have the potential to produce much more revealing insights.  For Bialik, they are:

• Potential economic benefits, such as boosting other industries like broadband or creating buzz around traditional film box office
• The relative success, or its lack, of efforts to mitigate piracy
• The effects of piracy on the supply of creative work

Without unduly embracing piracy, the first and third of these questions raise an important -- if, for the industry, unsettling -- possibility: namely, that there may be more to piracy than the MPAA allows in discussing the issue only in terms of declining revenues.  Underpinning both is the new reality, really the new media and entertainment eco-system, in which film is situated.  More research about the future of film and possible business models for film companies is crucial, and some would argue that it is pirates who are, in fact, most actively exploring those futures.  The relationship between piracy and creativity, especially, deserves more attention in a world where innovative productions and delivery strategies are celebrated (and later often co-opted by the industry).  Hopefully the industry will move beyond its halting steps and engage in more open-ended research on its own future -- a future, as it happens, that includes potentially far-reaching new opportunities that have been illuminated by pirates but that the industry itself could lead.

The Leader’s Guide to Building an Everyday Strategic Practice: Lafley and Martin's 'Playing to Win'

A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2013.

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A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble from 2000-2009, is one of the most-respected and successful corporate leaders of the young twenty-first century.  Roger Martin, a long-time business consultant and currently Dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, is among today’s most original and prolific management thinkers.  Having worked together for nearly three decades, the pair have written a book arguing that “strategy really works” through the development and practice of ongoing strategic leadership rather than the application of specific frameworks, analyses or best practices.

That said, Playing to Win does advance its own original model, which involves answering  five key questions:

     1.  What is your winning aspiration? 

          (The purpose and motivating objectives, financial and non-financial, of your enterprise.) 

     

     2.  Where will you play?  

          (The playing field – geographies, product categories, consumer segments, channels, vertical stages of production – where you can achieve this aspiration.)

     3.  How will you win?  

          (The way you will win on the chosen playing field or market -- your value proposition, profit models, partnerships, or competitive advantage.

     4.  What capabilities must be in place?  

          (The set and specific configuration of distinctive capabilities and reinforcing activities required for you to win in the chosen way.)

     5.  What management systems are required?  

          (The systems, structures and measures that enable your capabilities and support your choices.)

These steps and questions are interconnected, cascading into and reinforcing each other as visualized below:

Lafley and Martin nicely demonstrate how each of these questions can be answered and linked, mostly using examples from P&G like the creation of the new market category called “masstige” for the re-launch of Oil of Olay in 2000.  They mount a compelling and always accessible argument that includes a very helpful “logic” flow of sub-questions to help users make better decisions about each of the five major questions.  In doing so, they underscore how theirs is less an analytical than a process model, less about analysis or vision-formation or priority-setting and more about enabling continuous strategic thinking and decision-making. 

This is an essential insight because it shifts strategy from being about a static plan or analysis to being more about an ongoing process.  Put differently, the book emphasizes strategic management or leadership rather than a one-dimensional approach to strategic plan-making or priority-fixing like the BCG matrix or Michael Porter’s Five Forces (which makes an appearance here).  While such tools are important for assessing point-in-time conditions, Lafley and Martin focus on how they are really means to developing an everyday way of strategic thinking and acting. 

It is in that focus that Playing to Win becomes as much a leadership as a strategy handbook.  If the process model rolled out in the book is ultimately “an integrated cascade of choices,” both the strategic value of the choices and the motivations and drivers of those making the choices share emphasis here.   Repeatedly, the articulation of how the five questions can be answered is couched in some of any leader’s fundamental challenges and responsibilities: knowledge and information management, communications, decision-making.  Far-reaching and robust strategic analysis is a crucial part of that process but should finally be relegated to serve the leader’s wider obligations.  As a result, the leadership thinking celebrated here is integrated, disciplined and courageous, in part because it never grows too removed from decisive action. 

Yet one of the issues that arises in approaching the book as a guide for leaders concerns the potential wider applicability of lessons and insights that are mostly drawn from P&G.  With its scale, diversity and resources, one wonders about the relevance of the approach to strategic leadership to different types of businesses.  Lafley and Martin do cite other examples throughout, but they tend (think Apple, Google, or General Motors) to be similarly outsized compared to most businesses.  While no one size fits all, of course, some of the guiding assumptions here would be well-tested by smaller and creative firms.  There’s also the further, fascinating question of whether the rapidly changing relationship between firm and customer, client or public is more varied than assumptions grounded in P&G’s consumer goods markets allow.   

Upon reflection, the emphasis on strategic leadership thinking and action seems mostly quite promising for businesses of diverse sizes and market orientations.  For creative organizations, in particular, the centrality of creative talent and the aspiration to creative excellence can often make the requisite assessments of capabilities and systems more challenging.  In ways, though, that very need can be seen to recommend the embrace of more robust and ongoing strategic thinking and action outlined here.  “There is simply no one perfect strategy that will last for all time,” Lafley and Martin write.  “That’s why building up strategic thinking capability … is so vital.” 

Reading these lines brought to mind a memorable presentation I had attended in 2011.  At the Cannes Lions festival that year, the leadership of the award-winning and always forward-looking creative agency, R/GA, was recounting its history and also describing the thoroughgoing strategic review and re-organization it conducts every nine years (http://www.rga.com/about/featured/the-next-nine-years).  The review by Bob Greenberg and his team is certainly done in planned cycles.  A crucial takeaway from the presentation, however, is that these cyclical re-organizations are merely the most conspicuous outcomes of a thoughtfully developed and decisive strategic leadership capability that has proven enormously successful in creative communications.

A.G. Lafley is a renowned and passionate believer in deep customer understanding.  He nevertheless recognizes the limits of uncovering knowledge of shoppers and other end-users.  As he has observed elsewhere, “Customer research doesn’t tell you the answer. It is only an aid to judgment.”   That approach is also a good way to think more generally about Playing to Win.  While we can embrace the fundamental importance of strategic models and practices – even Lafley and Martin’s own – such knowledge must finally be less an end in itself than an aid contributing to a broader leadership practice driven by everyday engagement with purposeful prioritization, communications, and decision-making.

A Resolution for Creative Leaders in 2013: Give Up Power and Cede Control...to Create More Value

‘Tis the season of making resolutions for the new year.  Of looking back at what has been been and looking ahead to what can be.  It’s a season of future possibilities grounded in the hard work, the successes and the failures, of the past twelve months.

One of the core tenets of creative leadership is reflection – consistent, constructive, courageous reflection about our individual values and beliefs and the actions they guide.  Reflection serves as a crucial basis for understanding ourselves as well as our actions as leaders.  Reflection and the self-knowledge it generates also shapes our decisions about the future.   We pause to reflect on the “why” of our busy lives in order to decide on “what” to do next and “how” effectively to take that action.

This dynamic of reflection enabling us to align our beliefs and actions as creative leaders makes looking forward to the arrival of a new year filled with possibilities so exciting.

Yet as we approach the new year, my wish is for you to consider taking an especially challenging action.  Most of us will make lists of resolutions for the months to come.  We’ll design ambitious goals and then dedicate ourselves to achieving them.  Some of these may involve committing to more regular practice of reflection on our days, perhaps meditation, and to stay grounded by integrating different areas of our lives.

More likely, though, the majority of our professional goals for the new year will involve re-focusing our time, attention and energies with our clients or customers, associates and colleagues.  We’ll dedicate ourselves to new projects.  We’ll re-double our efforts on existing ones.  We’ll pledge to be more effective leaders of people, teams and organizations.  All noble and worthwhile aspirations, but our way to reach those goals will typically be by taking on more responsibilities and assuming more control ourselves.  Ultimately, many of our resolutions will translate into accruing more power.

Instead of resolving to gather more power, let me offer an alternative approach to your 2013: Consider how to give up more power.  To cede more control.  To share more responsibility.  Ask yourself, how will you build more trust in your core team next year so you can collaborate with rather than control them?  How will you move beyond providing direct inspiration to fostering an individual sense of aspiration in each of those around you?  Ultimately, how will you stir the passions of those with whom you work in order to be more innovative together?

These are hard questions.  For power and control in many organizations means final decision-making authority or profit and loss responsibility or supervision over people or departments.  It’s very difficult giving up those hard-won markers of success – they’re typically our rewards for, and outward signs of, our achievements, after all.

Yet by giving up tight-fisted individual control, we allow for an increased sense of shared ownership that translates, ultimately, into the creation of greater value.  You may recognize such thinking from the recent work of Tim Leberecht, Charlene Li, Nilofer Merchant, among others (and yes, I recommend their work for your 2013 reading lists…).  However, creative leaders have long understood that fostering creative excellence requires purposeful openness and genuine trust to draw fully on all the passion and capabilities of those with whom we work.  The challenge is to reflect on that understanding for our own lives as leaders and to act.

So, Happy New Year.  And all good wishes for your giving up power and control for a more creative and successful 2013.

The Irony of the NRA’s Response to Sandy Hook – and to America’s ‘Culture of Violence’

In response to the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Wayne LaPierre, the Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association, called for every school in the country to be protected by an armed guard.  “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun,” he said in summary on December 21, “is a good guy with a gun.”  A “National School Shield” program, to be funded by the federal government, was one aspect of his multipronged proposal for greater school safety.  Other aspects were the greater tracking of individuals with mental illness and the renewed critical attention to violent media, particularly video games, which he claimed engender a “culture of violence” in the United States.

Many have already criticized LaPierre’s comments as being tone-deaf to the desire of many to have a broad-based national conversation about mass killings or blaming any cause for the tragic shooting except guns.  I generally agree with both these responses.  But I also acknowledge the need to look for multiple explanations and to draw together research and expertise from a variety of fields in order to formulate the best social and policy solutions to violence in its myriad forms.  Having researched and written about media violence for most of my scholarly career, I know it goes without saying that violence in the United States, particularly as it helps us to understand and prevent school shootings and rampage killings, is a complex topic warranting a wide-ranging policy debate.  

To pick up a ready example from LaPierre’s remarks on Friday, it should immediately be noted that media violence is not equivalent to a “culture of violence.”  Every society or nation can be said to have a “culture of violence.”  To say so is to state the obvious.  The ancient Aztecs had a culture of violence; so do modern-day South Africans.  Or the Japanese.  Or the Spanish.  Speaking of an American (or any) culture of violence is a means, not an end: the point of such a statement should be to go on and explore a propensity toward violent action or conflict-resolution and to better understand specific norms and beliefs about the legitimacy of violence and how those have emerged historically and are enacted today. 

Following the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary, speaking generically about a “culture of violence,” particularly one caused by media, has the unfortunate effect of muddying the waters of any policy debate related to the myriad forms and episodes of violence in a given society.  Rather than recognizing that mental illness, school safety, media, and, yes, guns themselves variously shape and sustain norms of violence – and have long helped to define the history and guiding myths of America – LaPierre trotted out the “media” as bogeyman and somehow the basis of that overreaching and destructive culture.  We can debate the extent to which media might be understood to contribute to an American “culture of violence,” but to exclude other social actors, institutions, and beliefs is irresponsible and simplistic. 

Any culture of violence we might identify, in the U.S. or elsewhere, isn’t produced simply by contemporary makers of blood-drenched media entertainment.  Such a culture is grounded in the long-held stories we tell ourselves about our founding as a nation and our past triumphs over adversaries and evil.  The American way of violence, in other words, has deep historical roots.  Some of these roots, reaching to Christian tradition and Biblical calls for justifiable retribution, hold that the violent sacrifice of some individual lives is legitimate because that bloodletting is necessary for the larger community or country to regenerate and advance.  In the classic Hollywood Western, for example, the hero (reluctantly) deploys violent and retributive justice to vanquish evildoers who have provoked and threatened civilization.  Likewise, the physical justice dispensed in crime-ridden cities, by police and vigilantes alike, illustrates how the violent forces of social order mounted against the violent threat of chaos can be easily celebrated as effective – and legitimized. 

LaPierre’s proposal for “good guys” with guns to stand at the ready at school to protect our children from evil “bad guys” with guns was therefore hardly novel: instead, it was a call back to the mythical American frontier or, more specifically, the besieged frontier fort or settlement.  A twenty-first century school in this way becomes the site of our last stand against armed bad guys, with children as the innocents who are being threatened and whose defense justifies any manner of violent response.   To those with a certain vision of America, it was a canny pitch for the deployment today of nostalgic, gun-toting frontier justice.  At the same time, and here’s the real irony, it was a call for institutionalizing good guys with guns – many of whom who have indisputably made an enormous difference in the history of the United States but who at the same time have, also indisputably, been at the center of very American culture of violence that LaPierre claims to decry.

Identifying such irony in itself only goes so far, of course.  The more important lesson to be taken from LaPierre’s proposal is that other powerful American stories – say, of building consensus from a shared belief in the exceptional society we aspire to – need to be embraced at this moment as the basis for creating safer schools and less conflict and bloodshed.  If training and posting guards with guns ultimately relies on a culture of violent solutions to violent problems, in other words, aren’t there less or non-violent alternatives?  Is the threat of violence or superior physical force really the way we want to solve the problem of violent conflict or provocation?  Recall such escalation is the logic of first-shooter video games and hyperviolent cartoons. 

Isn’t it better ultimately to identify and treat the bad guys earlier, to make it harder for them to get guns, and maybe to make the guns they get (legally or not) less lethal?  That would seem an approach driven by a logic not of deploying more and greater violence but of taking compound, collective, and enlightened actions to address and prevent what is emerging as a deep-seated problem.  That’s the kind of approach that we could both adopt to protect our children in schools but also be proud to teach them there.