Thursday Sep 22, 2022

Leadership in disruptive times - PROFESSOR JULIAN BIRKINSHAW

As Vice-Dean and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School, Julian Birkinshaw is a world-renowned figure in the world of management. With decades of experience studying organisational innovation, corporate entrepreneurship and strategic leadership, he is a perfect guide to the business landscape of today – one marked by disruption, ‘discontinuous innovation’ and existential debates from digital technology to the very purpose of the firm itself.

Beyond the academy, Julian is also a popular author, speaker and executive mentor across the world of business. When we say he’s a big deal, we mean it – he makes regular appearances in the “Thinker’s Fifty” and has received widespread acclaim for books such as Rethinking Management, Becoming a Better Boss, and Fast/Forward.

As well as his own ideas on ‘organisational ambidexterity’ and ‘adhocracy’ in the face of climate change, we also took a hard look at rational strategic planning, remote working, the Great Resignation, and the very future of shareholder capitalism itself.

What’s in this episode?

Professor Birkinshaw’s work arbitraging business and academia (yes, in both directions!)
How to find – and sculpt - big ideas that truly resonate with leaders on the ground
Disruption as the key framework to understand our times…
…and why the secret to surviving it might just be to following the ‘dancing elephants’
Digital technology as a grand experiment for hierarchical authority
The ‘grey rhino’ that is climate change: a greater or lesser challenge than COVID for adaptive firms? Will Big Oil cope better in Europe or the US?
His view on the purpose vs. profits debate – and the Unilever story we can’t stop talking about
Where he would head out into the world, as a purpose-first MBA graduating today
Motivation, micromanagement and the Great Resignation
Organisational ambidexterity – what it is and why it matters
Thinking through global climate institutions as ‘adhocracies’

"…take the Fortune 500 from last year and guess how many of that Fortune 500 did not exist in any form 25 years ago at the beginning of the Internet revolution. And most people, when I ask that question, they say, oh, maybe it was 100 or 200. Some people say maybe it was 300….Only 17 of the Fortune 500 are completely new. And of course, it's Facebook. It's it's Amazon, it's Google. It's Netflix. I mean, Tesla, you can name half of those even without thinking about it.…Most people fixate on the world's being disrupted…"

"…You’ve got to be resilient to very short term shocks covered in a global financial financial crisis where the effect is felt within weeks. You've got to be resilient to the stuff which takes, you know, months, If not years to work through. And certainly digitization is one… and then you've got to be resilient to the things which take decades to work their way through, which, of course, is climate change.

…And and we sometimes call the first one a black swan event… the thing that you kind of didn't foresee. And then suddenly it's there and and you think, oh, my gosh, why didn't we think of that? Then you've got the other end. You've got climate change, which sometimes is called a gray rhino.

And the metaphor there is, this thing is coming at you, it's coming at you. You can see it a long way off. No one needs to predict this. It's happening. And yet, because it's a long way off for a long time, you actually just sort of, you know, say, yeah, I can see it's coming…

…And then and then suddenly you've actually got to act…climate change is in some ways the hardest. I mean, everybody found COVID difficult, but the point is, there was never any ambiguity about what needed to be done… but the climate crisis: the question is, is when do you act, not do you act…?”

References:

https://www.london.edu/faculty-and-research/faculty-profiles/b/birkinshaw-j

https://julianbirkinshaw.com

Article from HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW:

https://hbr.org/2014/05/beware-the-next-big-thing/

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Leadership in disruptive times - PROFESSOR JULIAN BIRKINSHAW

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