Our Guide to the Fall 2022 Issue
These summaries will help you navigate our fall 2022 lineup.
Topics
Manage Your Customer Portfolio for Maximum Lifetime Value
Fred Selnes and Michael D. Johnson
Key Insight: Having a clear understanding of when and how much to invest in, leverage, and defend different customer relationships is an essential determinant of both current and future revenues and costs.
Top Takeaways: Setting goals regarding how customers are acquired and retained can provide long-term value and requires a clear understanding of the heterogeneity of customer needs and economies of scale as they emerge over time. To inform and act upon this understanding, companies need an integrated approach to customer portfolio management and customer portfolio lifetime value.
Why Innovators in China Stay Close to the Market
Neil C. Thompson, Didier Bonnet, Mark J. Greeven, Wenjing Lyu, and Sarah Jaballah
Key Insight: Chinese companies are about twice as likely as those elsewhere in the world to use customers, competitors, or business unit operational employees as a source of innovation.
Top Takeaways: While most of the world is converging on a common innovation recipe, running it out of centralized innovation groups, China is an exception. Companies there, both domestic and foreign, are much more likely to turn to market-facing sources for innovation, including customers, competitors, and front-line employees. Global companies that want to capture the benefits of being in China need to accept that they have to have a dual model: one for China, and one for the rest of the world.
How Smart Products Create Connected Customers
Mohan Subramaniam
Key Insight: Data acquired from digital customers — those who use smart, connected products — empowers businesses to dramatically expand their value scope.
Top Takeaways: Leaders of companies anchored in traditional value chains can drive growth by transforming their existing customers into digital customers. Digital customers’ interactions generate streams of data that can be used to create fresh revenue and expand the scope of product and service businesses. To achieve this, however, leaders must shift strategic priorities and develop new marketing, business, and revenue- and profit-generation models.
Strategically Engaging With Innovation Ecosystems
Philip Budden and Fiona Murray
Key Insight: A common pitfall for companies looking for new innovation partners is focusing on how to connect before identifying what they need or which ecosystem players to approach.
Top Takeaways: Companies aiming to accelerate their innovation efforts can find opportunities by connecting to regional clusters of startups, researchers, and investors. The key to success is to have a well-considered strategy for engagement that is clear on what the business hopes to gain and what it can contribute. Leaders must understand the needs and interests of the different stakeholders in the ecosystem and make a long-term commitment to building relationships with them.
The Cognitive Shortcut That Clouds Decision-Making
Jonas De keersmaecker, Katharina Schmid, Nadia Brashier, and Christian Unkelbach
Key Insight: When information is repeated, it gains credibility — regardless of whether it is true.
Top Takeaways: Business leaders are routinely confronted with bad information, including falsified data, facts, and figures, making them vulnerable to biased judgment if misinformation is repeated. Researchers call this the illusory truth effect — believing repeated information to be true, even when it is not. Understanding that you might have bias blind spots is the first step in combating it. So too is avoiding epistemic bubbles, where members of a network encounter only similar opinions and don’t consider alternative points of view.
Closing the Governance Gap in Joint Ventures
James Bamford and Geoff Walker
Key Insight: As global companies increasingly seek new capabilities through joint ventures, many are choosing nontraditional partners, making managing risk via good governance even trickier and more important.
Top Takeaways: JVs make meaningful contributions to corporate revenue and can enable new growth strategies, but they increase their shareholders’ risk exposure, often in ways that are hard to manage. To build a foundation for good governance — and increase the likelihood of better medium-term financial and strategic performance — JV owners must reach clarity and alignment on the JV’s purpose and operating model.
Meet the New Board — Same as the Old Board
Cynthia E. Clark and Jill A. Brown
Key Insight: Many companies still struggle to appoint directors who are women, people of color, or members of other underrepresented groups. That needs to change.
Top Takeaways: Investors and regulators are increasingly pushing for greater diversity on boards, but many companies’ efforts to do so, known as board refreshment, are falling flat. Vague terms, loose requirements, and CEO influence work against change and favor the status quo. Meaningful refreshment requires organizations to articulate specific intentions and guard against too much CEO input. Organizations can also make refreshment, not replacement, the norm — and refresh frequently.
Can Design Thinking Succeed in Your Organization?
David Dunne, Theresa Eriksson, and Jan Kietzmann
Key Insight: Under the right conditions, design thinking can be a powerful way to innovate and solve challenging problems, but good results depend on the right organizational culture.
Top Takeaways: Design thinking offers a way to make business decisions that is especially suited to exploring uncharted territory and solving complex problems. But many leaders become discouraged when design thinking doesn’t get the results they expect. Leaders need to know when to apply it, and they have to prepare both their employees and managers to be “design thinking-ready” — in part by finding a champion, creating a dedicated space to work on ideas, and choosing the right projects.
Women Are Stalling Out on the Way to the Top
Monika Hamori, Rocio Bonet, Peter Cappelli, and Samidha Sambare
Key Insight: Despite accounting for 47% of the U.S. labor force, women held just 27% of the Fortune 100’s top leadership positions in 2021.
Top Takeaways: Although gender representation among senior leaders has improved since 1980, there’s still a lot of work to do. An analysis of Fortune 100 executives’ career histories and demographics shows that women in senior leadership positions are largely stuck in support functions, not moving into key operating roles. To get closer to parity, employers must invest more in leadership development overall and give women more equitable access to growth opportunities.
Saving Management From Our Obsession With Leadership
Jim Detert, Kevin Kniffin, and Hannes Leroy
Key Insight: Organizations and top teams downplay or ignore how hard it is simply to be a good manager — to skillfully hire, engage, develop, coach, supervise, evaluate, and promote people.
Top Takeaways: We’ve underappreciated and underinvested in the everyday management skills that organizations desperately need, including the ability to adeptly hire, engage, develop, coach, supervise, evaluate, and promote people. Most managers have internalized a message that qualities like strategic vision and executive presence matter more. But organizational success depends at least as heavily on the daily work as on the lofty stuff.