Editor’s letter

• Tesla’s management innovations operationalize its “Deep Purpose”

• Blue Ocean innovation strategy: one of three market creation avenues

• From manager to inclusive leader: tactics for success

• Factors that make open innovation more successful

• Visioning strategy’s “unknowns unknowns” through the “Johari window”

• Marvel: value destruction, managing customer alienation risks

The authors and articles in this issue are:

• A number of leading strategists have flagged the potentially crucial importance of having an authentic deep purpose that enables firms to operate with heightened passion, urgency and clarity. Stephen Denning’s article, “How Tesla’s management innovations operationalize its ‘Deep Purpose’ to save the planet,” explains how the company’s revolutionary management practices, its factory designs, its product component modularity and its sense of urgency are all powered by its purpose.

• In their article, “Three avenues of innovation for new market creation and growth,” W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Professors of Strategy at INSEAD and codirectors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute, advocate for “nondisruptive creation,” which occurs when companies create a new market where there once wasn’t any. They note that “The process of redefining an existing industry problem, and then solving the redefined problem, is the essence of the ‘blue ocean strategy’ approach, which generates a more balanced blend of disruptive and nondisruptive growth.”

• In her article, “From manager to inclusive leader: traits and tactics for success.” Shehla Malik, an Assistant Professor at St. Joseph’s Institute of Management, Bengaluru, India, warns that rapidly dealing with manifold complex competitive, social, technical and governmental issues may not be possible using conventional, hierarchical leadership styles. She offers a guide to how “Organizations can develop inclusive leaders who are able to communicate and act with empathy and cultural intelligence to create a culture of trust and collaboration.”

• Analysis by IBM researchers Jacob Dencik, Lisa-Giane Fisher, Lisa Higgins, Anthony Lipp, Anthony Marshall and Kirsten Palmer indicates that organizations need to prioritize open innovation practices by actively engaging with ecosystem partners in order to expect superior financial performance and achieve major contributions to financial and growth metrics from innovation. Research for their article, “Factors that make open innovation more successful than traditional approaches,” found that “For every dollar of investment, the proportion of direct revenue attributed to open innovation is four times higher than for traditional innovation.”

• In his article, “Visioning strategy through the ‘Johari window’: discovering critical ‘unknowns’ in a rapidly evolving context,” James S. Welch Jr., Associate Teaching Professor of Management in the Sykes College of Business at the University of Tampa, cautions that focusing only on the knowns that are already identified, while disregarding the unknowns that have not been discovered, can lead to blind spots and oversights that put an organization's growth and sustainability at risk. By researching all four quadrants of the Johari window model an organization’s “strategy formulation is intricately connected to process of investigating ‘known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.’”

• In his article, “Value destruction at Marvel, and how to manage customer alienation risk,” Joseph Calandro, Jr., a Fellow of the Gabelli Center for Global Security Analysis at Fordham University, chronicles how the company’s superhero movies increasingly strayed from fidelity to character brand that long-term fans expected. He found that at Marvel and other companies, “The more customers personally identify with a brand, the greater the likelihood customer alienation will occur if a firm disrespects that bond.”

Good reading!

Robert M. Randall

Editor

Strategy & Leadership