New book review for Future Legends: Business in Hyper-Dynamic Markets, by Janka Krings-Klebe, Joachim Heinz, and Jörg Schreiner, 2017, reposted here:
Just recently, I read a post submitted to a professional forum that someone had written on the subject of agility and why agility is not really what organizations need to succeed. This particular post attracted over a dozen comments from readers, and somewhere across the thread of discussion an individual remarked that an assertion another reader had made was correct with the given that agility was synonymous with speed. In turn, I responded by commenting that these two terms are actually not synonymous, and that agility is typically needed but cannot be considered in isolation.
This discussion recalled to mind that I have found myself needing to repeatedly define quite a few seemingly common terms for others in the workplace, as many terms summoned by those around me in conversation come prepackaged with assumptions, with conversation participants often not seeing eye to eye so-to-speak. The authors do touch on a number of terms with which readers may already be familiar, but their presentation was thoughtfully put together in a way that makes the risk of losing reader attention low. At the outset, the authors comment that their focus was to provide a collection of their insights and answers around five key questions in the hope that it will provide inspiration and hands-on guidance to business leaders and policy makers.
These five questions are the following, slightly reworded for clarity: (1) "What exactly makes digitalization such a powerful force in the marketplace?" (2) "What are the principles that make companies highly adaptive and innovative in the digital age?" (3) "How can the innovativeness of start-ups be combined with the scale of large organizations?" (4) "How do the practices of management need to change for a connected business?" and (5) "What could connected businesses contribute to solve income and opportunity disparities?"
After the authors discourse about the world being in a permanent state of change at a scale never previously experienced, they explain why businesses need to adapt to the connected age enabled by digital technology in order to remain relevant. The discussion then segues into why this connected age requires businesses to become engines for innovation, and is furthered by discussions on why hyper-dynamic markets challenge businesses, why management is no longer about optimizing the known, and why societal contracts from the industrial age cease to work in the connected age.
While I found the introductory claim by the authors to be correct that they deliberately stay clear of technical jargon (because they have found technical terms to be often burdened with theory and distracting in nature from key concepts), this is not to say that they do not take the time to provide explanations along the way. Quite the contrary, the authors lead readers in a manner that assumes a bulk of the material they have to present is being taken in for the first time. And as such, they likely leave very little room for misinterpretation by those in the business world.
One of the few areas in this book where I divert from this view is with regard to the brief mention of Scrum midway through the chapter 2, as successful reader interpretation is assumed. While I agree with the authors that such methodologies are often adopted in isolation within firms rather than adopted wholesale, and that the latter is preferable, what is not explained is that starting small can lead to success within a specific domain or context, albeit even if this strategy does not end up providing success for the business as a whole, as I have witnessed this with the practice of bimodal IT.
That said, the authors explain in chapter 4 that one popular approach in the transformation of a business is to set up separate business units that are then tasked to develop new business opportunities, and they have found the following from their research and experience: (1) business incubators more or less always act within the limitations of the corporation in which they belong, and (2) the options to scale the business that has been developed in an incubator also depends on the framework of the corporation, and unconventional business operations will not survive in a framework optimized for a completely different goal.
As a consultant, I especially appreciated the discussions on the opposing cultures of exploration and exploitation which permeate throughout the text. As the authors explain, any business needs to perform these two fundamentally different tasks. Exploration means the continuous search for unmet market needs and how to address them, or in other words, exploring the known. Exploitation means delivering solutions to the market at scale, or in other words, scaling the known. And businesses cannot typically perform both of these tasks very well, and so tend to favor one over the other.
Additionally, I enjoyed the last several sequential sections in chapter 3 (about 30 pages in length) that present how a connected business acts, the new logic of a connected business, and how a connected business deals with the dynamic. In contrast with many business texts which heavily comprise historical business cases and do not spend enough time abstracting what should be gained from these cases (or for that matter, explaining to readers that copying the strategies of competitors is not going to help them differentiate), for this particular subject matter I appreciated that the authors did not do so here, especially with regard to what they have to say in the section entitled "how to start a business in the future".
Toward the conclusion of this text, the authors comment that a connected business with its open system does not try to limit variety and dynamic, and on the contrary, these conditions fuel its business. They need exactly the opposite conditions of those that closed business systems offer. In asking Haier's CEO Zhang Ruimin how he managed to balance the chaotic entrepreneurial energy and the need to control, he answered: "We don't need to balance! An unsteady and dynamic environment is the best way to keep everyone flexible!" Of course, the authors backpedal a bit on his response and comment that this is not necessarily a statement that can be made more broadly, but I like it!