Orchestrating Transformation - Preview

The Context for Transformation

period. Between 2016 and 2018, Uber retreated from Russia, China, and Southeast Asia. Uber is not alone. Facebook has endured what Wired called “a hell- ish two years,” drawing the ire of both consumers and government watchdogs. The company’s leadership has been consistently on the defensive, combating stories that paint Facebook as a purveyor of “fake news” and prone to privacy breaches. These stories, and oth- ers, helped spawn a global mass movement with the name “Delete Facebook.” 4 It’s also dangerous to focus too much on successes. Unfortunately, this is what most business books do. They look at successful com- panies or individuals, describe what they do, extrapolate some “keys” to their success, and then suggest how you can put these “lessons” to work for you. There are many reasons that companies and people succeed. Of- ten, macro-economic or sectoral forces should get as much credit as anything the company or the individual did. Sometimes, share price is a function of irrational exuberance, as Alan Greenspan called it, or some other factor. For many high-performing market leaders, any business transformation may have been coincidental to success, not the cause of it. Hence, the companies that perform best are not nec- essarily the most useful examples of how transformation programs should be executed. As our IMD colleague Phil Rosenzweig noted in his discussion of the Halo Effect: The fact is that many everyday concepts in business—including leadership, corporate culture, core competencies, and customer orientation—are ambiguous and difficult to define. We often infer perceptions of them from something else, which appears to be more concrete and tangible: namely, financial performance. As a result, many of the things that we commonly believe are contri- butions to company performance are in fact attributions. In other words, outcomes can be mistaken for inputs. 5 This calls into question the lessons learned from the “best” compa- nies—think In Search of Excellence or Good to Great — and how they can be applied to your company. The Halo Effect, the tendency to infer the presence of a successful strategy (or program of digital

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