Til forsiden

As one might have expected, along about now comes a trickle of hope that grows into the fountain of good wishes that pours into a rushing stream of positive prognostications that flows into a mighty river of business articles and eventually, books on how to manage though the crisis.      

The McKinsey Quarterly informs us, in a prelude to ”Leading through uncertainty,"” its new multi-week focus on the crisis – we may all soon be calling our times, “The Crisis” – that: 

In the coming days, McKinsey & Company will explore in a series of articles by our consultants and outside contributors the managerial implications of the global financial crisis. Today we focus on strategic responses, including how to address uncertainty and structural shocks, rethinking marketing, and how global executives surveyed by the Quarterly are coping.  

The Quarterly email lists five current articles pertinent to the theme: ·        

• Leading through uncertainty·        
• Strategy in a “structural break”·        
• The downturn’s new rules for marketers·        
• A fresh look at strategy under uncertainty: An Interview·
• McKinsey Global Survey Results 

A young friend who was reading this over my shoulder reminded me that reinventing history rather than accurately recording and critically commenting on history is an almost obsessive compulsive trait among many American opinion-leaders (and those who follow) that blots out the facts.  It leads to wrack and ruin as organization’s values, self-concepts, and collective behavior become seemingly out of whack with objective realities.    

The more we think we know about the past, but don’t really understand it as precedent, the greater the dissonance between the reinvented past and the concrete reality  -- until reality asserts itself too strongly to be ignored, repealed, or restated.  Then it’s the society that has to change; and as we know from archaeology and personal experience, it may have to change very fast.  

In the near future, GEMBA may be sharing time with several strategic design firms to discuss these and similar topics in comfortable settings and an intimate, frank and forthright manner.  “Isn’t all innovation fraught with uncertainty?”  we may ask, and we’d be right.   This suggests a new role for successful innovators as leaders in their respective organizations and domains of practice, men and women for whom uncertainty has been an almost constant companion and for whom innovating one’s way out of a predicament is just in a day’s work.   

No doubt there will be more reactions to the crisis, which bodes mixed futures for innovators. 

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Strategic_Thinking/Leading_through_uncertainty_2263