Leadership Pure and Simple: How Transformative Leaders Create Winning Organizations

by David Wilkins, Greg Carolin

Overview

Seize control of your company's future—even intimes of business disruption and market turmoil

From expanding global markets to an intensifying "war" for human resources, disruptive shifts are now a fact of business life. The ability to anticipate and adapt to suchchanges is what will separate the winners from the losers in the very near future. Creating the organizational agility necessary to compete in this new environment doesn't begin with the brute force of spending huge sums of money. Nor will a "bulletproof" business strategy ora culture of innovation magically transpire without the right foundations in place.

You have to begin where all business success starts—with Leadership Pure and Simple.

Leadership Pure and Simple gives you the toolsto turn today's toughest business challenges into transformative opportunities for profitability and growth. By approaching leadership in a number of ways—including as a strategist, an innovator, a decision maker, a critical thinker, and a process manager—you can lead yourcompany to profitability and growth no matter what the global economy throws your way.

Leadership Pure and Simple addresses the broadest and most important changes occurring in society today to help you:

• Develop strategies built around a central core that are refl ective of local strategic variables
• Inspire greater degrees of innovation
• Eschew a defensive "batten down the hatches" approach and look ahead to exploit new opportunities when economic conditions improve
• Develop a business model for attracting and retaining the best people to meet your goals
• Foresee how everything from climate change to the expanding gap between rich and poor will affect your particular industry

The fallout from our rapidly changing global economy hasn't occurred in force yet. But it's coming. Read Leadership Pure and Simple and learn how to adapt your company to the upheaval going on around it and lead it to ultimate success.

Praise for Leadership Pure and Simple

"[DPI's] process has been a key catalyst of our growth." — THOMAS CHUA, chairman, Teckwah Industrial Corporation

"The DPI process requires the organization and all its key managers to quite extensively draw on their collective knowledge and experience to formulate answers to the challenging questions framed. We found it easier to do [innovate and change the game] based on the methodology, because the leadership itself had crafted the new strategy and the new business concept." — CHONG SIAK CHING, CEO, Ascendas

"All the knowledge you need [to create a strategy] resides in the head of your own people, and all you need is a process to extract that and look at it differently. It is a powerful concept and the right concept for every organization. I've used it at three organizations and in each case the results have been spectacular." — STEVE BONNER, CEO, Cancer Treatment Centers of America

"New products are the lifeblood of our company. We put this process into place about 18 months ago. And after 18 months, 30 percent of our sales come from new products." — NEIL McDONOUGH, CEO, Flexcon

"Once again, the capable team at DPI has taken a difficult topic and applied their extensive experience in strategic thinking and execution to provide a well-structured, simple, and easy-to-follow approach to building a winning organization." — MARTIN BANNER, CEO, National Airways Corporation

"We thought that if we went through this process, we would get a common understanding and buy-in to our business philosophy. And it defi nitely achieved that objective." — LAURIE DIPPENAAR, Chair, First Rand Limited

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780071791823
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	09/21/2012
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

DAVID WILKINS is the managing partner of DPI Singapore and works with clients across Asia to help them improve the quality of their strategic and operational decisions. He spearheads the development and enhancementof the company's Strategy Execution Framework and Situation Management Processes.

GREG CAROLIN is the managing partner of DPI Africa and has extensive experience working with organizations across a variety of industries in South Africa and the United Kingdom, helping them improve the quality of their critical business decisions. He focuses onthe ongoing development of all the company's Critical Thinking Processes for application across industries.

Read an Excerpt

LEADERSHIP PURE AND SIMPLE

How Transformative Leaders Create Winning Organizations

---

By David Wilkins, Greg Carolin

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2013David Wilkins and Greg Carolin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-179182-3

---

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The World in 2020

The world today is experiencing change of unprecedented speed and scope. And you don't need to be a historian to know that some organizations cope with, or indeed flourish from, change better than others. And you don't need exceptional foresight to know that the ability to handle change is going to be required more acutely in the future. This will be what separates the true leader from the rest of the pack.

Transformative leaders will require fundamental skills of leadership. An effective leader must be able to uncover and drive insight from changes specific to his or her industry and the world at large, translate this insight into an operable and sustainable strategy, underpin it with innovation, and drive it to conclusion through relentless, hard-nosed operational implementation. In our view this is Leadership, Pure and Simple. Regrettably, such skills are not as pervasive as one might expect. But they can be learned or acquired. That's why we wrote this book.

Confronted by change, the first question to be answered by any leader is, "Where are we going?" This question is becoming increasingly more difficult to answer. Or is it?

During one of his final lectures, Peter Drucker, the founder of modern management thinking, was asked, "Professor Drucker, you seem to have this incredible ability to predict the future. How do you do that?" To which he replied, "I cannot do that. What I do is to look out of the window and see things that others do not see."

So how can one gain more insight through one's own window into the future? Some research will help.

One trove of observations and foresight is the excellent Future Agenda open insight initiative led by Vodafone, the largest provider of mobile communications in Europe and Africa. This ambitious project convened collaborations of experts in a wide range of business, scientific, and economic disciplines to assemble a broad view of possible futures around the world. Many of the trends uncovered by the Future Agenda project and described in the organization's report The World in 2020 have often cropped up during our client assignments. Here is some of what we see.

THE FOUR CERTAINTIES

Peering out through the window of the future can be a daunting task if one doesn't know where to look. The first things to look for are future certainties that can be clearly separated from speculative events. Future certainties are trends in which "the train has left the station" and the destination is known and is virtually certain. Obvious examples are the rise of China and India as political and economic powers. Other examples are changing demographics, such as developed nations getting "older" and developing nations getting "younger." According to Future Agenda, there will be four macro certainties developing in the next decade:

• A continued imbalanced population growth

• More key resource constraints

• An accelerating Asia wealth shift

• The achievement of universal data access

TEN BROAD TRENDS

The next level of inquiry can be built around these certainties. In our view the following 10 broad trends will impact almost all industries and organizations on the planet.

TREND 1. WEALTH CREATION

Future Agenda has described it this way: "How wealth is created, valued, shared, and used over the next decade is subject to a number of possible changes."

We agree. Powered by globalization, an unstoppable yet not fully understood force, previously unseen methods and centers of wealth creation will emerge. One could argue that the wealth creators of recent history were the Europeans (Industrial Revolution) followed by the United States (the American Century). There are clear signs that this is changing. China, India, and other emerging markets are operating on new definitions of capitalism that make hefty research and development investment more palatable. So-called state capitalism is characterized by state-owned or family-controlled firms that don't have the short-term, "beat the analyst forecasts" mentality of their Western counterparts. In the future, leaders will no longer be able to plan without considering the longer-term global marketplace.

Continuing its analysis, the Future Agenda proceeds:

Globalization has connected many of us in ways we never conceived of, that allow new ideas to be shared and innovations to accelerate. It has also linked us together in ways that mean shocks in one region can quickly be transferred to another. A "flatter" world is providing opportunities for those with talent to leapfrog ahead of others, but at the same time there is a growing imbalance between the haves and the have-nots in society.

The next decade will see new technologies that will drive new business models that will, in turn, change how wealth is created and shared, but it will also see political and social needs drive other changes in how we manage and use the wealth and resources that we have available. There is also a clearly significant influence in this area from the certain shift in the center of gravity to Asia and the consequences that this will have for wealth creation, trading and even currencies.

Which raises the question: What will be the specific impacts of these macro wealth creation trends on the outlook of your industry?

TREND 2. WEALTH DISTRIBUTION

The wealth gap between the rich and poor will continue to expand, fueled by widening differences in wealth between and within urban and rural communities. But, predicts Future Agenda, the rich and poor will still need each other:

In recent years the gap between richer and poorer households has widened in most areas of the world despite strong economic growth that has created millions of jobs.

This has applied not only in the gaps between some rich countries and some poor ones but also within many nations. The rich/poor gap in the United States has increased, just as it has in Brazil, India, and Africa.

We would agree with many in saying that urbanization is perhaps the most significant issue. However, there are no clear signs of governments making significant changes to taxation and spending policies to redress the imbalance. Access to good education will remain the catalyst to breaking through the divide. One analyst put it bluntly: "If it was simply a matter of robbing Peter to give to Paul, humanity would have solved it [wealth redistribution] years ago."

According to Future Agenda, "Over the next decade, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will grow, even though there will be ever more interdependence, in some areas, between wealth-generation across the social spectrum."

One of the early authorities to recognize the wealth gap was C. K. Prahalad. In his book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, he asks how this gap can potentially be closed or addressed. Prahalad ponders the question of "why we cannot create inclusive capitalism, and why all of our technology, managerial know-how and investment capacity cannot make even a minor contribution to the problem of pervasive global poverty and disenfranchisement." He then suggests that "refining developmental aid, subsidies, governmental support, reliance on deregulation and privatization of public assets, and the solutions of localized nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) is important, but it has not redressed the problem of poverty." Prahalad asks, "Why can't we mobilize the investment capacity of large firms with the knowledge and commitment of NGOs and the communities that need help?" Searching for uniq
(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from LEADERSHIP PURE AND SIMPLE by David Wilkins, Greg Carolin. Copyright © 2013 by David Wilkins and Greg Carolin. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword by Michel Robert          

Acknowledgments          

PART 1 TIMELESS LEADERSHIP IN A CHANGING WORLD          

CHAPTER 1 The World in 2020          

CHAPTER 2 What Is Leadership?          

PART 2 THE LEADER AS STRATEGIST          

CHAPTER 3 Obstacles to Transformative Strategic Thinking          

CHAPTER 4 Determining the Strategic Heartbeat of the Business          

CHAPTER 5 The Strategic Thinking Process: From Strategy Formulation to
Deployment          

PART 3 THE LEADER AS INNOVATOR          

CHAPTER 6 Innovation: The Fuel of Corporate Longevity          

CHAPTER 7 The Process of Strategic Product Innovation          

CHAPTER 8 Making New Product Creation a Repeatable Business Practice          

PART 4 THE LEADER AS SITUATION MANAGER          

CHAPTER 9 Balancing Operations and Execution          

CHAPTER 10 The Situation Management Framework          

CHAPTER 11 Increasing the Situation Management Quotient of the
Organization          

PART 5 THE LEADER AS PROCESS COACH AND MANAGER          

CHAPTER 12 Self-Mastery          

CHAPTER 13 The Leader as Critical Thinking Coach          

CHAPTER 14 The Leader as Process Manager and Implementer          

PART 6 THE TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADER          

CHAPTER 15 Leadership Pure and Simple          

Index