Find The Attacker's Advantage: Turning Uncertainty Into Breakthrough Opportunities Authored By Ram Charan Offered In Volume
Wall Street Journal bestseller
The forces driving today's world of structural change create sharp bends in the road that can lead to major explosions in your existing market space.
But exponential change also offers exponential opportunities, How do you leverage change to go on the offense The Attacker's Advantage is the game plan for winning in an era of ambiguity, volatility,
and complexity, when every leader and every business is being challenged in new and unexpected ways.
Ram Charan, harnessing an unequalled depth and breadth of experience working with leaders and companies around the globe, provides tested, practical tools to help you:
Build the perceptual acuity to see around corners and detect, ahead of others, those forces especially people, who are the catalysts of change that could radically reshape a company or industry
Have the mindset to see opportunity in uncertainty
Commit to a new path forward despite the unknowns, positioning your business to make the next move ahead of competitors
Break the blockages that can hold your company back
Know when to accelerate and when to shift the shortterm and longterm balance
Make your organization agile and steerable by aligning people, priorities, decisionmaking power, budgeting and capital allocation, and key performance indicators to the new realities of the marketplace
The Attacker's Advantage provides a stark and simple challenge: stay in a legacy world of incremental gains or defensiveness, or be an attacker by creating a new world, scaling it up quickly, ahead of the traditional players.
The Attacker's Advantage: Turning Uncertainty into Breakthrough Opportunities by Ram Charan was chosen by sitelinkSoundview Executive Book Summaries as one of the sitelinkTopBusiness Books of.
THE SOUNDVIEW OVERVIEW:
The forces driving todays world of structural change create sharp bends in the road that can lead to major explosions in your existing market space.
But exponential change also offers exponential opportunities, How do you leverage change to go on the offense The Attackers Advantage is the game plan for winning in an era of ambiguity, volatility and complexity, when every leader and every business is being challenged in new and unexpected ways.
Ram Charan, harnessing an unequalled depth and breadth of experience working with leaders and companies around the globe, provides tested, practical tools to help you:
Build the perceptual acuity to see around corners and detect, ahead of others, those forces especially people, who are the catalysts of change.
Commit to a new path forward despite the unknowns,
Make your organization agile and steerable by aligning people, priorities, decisionmaking power, budgeting and capital allocation and key performance indicators to the new realities of the marketplace.
The Attackers Advantage provides a stark and simple challenge: Stay in a legacy world of incremental gains or defensiveness, or be an attacker by creating a new world, scaling it up quickly, ahead of the traditional players.
Soundview's indepth,page Executive Summary of The Attacker's Advantage is sitelinkavailable here, By developing your perceptual acuity, you can learn to identify the seeds of structural uncertainties that may shake up the market in the future.
Use your knowledge to push for change in your company ahead of time, and work to embed this sort of attack attitude in management circles.
We feel Uncertainity in our bones, Competition that appears in an instant and scales up almost as quickly, the algorithmic revolution, a growing pool of economic contenders from virtually every part of the world, a global financial system that will not be reformed.
These are just a few of the many forces that can permanently alter money making for a company, industry, or entire economic sector and make Uncertainity the fundamental leadership challenge of our time.
Taking control of such uncertainty is the fundamental leadership challenge of our time, What today's business leaders face is something totally unique its scale, it's speed, the ferocity of its impact and its increasing ubiquity, which is qualitatively different by orders of magnitude from anything that has gone before.
Life is full of uncertainties and most of those that businesses face are familiar, Some are operational like optimising production for shifts in demand, launching a new product or adjusting for changing interest rates.
Other are career uncertainties that affect your job security and future opportunities such as bad decisions made by bosses who favour less competent rivals.
Some are macro: geopolitical conflict, climate change and a seriously unstable global financial system, What is new is structural Uncertainity, It is structural because the forces now at work can explode the existing structure of your market space and industry, putting it at risk of being drastically diminished or completely eliminated.
These forces are long term and irresistible, For those who are unprepared, the massive chnages they bring are sudden bends in the road that appear seemingly without warning to obscure whatever future you envisioned for your business.
But in a world economy projected to grow a nettrillion in the coming decade, human needs and wants are always changing.
The opportunities are boundless for those who can anticipate and take control of them to create new businesses, new business models, new market segments and even new industries.
Structural Uncertainity is global and yet at the same time atomistic, A growing army of change creators everywhere is empowered by the Internet and low cost wireless communication, In theory there are potentially seven billion of them: the entire population of the world, Everyday more of the seven billion have instant access to any and all knowledge and insight that exists as well as ability to collaborate with others like never before.
Their ideas can be scaled up swiftly because capital is readily available to fund promising ideas, For digital companies, the scaling can be accomplished extremely fast and at low incremental cost, On the other side of the coin, consumers have acquired great new powers because of digitisation and online connectivity including social media, reviews and instant price comparisons, that give them information and options they never had before.
Their preferences can shift en masse, even globally destroying and diminishing whole industries and creating new ones adding yet another dimension to Uncertainity.
Finally, every Uncertainity is magnified by quantum increases in the speed of change, largely brought about by revolutions in computer and communications technologies.
Steering the business through structural Uncertainity will call for a distinctly different type of leadership than the one you were trained for, a radically differ t mindset, new skills anticipating events and going on attack.
The advantage now goes to those who create change and not just learn to live with it, Instead of waiting and reacting such leaders immerse themselves in the ambiguities of the external environment, sort through them before things are settled and known, set a path and steer their Organization decisively onto it.
They conceive a new need or a total redefinition of an existing need, often with a new business model in mind.
They paint a specific picture of what the new company will be, Then they take their Organization, along with its external constituencies on the offensive, No matter how successful it has made you, your past experience won't ensure success in the new world.
Many leaders wait for uncertainties in the external environment to firm up before they react to them, With blind faith in the core competencies and momentum of the established companies, the deniers focus on the most immediate symptoms of shrinking margins, market share and fight back as they always have, typically by lowering prices, increasing promotions, cutting costs deeply and improving service.
Their rationalisations are reinforced by short term but temporary success, Given the realities of the changes taking place now, these behaviours are rear view mirror thinking, Those that are best prepared to lead now and in the future in this era of big bends in the road have Perceptual acuity, a mindset to see opportunity in uncertainties, the ability to see a new path forward and commit to it, adeptness in managing the transition to the new path and skill in making the Organization steerable and agile.
Taking advantage of the Landscape that is emerging will almost certainly call for significant changes in how you define your business.
In many cas s it will mean starting a new and different business that could sooner or later eclipse your biggest revenue maker or cash generator.
Either of these is an entrepreneurial act on a grand scale, one that leaders in legacy companies have little experience with.
The risks make them uncomfortable, they ignore the risk of not going into a new game and sticking too long with a business that is ripe for transformation.
How you deal with uncertainty puts you in one of the two worlds, The first is the legacy world of core competencies, incremental gains and defensiveness, The second is the world of large scale entrepreneurs who create a new need, scale it up quickly and put a bend in the road for traditional players.
You can manage an operational uncertainty with existing tools but a structural Uncertainity arises from the external environment.
It is outside your control, and it can obliterate your business if you don't detect it in time and create your own space in the new environment that is taking shape.
A contemporary case and point is the decline of Dell Computers, With its high velocity of inventory turns, low margins, low prices, Dell at one point with its "made to order Model" gained market share with negative working capital.
Dell got hit with a double whammy with Lenovo which focused on lower costs and innovation at the same time and init attained the largest market share in the world against Dell and HP.
Dell might have overcome this operational challenge but at roughly the same time a killer structural change occurred with the introduction of tablets and smart phones.
This was one of the most dramatic industry shifts which signalled a decline in desktop and laptop market.
Currently Dell has gone private to give Michael Dell the freedom to make big bets on the future.
Few industries are exempt from the threat of structural uncertainties, The single greatest instruments of change is the advancement of the mathematic tools called algorithms and their related sophisticated software.
Never before has so mush mental power been computerised and made available to so many, The power to deconstruct and predict patterns and changes in everything from consumer behaviour and human health to maintains fe requirements and operating life times of industrial machinery.
Algorithms are changing both the structure of the global economy and the life styles of people, The others include digitisation, the Internet, broadband mobility, sensors, and faster and cheaper by the day data crunching abilities.
Companies that have new mathematical abilities possess a huge advantage over those that dont, They are math houses which are creating structural Uncertainity for all industries and companies within them, Google, Facebook and Amazon were created as Mathematical Corporations, they were born digital, Apple became a mathematical corporation after Steve Jobs became the CEO, Legacy companies that don't make the shift will be vulnerable to digital competitors, Leaders often miss the early warning signs because they are flying at low altitude immersed in daily operating details of the business.
The attackers advantage is the ability to detect ahead of others those forces that are radically reshaping the market place, then position the business to make the next move first.
Perceptual acuity is your human radar for seeing through the fog of Uncertainity so you act before others do.
How many times have you heard someone say something like, " Ted Turner could see it, but others couldn't" referring to his creation of a national cable television network and CNN or ask, " how could they have missed it" after Sony's leaders slept through the dawn of digital music.
Though perceptual acuity is a native talent for the Turner's of the world, you can cultivate it by watching such people and adopting the routine and disciplined practice of looking over the horizon and searching for new ideas, events, technologies or trends, things that an imaginative person can combine to meet an unmet need or create a totally new one.
There are many ways to practice the skill of sorting, sifting and selecting what matters from the vast and changing landscape.
Whenever you notice an anomaly, contradiction or oddity, you need to imagine what the new land scape might be if what you are seeing is a signal of powerful change.
Picture a highway stretching more or less straight to the horizon, Yes, it has hills and bumps and curves, but as you look at it, you get a pretty clear idea of the direction you are heading.
That's life in the age of core competencies, Now imagine that the road takes a sudden sharp bend and branches off into a multitude of directions.
Which way should you head Will there be wash outs or dead ends This is the new world of leading in Uncertainity.
Seizing the attackers advantage is not the same thing as seeking new ways to use your core competencies.
Rather, it is a process that starts with the central question " what new developments can I take advantage of to create a new need or give the customer or consumer a more compelling experience.
Remember, even the best strategic thinkers can be weak on offence if they lack the courage to move in the face of Uncertainity.
Companies such as Amazon that were born digital don't have to peel through layers of bureaucracy to become consumer centric.
Companies can be reborn digital if their leaders have a mindset for offence and the courage to venture into U chartered waters.
Besides the mental gymnastics, setting a clear path in the face of Uncertainity includes a psychological component, Your tolerance for ambiguity and risk will be tested, because going on offence almost always requires taking action before you have a crystal clear picture of all the factors your success will depend upon.
Even if you educate yourself about digitisation and the consumer, your own psychology may get in the way of finding a path to take advantage of Uncertainity.
Paying keen attention to your subconscious blockages, your own as well as your teams will help transform your mind set from defense to offence.
For a mindset of offense, the blockages are attachment to your existing core competencies, inability to build a new core competency, obsolence officials key people, fear, avoidance of opposition.
You cannot steer an Organization properly without making the necessary shifts in decision making and making the Organization agile.
You may have a creative thought out plan to go on the offense, but you still have to sustain your existing business for some period of time.
This dual track creates enormous stresses, particularly among those at higher levels who are being adversely affected, People who sense they are losing power will procrastinate, hide resources, distort changes you need to make, usually hoping the new thing will go away.
Their reactions may stir up your own selfdoubt and test your leadership, You will have to be a master at managing the transition at appropriate speed with the financial resilience to withstand shocks and transitions.
Continually stimulating your thinking and selfreflection is a critical aspect of building and maintaining your attackers advantage, To be successful in this era of structural Uncertainity you will need the skills mentioned at the start.
Perceptual acuity, a mindset to see opportunity in Uncertainity, the ability to see a new path forward and commit to it, adeptness in managing the transition to the new path and skill in making the Organization steerable and agile.
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