I can’t remember business times anything like as exciting as the present. The onrush of new ideas, new products, new services, new people, leaves even the perilous days of the dot.com boom far behind. Every one of these new developments presents an opportunity; the key to success for any management has to be its ability to spot and seize opportunities before they vanish from sight. Strike while the iron is hot, in other words.
There are managers, though, who don’t like being first and prefer to hang around until the opportunity looks safer and bigger. In most cases, that strategy enshrines failure; but I was interested to see that Rupert Murdoch (no failure, he) justifies his time-lags - speaking particularly of the internet - as strategic brilliance. One media veteran told Fortune that Murdoch ‘came late to the network television game, late to the sports game, late to the cable network game and late to the distribution game, but News Corp has created relevance in all those areas’.
The magazine comments that four-game loser Murdoch ‘doesn’t care if he’s first, last or in the middle. What matters is that the business grows and makes money’. The media veteran has an advantage, of course - access to huge piles of cash. Playing catch-up, he has just spent $1.3 billion on new media businesses. Most managers don’t have the resources to correct their late (or lateness) sins of. Make no mistake about it, Murdoch’s strategy ran huge risks in all the business areas mentioned above. You can sneer at the advantages of being ‘first mover’, but not at the benefits of leadership.
So how do you find the right bets and the right time to make them? First, do you have an innovation strategy of any kind, complete with your best people searching for new opportunities and others of the brightest and best turning the ideas into action plans? If not, get going NOW. They should be areas where you already have relevant experience and technological fit. Otherwise you’ll do what one entrepreneur did in the 1990s - make a lot of little investments in e-businesses which all flopped because ‘we didn’t have a clear strategy other than to be careful’.
The name of this flop entrepreneur? Why, Rupert Murdoch. So think big, think early and act vigorously. Neither the thought nor the action will succeed, however, unless you can master team-working. Many brains are more effective than one, even that of a genius - anyway, how many of those do you have on the premises? Our blog on Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats explains one brilliant way of getting teams to work together - which is the absolute essential for improving on the generally poor record of would-be innovators, small and large.
Motorola, for example, has been doing far better of late (it needed to) by setting up innovation teams away from its main R&D facilities in a separate building and with separate remits. All the academic work says don’t try and innovate to make the old business think in new ways. Rather, get the innovators out and about on their own turf. Also, don’t let emotional dullards stultify the intelligence of their team-mates by sucking thought into well-worn ruts. Do new things in new ways and you’ll inject new vitality into the company - and your career.
