Gabriel Kahn

For this podcast, the Confident Retirement, there's a twist: I was the one interviewed, not the one asking the questions. (I like it better the other way - but that was fun - thanks for inviting me on, Kristopher Flammang CRPC®AIF®BFA®) Oh - and I'm not retiring :) Some of the things we talked about: * My early journalism career change to being a juvenile probation office for three years; • Why and how the Business Observer has made a transtions to #digitalfirst — and why we keep the focus on that; and • The lessons I've learned from interviewing hundreds of entrepreneurs ands business owners Take a listen!

30

1 Comment

From Expertise to Strategy In The Crux, How Leaders Become Strategists, Richard Rumelt, emeritus professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, highlights a big problem leaders face: Access to expertise doesn't always translate to strategy, especially in complex situations. Rumelt writes: “I had the opportunity to interview then US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2004. At that moment, he was trying to deal with a rising insurgency in Iraq. The invasion’s outcome had been expected to be a popular celebration of democracy, not an insurgency. The interview topic was about how the Defense Department managed shifts in spending. Almost as an afterthought, I asked him about his view on strategy or policy creation. His reply remains fascinating. Rumsfeld told me that as defense secretary, he had access to just about any expertise imaginable. “Do you want to know the various tribal histories, languages, customs, and intermarriage situations? We have people who know,” he said. He described the wide variety of expertise on weather patterns in Iraq and internal politics. “Do you want to know who, in Turkey, blocked our access to a northern invasion and why did they do so? We have people who know.… The real problem,” he said, was pulling all of this expertise together into a coherent strategy. Rumsfeld said that “each morsel of expertise came with an agenda attached. It came from a person or group with a perspective, an ax to grind, a budget to manage, a contract to renew, a career to push forward, and so on.” “Professor,” he asked, “have you academics found a way to deal with this issue?” Responding to his question, I thought for a minute and reflected briefly on what was systematically known about the policy process. I told him that I had to admit that our technology for these issues had not much improved from ancient times. I said, “We know a lot about what can go wrong, but very little about how to fix it. Basically, you put a small group of smart people in a room and see what they come up with.” Source: Blog FFI I say this is a classic conundrum businesses face. People sit around tables discussing strategy and plans without actually putting emphasis on fixing a problem or a set of problems which are staring at them! As Thomas Edison put it eloquently “strategy without execution is hallucination”. I am merely taking execution as an alternate for fixing. What are your thoughts?

11

3 Comments