Media bites

Leading by example

The Necessary Revolution

Peter Senge is tackling today’s sustainability crisis by helping people see and rethink the big-picture system that connects energy, transportation, food, water, and materials to the way they do business. In The Necessary Revolution, Senge, along with Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur and Sara Schley, discuss how companies can take advantage of extraordinary opportunities for profitable innovation if they move past environmental quick fixes that make them seem “less bad” to integrating sustainability into their core strategies for value creation.

The Necessary Revolution gives examples of how organizations found strategic and profitable opportunities by seeing the big picture, collaborating across boundaries, and rethinking the way they do business. Among the examples are Coca-Cola’s collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund to conserve clean water; the Xerox Lakes Project with a zero-to-landfill goal of reducing waste; Nike’s green products and biomimicry systems; and Sweden’s “Bio Region,” the world’s first region in which all energy needs are met without fossil fuels.

Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, Sara Schley. Doubleday.

Billions of Entrepreneurs

The world’s future is irrefutably tied to the futures of China and India. In one generation, these nations will become the largest and third largest world economies, respectively. Because of their future dominance, Harvard Business School professor, Tarun Khanna, says an understanding of these two countries is critical for other individuals and organizations.

“China and India together could have a stronger impact on each other and on the world than either country could on its own,” Khanna writes. “What China is good at, India is not, and vice versa.” The relationship is the basis for a new era of economic cooperation. Yet for each nation to benefit from cooperation, and for the West to succeed at engaging both countries, there must be a greater understanding of the sharp differences that Khanna explores in the book.

The book mixes real-life cases with thorough research to show how Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs are creating change through new business models and bring hope to people around the world. The author argues that hope for prosperity in both countries lies in the hands of the billions of entrepreneurs who are alleviating social problems and historic tensions, benefiting both countries, and the world at large. 

Tarun Khanna. McGraw-Hill Ryerson.

Stall Points

Veteran industry strategists Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever of the Corporate Executive Board analyzed the performance of hundreds of Fortune 500 companies in the past half-century to explore challenges to sustained revenue growth. They found that an astonishing 87 per cent of companies experienced “stall points,” or turning points when a company’s growth rate slips into a prolonged decline. Once a company stalled, it had only a seven per cent chance of returning to top-line growth.

“The most common causes of growth stalls turn out to be preventable for the most part,” writes Olson and van Bever. “The vast majority of stall factors result from a choice about strategy or an organizational design decision. They are controllable management.” Stall Points offers practices for articulating, challenging, and monitoring strategic assumptions that can help position a company against a potential stall. Such practices include: commissioning a core belief identification squad, conducting a pre-mortem strategic analysis, appointing a shadow cabinet and inviting a venture capitalist to a company’s strategy review.

Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever. Yale University Press.

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