Companies during this pandemic must protect core businesses even as they create mechanisms for thinking about new opportunities, write Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden of Harvard Business School. Cross-functional teams and agile structures can be valuable in identifying areas of inefficiency, along with tactics such as “the clean sheet of paper exercise,” which asks executives to imagine rebuilding the company from scratch.
Leaders can “stop reacting to change and become the agent of change” when they cultivate characteristics such as humility, openness, integrity and an ongoing passion for learning, writes John Thurlbeck. “Those characteristics will draw people to you who are engaged, focused, and willing to go that extra mile and provide a challenge to perceived wisdom.”
Forecasts should be a jumping-off point for creativity and imagination, but too often forecasts are used to pretend that there is certainty and guarantees, writes Margaret Heffernan. “It’s so tempting to think that when the past and the present look the same, they must somehow be the same — and play out in the same ways,” she writes in her new book, “Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future.”
