Page 174 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Innovating for the Future 163

artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, probing for implications for their
own next generation of products. Many companies are also investing in
mining big data of public and consumer information to analyze trends and
opportunities in customer behavior.
While much of this work requires you to look outward, don’t neglect
your own backyard. Talking to people throughout your unit or organiza-
tion—especially those on the front lines—will help you discover weak and
not-so-weak signals about where your market is headed. Your best sales-
people will be aware of changing customer tastes and competitors’ innova-
tions, and your engineers or product people often have strong relationships
with other insightful industry practitioners. Leading innovation means
listening to your own people as much as guiding them on what to do.
It can be exciting to identify possible opportunities, but you need to be
clear-eyed about the threats as well. Anne Mulcahy’s turnaround of Xerox,
for example, was partly fueled by her personal understanding of how
competitors were leapfrogging the company’s products and services with
a superior value proposition, an understanding she drew from her days
working in sales. Paula Kerger’s multiplatform strategy for children’s
programming was developed partly because she realized how much digi-
tal educational content was now encroaching on broadcast viewership and
the traditional business model of PBS. At TIAA, the business model threat
came into focus for Ferguson when he analyzed the company’s longer-term
payout viability and realized that baby-boomer retirements could impact
the long-term financial strength of the company.
As a leader, you can never become complacent or let your team be-
come satisfied. By incorporating this kind of scanning into your daily work,
you’ll prime your team or unit to take advantage of opportunities and avoid
threats—right away.

Shaping the future

How do you act on the opportunities and threats you’ve identified in your
operating environment, once you have the resources in place to do so?