Page 70 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

60 HBR Leader’s Handbook

The second part of the task—understanding the external world in
which you operate—is complex: you must consider not just existing mar-
kets, customers, and competitors, but also those emerging and changing
due to social, economic, and technological trends. This is also the time to
assess major discontinuities in markets and how emerging new players are
reinventing ways to serve the traditional needs of customers (including
what Clayton Christensen has famously labeled disruption) or creating
whole new markets that previously didn’t exist.
Frontline workers are important sources for getting these perspectives
(another reason for including people with pivotal jobs in your strategic task
force). In all cases, you should be sure to tap their experience and obser-
vations—both about forces at work externally (changing customer needs,
new competitors arising, pricing pressure, etc.) and internally (e.g., orga-
nizational obstacles or operational inefficiencies blocking your company’s
ability to compete).
Many off-the-shelf analyses assess internal and external issues, and
armies of consultants are happy to help you further, often with their own
special tools, including an increasing set of analytical and big data inter-
pretative technologies. But beware: you can be easily overwhelmed by the
amount of analysis you may think you have to do, even (and, sometimes,
especially) when you have consultant help. (See the box “When to bring in
consultants.”) Constraints and the pace of competition will here again
force you to make some choices. Constantly ask yourself whether the on-
going investigation is still adding substantial benefit to the process. Keep
building your experience about the kind of effort needed: ideally, when
you’ve done enough to get the picture roughly right, but not so much that
momentum and opportunity are lost due to analysis paralysis. These are
judgment calls that distinguish effective from less effective leaders.
In the PBS case, Kerger challenged Rotenberg not only to explore the
market need and station capacity for a stand-alone children’s channel, but
also to leverage the knowledge of Rubenstein and his colleagues in the
digital unit about technology’s evolving impact on the media landscape.
That could have expanded into an almost endless research project, but by
working with a few established experts, mining PBS’s already rich audi-