Page 54 - Harvard Business Review (November-December, 2017)

UNDERSTANDING THE FIVE QUESTS
The best execution in the world won’t lead to a successful transformation if your
organization pursues the wrong change. Quests fall into five categories, and more
than one may be relevant, so leadership teams must decide which to prioritize and
which to postpone. Pursuing too many quests at once is a recipe for failure.
in 2007 and Packard Bell in Europe in 2008.
But a key difference between Lenovo and
QUEST ENABLERS BLOCKERS Acer was their commitment to globalizing
GLOBAL • Rewiring systems and • Acquiring weak the senior leadership ranks.
PRESENCE networks to leverage businesses in haste Acer’s board struggled with “de-Taiwan-
Become more capabilities, knowledge, to develop a global ization,” rejecting CEO Gianfranco Lanci’s
international in and ideas wherever they are footprint bold plans to hire foreign talent with ex-
mindset as well as • Preserving corporate • Honoring the
market reach by principles while remaining “dominant” culture pertise in mobile technology and to triple
reconfiguring the flexible on cultural while paying lip the number of engineers. (It’s worth noting
operating model practices service to the rest that Lanci soon left Acer to head up Lenovo’s
• Using diversity as a source • Failing to integrate PC group.) In 2010 Acer had six foreigners
of competitive advantage talent on a global scale among its top 24 executives; by 2014 it was
down to three out of 23. In the same period,
the board went from having two foreign di-
CUSTOMER • Organizing, equipping, • Failing to reshape an rectors to having none. Predictably, the top
FOCUS training, and rewarding entrenched culture that team’s decision making became increasingly
Provide tailored the workforce to better emphasizes pushing cautious and inward-looking. In 2016, for
solutions to user understand and address products
problems by customers’ needs • Continuing to depend example, it hired the founder’s son to head
reconfiguring • Redefining relationships with on former sales up the company’s cloud services, which
the customer vendors, intermediaries, and intermediaries prompted the TechNews headline “Is Acer
experience suppliers • Not coordinating front- Becoming a Family Business?”
• Reframing customer and back-office units By contrast, leadership development at
relations to learn rather to deliver seamless Lenovo was fully in line with the compa-
than simply to close deals solutions ny’s quest for a greater global presence. By
2012 its top team of nine represented six na-
tionalities. Its Chinese CEO, Yang Yuanqing,
INNOVATION • Navigating the full • Relying too much on relocated to the United States, and other
Tap multiple innovation spectrum, from one or two parts of the
sources value chain partners to innovation spectrum members of the team were scattered glob-
of ideas and competitors to lead users • Resorting to rigid ally, gathering for one week each month in
approaches by and crowdsourcing contracts with a different strategic market. Aware of the
reconfiguring • Collaborating to convert innovation partners challenges his team faced as a result of its
R&D partners new ideas into tangible • Lacking oversight members’ varied backgrounds, the CEO
innovation that ensures frugal brought in a coach to work with the execu-
• Articulating innovation investment tives on cross-cultural issues. And to pro-
needs clearly and creating mote diversity as a source of competitive
win-win outcomes with advantage—in both hiring and operations
partners companywide—Lenovo elevated the role of
cultural integration and diversity VP to the
NIMBLENESS • Developing the capability • Allowing blind spots C-suite. Such efforts paved the way for am-
Become more to detect and respond to produce an bitious acquisitions and joint ventures with
strategically, to major changes in the incomplete picture German, Japanese, Brazilian, and U.S. com-
operationally, and environment • Responding too slowly panies—enabling Lenovo to extend into new
culturally agile • Leveraging diversity to because of red tape software and services categories globally.
by reconfiguring exploit opportunities
business processes • Taking too long to
• Learning to prototype cut your losses
rapidly and institutionalizing when something TRANSFORMATION TRAPS
what works doesn’t work
Many transformation efforts are set up to fail
at the quest stage. Top teams get sidetracked
SUSTAINABILITY • Engaging all stakeholders • Undermeasuring or or overreach when they lose focus on what
Become greener to become sustainable -reporting progress value is worth pursuing—or they take on
and more socially • Leveraging sustainability toward sustainability more change than their leadership capabili-
responsible by as a source of strategic • Broadcasting
reconfiguring advantage shallow PR victories ties can steer. Our investigations reveal three
resources (“greenwashing”) common failings:
• Communicating top- Neglecting the quest. In companies
team commitment to the • Failing to balance that don’t identify a mobilizing theme, value
sustainability agenda efficiency and
sustainability goals generation and leadership development can
become ends in themselves—generic efforts,

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