Scott Anthony cites "strategy gurus to avoid" - including himself!

In a great post on HBR.org, Innosight's Scott Anthony pricks the bubbles of highfalutin strategy gurus:

About a year ago I miscalculated — badly — on the Microsoft Kinect. In terms of speed of adoption, only Apple's iPad has rivaled the Kinect. Aside from some tough comments on my blog, the long-term repercussions were low. That's pretty much what happens to a pundit who gets it wrong — nothing.

And this:

The non-user. This pundit makes bold predictions about a product or service he's never used. Remember, a wide gulf separates a corporate press release or a carefully scripted demo and in-the-field reality. I ran into this trap when I started getting excited about Research in Motion's Playbookbefore the product had even been officially launched. The product's performance didn't live up to early press releases and has struggled in the market.

Finally, this:

The freeze framer. Back in 2005 I wrote a piece [PDF] looking at a new video recorder introduced by Pure Digital Technologies, the Flip. I said the simple, easy-to-use product had one fatal flaw — customers had to drop it off at drugstores to get videos processed. How many would do that, I wondered? The mistake I made was assuming that Pure wasn't already working on its second version, which featured a simple mechanism to load video onto computers. The company took off and was ultimately acquired by Cisco for hundreds of millions of dollars. (Cisco strangely shut down Pure Digital this year, but that's a different story.) Markets are dynamic, and if pundits don't take the long view they can make mistakes. 

How cool is it that Anthony is comfortable enough in his own skin to base a blog post on his bad predictions?

Novartis' Joseph Jimenez: forecasting errors caused by culture, not process

This story, from Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez via Adam Bryant's Corner Office series in the NY Times, has echoes of Amy Edmondson's research into high-performing hospital teams. Read the story, and I'll tell you what I think the connection is:

Q. What are the most important leadership lessons you’ve learned?

A. One occurred when I was a division president of another company. I was sent in to turn the division around after four years of underperformance. It was a declining business. And when I got there, I completely misdiagnosed the problem. I said: “Look. We’re missing our forecast every month. What’s wrong?” I brought in a consulting firm, and we looked at what was wrong. And the answer was that we had a bad sales and operations planning process, where salespeople, marketing people and operations people were supposed to come together and plan out the next 18 months and then forecast off of that. So I said: “O.K. We’re going to fix this. We’re going to have the consulting team come in and help us make that a better, more robust process, with more analytics.”

And it turned out it wasn’t at all about analytics. Because once we did that, and we put that new process in place, we still continued to miss forecasts. So I thought, “Something’s really wrong here.” I brought in a behavioral psychologist, and I said: “Look, either I’m misdiagnosing the problem or something’s fundamentally wrong in this organization. Come and help me figure it out.” She came in with her team and about four weeks later came back and said: “This isn’t about skills or about process. You have a fundamental behavioral issue in the organization. People aren’t telling the truth. So at all levels of the organization, they’ll come together, and they’ll say, ‘Here’s our forecast for the month.’ And they won’t believe it. They know they’re not going to hit it when they’re saying it.” The thing she taught me — and this sounds obvious — is that behavior is a function of consequence. We had to change the behavior in the organization so that people felt safe to bring bad news. And I looked in the mirror, and I realized I was part of the problem. I didn’t want to hear the bad news, either. So I had to change how I behaved, and start to thank people for bringing me bad news.

Edmondson found that hospital teams with the highest outcomes also had the highest reported incidence of mistakes. When she dug into this paradox, she found that the high-performing teams had the psychological safety to share mistakes so they could be fixed and avoided in the future. The poorer-performing teams tended to cover up their mistakes.