I have seen a number of business gurus' ideas, from books like The One Minute Manager to Six Sigma. Unless an operation is willing to support a program both financially and managerially and stick to it for some time, you will have continually changing, disgruntled employees. They will lose trust in your management style and consider this the next passing fancy. Find an adaptive process, stick with it, and listen and reward the trench workers. You will be surprised at the outcome.
Anonymous
Outstanding companies create the concepts that are then formalized and spread by gurus. Outstanding companies exist in all cultures and continents. But gurus, as you pointed out, are mainly U.S.-based.
At least two factors explain the prevalence of U.S. gurus: 1) the business of Americans is business, and 2) the U.S. has developed a strong cultural ability to communicate clearly between people of diverse origins.
U.S. economic strength is partly explained by the coexistence of both outstanding companies and a social mechanism which help the rest of the pack to close the gap (gurus/ consultants). In short, following gurus is less a way to create a competitive advantage than a way to avoid creating a competitive disadvantage in one specific area.
Of course, a company is never outstanding in all regards (otherwise the company has made no strategic choice) and can always use guru advice in one area or outsource the activity. Finally, one might consider that "closing the gap" is as strategic an activity as "innovating ahead of the pack" because a system is as strong as its weakest element.
Thomas Kermorgant
CEO
Saint Jacques Group
A big idea is important since it will drive and motivate a person and his or her organization toward something that it believes is even better than what it has or does today. But it is just a start .... The overall importance of an idea is when it is executable and the result can give a contextual meaning. Time will tell.
Gaspar
Head of Services Marketing & Sales
Ericsson Indonesia
There is a big advantage to having the edge on managerial theory. Since the U.S. is the leader in bringing free market economic principles to the world, we should also have the know-how to effectively implement those strategies. And while it seems there was a detour through Japan in respect to leading-edge management practices, I see that as a laboratory of things many of our manufacturers first tried out in World War II. So rather than thinking of management and leadership practices as being somehow a separate item from the rest of the business, we should view them like any other innovation by doing our best to nurture them and putting them into practice!
Tery Tennant
President
SHP
It's always a great idea to make people rethink processes, to move people out of their comfort zones, and to tweak the system. Nonetheless, I view the "gurus" as businessmen who swim in the business milieu but are primarily concerned with selling books and conference dates. And while they do add value in the aforementioned ways, they have found and are succeeding in a lucrative business niche all their own.
Richard Leatherman
Marketing
Write on the Edge, Inc.
Prusak and Davenport's book mentioned in your column makes some excellent, provocative points regarding the role of leading edge thinking and competitive advantage in U.S. business. It is hoped large enterprises will recognize how important this type of thinking (or, more to the point, this type of thinker) is to their continued success, and more deliberately cultivate these people from within, giving them room and affirmation. In the past there has been much lip service paid to the notion of valuing creativity, but little room afforded to those who are truly creative—at least within the management and leadership hierarchies of large enterprises.
Anonymous
In the long run, the value provided by the management gurus' business issue analysis and recommendations far exceeds that provided by any technology or intellectual property. In fact, IT and IP advantages may very well be successfully implemented results of the management concepts laid out by these "big idea" thinkers.
For example, in his writings marketing great Philip Kotler emphasizes the "lifetime" value of a customer as opposed to "single-transaction" value. Today's booming CRM technology appears to be a direct technological application of such a perspective.
Therefore, I think that big ideas are of extreme importance in economic wealth creation, and we can't thank these Brahmins of business enough.
Nishant Miglani
Student
University of Waterloo
Yes, a competitive advantage can exist where the application of management concepts is applied where they have not been utilized by competitors. Management concepts provide a benchmark against which the desired direction within a company both externally and internally can be measured. These resources can be applied both more effectively and efficiently as a result providing a competitive advantage.
The challenge for U.S. gurus and those who provide leaders and managers these ideas is to avoid a homogeneous pool of concepts which, over time, are practiced by everyone and provide no clear point of differentiation as a result within the U.S. domestic market. External to the U.S., these concepts would still provide a competitive advantage unless those practiced by others were superior. A question remains: Where do the next big ideas come from after the U.S.? Back to Europe? Asia?
Don Martin
Business Development
Toops Wholesales
I've spent thirty-five years in the computer industry, most of it participating in some of the most dramatic changes. I've read but mostly heard quite a few explanations for why things were going well or badly. Worse, I've seen strategies implemented from on high that made no sense for the company I worked for. Over time, I developed a sense for what would work and what wouldn't. I never got the timing right, but nearly every company that I thought was a bad idea is gone or struggling to recover from bankruptcy.
The only book that explains it is The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. As I read The Innovator's Solution, the thing that I'm impressed by is the emphasis on the "solution" only being a theory. A few years ago [at my company], we were told that management was encouraging everyone to read Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese? Fifteen minutes with that book and I knew the company was doomed.
What worries me is that companies outside the U.S. seem to be much more open to American management theory and processes. The best example is of Americans ignoring W. Edwards Deming, to the benefit of Japan who embraced his methods. Christensen's analysis explains why Demings' methods were so powerful.
Michael Pettengill
Student/computer system engineer
How important are big ideas? Historically speaking, big ideas did not have an immediate impact on our lives. Television is a good example because it took more than twenty years until became commercially available. The automatic teller machine (ATM) struggled more than ten years before becoming a daily and easy-to-use service.
Let's take another and more recent example, the Internet. It has had a life of over twenty years, it caused great disappointment after the bubble, and even today it is technically a best-effort service but not a guarantee.
The view from 10,000 feet up is that we all have computers and we like to say this is the Information Age. The question is, "To be or not to be in the matured Information Age?" Let's look around and notice the annual loss of tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars in IT spending due to failed, late, or off-budget projects. It is not all spent on big ideas, but in a way they are new ideas since an IT project has its intrinsic originality.
Big ideas are important to move humankind forward.
How fast can you do it? Is it economically feasible? Are big ideas technologically, economically, and politically mature enough to allow them to become practice?
John
System analyst
Hospital of Saint Raphael
Being a marketing and management consultant and having been a professional for the past twelve years, mostly in Silicon Valley, I definitely support "Big Ideas" because, if not for them, there would be no innovation. Creativity, which lies at the crux of big ideas, is the cause for the forward motion of mankind.
Kumu Gupta
Consultant
KUMU Consulting
I am currently doing training for a "big idea," and what I am finding is that you can have the biggest idea in the world but if you don't make it personal in your employees' lives—so they can really understand it and see how it relates to their work—the idea will go nowhere.
Matt Crichton
Developer
YMCA
I think Professor Heskett has just disclosed the recipe for the competitive advantage of U.S. businesses. It's the right mix of management concepts, IT and IP—not just one of them—that probably defined the American century. Now all these ingredients are more transferable to the rest of the world in the emerging global context. This obviously helps the regions and countries with more untapped potential (read China and India) and paves the way for an Asian century through the information highway.
Anju Marempudi
President
IntelliBusiness, Inc.
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