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then Henry presents his ideas as a contrast to Michaels. We started doing this tag team effort about 11 years ago and it has become increasingly easy for Henry to shoot me down in the last few years. And the executives in the class agree with Henry. It seems the relatively stable world of (at least part of) my corporate career has gone the way of the dodo. At times, it seems the worlds gone nuts. Let me count the ways: Japan, the PIGS, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, SARS, the financial collapse of 2008 and 2009, the BP oil spill, and many more examples. As one writer put in it this weekends Sunday New York Times, For a moment, all the swans seemed black. However, as my friend Dick Evans, ex-CEO of Alcan, pointed out that my memory was being a bit selective, as it was not only recently that stability seems to have gone out the window. He reminded me of the time he was stationed in Africa experiencing 3 coups and then back in the USA in the midst of the junk bond raiders, a wrenching manufacturing recession and the fall of the Iron Curtain not to mention personally experiencing the Loma Prieta earthquake. All of these seemed pretty black swanish to me at the time! Fair point, nevertheless, it seems that strategy has shifted in the last decade to where the planning school no longer has the street cred it once had. It is precisely because we cannot, try as we may, control the variables that factor into business decisions that Mintzbergs emergent strategy is so useful. Porters ideas are still relevant, my colleagues and I still teach them, so I still believe in them and when I talk to corporate CEOs they still use them as part of their strategy planning thinking. But they are getting a bit long in the tooth for todays different world. Henrys emergent strategy ideas simply seem to be more relevant to the world we live in today they reflect the fact that our plans will fail. This is not to say that planning isnt useful, but other than some long term technology plans, the day of the 5 year and even 2 year plans has faded and emergent strategy is the reality in most industries that I work with. You must be much more fleet of foot, strategic flexibility is what we are looking for in most industries. The boundaries are more fluid now. For many, albeit not all, knowing what industry you are in is not as clear cut as it once was. This makes industry analysis less easy. The value chain is now shared across firm boundaries and at times, in part, in common with competitors. Though I think that Henrys ideas have pulled ahead of Michaels, I very much keep on an eye on Porters thinking. I interviewed him recently for a weekly videocast I do for the Globe and Mail, Canadas National Newspaper, because his new ideas are very much current. Interestingly both Porter and Mintzberg started to put a great deal of their attention on Health Care about 8-10 years ago. They approach the topic differently. Porter is in the U.S. and Mintzberg in Canada, which have quite different health care systems, yet when I realized this it was clear signal to me that this is an area that I should pay attention to. The other thing Porter has been working on, Corporate Social Responsibility, suggests a fairly fundamental change in how corporate American runs itself. Meanwhile, Henry is working on Rebalancing Society radical renewal beyond Smith and Marx. So when it comes to Strategy I think Henrys ideas are au courant. Yet when I consider their most recent respective work I see that they are looking at two not dissimilar topics, albeit in different ways. We are indeed fortunate that these two outstanding minds are still at it when many others are retired. Still two, too very much keep an eye on!
This new Forbes.com column is called Rethinking Leadership. What I will do one week is to feature video interviews with top business professors from the worlds leading business schools on their latest thinking, how they are rethinking what we teach in B-schools. The other week I will write an on-line column like this one. A key theme is to ruminate on how younger people, what I call the PostModern Generation, want to be worked with. A book I am working on is entitled: PostModern Management: Leading, Managing Working With Under 35s The Way They Want To Be Worked With. They dont want to be lead or managed, those words are too strong for them, they want to be worked with, more on that soon.