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From
hbr
Managers today know that their enterprises depend on frequent, important innovation, but they lack good frameworks and tools to act on that recognition. Management science as it is taught today and embedded in firms’ structures and processes still assumes that the introduction of a new offering – let alone a new business model – is the exceptional event and not the norm.
Via Kenneth Mikkelsen
Great points by Clayton Christensen:
My observation of what’s happened is that, today, the people convened for that senior executive meeting all have different languages that they speak. One speaks finance, one speaks HR, one speaks operations, and so on. They have discovered that, if they translate all of their initiatives into numbers, then everyone can talk about them.
When you put the agenda together, all of the options that people need to decide upon are translated into numbers. And so the evaluation of the ideas quickly turns into a review of how good the numbers look, as opposed to being a substantive discussion about things that are not known.
The fork in the road for managers is this: if finance, which has been the kingpin for the last fifty years, is no longer the kingpin, what will be? The only viable alternative is talent, so that managers must learn better how to help people become more capable.
Talent (or people focus) will replace numbers (or financial focus) in the new lingua frnca of the executives.