Best Among What I Read Today, The Corporate Edition – Jan 2nd 2017

This is a collection of posts that I loved reading today and I hope that you will like as well.

How Starbucks’s Culture Brings Its Strategy to Life

In this HBR post, Paul Leinwand & Varya Davidson share the importance of the alignment of culture and strategy in the success of an enterprise. It is clear to any leader who has tried to create and execute on a new strategy, how difficult it is to get people to change the way they do things (culture).

I strongly believe that the culture comes ahead of strategy.

So, if you have a strategy that requires your teams to behave in ways different from how they behave now, you need to first find ways to get them to behave in a way that would be congruent to what your strategy expects them to behave, before the strategy is implemented.

You can read the entire post here.

Embracing Bad Ideas To Get To Good Ideas

In another HBR post, John Geraci shares his perspective on the secrets of fostering successful innovation in large corporates. He argues that large corporates need to embrace the method that successful entrepreneurs use while working on ideas (Good or Bad). 

Engage with so-called “bad” ideas in order to find their way to the positive outcomes

He also argues that

While sometimes bad ideas are necessary stepping stones to good ideas, sometimes they are in fact actually good ideas — just ones that nobody else understands yet.

He then goes on to list his suggestions on how people responsible for innovations in large corporates can embrace bad ideas as much as good ones and improve their odds of a big success.

You can read the full post on HBR here.

While we are on this topic there is another HBR post that has quantitative data to prove the large corporates are much more probable (1 in 8)  to build a successful business (reach a revenue of 500 Million USD) than entrepreneurs (1 in 500). You can read this post here.

Your Turn

Pls do share any interesting article/post/book that you have come across recently in the comments section.