Russell McGuire

Uncharted has shown up on a number of lists of the top books of 2020. Given how 2020 has convinced us that the future is uncharted and unpredictable, there’s a real hunger for an answer to how we can navigate the future. I picked up the book hoping it contained some new approaches and tools that I could use in my work with clients. I wanted quick and easy practical steps and instead the author delivered long and messy stories of real life. She’s a great storyteller and her chapters are full of compelling stories, but no easy answers.

Read the full review here.

The audiobook version of A Sprint to the Finish, read by the author, is available now from a number of leading retailers (more coming soon).

You can currently find it at:

• Google Play
• Apple
• Kobo/WalMart
• Audiobooks.com
• NOOK Audiobooks
• Chirp
• Scribd

I hope you find it interesting, entertaining, and informative!

One of the online classes I took this year was “Robots in Society: Blessing or Curse” offered by Delft University of Technology. Last week I was informed that the final paper I submitted for the course had been selected for their “Hall of Fame”. 

The Connected Intelligence Revolution is the collision of advanced data processing technologies with massive amounts of available data, resulting in new ways that we see the world, anticipate the future, make decisions, and take action.

This revolution promises great benefits for companies, individuals, and society, but it also introduces great dangers. In a global economy, with rapidly changing technologies, ensuring that no one gets left behind is a complex, multifaceted challenge that requires action and commitment at the individual, company, industry, national, and international levels. I believe that the actions I have outlined in this paper are reasonable, realistic, and can result in a positive outcome for all stakeholders.

Read the full paper.

One of the richest tools I’ve found for connecting strategy and execution is the Strategy Map introduced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 2001.

In their Balanced Scorecard work, Kaplan and Norton had defined four “perspectives”: Learning and Growth, Internal business process, Customer, and Financial. The Strategy Map creates a cause-and-effect relationship to emerge between these four perspectives, with the Internal and Customer perspectives being central.

If we are to achieve our strategy, what needs to be true about our business (Internal), and therefore what needs to be true about our culture and our people (Learning and Growth)? When we achieve our strategy, how will that translate into value for our customers (Customer) and therefore into value for our investors (Financial)?

As helpful as the Strategy Map is for “connecting the dots” from the company’s people and culture all the way to financial performance, with the strategy at its core, the Strategy Map often could not capture on a single page all of the things happening within the business to execute the strategy, and how those activities would be managed.

Kaplan and Norton introduced the concept of Strategic Themes as a way to focus on specific parallel aspects of the strategy. I like to consider the Pillars of the strategy as Strategic Themes and to map out the logical flow of the strategy at a greater level of detail. I also like to use this view to identify key initiatives that align with the aspects of the Strategy Map. Finally, the Strategic Themes level of mapping is also a great place to begin to call out specific metrics that can be used in monitoring the strategy to make sure that execution is staying on track.

Those metrics are then managed through the Balanced Scorecard. The Strategy Map and Strategy Themes help us translate the strategy into specific actions we need to take as a company and the Balanced Scorecard provides the tool for regularly monitoring our progress in executing the strategy.

Read the full story here.

Warner Bros. made big news this past week by announcing that new feature films in 2021 will simultaneously release in theaters and streaming on HBO Max. 

For many that haven’t closely followed the company’s corporate transactions, the decision was a bit of a head scratcher. But once you understand that Time Warner was acquired by AT&T in 2018, who had also acquired DirecTV in 2015, it all starts to make sense. Kind of. In a troubling sort of way.

AT&T clearly believes in vertical integration. Vertically integrating has many advantages — you can control the value chain, drive out inefficiencies, and make decisions to maximize profitability. 

But it also comes with significant challenges. I’m not sure AT&T is up for those challenges. The companies in AT&T’s portfolio come from industries with very different expectations, market disciplines, cultures, and ecosystems. 

In 2020, streaming networks are the shiny thing that everyone is chasing. AT&T wants to turn the crank on the vertically integrated machine they’ve built to deliver growth in HBO Max subscribers. Who cares if Warner Bros. gets squeezed a bit in the process?

It turns out a lot of people care. 

Let’s hope AT&T learns their lessons before they do too much damage.

Read the full story here.

Last week, General Motors’ Chairman and CEO Mary Barra increased the company’s commitment to electric vehicles from $20 billion to $27 billion by 2025 and announced the company’s plan for an all-electric future. This week General Motors sent another significant signal of this pivot by withdrawing from the Trump administration-led litigation against California’s tough fuel economy and emissions regulations.

Startups often pivot multiple times before settling on a winning business model. What GM is doing is much trickier.

The auto industry has been a mature industry for quite some time. When industries approach the end of their life, smart companies try to “jump” to another S-curve still in the startup phase. That’s what GM (and every other automaker) is trying to do. Making that jump isn’t going to be easy. Big mature companies are complex. GM customers, employees, and dealers are all heavily invested in the company’s gas-powered legacy. The company’s business model and economic engine are fine tuned for the way GM has always operated. 

While it might seem that logically GM has a strong starting point, the investment that the company needs to make to transition to electric vehicles may be greater than for a pure-play startup like Tesla. General Motors also has everything at stake. Their existing revenue streams and loyalties can easily be lost if the company stumbles in this transition.

Billy Durant successfully led his companies through the S-curve jump from horseless carriages to automobiles in creating GM. Can Mary Barra do the same as GM tries to jump from gas-powered to electric-powered vehicles? We will have to wait and see.

Read the full story.

This week, BuzzFeed announced that it was acquiring HuffPost (acquired by Verizon in 2015 as part of the $4.4 billion AOL acquisition) in a complex deal with Verizon Media. Meanwhile, AT&T is still looking for a buyer for DirecTV (which they acquired in 2015 for $49 billion). Also announced this week, T-Mobile is shutting down their TVision Home service that they aquired in 2017 (while confusingly launching a similar service also called TVision). These transactions are just the latest in a long line of symptoms of a consistent problem. While mobile operators are great at operating wireless networks, they fail their stakeholders when they stray beyond their strategic boundaries.

Verizon and AT&T have reached their similar situations by moving in opposite directions. Verizon seemed to start without a strategy, so they made some big mistakes, and now that they have a strategy they need to unwind those mistakes. AT&T had a strategy, but they ignored it and made some big mistakes. They now don’t seem to know what their strategy is, but still need to unwind those mistakes so their debt doesn’t kill them. Meanwhile, T-Mobile was a scrappy, under-resourced upstart that executed against a focused strategy.

Read the full story.

Rich Horwath is a consultant who helps companies with their strategic planning. In StrategyMan vs. the Anti-Strategy Squad Horwath uses a super-hero vs. super-villain comic book to teach his approach to strategic planning. He does so by introducing the factors common in businesses that lead to “bad strategy” in the form of the villains who are set on killing the strategy for TechnoBody, a fictional company. At each step in the process, the villains show up, only to be defeated by the heroes from the Strategic Thinking Institute (Horwath’s company). The heroes teach basic principles and tools that lead to successful strategic planning. 

StrategyMan is a fun and informative book. While a relatively quick and enjoyable read, it contains much to help business leaders recognize common behaviors that can impede strategic planning and learn tools and principles for doing it right. Optimally, the book would make a good pre-read for a team heading into the strategic planning process. Unfortunately, Horwath leans heavily on the terminology and some frameworks that are unique to his approach to strategic planning. While there’s nothing wrong with the Strategic Thinking Institute approach, companies that already have their own terminology, processes, tools, and timelines may be hesitant to confuse participants by introducing an alternative framework.

Read the full review here.