Leading Strategic Growth and Change

Leading Strategic Growth and Change is a five-day program focused on the process of finding opportunities, launching new ventures, and leading necessary organizational changes to revitalize an organization.

Participants learn how to thrive in rapidly changing and highly uncertain environments, gain insight into a current pressing change initiative within their own organization, and immediately begin to apply the learning to make rapid progress on the issue.

If you have ever worried about how to drive new growth or how to make a change initiative successful, you will enjoy the insights developed in this course.

Impact

Benefits in the Current Context

This program is more relevant than ever, because it presumes high levels of uncertainty, complexity, and velocity in every tool and technique we present. It further covers both the analytical side of coping with uncertainty (what to do) as well as the human side (how to get people to realize the challenges and respond appropriately). In this program, we insist on driving strategic decision-making from the perspective of deep insight and differentiating rather than going along with the crowd. And at Columbia, since we are in the heart of the financial markets, we are very close to the phenomenon.

– Rita Gunther McGrath, faculty director

Summary of Benefits

• Explore how to lead through change and uncertainty
• Learn to make use of an entrepreneurial mindset in an established corporation
• Understand the political and implementation challenges of growth
• Discover a proven framework for leading growth
• Gain insight into the cultural and leadership challenges of the information economy

Program Structure

One of the distinguishing features of the course is that rather than using standard business school cases, most of the application of the tools and concepts takes place as participants help one another find solutions to a thorny growth or change problem they are facing in their organizations. Prior to the course, each participant prepares this 'personal case' which is then used as the basis for small-group discussion and problem solving. Each case group, consisting of other participants from non-competing organizations, also creates a video which is shared with the entire class at the end of the week. By the end of the week, most participants report having made significant progress on resolving their issues with actionable ideas they can take back to work and apply immediately.

A select set of additional readings and materials are also included, and each participant receives copies of relevant books.

Day One

• Introduction to MarketBusting, a structured approach to identifying growth opportunities via five 'lenses'
• Change the customers' experience
• Reconfigure products and services
• Change your business model
• Take advantage of industry shifts
• Identify entirely new markets
• Learn to avoid the most dangerous biases that can have a negative impact on your decisions under uncertainty
• Learn to improve your intuition

Day Two

• Think Wrong Workshop, an immersion day on Design Thinking showing you how to unfreeze your thinking about a major challenge you are currently facing
• Learn the 3 leadership roles that are essential to growth
• Real options reasoning
• Creating an opportunity portfolio
• Learn to manage high assumption: knowledge ratio situations
• Learn the principles of intelligent failure
• Creating the conditions for effective organizational transformation

Day Three

• Discovery Driven Planning, including an experiential simulation exercise
• Identify in advance the most likely situations in which your project will be delayed or encounter resistance; apply this idea to personal cases
• Learn simple and powerful ways to confront organizational politics and use them for positive purposes

Day Four

• Learn from a 'living case' what mistakes were made and how you can avoid making the same mistakes in undertaking large-scale change
• Entrepreneurial thinking
• Optional session on the utilization of sophisticated modeling and simulation techniques in conjunction with discovery driven planning

Day Five

• Disengagement – how to gracefully shut down a project or end a business
• Nominated topics, in which participants propose the topics for discussion
• Action planning for return