January–February 2022

The Founder of UBI Group on Leading a Transition to Renewable Energy in Africa

After building the oil and gas distribution company UBI Group in her native Ghana and then selling a majority stake to an international investor, Salma Okonkwo turned her attention to solar power. As the pace of industrialization in Africa accelerates, she wants to make sure that political and corporate leaders don’t repeat the mistakes that their Western and Chinese peers made as they pursued development and economic growth. That’s why, in 2018, she created Blue Power Energy. It’s still early days for the company, which has 20 employees and hasn’t yet started generating revenues. But it’s currently building two solar farms in Ghana with the goal of eight more by 2028 and has signed contracts to supply 3 million customers with 140 megawatts of clean energy by the end of 2023. Okonkwo’s hope is that she can apply the lessons she learned launching and building UBI to her new venture so that it not only becomes just as successful but also makes a more positive impact on the world.

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How Incumbents Survive and Thrive

While many believe that technological disruption has been rampant for decades, the internet has actually caused much less creative destruction than people think. An analysis of the Fortune 500 and the Global 500, in fact, reveals that most sectors have been surprisingly stable over the past 25 years. Very few firms on those lists today were launched after 1995.

What else is misunderstood? The best response to disrupters. The default is to fight back with a new digital unit or a transformation. But there are three other viable strategies: doubling down on your existing strengths (as Disney did); retrenching to ensure your survival (as banks are doing); and moving into new opportunities (as Fuji did). Each strategy has benefits and risks, and your circumstances determine which one you should pursue.

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The Strategic Advantage of Incumbency

For most of the 20th century, size, longevity, and a large market share were seen as assets in business. Then they began to be viewed as vulnerabilities, putting many companies in a defensive stance. Successful incumbents, however, convert these traits into market power, lasting relationships, and deep insights and use them to create new opportunities and ward off upstarts. Three capabilities in particular give established firms an edge: the ability to manage complexity, the ability to focus on the long term, and the ability to leverage customers’ trust in new arenas. This article describes how companies like Hindustan Unilever Limited, Deere and Company, and A.P. Møller–Maersk have prevailed by exploiting their strengths in these areas.

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Persuade Your Company to Change Before It’s Too Late

Executives who spot signs of big market shifts face a quandary: They need good data to convince stakeholders that their companies have to change. But by the time data about disruptive trends is public, opportunities have shrunk or disappeared, and their firms may be on burning platforms.

How can leaders build the conviction to act before evidence is abundantly clear? First, they can gather “private data” (from their employees, customers, and proprietary systems) that illuminates the risks firms face. Second, they can map their firms’ position on the information-action paradox model and use it and other disruption frameworks to inform discussions that lower the threshold of proof.

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Can Big Tech Be Disrupted?

The tech giants Facebook (now Meta), Amazon, Apple, Google (now Alphabet), Microsoft, and Netflix are all so successful—and generate so much cash—that they seem virtually unstoppable. Yet according to Jonathan Knee, a Columbia Business School professor and veteran investment banker specializing in media and tech, even the digital superpowers face threats. In this interview he shares an analysis of the weaknesses and strengths of the large tech companies and the strategies they might use to defend themselves.

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Reinventing Your Leadership Team

Digitization may be necessary for many businesses’ continued success, but in our increasingly complex world, what companies really need to do is build new forms of competitive advantage and transform themselves for the future. And that requires fundamental changes in their top leaders—not just in individuals’ capabilities but in the way they collectively steer the ship.

Drawing on their research at 12 prominent global firms, the authors note the contradictory-seeming skills that leaders are expected to have—being both great visionaries and expert executors, for example. But in this article they focus on the urgent imperative to improve leadership teams, arguing that CEOs should:

• Identify the roles that are needed at the top to reimagine and then deliver on the company’s purpose
• Fill those roles thoughtfully, assembling a diverse group of people who think boldly and work together harmoniously
• Focus the team on driving transformation rather than managing the current business
• Take ownership of the team’s behavior, fostering trust, collaboration, and a commitment to leading the company forward rather than dwelling on personal advancement

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The “New You” Business

All too often fitness centers, medical providers, colleges, and organizations in many other industries seek to distinguish themselves only on the quality, convenience, and experience of what they sell, say the authors. It’s not that those things aren’t important. But they matter only as means to the ends that people seek. Too many organizations lose sight of this truth. Even when they do promote what they sell in relation to consumers’ aspirations, they rarely design solutions that allow people to realize them. Instead, individuals must cobble together what they think they need to achieve their goals—for example, a trainer, a particular diet, and a support network to lose weight. Enterprises should recognize the economic opportunity offered by a transformation business, in which consumers come to them with a desire to improve some fundamental aspect of their lives. Even though we’re all filled with hopes, aims, and ambitions, significant change is incredibly hard to accomplish on our own. This article offers an approach to designing a transformation business.

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How Companies Can Address Their Historical Transgressions

Some multigenerational companies or their predecessors have committed acts in the past that would be anathema today—they invested in or owned slaves, for example, or they were complicit in crimes against humanity. How should today’s executives respond to such historical transgressions? Drawing on her recent book about the effort by the French National Railways to make amends for its role in the Holocaust, the author argues that rather than become defensive, executives should accept that appropriately responding to crimes in the past is their fiduciary and moral duty. They can begin by commissioning independent historians, publicly apologizing in a meaningful manner, and offering compensation on the advice of victims’-rights groups. The alternative is often expensive lawsuits and bruising negotiations with victims or their descendants.

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Family Ghosts in the Executive Suite

Professional growth can get stymied for all sorts of reasons. But one of the most important is rarely discussed: You’re contending with ghosts from your past. Early in life, family dynamics give rise to many fundamental behaviors and attitudes toward authority, mastery, and identity. When similar dynamics emerge at work, people often revert to childhood patterns.

To enable change in the personal realm, psychologists often encourage clients to consider the nature of their original family system. This approach can—and should—be applied at work too.

Guided by the tenets of family-systems theory and their own research, the authors have identified six elements of family dynamics that commonly play out in the workplace. To achieve your greatest potential as a leader, you need to recognize your own “family ghosts,” understand how they influence your behavior at work, and decide which ones to celebrate and which ones to leave behind.

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Manage Your Organization as a Portfolio of Learning Curves

As people develop competence in a new domain of expertise, they move along an S Curve: Growth is slow and effortful at the outset, or launch point. It then progresses rapidly as people acquire new skills in a stretch known as the sweet spot. At the peak is mastery, when work becomes easier but the curve flattens. Understanding where your employees are on this S Curve of Learning will help you coach them appropriately, craft thoughtful succession plans, and build a team with diverse but complementary strengths.

The S Curve is a tool that smart managers use to launch conversations with their reports and create tailored development plans for them. It reveals when people are ready for bigger challenges—something that’s especially critical if they’re in mastery, which may mean they’re getting restless and need to jump to a new S Curve. Often the employees don’t even realize they’re ready to take the leap, but their managers push them anyway.

When that happens, it’s key to surround an employee with the right supporting team. A good team will include members from all phases of the curve, who can contribute diverse perspectives and skills.

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Quantum Computing for Business Leaders

Quantum computers can solve problems exponentially faster than classical computers can. They will bring about two huge changes: an end to our current infrastructure for cybersecurity over public networks and an explosion of algorithmic power that holds the promise to reshape our world.

Scientists face myriad challenges in developing commercially relevant quantum computers. But once they are overcome, the disruption caused by postquantum cryptography will eclipse that of Y2K, which cost the United States and its businesses more than $100 billion to mitigate.

This article examines the way quantum computers will not only upend digital security but spur investment, reshape industries, and spark innovation.

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Sensemaking for Sales

The amount of product and service information available to B2B customers—reports, blogs, display ads, email marketing, and more—has become overwhelming, leading to indecision and a sharply reduced likelihood of making a substantive purchase.

The best reps have turned this conundrum into a prime selling opportunity. Above all else, they help buyers make sense of the information they’ve encountered. Their approach is a form of sensemaking, and it encompasses three broad activities. Sensemaking sellers connect customers with relevant resources, curating the information they share for utility and clarity and including only what will help customers proceed with confidence. They clarify information, helping customers feel that they’ve asked the right questions, understood competing perspectives, and accounted for potential contingencies. And they collaborate on customer learning, Socratically guiding buyers on a purchase journey rather than telling them what to do.

A lack of self-confidence impedes big deals more often than a lack of confidence in a particular vendor does. Sensemaking sellers boost customers’ self-confidence, enabling buyers to take bold, decisive action with assurance and peace of mind.

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Corporate Political Spending Is Bad Business

Corporations are facing increased scrutiny over their political spending—particularly when their stated values seem to contradict their lobbying efforts. A 2020 report by the Center for Political Accountability offers abundant examples, including corporations that have publicly demanded racial equality while contributing to groups and candidates that promote racial gerrymandering and corporations that purport to be concerned about climate change while donating to groups that challenge the EPA’s clean-power plan. In this groundbreaking article the authors argue that companies should halt political spending entirely to reduce the risk of blowback and enable executives to focus attention and resources on running their companies.

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How to Sell Your Ideas up the Chain of Command

You have a great idea—a product tweak that will save your company money, a process change to increase your team’s productivity, or a plan for heading off a looming crisis. There’s just one snag: You’re not sure how to approach your boss about it, or worse, you’ve tried and failed to get the attention of higher-ups.

According to the author’s research, two factors are crucial to a successful pitch: having the confidence to make your suggestion and knowing how to frame it to get the best reception from your boss.

The key, the author says, is to understand the psychology of higher-ups—to get inside their heads. Doing so can help you recognize what tips the scales in your favor—and identify the (rare) instances when it’s best to try to go around or above them.

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