Brown and Hagel
Here is an excerpt from an article written by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, and sign up for a subscription to HBR email alerts, please click here.
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Inspired by the loss of her thirteen year-old daughter, Candice Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in 1980 to combat drunk driving through education and legislation. Just a few years later, Lightner and MADD played a pivotal role in passing a federal law which penalized any state that didn’t raise the minimum drinking age to 21.
After
Barbara Minto joined McKinsey as the firm’s first ever female consultant, she found that many management consultants had trouble communicating information effectively. She developed the Minto Pyramid Principle to help colleagues structure their writing, and after gaining support within McKinsey, took the framework to other firms. It has since become ubiquitous across the consulting industry.
Lightner and Minto started out as individuals with a vision, and both women went on to significantly impact the realms they cared about. In our 2008 Harvard Business Review article “
Shaping Strategy in a World of Constant Disruption,” we discuss how certain firms are harnessing the power of business ecosystems to shape entire industries or markets. As it turns out, individuals can apply several lessons from shaping strategies when trying to turn a grand idea (be it for social good or professional gain) into a reality.
1. Create a Compelling Shaping ViewIn order to mobilize supporters, it helps to put forth a compelling view of what the future-state could look like. Perhaps the most famous example of a shaping view comes from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have a Dream”
speech. In just 17 minutes, the Baptist minister who had been gaining reputation as a Civil Rights leader painted a vivid portrait of a world without racial inequality that ignited his supporters and spurred many to action (even risking their lives) in order to help achieve such a world.
Though the delivery may be less dramatic, a compelling view is just as important when trying to launch a new business venture. When Marc Benioff launched Salesforce.com in 1999, he used speaking engagements not to pitch his new business, but rather, to evangelize his vision of where the future was headed and bring supporters on-board. By getting people to believe in a radically redefined industry, Benioff inspired listeners to invest in making it a reality.
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We live in a world where individuals increasingly have the ability to shape the environment in which they live. Shaping is not just limited to large institutions. In fact, in many of the successful shaping strategies that we studied, the strategies were executed by people with limited resources on the edge of a market or industry. Whether we are seeking to shape our workplace or our society, small moves smartly made can set big things in motion.
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To read the complete article, please click
here.
John Hagel III (jhagel@deloitte.com) is cochairman of Deloitte LLP’s Center for Edge Innovation, located in the Silicon Valley region of California. He writes a strategy blog at edgeperspectives.typepad.com. John Seely Brown (jsb@johnseelybrown.com) is independent cochairman of Deloitte LLP’s Center for Edge Innovation. He formerly was chief scientist at Xerox and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). To check out their other articles, please click here.
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