Alexandra

The Three Box Solution Playbook: Tools and Tactics for Creating Your Company’s Strategy
Vijay Govindarajan and Manish Tangri
Harvard Business Review Press (May 2020)

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”  Leonardo da Vinci

This is a companion to The Three-Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation, published in 2016, a volume —  in my opinion — and one of the most valuable business books published during the last ten years. Briefly, “VG” provides what he characterizes as “a simple framework that recognizes all three competing challenges face that managers face when leading innovation.” That is, simultaneously managing today’s business while creating tomorrow’s and letting go of yesterday’s values and beliefs that could keep the company stuck in the past. “It’s a powerful guide for aligning organizations and teams on the critical but competing activities required to simultaneously create a new business while optimizing the current one.”

With regard to the book’s title:

Box 1: Optimize the current business.
Box 2: Let go of the values and resources that fuel the current business but fail the new one.
Box 3: Invent a new business model.

As the subtitle of the Playbook suggests, Govindarajan and Tangri provide tools and tactics that leaders need in order to create an appropriate strategy for their organization. Keep the three boxes in mind because each is important to the other two. They may be separate but are in fact [begin italics] interdependent [end italics]. That said, leaders must — simultaneously — manage the present, selectively forget the past,  and create the future.

This playbook is also, to some extent, a workbook. There are dozens of exercises throughout that enable the reader to interact with specific content in the book  (e.g. ) but also correlate that material with specific issues that they and their associates are now struggling to address and resolve.

For example, in Chapter 1, PROCESS, the material includes “Assessing Your Organization’s Primary Business Model”  (six questions are posed with lined space to record responses) and then “Assessing Your Organization’s Ambition and Box 1 Leftover Growth” (three questions with lined space to record responses). As indicated, there are dozens of exercises. Suggestion: Obtain a lined notebook and keep it near at hand because you will need more space that provided in the book, especially if you wish to record your own comments, questions, and page references.

Those who read this book will appreciate the skill with which Govindarajan and Tangri share their thoughts about what they characterize as the “Innovation Journey”: Ideation (Chapters 2-5), Incubation (6), and Scale (7-10).  There is a brief discussion of that journey in Pages 9-10 and a separate Part is devoted to each of the three stages.

One final point. I selected the da Vinci quotation because it correctly stresses the importance of simplicity when designing, launching, and completing a journey that involves organizational transformation. Einstein often cited da Vinci when explaining his admonition to “make everything as simple as possible but no simpler.” The two Three-Box Solution volumes offer an excellent case in point. Obviously, Vijay Govindarajan and Manish Tangri agree with da Vinci and Einstein!