Organizational Renewal

• All businesses have two tasks: 1. deliver today's profits and 2. create tomorrow's offerings - renewal.
• Delivery means efficient execution, renewal requires innovation.
• Competing on cost, quality and service = majoring on delivery.
• Fast changing markets require constant renewal through innovation.

How modern is your business?

• Process innovation leads to better delivery, not renewal.
• Product or service innovation gives birth to future product generations - this is renewal.
• Increasing the efficiency of delivery is like an older person getting in better shape.
• Genuine renewal replaces an older generation of products with a younger generation.
• Business process re-engineering improves efficiency but delays the harder task of genuine renewal.
• This buys time in the short term and makes executives feel that they are doing something.
• High volume, low cost businesses are locked in an efficiency race.
• Renewal through new products is the only way off this treadmill.
• But high efficiency cultures with their "right first time' slogans are not conducive to risk taking.
• Organizations that excel in renewing themselves are much more entrepreneurial.

Can management shed its negative image, be reinvented for the 21st century and differentiated from leadership? See Leadership and Management Reinvented. Also 21st Century Management.

We have an ideal image of leaders that actually says more about us and our needs than it does about leadership.

Do you think leadership should be redefined for a knowledge-driven world? Is our current concept of leadership not working? Is there room for heroic leadership today or is it now all about post-heroic leadership? Is emotional intelligence essential for leadership? Is leadership a role, like being a CEO?