CUES member relations director describes all she took home from Wharton this spring.
I took a lot of useful things home from
CEO Institute I: Strategic Planning this spring. But the size of the experience was so big I had to ship a box of things back to get everything home. Here's what was in my box (these items are in the photo, too):
- requisite Wharton T-shift and environmentally sound water bottle;
- recommended future reading, including The Art of Woo: Using Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas by G. Richard Shell; The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem; and The Leader's Checklist, also by Useem and
- my institute binder.
That last item--the leadership binder--is a particularly excellent "go back to it" resource. I'm thumbing through it now, seeing the tabs for each day of the week of our learning, and picking a section of the session to remember. Ah yes, this was a good part: Consider which of the companies that were prominent in 1910 are still around. (The companies listed include the likes of U.S. Steel.) The short answer is there aren't very many. In keeping with this, we talked about what a company has to do to build a
sustainable competitive advantage--that will keep them going over time. Some of the key ideas were:
- Invest in yourselves, your people, your CU.
- Think critically about your organization's assumptions and challenge them.
- Reflect on changes happening within and outside of your organization.
And then we talked about what gets in companies' way of having a sustainable competitive advantage. These items included:
- undisciplined pursuit of more--the idea that when you recreate yourself you don’t want to lose your core, whatever you’ve defined that do be;
- not giving enough attention to "weak signals"--for example, is the fact that members wouldn't recommend you to a friend, as measured by Net Promoter Score, something you need to give more attention to?
- lack of vision and risk-taking;
- being trapped in yesterday’s business models;
- biases of internal decision processes and
- having the wrong incentives in place (are yours short term, or risk averse?).
I could go on and on about all the great things I learned. But you can get your own knowledge and memory box. A few slots remain for the first-ever summer session of
CEO Institute I: Strategic Planning, slated for Aug. 17-23 at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Philadelphia.
Tammy Douglass is a director of member relations for CUES.
