Rotman Management Winter 2008

When was the last time you asked yourself where your thinking comes from, and how much of it is good quality? WITH EACH PASSING DAY, the pace of change continues to quicken, requiring that we continually learn and relearn, rethink our decisions, and re-evaluate the way we work and live. In such an environment, the power of our minds to regularly engage in selfanalysis will increasingly determine the quality of our work, our lives, and perhaps even our very survival. No matter what our circumstances or goals, one simple truth applies: we will be better-off if our thinking is skilled. Unfortunately, serious thinking about thinking is rare. When was the last time you asked yourself where your thinking comes from, and how much of it is good quality? If we are to…

It was September, 1999, and Michael Lee-Chin had a serious crisis on his hands – the worst of his business career. Lee-Chin had presided over more than 10 years of remarkable growth at his beloved moneymanagement firm, AIC Limited, but now AIC was under withering attack. Its very survival was in doubt. An admirer of Warren Buffett, Lee-Chin had pursued a strategy with virtually no parallel in the mutual fund business. The typical mutual fund manager holds 100 to 200 different stocks at any given time and turns over the entire portfolio every 18 months or so. But emulating Buffett’s approach of taking long-term stakes in a relative handful of companies, Lee-Chin’s AIC Advantage Fund would hold only 10 to 20 stocks and hang onto them, as he says, “more or…

You have dedicated your career to studying the connections between thought and action. What are some of your key findings? What I am most interested in is how people produce action that is effective, and by effective I mean action that leads to the consequences people desire – consequences that persist. In our minds, all human beings hold what might be labeled ‘micro theories’ of action that specify what ‘effective action’ is and how to produce it in any type of situation, whether it be as a leader, a follower or a peer. How do we produce behaviour? Through the use of our minds. How does the mind produce behaviour? By designs that are programmed into it, which can be warehoused and then retrieved. These are ‘causal’ designs, whereby doing one…

BUSINESS STRATEGISTS TEND to be well-versed in the identification and analysis of constraints. But what of possibilities? If the ability to see new possibilities is fundamental to creating innovative designs – whether of products, cities or business strategies – what do we know about state-of-the-art possibility thinking? Not much, it seems. Business strategy has historically been seen as a largely analytic endeavor, with relatively little attention paid to the creative aspects of strategy formulation. In this article, we will describe eight ways to illuminate new possibilities taken from Engineering success stories and discuss what each might look like if applied to business strategy. 1. Challenge Assumptions Challenging assumptions and defying convention are often the first steps in creative Engineering. To produce something original, an engineer raises questions about the way things are done…

IF YOUR ORGANIZATION DEMANDS knowledge work from its people, then you undoubtedly appreciate the importance of sheer brainpower. You probably recruit high-intellect people and ensure they have access to good information. You likely also respect the power of incentives and use formal compensation systems to appropriately channel that intellectual energy. But you might be overlooking another crucial driver of a knowledge worker’s performance: their inner work life. People experience a constant stream of emotions, perceptions, and motivations as they react to and make sense of the events of the workday. As we arrive at our workplaces, we don’t check our hearts and minds at the door. Unfortunately, because inner work life is seldom openly expressed in modern organizations, it’s all too easy for managers to pretend that private thoughts and feelings…

THE HANDIWORK OF HUMANKIND has finally begun to impress itself on the global environment and on us, its inhabitants. It is news to no one that current rates of resource consumption cannot keep up with population growth as it exists. By 2050, world population is virtually certain to increase by half again from its present 6.46 billion – with all that means for our dwindling resources. Coupled with that, it is now clear that global warming is fact, and its growing control over Earth’s climate and weather systems will unpredictably complicate problems already made serious by population pressures. While the road ahead seems dark, there is hope: a profusion of new technologies is emerging, many with the potential to alleviate the problems induced by population growth. Key to the use or…