Do you want to make sure “Dreams & Details” doesn’t keep you dreaming? Earn the Right to Attack!

"Dreams & Details" is now available in English – a leadership book by Jim Snabe and Mikael Trolle sharing their view on value-creating leadership in a digital and exponential business world. A remarkable and highly inspiring book, easy to access because it creates a highly topical leadership context, spiced with cases and their own experiences from the world of businesses and sports. A wonderful "kick in the pants" to those who have not yet dared to disrupt themselves - on time. And valuable inspiration for those who dare, but have not yet found the leadership formula, which can make things happen.

The authors’ aim is not only to provide advice, but also to facilitate a thought leadership debate among professional networks. For me, the book ignited many reflections and encouraged me to share them – which I based on a chat with Jim Snabe will sum up as "Earn the Right to Attack"!

Private equity governance has for years set the route for management professionalization with industrial advisors on their board teams. As any other business, they however also from time to time experience that even the best plans fail due to lack of execution skills for which leadership is key. Thus, a leadership advisor approach may be maturing as a supplement to their classical industry advisor approach – what do you think?

Clear trend on board professionalization and competent teams

Private equity funds have long been at the forefront when it comes to professionalization and composition of board teams based on business challenges and competence needs, rather than classical networking relationships. With a typical exit horizon of 4-7 years and clear ambitions to maximize value creation during the ownership period, it has been natural to introduce new management paradigms from top to bottom of the management systems.

Creating leadership value can happen by luck, coincidence or great performance of course. However, only few of us are born leaders, so why not structure your analytical approach to leadership, as you do with other assets on the company’s balance sheet. Personally, I fell in love with Dave Ulrich’s Leadership Capital Index (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2015), which could be one way to assess the value of your current leadership and identify improvement targets inspired by the research based drivers.

Great leadership is an untapped potential. According to at least some research below, only 25% of leaders are good leaders, half of them are “only managers”, and 25% are “bad supervisors”. Two other pieces of research reveal the challenge of leaders’ misperception of being inspirational. Thus, 77% of leaders find themselves inspiring, whereas 82% of employees find their leaders uninspiring. Acknowledging that inspiring leadership correlate positively with employee commitment (+32%), satisfaction (+46%) and performance (+16%), it could be fair to believe that better leadership would create more business value.

My own leadership experience tells me that management is about “What” and leadership about “How” - and that the ability to strike the right balance between the two is key to accelerate change and deliver top results. Thus, I am happy that the authors of the well-known book Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, have now also released the more dynamic Blue Ocean Shift – focusing on the transformational process of “how” to actually make it happen. 

It’s an updated repetition of the blue ocean strategy elements wrapped in appreciated research on how some of the best companies have managed to succeed. I can only recommend that you read the full book your-self, but let me share a couple of appetizers spiced with my own reflections.

Recently I read and can recommend the management book ”Digitaliseringens paradokser” by Søren Schultz Hansen og Jan Horsager (The Paradoxes of Digitization – so far only available in Danish). It is an easy read with a broad spread of twelve case studies on digital transformations – both well-known and less known cases within manufacturing and service, the private and public sector, small and large businesses. Based on these, the authors have defined five paradoxes and their impact on three main areas and summarize it all in ten good advice, which they have named the “Manifesto of Paradoxes”.

The paradoxical is related to the apparent contradictions between the analogue world and the digital world, which however "analogue" leaders from time to time ignore or deliberately ignore because it is beyond the comfort zone.

You probably won’t agree with it all, and some of it may even be dangerous to apply in the wrong place or at the wrong time – but it helps turning everything upside down and reflect on your own challenges of digitization. You may at least agree on one thing – that we all, sooner og later are faced with the paradoxes of digitization, and if not, it may unfortunately be too late.