Brian Leavy's research while affiliated with Dublin Business School and other places
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Publications (79)
Purpose
McKinsey partners, Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock and Emily Field are championing the premise that the need for a fundamental rethink of the role of middle management in today’s organizations is now more urgent than ever.
Design/methodology/approach
So what should the new blueprint be for middle management as the crucial link between the e...
Purpose
An interview with Zeynep Ton, a professor of practice in the operations management group at MIT Sloan School of Management, about er latest book, The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay & Meaning to Everyone’s Work.
Design/methodology/approach
She believes that leaders can either view their employees as a cost to be...
Purpose
This masterclass examines former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's personal memoir of her life and career as a study of authentic leadership in action, and her concept of “good power” through which she distills the major insights on leadership she gleaned along the way.
Design/methodology/approach
This masterclass examines the insights from a former...
Purpose
Over the last two decades Bill George has been researching the basic ingredients of authentic leadership through one of the most extensive empirical studies of leadership ever undertaken. He and his team have extended their research to include both international and rising generation leaders and parlayed their findings into a development pr...
Purpose
This is a thought-leadership interview with digital-era experts Thomas Davenport and Nitin Mittal on the strategic desirability and implications for legacy companies on being fully committed to becoming AI-driven businesses.
Design/methodology/approach
An interview with thought-leaders in the area of digital strategy.
Findings
The intervi...
Purpose
This is a thought-leader interview with psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic on his insights into the implications for our humanity of the AI age.
Design/methodology/approach
A thought-leader interview
Findings
The interview highlights six maladaptive human tendencies that are at risk of being amplified in the age of AI and what we can do...
Purpose
This study aims to propose a conceptual framework describing the relationship between enablers of knowledge sharing (KS) and organizational sustainability.
Design/Methodology/Approach
An in-depth literature review based on PRISMA flowchart was conducted to identify the enablers of KS. The study develops a conceptual framework by assimilati...
Generation after generation, particularly in times of crisis, cry out for leadership. People and institutions that we once admired, like Kenneth Lay of Enron or Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco end up letting us down. How do we get them so wrong? Leadership remains an intriguing but elusive phenomenon. What then is the essence of great leadership? Is it th...
Purpose
The interview explores the Live Enterprise model at Infosys. The idea is to enable mature companies to transform into a business with digital native agility, with many small teams innovating while leveraging shared digital infrastructure, in an environment of continuous evolution and learning.
Design/methodology/approach
Jeff Kavanaugh, Vi...
Purpose
An interview with Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy. His new book is the articulation of key leadership principles for the next era of capitalism, and how to put them into practice, in both the best and hardest of times.
Design/methodology/approach
Joly believes “Work is a quest for meaning. Maximizing profit does not answer that quest.”...
Purpose
This interview with Adam Bryant and Kevin Sharer, the authors of “The CEO Test: Mastering the Challenges that Make or Break All Leaders,” examines the relationship between the leaders and followers and the key challenges that tend to determine leadership success or failure.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors told S&L’s interviewer Bri...
Purpose
Corporate innovation is an often misunderstood process, largely because managing it successfully requires inherently contradictory aims, such as control and freedom. This article looks at a variety of approaches by leading authorities.
Design/methodology/approach
A number of recent books have examined the paradoxical tensions at the heart...
Purpose
This masterclass examines how two important new books propose to achieve cost innovation, a value creation strategy that can transform an over-priced industry.
Design/methodology/approach
In their book, marketing gurus Stephen Wunker and Jennifer Luo Law highlight the potential of cost innovation in helping to create new market demand an...
Purpose
Whitney Johnson is interviewed about her latest book, Build an A Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018), which extends her disruptive innovation perspective on career development into a talent management strategy for corporate leaders and their organizations. 10; 10;
Design/m...
Purpose
This interview with the authors of Strategy – Beyond the Hockey Stick offers their insights into a major problem which has bedevilled the strategy process in too many companies over the years - the combination of bold but delusional “hockey-stick” forecasts and timid strategic moves – a coupling that severely limits the impact of any strat...
Purpose
This masterclass examines the blue ocean value innovation process, how it works in practice and how it has evolved since the publication of Blue Ocean Strategy (2005) by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne as explored in their new book their new book Blue Ocean Shift (2017).
Design/methodology/approach
The main focus is the value innovation...
Purpose
The author explains how the story of China geo-political vision has recently taken a new turn under the leadership of Xi Jinping, and signals a major shift towards a more expansive and outward-looking economic policy.
Design/methodology/approach
Understanding more fully what is happening in the latest phase of China’s modern resurgence is...
Purpose
China’s biggest contribution to Africa’s modernization is more likely to come from the rapidly expanding number of Chinese migrants determined to seek their fortunes by setting up manufacturing businesses across the continent, according to Irene Yuan Sun in her new book The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment is Reshaping Afr...
Purpose
Roger L. Martin, one of the most respected strategists, is questioned by veteran S&L interviewer Brian Leavy. The questions range from the how and why of integrative thinking methodology to academic arguments over resource-based view of strategy.
Design/methodology/approach
Martin, co-author with Jennifer Riel of the new book Creating Gr...
Purpose
Brian Leavy interviews Chris Kuenne and John Danner about research into entrepreneurial personality published in their new book Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win Corporate.
Design/methodology/approach
By studying personality types, executives can learn how different types o...
Purpose
This Masterclass considers the lessons of two recent important books have contrasting but complementary insights to offer to company leaders and strategists on how to improve the odds for developing successful innovations in response to game changes in markets.”
Design/methodology/approach
In Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today’...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the lived experience of the project leader and generate additional insight into the relationship between the social and technical aspects of the actual practice of project leadership, focussing on a particular type of project that is prevalent in practice but largely overlooked in mainstream lite...
Purpose
With the growing importance of services in the overall economy, it is surprising that the notion of service firms investing in systematic and dedicated innovation activities has taken so long to materialize. This is now set to change as service firms undertake the kind of research, design and development disciplines which for more than a c...
Purpose
This masterclass examines how customer-centric marketing, using new perspectives developed by Clayton Christensen and others, can guide new product and service innovation. Christensen’s Jobs Theory revolves around the observation that “customers don’t buy products or services,” but rather “pull them into their lives to make progress” in som...
Many leading authors in the areas of strategy and leadership believe that we are living through unprecedented volatility and complexity in the world of management, an “inflection point in the pace of change itself,” as Gary Hamel recently put it. Managers must address a tapestry of rapidly evolving issues raised by a diverse cast of powerful or sym...
Purpose
Strategy and leadership guru, Sydney Finkelstein believes that “regenerating the talent pool is the single most important thing that any leader can do” to help his or her organization to “survive and prosper.” His new book, Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016), studies “those...
Purpose
The challenge of sustaining growth seems to be getting steeper and steeper. This Masterclass provides context for two recent books that have valuable insights to offer to company leaders and strategists on how to build resilience and sustain growth in increasingly dynamic and uncertain global competitive markets.
Design/methodology/approa...
Purpose
This interview with petroleum executive John Browne, lead author of Connect: How Companies Succeed by Engaging Radically with Society, discusses sustainability practices that could be more successful than those of the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement.
Design/methodology/approach
Lord Browne, a British peer, was CEO of BP (Bri...
In traditional project management, knowledge integration assumes upfront plans as explicit knowledge. For complex projects that cannot be fully specified in advance, however, knowledge integration requires emergent learning in situated contexts (Lindkvist), which involves explicit knowledge (know-that) and experiential knowledge (know-how).
>>> To...
Purpose
Two recent books will be of considerable value to company leaders and strategists seeking to deepen their understanding of the major trends driving this current wave of global transformation: “No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends” and “China’s Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent and Other Companies are...
The research literature informs us that a software development process should be appropriate to its software development context but there is an absence of explicit guidance on how to achieve the harmonization of a development process with the corresponding situational context. Whilst this notion of harmonization may be intuitively appealing, in th...
Purpose
– In the recent book, Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation, a team of authors and researchers offer answers to the questions: How can leaders build an organization that can innovate over and over? And why, in spite of all we know about innovation, have companies not made more progress on this important question to d...
>>> Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to extend the learning boundaries of traditional project capability, which follows the linear planning paradigm, in order to include non-linear complex projects that cannot be completely specified and planned in advance, and so require continuous learning over their life cycles.
>>> Design/methodology/appr...
Software development is a complex socio-technical activity, with the result that software development organisations need to establish and maintain robust software development processes. While much debate exists regarding the effectiveness of various software development approaches, no single approach is perfectly suited to all settings and no setti...
Purpose
– The author believes that China’s modern development is reaching a crossroads, and that country is facing some critical challenges as it seeks to keep its modernization program, and further economic development, on track.
Design/methodology/approach
– This masterclass posits that understanding more fully what is happening in China, and ho...
Traditional project management (PM) privileges planning and downplays the role of learning even in more complex projects. In contrast, this paper draws inspiration from two organisations that were found to have developed complex PM expertise as a form of complex problem solving (CPS), a practice with implicit learning because complex projects are u...
In contrast to traditional projects, which are assumed to be fully specified and then executed with little learning anticipated, complex projects cannot be fully specified at the outset and require continuous learning over their life cycles. Nevertheless, the key role of knowledge formation and learning in managing complex projects is under-develop...
Purpose
– This interview aims to illuminate some of the implementation issues inherent in a new conceptual approach to managing change offered by John P. Kotter. His very promising and compelling idea is a dual operating system, comprised of a traditional management-driven hierarchy focused on delivering day-to-day performance and a strategic accel...
Purpose
– This paper aims to present an interview asking Robert I. Sutton how leaders can create or discover wellsprings of excellence and engagement within their organizations and then scale them successfully to encompass the company as a whole, and then continue to scale them successfully as the business expands.
Design/methodology/approach
– Su...
Purpose
– In this Masterclass Prof Leavy considers some game changing advice about how to manage the fundamental challenges of the spread of hyper-competition and speed at which knowledge advantages now typically erode. His intent is to advance the dialogue among the corporate strategy, innovation, leadership and entrepreneurship functions.
Design...
Purpose
– Companies with global ambitions need to pay close attention to how innovation is achieved in India. In particular, corporate leaders still have much to learn about how this economic powerhouse is likely to develop in the coming decades and what strategy and innovation plays are most likely to be successful.
Design/methodology/approach
–...
Purpose
– In this interview with Prof. Venkat Ramaswamy, Strategy & Leadership reviews the way the concept of co-creation of value with customers is being implemented on its tenth anniversary. Prof. Ramaswamy explains the basic elements of the co-creation playbook.
Design/methodology/approach
– Based on his research with companies pioneering innov...
Purpose
– This masterclass offers a guide to the disciplined approach to getting strategy fundamentals right and the strategy review process that A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin developed at P&G.
Design/methodology/approach
– The article demonstrates how P&G practiced a process that revolves around five major interrelated questions and the choices th...
Traditional project management (PM) privileges planning and downplays the role of learning even in more complex projects. In contrast, this paper draws inspiration from two organisations that were found to have developed complex PM expertise as a form of complex problem solving (CPS), a practice with implicit learning because complex projects are u...
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to provide an interview with innovation guru Rita Gunther McGrath. In this interview, McGrath offers her own perspective on the new competitive landscape, which she refers to as the “transient advantage economy,” and she sets out to help strategists more fully understand its implications and better navigate it...
Purpose
– This article sets out to examine what is different about top leadership and what is required beyond proven professional competence to be highly effective at this level.
Design/methodology/approach
– The article is a masterclass – essentially a thematic review and synthesis of some of the most influential ideas on the topic from research...
Conceptual article ‐ Purpose ‐ The tempting luster of new business ideas has led many executives to take their eyes off the basics of positioning, and instead undertake seemingly inspired initiatives that eventually destroy value. This "Masterclass" aims to put attention back on the fundamentals of strategic positioning by analyzing how the insight...
Purpose
– This paper aims to present an interview with Professor Ron Adner, author of The Wide Lens.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper presents an interview with Professor Ron Adner, author of The Wide Lens to ask about his structured approach to uncovering the hidden sources of dependence in innovation ecosystems that undermine collaboratio...
Purpose
This “Masterclass” aims to guide executives through three complementary sets of insights into what is fundamentally wrong with the current model of capitalism, and the specific actions that they can take to create long‐term economic and social value.
Design/methodology/approach
Three sets of insights are compared: Fixing the Game by Roger...
Purpose
This “Masterclass” for corporate leaders aims to explain how to integrate three revolutionary approaches to business innovation to stimulate and propel the creativity that remains latent in and around most organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
Veteran “Masterclass” author Brian Leavy believes that collaborative innovation is the new c...
Purpose
This is another in a series of Strategy & Leadership “Masterclass” papers that aims at bringing senior managers up to speed on an emerging topic – in this case, leading adaptive change by harnessing the power of new tools such as positive deviance.
Design/methodology/approach
Noted strategic management observer Brian Leavy analyzes new too...
Purpose – Companies recently have begun to look for ways to help make value pioneering more systematic and repeatable. This “Masterclass” paper aims to examine one of the first frameworks for making value innovation an effective, manageable practice, an approach practiced by Mark W. Johnson. Design/methodology/approach – This “Masterclass” paper sh...
Purpose
This paper aims to present an interview with Deloitte researcher John Hagel III, the co‐author of The Power of Pull and co‐chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, which conducts research and develops concepts for new corporate growth.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper presents the views of Hagel on how to help managers understand...
Purpose – As value innovation becomes a core top management concern, there is a growing recognition that “design thinking,” or the creative principles long associated with the design function, may now have something very significant to offer when applied more broadly to business management and strategy development. This paper aims to investigate th...
Purpose
Leading CEOs have put innovation at the forefront of their agenda for most of the last decade, but they have come to realize that it can take many forms, with different degrees of competitive impact. The paper aims to compare and contrast several forms of innovation and schools CEOs in the latest version, “design‐driven” innovation.
Design...
Purpose
Strategy & Leadership asked the originator of the concept of co‐creation of unique value with customers to explain how it works in theory and practice.
Design/methodology/approach
Questions for this interview were prepared by both academics familiar with C.K. Prahalad's concepts and managers struggling to innovate new value propositions....
Interest in the study of long-term change at industry level has been growing, yet there have been few industry studies outside the manufacturing sector. This paper looks to address this by drawing from longitudinal research that examines the drivers of industry evolution by focusing empirically on the wholesale sector. The findings confirm the impo...
Purpose – Supply chain effectiveness has never been more important to commercial success. Yet, the overall experience to date has been disappointing for too many companies. This article sets out to explain why, arguing that technology alone is not the answer and that strategy and management considerations are also crucial. Design/methodology/approa...
Purpose
To study blue ocean strategy (value innovation management), which not only reframes the strategic challenge – from competing to making the competition irrelevant – but also provides a series of tools and frameworks to act on this insight in a way that maximizes the opportunity and minimizes the risk.
Design/methodology/approach
This interv...
Purpose – How des Xilinx Corporation, with worldwide headquarters in San Jose and European headquarters in Dublin, stay on Fortune magazine's top-ten-best-companies-to-work-for list and remain the market leader in the programmable logic segment of the semiconductor industry? Design/methodology/approach – Strategy & Leadership interviewed Paul McCam...
Purpose
Advising top management how to find the right balance between corporate creativity and efficiency in order to turn innovation into commercial reality.
Design/methodology/approach
The author interviewed senior corporate managers and reviewed the literature.
Findings
Inventiveness is required in everything that is done by the company, not j...
The research reported in this paper sets out to study empirically the process by which an industry evolves, and to examine how this process is related to the process of strategic change at the level of the firm. In this way it extends the study of strategic change to change processes that involve strategic intention and action at national, industry...
Managers in developed countries are increasingly interested in outsourcing as a potential source of competitiveness and value creation. There has been a growing awareness of the potential of outsourcing to support a range of strategies beyond that of lower cost. This article makes corporate strategists familiar with four of the most promising oppor...
With their new theory about the coming revolution in value creation, C.K. Prahalad and his new collaborator, Venkat Ramaswamy, seek to go further than they or other strategy writers have gone. In their new book The Future of Competition (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), they aim to shift our whole business paradigm, or “dominant logic”, by imp...
The practice of strategic decision-making has two major perspectives to help managers create and maintain competitive advantage in the face of a range of business challenges. One stresses market position and the other core competence. (1) Market position – the positioning approach to strategy development is associated mainly with the work of Michae...
This article presents an empirical analysis of the privatization process at Comhlucht Siuicre Eireann Teoranta (CSET), the Irish Sugar Company. The CSET privatization was significant in being the first in the modern Irish political context. It was also significant in that the primary momentum for the process was generated and sustained by strategic...
The partnership approach to supplier relations is now a very common feature in many industries. This is due in large part to the phenomenal success of the ‘world class manufacturing’ (Schonberger, 1985), and ‘lean production’ crusades (Womack et al., 1990; Womack and Jones, 1994) over the last two decades, which have drawn their inspiration from th...
In the knowledge-based economy, organizations require new competitive capabilities based on harnessing the innovativeness of key individuals and teams to create value.
This article begins by looking at how the concept of learning has informed our understanding of competitiveness. It then goes on to examine the fresh perspective that the notion of learning opens up on the traditional concerns of corporate strategy, diversification and vertical integration, and on the link between strategy and structure. Next, the...
Strategic renewal has become a central focus in the strategy field in recent times.Leading companies with long track records of success, like General Motors, Sears and IBM, have been undergoing the kind of painful transformations that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago.Must the renewal process be so painful and socially disruptive or can...
Is the capacity to innovate purely attributable to talented individuals or can it be fostered by organizational processes?
This article is primarily concerned with the study of leadership in the strategy field. It argues that as our perspective on the strategy process itself changes so too must our perspective on top leadership and our approaches to studying it. From a review of the literature the article identifies some of the current issues and challenges in studying...
Citations
... The firm's purpose focuses the organization to navigate volatile and unpredictable ecosystems (including potential crises) solidifying its ability to deliver higher and more sustainable performance and its continuity into the future. Defining a firm's reason to exist and making sure it guides decisions and its operations have become a cornerstone of doing business and addressing crises (Leavy, 2021). ...
... The blue ocean strategy considers organizations existing capabilities, assets, resources, and operational activities and uses them to create innovation (Agnihotri, 2016). Leavy (2018) opined that innovation is value driven, in that cost and innovation are not opposites, but should be considered a powerful combination in marketing products and creating a competitive advantage over other organizations. The main flaw identified by Agnihotri was that the blue ocean strategy only targeted existing customers and did not seek to integrate new customers, which is why a lack of innovation could cause the blue ocean strategy to fail (Agnihotri, 2016). ...
... The final step, making your move, involves consolidating all the information into tangible actions. Leavy (2018) adds that the "wisest rollout strategy is to start small" to further test and enhance the feasibility of the new blue ocean initiative and subsequently "go fast and wide." Consequently, the formulated solution in this study will help herbal Yodosan Herba Natur shift practice away from an over-loaded market space towards a profitable and promising uncontested one, and on top of that, fabricate hitherto unfulfilled desirable products for customers. ...
... There exist nuances in this view. Bhattacharya (2016); Cau (2018); Fallon (2015); Leavy (2018); Flint and Zhu (2019) and Sági and Engelberth (2018) argue that China seeks to marginalize America in Asia, strengthens China's regional hegemony, and diminishes America's global position through leveraging its economic power on other countries. By comparison, Ma (2017); Yiwei Wang (2015), and Leverett and Wu (2017) affirm that China is geared towards a more multi-polar order by deepening the EU-China economic integration and enhancing its "legitimacy in the international economic and financial order", rather than replacing American dominance in Asia and the world (Ma 2017, 152). ...
... China is a fast-growing economy, and Chinese investors and entrepreneurs are searching for new markets to expand their businesses and control their cost of production. Recent evidence of such Chinese entrepreneurs' investment activities can be observed in African countries (Leavy, 2018). ...
... Innovation and innovation competences are the key drivers in all business sectors, including the cultural and tourism sectors; management theory implies the need for continuous improvement [5] & [6]. Innovative approaches applicable to adjust to or prevent market disruptions are plentiful [7]. The planet is facing daunting problems, such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, health threats and social injustice [8]. ...
... However, each customer feels differently about service, and they cannot predict what they will get when they receive service. When customer experience is a basic element of competitive advantage, service design becomes the key to unlocking competitive advantage (Leavy, 2017). Therefore, it is not just product or service itself that customer can identify with a company, but excellent and unforgettable experience they receive through product or service that will have a lasting impact in their memories and influence their decision to repurchase (Sultan, 2020). ...
... e role of the convolutional layer is essentially to extract local features, and then the role of the pooling layer is to combine semantically similar features [6]. Usually, the pooling layer calculates the maximum value of the local block in the feature map, and the adjacent concentrated neuron reads data from the small block by moving rows or columns. is is to reduce the dimensionality and immutability of the data [7,8]: ...
... Según Kotler (1987), una organización es capaz de alcanzar el éxito si introduce las adaptaciones oportunas y apropiadas ante la versatilidad del entorno en el que se desenvuelve. En este contexto, las entidades deben dotar a sus estructuras productivas flexibilidad, dinamismo y una rápida capacidad de reacción (Leavy, 1999), características estas, que en la mayoría de los casos pueden ser satisfechas a través de la aplicación de tecnologías de la información (TI). No obstante, su aprovechamiento debe realizarse de manera racional, debiendo ser principalmente consideradas como un instrumento, a través del cual la compañía puede no sólo manejar la información de la que dispone, sino también alcanzar sus fines organizativos (Haeckel, 1985;Bakopoulos, 1985, citados por Hernández y Jiménez, 2006. ...
... Other subjects in this category include allocation and leveling of human resources (Celkevicius and Russo, 2018), importance of soft skills (Azim et al., 2010), capability development (McEvoy et al., 2016) and formal training (Aramo-Immonen et al., 2011). The category also consists of studies related to project leadership (Cullen and Leavy, 2017;Sankaran, 2018), client capabilities (Adam et al., 2019), contractor skills (Taylor et al., 2015) and project team (Emil Berg and Terje Karlsen, 2014). This indicates the importance of human skills in project management. ...
