Leading the vigilant organization

Strategy & Leadership

Volumn 34, Issue 5, 2006, Pages 4-10

  Day, George S ^a   Schoemaker, Paul J h ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

^b Decision Strategies International Inc   (United States)

Author keywords

Business environment; Leadership; Organizations

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748209227     PISSN: 10878572     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1108/10878570610684784     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. Quote from a speech given by Lord Browne at Bradford University on November 23, 2001; for full text of his speech see www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId 1/4 98&contentId 1/4ss 2000350
2. Our research study began with an extensive set of scaled indicators for each of the five components of the capability. A questionnaire based on these indicators was given to 160 senior executives in a variety of companies, or in executive programs at INSEAD and Wharton. The indicators of the leadership component clustered together, and were the most highly correlated with a question asking about the overall capability. This research is described in detail in Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Can Make or Break Your Company, George S. Day and Paul J.H. Schoemaker (Harvard Business School Press, 2006).
3. The terms “minding and mining” were used in a presentation made by John Seely Brown at the Wharton conference on Peripheral Vision and in his subsequent article: John Seely Brown, “Minding and mining the periphery,” Long Range Planning, Vol. 37, 2004, pp. 143-151.
4. “Change and reorganization - signs of things to come as Thompson becomes DG,” BBC, June 22, 2004, available at: www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/06_june/22/thompson. shtml
5. “BBC launches its vision of the future and manifesto for action,” BBC Press Releases, June 29, 2004, available at: www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/06_june/29/bpv.shtml
6. Gary Hamel, Leading the Revolution, Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
7. Our approach to the periphery is complementary to Max H. Bazerman and Michael D. Watkins. Predictable Surprises: The Disasters You Should Have Seen Coming and How to Prevent Them, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004. They are focused on the more predictable end of the continuum of uncertainty, and offer valuable insights into why events can take an organization by surprise, “despite prior knowledge of all the information needed to anticipate the event and the consequences.” We look further at the unpredictable end of the spectrum, and then build a capability for taking early action on signals of threats and opportunities.
8. Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (Little and Brown, 2005). For a critical assessment of this interesting book see Hogarth, R.S. and Schoemaker, P.J.H., “Book review of Blink,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Vol. 18, 2005, pp. 309-318.
9. For further detail on this tragic case, including the data charts, see Russo, J. Edward and Schoemaker, Paul J.H., Winning Decisions: Getting It Right the First Time, Doubleday, November 2001, pp. 202-204.
10. We are using “tolerable” in the sense of the second level of residual uncertainty as defined by Hugh Courtney, 20:20 Foresight: Crafting Strategy in an Uncertain World (Harvard Business School Press, 2001).