The Phoenix Encounter Method For Leaders

“All businesses sooner or later face the need to reconstruct their future,” explain the authors of the new book, The Phoenix Encounter Method. “They will need to destroy part or all of the incumbent business model in order to build their breakthrough, future-ready organization.”

Therefore, this book shares a new method of leadership thinking – the Phoenix Encounter – relevant to all organizations in today’s ever-changing environment. Readers will learn how to proactively bridge the gap between perceiving a threat and doing something about it.

Written by three INSEAD professors (Ian C. Woodward, V. “Paddy” Padmanabhan, Sameer Hasija) and Rum Charan, you’ll learn the steps needed to create a wider range of options to:

Defend your organization
Fortify its core business
Build specific renewal initiatives

The steps are grounded in transformation that includes these three elements:

The Phoenix Attitude: a set of mindsets, habits, and behaviors that allows a leader to embrace disruption as a path to organizational renewal.

Proactive Scanning: an intense and anticipatory curiosity that is always on the lookout for new ideas, trends, insights, threats and opportunities. Scanning while learning to think and inquire new ways to better recognize future threats and opportunities. This combines scanning with perceptual acuity and strategic inquiry.

Completely Opposite Viewpoint Debates: a form of strategic conversation that requires leaders to engage with diverse viewpoints, sometimes unwelcome ideas, and a wider range of radically different options before setting a strategic agenda.

As you read the book, you’ll also benefit from the book’s specific exercises, checklists and reflection questions to challenge your thinking and encourage growth and success. Be prepared to transform your attitude, mindset and habits to break against the status quo. The authors also ask that you hold an intense desire for renewal and change.

Phoenix Attitude Leaders are:

Dreamers and doers
Decisive with agility
Self-aware with humility
Confident to overcome fears and unleash change drivers
Courageous to bust through bias, blockers, and bureaucracy

This week, the authors shared these additional insights with me:

Question: How can leaders embrace the Phoenix Attitude?

Authors: By cultivating a set of personal attributes—mindsets, habits and behaviors—that allows them to embrace disruption as the pathway to renewal and transformation. Practicing the Phoenix Attitude enables leaders over time to see, think, and act very differently from the ways they were before.

Our field research shows that 80% of executives fall into one or more of the following four segments of strategic leadership thinking: the complacent, the arrogant, the cautious and the overwhelmed. These types find handling or imagining disruption very difficult because they are stuck in the old legacy traps of thinking and action that were encouraged and rewarded in their organizations. The unfortunate reality for these leaders is that they need to turn their mindsets and behaviors away from confirmation seeking and towards contradiction seeking.

This is the hallmark of the fifth category of leaders we have seen in our research whom we call the dreamers and the doers. They are neither overzealous imagineers nor obsessive micromanagers. They are willing to envision a future where change is a constant and they know they don’t have all the answers. They are explorers and navigators who are forward thinking, find uncertainty stimulating and outside viewpoints exciting. These are the leaders with the Phoenix Attitude.

Question: What are the new rules for succeeding in today’s unpredictable world of business?

Authors: Many of the new rules for succeeding in today’s fast-paced, unpredictable world of business are captured in the frameworks and tools of the Phoenix Encounter Method: the completely opposite viewpoints debate; proactive scanning, radical ideation, separation imperative, combinatorial innovation, embedding and dreamer-and-doer leadership.

While the book takes readers through all of these, we would like to highlight the importance of the “Completely Opposite Viewpoints Debate”. It is about orchestrating a new kind of strategic debate that starts with a very simple but extremely uncomfortable question, “what could somebody, somewhere in the world do to put together what it would take to kill our business.”

As Shigetaka Komori, CEO Fujifilm who took it to all-time highs in 2020 unlike its perennial rival Kodak who filed for bankruptcy, observed, “If the goal was simple survival, many things could be done...but I wanted Fujifilm to be a leading player in the 21st century”. His words when he assumed the CEO job in 2000 to his staff was, “In our present situation, we are Toyota if cars were to disappear. We have no choice but to confront it, and confront it head on.” Or as Jeff Bezos directed Steve Kessel (then head of its traditional media business - books, music, DVDs), “Your job is to kill your own business. I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” In short, one of the essential new rules is to get people with diverse viewpoints and ideas, to work through the Phoenix Encounter Method to generate a much wider set of options for future innovation, transformation, and change by imagining burning the business to the ground, and then conceiving ideas to rise Phoenix like from those ashes.

Question: What’s the first step any leader could take to start applying your advice tomorrow?

Authors: As a first step, we encourage leaders to step into a Completely Opposite Viewpoints Debate - just try to get a group together and experience an Encounter for themselves. Get their team to experience Radical Ideation and scanning. Confront the blinkers of the past; and reimagine a Phoenix-like future.

In the book, we walk readers through what we call “the Phoenix Encounter Method journey.” To give interested readers a flavor of this we sketch below the steps in the journey of one of our Encounter participants, Amy Kreutzer, the CEO designate of a successful healthcare business.

Amy had walked into the Phoenix Encounter with mixed feelings - what value will an exercise premised on destruction bring to me? Yet once she experienced working through the method and the debates with her team colleagues, she understood the urgency of transformation - herself and her organization. It made her redo her key strategic priorities, strengths, weaknesses and develop a totally new blueprint for renewal and transformation.

Finally, the authors recommend that as a leader you have to consciously work to create an environment, structure, and systems where Doers and Dreamers can coexist and leverage one another’s talents and complements.

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.

Comments

Bite-Sized, Daily Notes For Contemplation, Inspiration, Connection, And Clarity

Everyone can benefit from the new book, Dear Friend , which features bite-sized, daily notes for contemplation, inspiration, connection, and clarity. Busy and stressed business leaders can particularly benefit from the 365 profound, heartfelt reflections from author Michelle Maros , founder of Peaceful Mind Peaceful Life and cohost of the podcast, Life Happens with Barb and Michelle . Dear Friend invites readers to go deep and use the notes as a daily practice that compounds over time, nurturing strength, resilience, and clarity. In just a few minutes each day, this book will offer you a daily reprieve when you feel burned out, beaten down, or overwhelmed by the strains and stresses of modern life. The heart of Dear Friend began in the quiet mornings Michelle shared with her mom, Barb. Every day, they would sit together, reading affirmations or passages from Barb’s beloved books. These small rituals—simple but powerful—set the tone for each day, grounding...

How To Build A High-Performing, Resilient Organization With Purpose

“It’s time to get intentional about organizational culture and to make it strong on purpose,” explain James D. White and Krista White , authors of the new book Culture Design: How To Build A High-Performing, Resilient Organization With Purpose . “Strong company cultures, deliberately shaped, are the difference between businesses that are great versus those that are just good enough,” they add. The authors define organizational culture as a set of actions, habits, rituals, and beliefs that determine how work gets done, how decisions get made, and how people experience their workplaces. "Strong cultures don't emerge by accident," share the authors. "They're built—with clarity, consistency, and design. This book is your guide to intentionally designing a culture that is resilient, inclusive, powerful, and effective." Informed by over thirty years of operating experience across sectors and in the boardroom, the authors offer these strategies for desig...

10 Quotes From The 5 Levels Of Leadership -- John C. Maxwell

Soon I'll post my full review of John C. Maxwell's latest book, The 5 Levels of Leadership . In the meantime, here are some of my favorites quotes from the book that I believe should become a must-read book by any workplace/organizational leader: Good leadership isn't about advancing yourself. It's about advancing your team. Leaders become great, not because of their power, but because of their ability to empower others. Leadership is action, not position. When people feel liked, cared for, included, valued, and trusted, they begin to work together with their leader and each other. If you have integrity with people, you develop trust. The more trust you develop, the stronger the relationship becomes. In times of difficulty, relationships are a shelter. In times of opportunity, they are a launching pad. Good leaders must embrace both care and candor. People buy into the leader, then the vision. Bringing out the best in a person is often a catal...

Six Steps For Discussing Poor Performance With An Employee

As a leader, the time will come when you will have to speak with an employee about his or her poor performance. Here are six steps that will guide you through that process: Tell him what performance is in need of change and be specific. Tell him how his actions negatively affect the team. Let the discussion sink in. Set expectations of performance improvement and timeframe, and get his agreement on the desired outcome. Remind him that he is a valuable part of the team and that you have confidence his performance will improve. Don't rehash the discussion later. You made your point. Give him to make his improvement.

How To Be An Inspirational Leader

Today, I bring back one of my most-read blog posts from 2017. It read as follows: At the end of each year, I select my choice for the best new leadership book for that year and then highlight that book on my blog. Well, we're only five months into 2017 and there is a new leadership book so good that I can't wait until year-end to share it with you. And it's likely to be among the select few options for best new leadership book of 2017. It's called, The Inspiration Code , by Kristi Hedges . Perhaps now more than any other time, the need for inspirational leadership is critical in the workplace. Filled with profound insights and compelling data and based on a commissioned survey on who and what inspires people, Hedges uncovers a set of consistent, learnable behaviors that dramatically enhance leadership success. And shows you how to inspire those you lead. And, how to energize people every day . Kristi Hedges But, first, what exactly is inspiration? Hedges ex...

Learn How To Identify And Overcome Your Leadership Blindspots

"A blindspot is an unrecognized weakness or threat that has the potential to undermine a leader's success," explains author Robert Bruce Shaw . "Blindspots are tenacious and can reappear, causing problems over a leader's entire career." These blindspots can cause great harm when leaders fail to see what is right in front of them. Compounding the challenge says Shaw is that: "People who are smart and self-assured are often very skillful at justifying their thinking and behavior--to the point of being in denial about their weaknesses and the threats they face. One of the burdens of moving up is that the complexity of the decisions leaders face increases at the same time as their ability to reveal their vulnerabilities decreases . Blindspots are both the result of individual traits and situational factors. According to Shaw, there are 2 0 common leadership blindspots that fall under these four categories : Self Team Company Markets ...

How To Achieve Bigger Goals By Changing The Odds

Dive in for a fascinating read as you discover the life-changing power of probabilistic thinking, taught by Kyle Austin Young in his new book, Success Is A Numbers Game . “Every goal that you’re pursuing has two hidden numbers attached to it—a probability of success and a probability of failure,” explains Young, “If you can make the first number bigger and the second number smaller, you can rewrite your predicted outcome.” “Whether you’re trying to start a business, run a marathon, get a promotion, earn a pilot’s license, grow a bumper crop of tomatoes, or sign an acting deal, these two percentages are always lurking in the shadows predicting what is going to happen.” But, adds Young, "Most of us never think about them. We assume our odds are unknowable and unchangeable. This dangerous lie leads millions of people to fail at goals where they were perfectly capable of succeeding. You can choose a smarter path,” encourages Young. In Success is a Numbers Game ...

The 10 Questions Leaders Should Ask

Here are 10 important questions business leaders should ask, according to Ken Blanchard and Garry Ridge , authors of Helping People Win At Work : Does my business have a clear, meaningful, and easily understood vision/mission? Do I have the right people in the right seats on the bus? Do I have a BHAG (big hairy audacious goal), and have I communicated it to my employees? Are my values driving the behavior I want in my organization? Am I creating a culture that increases employee engagement? Am I cultivating a spirit of internal and external learning? Do my employees know what an A looks like, and am I supporting them to get that A? Are our products/services creating lasting, positive memories for our customers? Do I have the best, most timely data and information to help my business make good decisions? Are our key performance indicators the right ones, and are we measuring what matters? And, one more questions to ask is: Do we ...

42 Ways To Get Better At Getting Better

42 Rules For Getting Better At Getting Better is the sub-title of the new book, Practice Perfect . This is an interesting book because it is co-authored by three teachers and clearly it's a book for and about teachers. But, as the authors remind us, as leaders, we are also teachers. And, that's why Practice Perfect is a valuable read for everyone who wants to help their employees grow and excel through practice. And, although there's a handy three-page summary of the 42 rules toward the end of the book , take the time to read about each rule covered in the chapters: Rethinking Practice How To Practice Using Modeling Feedback Culture of Practice Post-Practice: Making New Skills Stick Key lessons and takeaways for me from the book include the following tips for providing effective feedback when working with someone who is practicing a skill : Correct instead of critique. Ask participants to redo an action differently or better rather than just ...

Eric Jacobson On Management And Leadership

Search This Blog