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

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...

How to Be a Leader – 9 Principles from Dale Carnegie

Today, I welcome thought-leader Nathan Magnuson as guest blogger... Nathan writes : This is it, your first day in a formal leadership role. You’ve worked hard as an individual contributor at one or possibly several organizations. Now management has finally seen fit to promote you into a position as one of their own: a supervisor. You don’t care if your new team is only one person or ten, you’re just excited that now – finally – you will be in charge! Unfortunately the euphoria is short-lived. Almost immediately, you are not only overwhelmed with the responsibilities of a team, but you quickly find that your team members are not as experienced or adroit as you. Some aren’t even as committed. You find yourself having to repeat yourself, send their work back for corrections, and staying late to fill the gap. If something doesn’t change soon, you might just run yourself into the ground. How did something that looked so easy ...

The Psychology Of Leadership

I read many books about leadership and this book is one of my favorites. It’s The Psychology of Leadership by Sebastien Page . It offers a fresh take on leadership through the lens of groundbreaking research in positive, sports, and personality psychology. “Like exercise strengthens your body, practicing positive, sports, and personality psychology will make you a better leader,” says Page. The book blends research, fascinating true stories, humor, and self-improvement advice to deliver simple yet powerful principles to master the mental game of leadership. Page reveals timeless strategies for achieving lasting impact, fostering growth, and promoting well-being. He demonstrates how leaders and individuals can balance measurable goals with practical approaches to maximize performance and fulfillment. “Effective leadership is not merely about achieving measurable outcomes. It requires aligning goals with intrinsic motivations and psychological ins...

70 New Year's Resolutions For Leaders

With 2026 fast approaching, it's a good time to identify your New Year's Resolutions for next year. To get you started, how about selecting one or more of the following 70 New Year's resolutions for leaders? Perhaps write down five to ten and then between now and January 1, think about which couple you want to work on during 2026. Don't micromanage Don't be a bottleneck Focus on outcomes, not minutiae Build trust with your colleagues before a crisis comes Assess your company's strengths and weaknesses at all times Conduct annual risk reviews Be courageous, quick and fair Talk more about values more than rules Reward how a performance is achieved and not only the performance Constantly challenge your team to do better Celebrate your employees' successes, not your own Err on the side of taking action Communicate clearly and often Be visible Eliminate the cause of a mistake View every problem as an opportunity to grow Summarize group consensus after each deci...

The Many Times You Should Thank Customers

In your leadership role, it's vital that your team members know how to deliver excellent customer service. " Knock Your Socks Off " type service as book editor Ann Thomas and Jill Applegate would say. Part of delivering excellent customer service is saying "Thank You" to your customers and knowing when to say "Thank You". Thomas and Applegate recommend telling your customers "Thank You" during at least these nine situations : When they do business with you...every time. When they compliment you (or your company) When they offer you comments or suggestions When they try one of your new products or services When they recommend you to a friend When they are patient...and even when they are not so patient When they help you to serve them better When they complain to you When they make you smile You and your team members can say "Thank You" : Verbally In writing (and don't underestimate the power of perso...

8 Tips For Leaders New To Blogging

Here are eight tips for leaders new to blogging or for leaders who want to ensure their company's Blog is the most effective it can be: Use keywords for your business in your Blog posting headlines. Write about the pain points of your target reader. Be sure your Blog covers topics where you or your company is truly an expert. Keep your Blog postings short. Keep paragraphs and sentences short. Use bullets. Include a call to action. Perhaps you ask a question or offer a downloadable white paper. Or, ask readers to sign up for your company's e-newsletter. Publish a list that is likely to be shared by your Blog's readers. Include and quote industry experts in your Blog postings. Use free metrics and analytical tools to measure which of your postings are best read and shared. Use the tool to track the sources that drive the most traffic to your Blog.

6 Ways To Seek Feedback To Improve Your Performance In The Workplace

Getting feedback is an important way to improve performance at work. But sometimes, it can be hard to seek out, and even harder to hear. “Feedback is all around you. Your job is to find it, both through asking directly and observing it,” says David L. Van Rooy, author of the new book, Trajectory: 7 Career Strategies to Take You From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be . As today's guest post, Van Rooy offers these six tips for how to get the feedback you need to improve performance at work . Guest Post By David L. Van Rooy 1. Don’t forget to as k : One of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming things are going perfectly (until they make a catastrophic mistake). By not asking, you’re missing out on opportunities for deep feedback: the difficult, critical feedback that gives you constructive ways to improve. 2. Make sure you listen : Remember, getting fee...

40 Timeless Lessons From Southwest Airlines

A few years ago, Southwest Airlines celebrated its 40th year and was kind enough to share in its in-flight magazine 40 lessons it learned since 1971. The lessons provide good tips for business leaders. If you missed the full list, here are some of the highlights of timeless lessons: Invent your own culture and put a top person in charge of it . A crisis can contain the germ of a big idea . Simplicity has value . For Southwest, simplicity means using 737s for most of its fleet, which makes maintenance more cost-effective and allows more efficient training for flight crews and ground crews. Remember your chief mission . Take your business, not yourself, seriously. Put the worker first . For Southwest, that meant being the first U.S. airline to offer a profit-sharing plan, in 1974. Employees now own 13 percent of the airline. The web ain't cool, it's a tool . Southwest was the first U.S. airline to establish a home page. By 2010, ...

70 New Year's Resolutions For Leaders

With 2024 fast approaching, it's a good time to identify your New Year's Resolutions for next year. To get you started, how about selecting one or more of these 70 New Year's resolutions for leaders? Perhaps write down five to ten and then between now and January 1, think about which couple you want to work on during 2024. Don't micromanage Don't be a bottleneck Focus on outcomes, not minutiae Build trust with your colleagues before a crisis comes Assess your company's strengths and weaknesses at all times Conduct annual risk reviews Be courageous, quick and fair Talk more about values more than rules Reward how a performance is achieved and not only the performance Constantly challenge your team to do better Celebrate your employees' successes, not your own Err on the side of taking action Communicate clearly and often Be visible Eliminate the cause of a mistake View every problem as an opportunity to grow Summarize group consensus after each decision point...

Leadership Lessons From A Serial Entrepreneur

Brad Jacobs’ new book provides you a treasure trove of leadership lessons from a man with more than four decades of CEO and serial entrepreneur experience. So, even if you don’t envision yourself wanting to earn a billion dollars, don’t pass up reading Jacob’s, How To Make A Few Billion Dollars . In the book, Jacobs defines the mindset that drives his remarkable success in corporate America – and distills a lifetime of business brilliance into a tactical road map. And he shares his techniques for: Turning a healthy fear of failure to your advantage. Building an outrageously talented team. Catalyzing electric meetings. Transforming a company into a superorganism that beats the competition. “This book is about what I’ve learned from my blunders, and how you can replicate our successes,” says Jacobs. He shares his candid account of the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. Jacobs has founded seven billion-dollar or multibillion-dollar businesse...

Eric Jacobson On Management And Leadership

Search This Blog