Creative Destruction

 I've been in and out of the "strategy" business for years, working as an ELT member in a startup, defining strategy, working as a strategy consultant, helping businesses develop and implement strategy, and teaching strategy in a master's program.  I find strategy fascinating, enough that I wrote a book on strategy with a friend and colleague translating military maneuver strategy to the business world .  Shameless plug! What's interesting about executive teams is how much they want to "get the strategy right" and of course they are incented to succeed.  What's also interesting is how little many executive teams understand about the reality of writing down a strategy and the work and focus it takes to implement a strategy.  What's worse is that most executive teams attempt to assign themselves so much of the responsibility for implementing strategies that they lose sight of the key responsibilities that leadership teams should focus on:  building...

 If you believe the pundits, we will soon experience a great transformation, shifting in the next 3-5 years to a workforce composed of fewer people and more robots and agents.  I, for one, welcome our benevolent computer overlords.  The implicit promise is that the robots and agents will remove the drudgery of my work and leave me with only the higher order functions and responsibilities.  I certainly hope that is true. If true, this should be highly motivating for the people who remain employed, but I don't think it addresses all of the factors of motivation.  In fact, I'm not sure most companies truly understand what it is that motivates people in their work.  I'd like to spend a few minutes today writing about what I think is true about motivation and engagement in the workforce and why companies get it so wrong.  More importantly, if we do end up with a smaller workforce that is providing more value, getting motivation right will become more import...