Editor's note

Citation

(2005), "Editor's note", Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 26 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jbs.2005.28826caa.001

Editor's note

With its reputation for performance excellence, BMW might be the last organization one might think of in connection with “flop of the month.” But, in a case study of rewarding creative error, Bernd Kriegesmann and his co-authors describe a unique program at BMW in Germany to encourage risk-taking without damaging the final product. In the auto industry, especially, innovation is critical to success and BMW wanted to encourage innovation in its new factory at Regensburg. But employees, long trained to avoid mistakes and follow a prescribed route, were extremely skeptical about whether management really wanted innovation or whether it was strictly a paper policy. A senior human resource executive initiated the “Creative error of the month” award for employees whose heroic efforts to innovate creatively seemingly failed despite the most meticulous planning and analysis. Because only the most creative, not accidental, errors were eligible for the award, it was given only about 12 times in three years and often consisted of a bottle of wine along with recognition.

We are tempted to generalize about the focus on innovation in Germany when recalling that Bolko von Oettinger of the Boston Consulting Group, based in Munich, recently contributed a series of articles on innovation to the Journal of Business Strategy, as our readers may recall. Many of his ideas, and those of the innovators quoted and interviewed in his book, A Passion for Ideas, resonate in the article by Kriegesmann and his colleagues. Clearly, achieving real innovation requires acceptance of mistakes, and it is not so easy to balance the two in a business world defined by fierce competition and little forgiveness for error.

Two of our articles in this issue refer to Robert Kaplan and David Norton’s seminal work on the balanced scorecard and strategy mapping. When it comes to executing strategy, pictures may be worth at least a thousand words, especially if those words refer to strategic concepts open to different interpretations. Cam Scholey provides a detailed guide to using the popular strategy-mapping concept in his case study of a trucking company. Dale Fodness, also a student of strategy mapping, maintains that the marketing profession is long overdue in applying the same attention and rigor to strategic thinking that it applies to strategic planning. While a robust planning framework is vital to marketing success, it is no longer sufficient by itself. The need for managers who can think strategically about marketing will only increase.

The word “opportunity” in business often substitutes as a euphemism for “problem” or “major problem,” just as “challenge” can mean almost anything when uttered by a chief executive. Don Morris’ paper on an opportunity model for strategic analysis narrows the definition of “opportunity” and presents a usable model for taking advantage of genuine opportunities. Morris’ background makes him an unlikely author of such a paper, although he teaches accounting and business ethics at a university. With three degrees in philosophy, including a doctorate, one might expect to find him meditating and not calculating. But his “purist outlook” convinced him that philosophy is not conducive to traditional academic dispensing and he turned to accounting as an area demanding objectivity, precise communication, deductive reasoning and a sense of balance. Besides, philosophers tend to be in much less demand than accountants.

Sometimes even the smartest business people have low intelligence – emotional intelligence, that is. They perform well up to a point, but ultimately their way of dealing with people at work causes major problems. Steve Xavier, in his article on improving emotional intelligence, a concept popularized by Daniel Goleman, suggests in several case studies that managers can improve their skills and their approach to other people through expert coaching and by being receptive to change.

Finally, Accenture’s paper on the “intelligent clean room” is not about decontamination. Earlier “clean rooms” were indeed physically isolated spaces where third-party experts could examine certain documents before a merger or acquisition. In this contribution by five Accenture experts, the intelligent clean room emerges as a construct that allows broad integration planning by third parties before final approvals come through. Clean room processes can include the building of detailed financial models for assessing cost synergies on a business-unit basis or even a line-item basis, creating tools for tracking synergies, assisting the legal teams with regulatory findings, setting up post-merger governance models, and administering the overall project calendar.

We welcome comments and suggestions from readers.