The energy for value creation and innovation originates with the customer. By being open to new value propositions, customers bring them into being. The customer imagines a future that’s better than today. Entrepreneurship brings that future into reality.
Visual design is an important element in value creation, especially in telling a brand’s or a business’s story in a way that engages with customers and communicates shared values. Visual designers are multi-talented artists and storytellers with an acute understanding of customers and their emotional responses to visual cues. Our guest this week is Jacqueline Porter, an accomplished professional in her field and a very successful business owner in her own right.
We explored the business of design and creativity from the challenges within design education, and the drawbacks of rigid design frameworks and the value of subjective, creative approaches. A notable reference to a transitional figure in design Steve Jobs shows how simplicity and creativity – rules and no-rules – can work together.
The conversation moves to the realm of implementation in branding, exploring the delicate and shifting balance between fixed and flexible elements. Jacqueline advocates for constant evolution, telling a story with a dynamic interplay between exploration and exploitation for sustained success. Consistency is achieved with creativity, empathy, and adaptability.
What in the past has been thought of as “management” has no place in the modern digital (and increasingly AI powered) enterprise. We need a new mental model.
In our ongoing series investigating leadership in business – coming from the skeptical perspective of “Is there such a thing?” – we meet Amanda Goodall, a professor of leadership at Bayes Business School, City University of London, specializing in the influence of leaders and managers on performance, shares insights from her book “Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders.”
She has a new perspective on business leadership. It’s not a general management function that can be taught in an MBA course. It can’t be learned from leadership courses. It can’t be implemented by management consulting firms. Leaders must first be experts in their field and the core business of the firm.
Amanda shares the importance of experts in providing a clearer sense of purpose and fostering a longer-term organizational perspective. The dialogue concludes with a call to establish expert-friendly environments, and emphasizes the removal of impediments to harness expertise for organizational success.
The world is moving in favor of value geeks – those who know and apply the 4 guiding principles of the value creation algorithm.
Moshik Temkin is a historian who offers an alternative perspective on leadership. He asks, do leaders make history or does history make leaders? Those two forces can’t be separated. While leaders contribute to shaping history, they are also molded by powerful historical forces. This nuanced perspective is evident in analyses of historical figures like FDR, Margaret Thatcher, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, emphasizing the role of circumstances in leadership’s response to complex historical challenges, ultimately leading to significant changes in their respective nations. The conversation explores moral leadership in the civil rights movement, comparing the approaches of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Despite their distinct styles, both leaders shared a commitment to collective progress and justice, challenging the prevailing emphasis on individual success. Temkin addresses the ethical dilemmas leaders encounter during crises, prompting reflection on the justifiability of extreme measures for the sake of victory.
How does this discussion contribute to the question of leadership in business? Leadership is subjective. We look to those who we feel can guide us, whether in politics or business. There are principles that cross both fields.