I consider John Wooden and Warren Buffett as two great teachers. Their main attribute is that they are great teachers of fundamentals whether it is finance or coaching. John Wooden is no more. He passed away on June 4^th, 2010 at the age of 99, but his wisdom lives on.

Leadership

• Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are
• Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming
• Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful
• Ability may get you to the top, but it takes character to keep you there
• The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team
• It is what we learn after we know it all that really counts
• Things turn out best for people who make the best out of the way things turn out

Execution

• If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes
• Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do
• It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen
• If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
• Never mistake activity for achievement
• It isn’t what you do, but how you do it

Pankaj Ghemawat in his book on the subject, Redefining Global Strategy, presents two strategic frameworks to help companies operate across borders. Two specific frameworks are – ADDING Value Scorecard and AAA.

The ADDING Value Scorecard is a framework to help companies assess whether a particular strategic move makes sense to add value to the business both locally and globally.

The acronym stands for –

• A – Adding volume, or growth;
• D – Decreasing costs;
• D – Differentiating or increasing willingness—to—pay;
• I – Improving industry attractiveness or bargaining power;
• N – Normalizing (or optimizing) risk;
• G – Generating and deploying knowledge (and other resources and capabilities).

One more framework to help companies deal with cross-border differences; it’s called the AAA triangle which stands for adaptation, aggregation and arbitrage.

• Adaptation strategies are designed to help companies adjust to differences across borders;
• Aggregation strategies are designed to help companies overcome some country differences by grouping them based on similarities;
• Arbitrage strategies seek to profit from some of these national differences rather than treating them as constraints.

Pankaj Ghemawat also has a blog, What in the World, on globalization. For my blog “Get off the drawing board”, the context of “learn-to-burn ratio” that he talks about in his blog entry  is topical.

• Recognize the value of options (alternatives) in an uncertain world. Strategy options often vary greatly in their "learn-to-burn" ratios – the rate at which they generate information about which scenario will come to pass versus the rate at which they commit resources to particular scenarios. Once you take this kind of option value into account, it opens the door to additional strategic possibilities: e.g., mixed supply chains (rather than complete offshoring or onshoring), toeholds as ways of exploring new markets and, more generally, sequenced strategies.

Business model can be best described through nine building blocks that show the logic of how a company intends to make money. The nine blocks cover the four main areas of a business: customers, offer, infrastructure, and financial viability. The business model is like a blueprint for a strategy to be implemented through organizational structures, process, and systems.

Per Business Model Generation Book, following are the 9 blocks –

• Customer Segments – An organization serves one or several customers.
• Value Propositions – It seeks to solve customer problems and satisfy customer needs with value propositions.
• Channels – Value Propositions are delivered to customers through communication, distribution, and sales Channels.
• Customer Relationships – Customer relationships are established and maintained with each customer segment.
• Revenue Streams – Revenue streams result from value propositions successfully offered to customers.
• Key Resources – Key resources are the assets to offer and deliver the previously described elements.
• Key Activities – Performing a number of key activities
• Key Partnerships – Some activities are outsourced and some resources are acquired outside of the enterprise.
• Cost Structure – The business model elements result in the cost structure.

The workshop at World Economic Form was organized around six themes as fire starters for discussion about design and its potential role in effecting change.

• Clarity: Complex problems require simple, clear and honest solutions.
• Context: No solution should be developed and delivered in isolation, but should recognize its context in terms of time, place and culture.
• Inspiration: Successful solutions will move people by satisfying their needs, giving meaning to their lives and raising their hopes and expectations.
• Participation: Effective solutions will be collaborative, inclusive and developed with the people who will use them.
• Sustainability: Every solution needs to be robust, responsible and designed with regard to its long-term impact on the environment and society. Quality of the materials and design concept should be long-lasting.
• Transformation: Exceptional problems demand exceptional solutions that may be radical and even disruptive.

Wicked problems, first identified by mathematician and planner Horst Rittel in the 1960s,  are messy, aggressive, and confounding.

According to Jennifer Riel, associate director of the Desautels Centre, you know you have a wicked problem if:

• The causes of the problem are not just complex but deeply ambiguous; you can tell why things are happening the way they are and what causes them to do so.
• The problem doesn’t fit neatly into any category you’ve encountered before; it looks and feels entirely unique, so the problem-solving approaches you’ve used in the past don’t’ seen to apply.
• Each attempt at devising a solution changes the understanding of the problem; merely attempting to some to a solution changes the problem and how you think about it.
• There is no clear stopping rule; it is difficult to tell when the problem is “solved” and what that solution may look like when you reach it.

Horst Rittel’s notion of wicked problems was detailed by C. West Churchman in a 1968 magazine of Management Science. Churchman described wicked problem as “a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients, and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing”. In other words, wicked problems are ill-defined and unique in their causes, character, and solution.

With hard problems, your job is to look at the situation, identify a set of definite conditions, and calculate a solution. With wicked problems, the solution can no longer be the only or even the primary focus. Instead, dealing with wicked problems demands that attention be paid to understanding the nature of the problem itself. Problem understanding is central; the solution, secondary.

Are there wicked problems that you are aware of? Is “Health care in US” a wicked problem? How about the long-term solution for the poorest nation in Western Hemisphere – “Haiti”?

Philosopher John Dewey believed “the aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education….The object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth.”

Learning skills are cognitive skills that are defined in three broad categories:

• Information and communication;
• Thinking and problem solving; and
• Interpersonal and self-directional skills.

Learning skills enable people to acquire new knowledge and skills, connect new information to existing knowledge, analyze, develop habits of learning and work with others to use information among other skills. These “knowing how to learn” skills provide both flexibility and security in an era characterized by constant change. People who can learn new information, new ways of doing things, for example, have opportunities to make larger contributions to the world than who cannot.

Example of complex integrative solution – Drive profitability while pursuing both innovation and operational excellence.

80-20 rule states that for 20 percent of the maximum effort, we can get 80 percent of the ideal result. Applied to the cognitive domain, the rule says that 20 percent of the maximum mental effort will yield 80 percent of the perfect answer. Further the rule suggests that only an obsessive or pathological perfectionist would invest 80 percent more effort in the hope of reaching an answer that would at best only be 20 percent better.

The 80-20 rule implicitly acknowledges that simplification is not the perfect solution to the problems of ambiguity and causal inconsistency, but rather a coping mechanism. We settle for 80 percent to avoid being overwhelmed by complexity and losing the ability to function at all. It is also a way to keep the complexity at a tolerable level.

As comforting as simplification can be, however, it impairs every step of the integrative thinking process. It encourages us to edit out salient features rather than consider the question of salience broadly. Editing, in turn, leads to unsatisfactory resolutions of the dilemmas that business throws at us. Simplification makes us favor linear, unidirectional causal relationships, even if reality is more complex and multidirectional.

Simplification also encourages us to construct a limited model of the problem before us whatever it might be. The alternatives we perceive are meager and unattractive, closing any remaining avenue to an integrative resolution. The simplifying mind has no choice but to settle for trade-offs, also known as best bad choice available.

The following graphics are from the book – The Opposable Mind –

The following is a subset of Israeli companies that have leveraged technological mashups to solve drug delivery problems. It is a product of the multidisciplinary backgrounds that is obtained by combining military and civilian experiences. But it is also a way of thinking that produces particularly creative solutions and potentially opens new industries and “disruptive” advances in technology.

The flaw with the simplicity/complexity is that it gives the impression that it about making a binary choice – but simplicity and complexity are not polar opposites. In fact, making something “simpler” is often a case of relocating complexity, rather than eliminating it. For example, from the driver’s perspective, a manual-shift transmission is more complex than an automatic transmission. But from an overall systems perspective, the automatic transmission is equally or even more complex.

The following is an example of the complexity of the problem situation in public health – what comes first – prevention of disease through clean water supply or treatment of disease – what comes first? There are no easy solutions to these situations.

Just to enact one part of the plan, just to extend Zanmi Lasante’s program for preventing of HIV from mothers to babies, looked as difficult as the nationwide MDR project in Peru, and that project ranked among the most complex health interventions ever undertaken in a poor country. Only 20 percent of women in rural Haiti received any medical care. An estimated 5 percent had HIV. To find them, a group of PIH and Zanmi Lasante doctors and health workers and Haitian government employees, would have to undertake AIDS education among about half a million peasants who were scattered throughout a mountainous region of about four hundred square miles. They’d have to establish labs and testing centers in a place where the principal roads were nearly impassable even in good weather. They’d have to train lab technicians to run those centers, in places that had only intermittent electricity or none, and hire and train many additional community health workers to deliver prophylactic drugs twice a day for nine months to each infected pregnant woman and for a week to each newborn baby. Because breast milk can transmit the virus, each mother would have to be provided with infant formula for at least nine months, and because the formula would have to be mixed with local water, team would have to clean up the water supplies in dozens of places.

“What problem are you trying to solve?” is the question usually asked when the problem situation gets complex. The intent of the person asking the question is to simplify and to get to the crux of the problem, and then move forward to putting together the actions to resolve the problem – and in most cases time and resources. But remember, “Resources are always limited”, for any organization. And decisions and indecisions made during the problem solving exercise drive the anticipated future.