Katzenbach Foresight - October 2011: Innovation 1000 on why culture is key and webinar invite

October 2011

The Katzenbach Center at Booz & Company is proud to present the latest edition of Katzenbach Foresight, the newsletter—where we push intellectual and best practice boundaries in leadership, organization, culture, and human capital.

This issue features the 2011 Global Innovation 1000 study, which reveals new thinking on how culture and organization can support your innovation strategy, as well as a new Leadership Excellence article on what you can do to balance the logic of the formal with the magic of the informal organization.

We would also like to invite you to our upcoming Webinar, “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast,” on Tuesday, December 6, 2011.

We appreciate your interest in the Katzenbach Center and warmly welcome your comments and questions. Please feel free to contact us or the authors of each piece directly.

Best regards,

Jon Katzenbach
Senior Partner, Booz & Company

In This Issue

Global Innovation 1000
by Barry Jaruzelski, John Loehr, Richard Holman
Booz & Company’s seventh annual study of the world’s 1,000 largest corporate R&D spenders focuses on the ways strategic alignment and corporate culture facilitate innovation. We show that companies whose innovation strategy is tightly aligned with overall corporate strategy, and whose culture supports innovation, have better innovation results and stronger financial performance than other companies have. As in years past, we also conducted a comprehensive trend analysis of global R&D spending: Spending rose 9.3 percent in 2010, returning to its long-term trajectory after 2009’s recession-induced decline.read more >

Leadership Excellence: Lead outside the lines—Balance formal/informal, hard/soft
by Jon Katzebach
Every enterprise has a formal and an informal organization. The formal consists of analyses, strategies, structures, processes, and programs, all codified in memos and charts—these are the tools that align decisions and actions. The less familiar informal organization consists of emerging ideas, social networks, working norms, values, peer relationships, and communities of common interest—these are the elements that often hide beyond the boundaries of the formal. It is in the informal world where magic happens. However, neither of the two organizations is likely to sustain peak performance without the other. So how can you balance the logic of the formal with the magic of the informal?download (381, PDF) >

The Katzenbach Center hosted a webinar on “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” on December 6, 2011 with Jon Katzenbach, author the s+b Article on Stop Blaming your Culture, and Paul Leinwand, co-author of Essential Advantage and Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of the strategy+business magazine.

In this Webinar we talk about what we believe is the right approach for strategic success (Capabilities-Driven Strategy), why strong cultural support is essential to our “CDS” approach and how to “work with and within” your culture to execute your strategy..