Start Talking to Strangers: Interview with Author Julia Hautz
I recently went one on one with Julia Hautz. Julia is a professor of strategic management at the University of Innsbruck, Austria and the co-author of the new book Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Julia: Thanks for this opportunity. I am a professor of strategic management at the University of Innsbruck and I am living with my husband and my two little girls in a small Tyrolean village in the Austrian Alps. My educational background and my research are characterized by drawing on different fields and perspectives. I don’t like focusing on and specializing in one field, I guess I have always been too curious about what’s going on somewhere else. Before studying international business, I was educated in civil engineering and construction management and my research interests have bridged strategy, innovation, information systems and organization studies and with multiple links to digitalization.
A very challenging experience that has really shaped and changed my professional perspective was my academic exchange year, which I spent in the USA. When planning this mandatory year abroad, I was determined to get accepted at the Tulane University in New Orleans. I did a lot of research and gathered tons of information to identify the best classes, the most interesting and engaging lecturers, and to find the best apartment strategically positioned between the campus, the gym, and the student bars. I enrolled in my favorite classes, furnished my dream apartment, and had a clear plan for the year ahead, and then – Hurricane Katrina hit the city.
After fleeing and wandering around Louisiana in a rental car, it became clear that the city would not re-open, so I was told to go home and postpone my year abroad. But I couldn’t warm to this option. I found a University that was willing to waive tuition fees even without a partner agreement, but this required me to take action. Within 24 hours I drove all night long to Texas, was admitted at the University of Texas at Austin in the morning, chose all my classes without any background information, rented an apartment I had not seen before in a city I knew nothing about, bought new furniture and clothes and sat in my first two classes. And I have to admit that was scary, painful and challenging. But it just turned out to be an awesome opportunity. A great semester in Austin was followed by an equally nice stay in New Orleans when the city was opened up again – so even better than I planned.
Long story short, I think this is exactly the situation that organizations and their leaders are facing today – they are hit by hurricanes such as rapid technological development, the pandemic etc. Long-term planning does no longer works. Organizations do not only have to be very flexible and quickly respond and adapt to any kind of “hurricane” situation, but they have to be able to see the unique opportunities brought by them and reap the associated benefits.
Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?
Julia: It’s simple: start talking to strangers. To be more specific, in our book “Open Strategy: Mastering Disruption from Outside the C-Suite” we wanted to tell executives that remaining sequestered in their Boardroom when crafting their strategic plans will not get them far. Rather than limiting strategic deliberations to small executive teams, leaders need to reach out to front-line staff, partners, customers, and even beyond their industry when forging strategies for the future. What we offer readers is a systematic way and a variety of tools such as strategy jams, online communities and contests, prediction markets or workshop formats to do this. In principle it does not sound like rocket-science. And it is not. But still, you need to be careful in pulling this off to get lots of exiting fresh ideas. One of the big bonuses: you will face much less resistance during implementation when people are involved. What’s important to really benefit from this approach: Opening up the strategy process is not about new tools, it is a new business philosophy, a fundamental mindset shift in thinking which embraces diversity, transparency and inclusion.
Adam: In your view, what are the key components of a winning strategy?
Julia: Where do I start! It seems to get more difficult every year. But in more seriousness, I think there are two key components here.
First, in today’s volatile, complex, and ambiguous world, strategy making no longer only concerns establishing order, predictability, and stability, which allow leaders to guide and constrain activities within their organizations. Instead, companies must constantly scan the horizon, to identify and interpret any changes and seizing opportunities. To stay competitive companies are required to find new and promising business ideas and formulate strategies around them before their competitors do so.
Second, companies are facing the challenge to successfully implement those strategies once they are created and translate them into meaningful action in order to quickly grasp newly identified business opportunities. And such quick and efficient execution is equally hard - if not even more difficult - than new strategy development.
Open Strategy can support both of these key components. Involving people outside of the executive team, from diverse hierarchical levels, functions, industries, and backgrounds, will enable leaders to better position their organizations to meet change and to identify future trends affecting their industry. But it will also help to transform ideas into new business models and to implement strategies more quickly and effectively.
Adam: How can leaders most effectively implement a winning strategy?
Julia: By involving people. Let me give you an example. Telefónica, the Spanish telecom giant, uses a social networking platform to engage all of its 125.000 employees in discussion around the company’s future. Not just once in a while but constantly. Strategy is no longer something that employees learn about passively. It’s not something that is done to them. It’s done with them. Executives don’t have to spend much time and effort on communicating and justifying a newly developed strategy and creating legitimacy. People understand, internalize and adopt the strategies and work on them with real commitment because they feel part of it. How cool is that!
Adam: What are key pitfalls leaders should be aware of and how can they avoid them?
Julia: There is actually a great new book out on this by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein. In “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement” they hone in on the biases we have when we make decisions. My thinking is very much aligned with what they point out as well. Today organizations feel immense pressure to see disruptive trends, act before they are disrupted, and enter new businesses. With so little time to make decisions, leaders fall back on their own experience—and they fall prey to their cognitive and behavioural biases, which hinder the adoption of radically new strategies and business models and are hard to overcome.
Such biases are especially dangerous to lone strategists and small close knit-teams. Similar experience and background and the pressure to conform can easily lead such groups to ignore information that contradicts their existing assumptions.
The solution I propose to break free of habitual patterns of thought and industry’s dominant logic is diversity. Involving more people and bringing in a really diverse crowd. Or put differently, open up your strategy.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Julia: In my view, a great example to discuss the qualities of a leader, who fully embraces the philosophy of openness is Jim Whitehurst, current President at IBM and former CEO of North Carolina–based Red Hat, one of the most open organizations we’ve encountered.
Leaders such as Jim do not think of strategy development as “their” role. Jim rather sees himself as catalyst in chief whose job is to stir the debate and ignite the conversation. Such leaders understand that involving others in the conversation has nothing to do with compromising power and status.
The inclination of Jim Whitehurst as a leader is to remain open to new ideas wherever they originate and to discover profitable applications. Such leaders acknowledge that in today’s volatile world, they can’t predict future trends and have the best ideas on their own. Rather, they see their tasks in transferring patterns across fields, cross-fertilizing ideas across domains, putting together discrete pieces of decentralized knowledge, understanding them, and synthesizing them into a workable solution. Therefore, they welcome diverse talent and people with non-traditional careers and unusual vantage points, invite their opinions, and make sure they have the support required to thrive in their organization.
You know you’re ready for Open Strategy when, like Jim Whitehurst, you can approach unpredictability and supposedly “crazy” ideas with interest and enthusiasm instead of skepticism. Finally, in my opinion, such leaders are characterized by their strong desire to learn and thrive on challenges even when they are encountering setbacks.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Julia: After all we talked about, you won’t be surprised that I also call for openness here. Read widely, meet people you don’t usually talk to, make sure that front-line staff has a voice in your company. Leadership is more and more of a coordination and orchestration job. Make sure you get comfortable with this.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives and civic leaders?
Julia:
Constantly look into different fields – even if the seem far from your industry
Listen to people who don’t have any experience or expertise in your respective field
Value collaboration
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Julia: Not sure whether I would call it advice, but one weekend, when I was in the midst of working on research related to the book my husband pointed out that as far as he knows universities are not open on weekends. He had a point here. It’s important to take the switch off occasionally. For me the ‘university’ is now closed on the weekend. Well, most of the time at least.
Adam Mendler is the CEO of The Veloz Group, where he co-founded and oversees ventures across a wide variety of industries. Adam is also the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. Adam has written extensively on leadership, management, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities and non-profit organizations.
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