Falling in love with the future

By Miquel Lladó

One of the top experts in business strategy, Miquel Lladó shares with us his professional experience in significant cant executive roles in big, multinational companies. In this book the reader will discover Miquel Lladó's work methodology, and, more importantly, the ideas that have contributed to him creating his own future and reaching high-ranking levels in business leadership. Rich in real-life cases, experienced first-hand by the author –a deep connoisseur of the ins and outs of management in big companies– Lladó offers a truly organic and understandable summary. It enables the reader to become immersed in concepts worth mastering to fully understand the needs of a company and to achieve successful strategy implementation, even in a context such as the current covid-19 pandemic crisis. Indeed, an inspiring text for those current and future leaders eager to play in the big leagues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Plataforma
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9788418582325

Book preview

writing

Introduction

Thinking versus teaching

I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.

Sócrates

Why don’t I find strategy books fascinating? I start reading one. It explains different theories to me. It shows me diagrams. Then … I see that it makes no difference whether the past, the present, or the future is important, whether strategy cannot be planned, whether it is emergent, whether it goes from top to bottom or upwards. Ultimately, authors are usually highly regarded professionals who honour their points of view as the most dominant. It seems like everyone is right. Maybe that is why I disengage after having read a few pages of a strategy book.

There are over two hundred thousand strategy books on Amazon Books and only four hundred on appendicitis. Why? I dare to think that when there are so many books on a subject, it means that the subject is not at all clear. I think that there are only four hundred books on appendicitis because appendicitis is appendicitis. And there are more than two hundred thousand books on strategy because many want to talk about the subject and because it is something that leads us to a future that does not yet exist, contingent on a thousand possibilities, where everything is yet to be written. When there are so many books on a topic, it confirms that there are many alternative paths to follow.

Therefore, I think that the best strategy book is each person’s own: the one we can write right now. We are all accumulating experiences, decisions, successes and lessons. This is the main reason that has prompted me to write this book, adding another one to those two hundred thousand. This book is not meant to impose any truth or theory, but to stimulate curiosity and reflection, putting forth my own experiences in black and white: those who have helped me in my professional career spanning more than forty years, both in executive positions and as a business consultant and strategy professor.

This is the book I would write for myself. It is a book in which to find the most important lessons, the ideas that have impacted and influenced me most. It is the book that I most want to share. In short, it contains ideas that have substantially helped me in my life.

I hope this book to inspire current and future leaders to believe in their own strategy view, as we are best placed to define it. We know ourselves best, our era, that of our people, nobody else. At the end of the day, as one student in a recent programme put it, strategy is life itself. And if so, that life is yours and nobody else’s.

Of course, you must spend time reading and learning from many people’s experiences and growing with them. This allows us not only to live our own life, but the lives of many. Yes, you need to devote time to reading. Of course. But there comes a time when, after having accumulated so much in your life, we are in the best position to write down our future. Let’s write. Write down your future from your own experiences and lessons learned, which are worth just as much as anyone else’s. Because they are yours and nobody else’s. Let’s listen to others, and read, and let’s also listen to ourselves by writing our own future. The best strategy book. The one that will take you where you want to go.

I sincerely hope that this book encourages you to give the best of yourself: not only to grow strategically, but above all, to allow you to lead, direct and inspire all those who trust you.

Regarding the title of this introduction, Thinking versus teaching, when I began my academic period at IESE Business School, in 2009, after twenty-five years as an executive in large multinational companies, I wondered how I could introduce topics of interest to managers who knew their business and their environment much better than I did. I wondered how much more I needed to know to coach executives in the automotive, aviation, banking, technology, distribution, pharmaceutical, chemical, consulting, start-up, energy, mining and other industries. How much more did I have to learn and know to feel I could teach them anything? And then I came across Socrates’ phrase, I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think, and my eyes opened. I felt good. I thought: Yes, it’s about making them think, about inviting them to reflect. That is how I confirmed that I had something to contribute.

That reflection, that way of viewing my teaching activity, has opened most of the strategy and leadership sessions I have delivered over the last eleven years.

There is clearly a wide range of knowledge about strategy that we can all access, mainly through the Internet, although my opinion is that to be really effective and useful, learning must include more than quick and easy access to knowledge. It also involves provoking thought about this knowledge. In this case, it is plainly and simply about developing ideas on strategy from my professional experience after having deepened them through my academic activity. I believe that strategy, a subject that is often shunned because of its abstract nature, is actually a concept that helps us get where we want to go and where we aspire to be.

Therefore, this book is not about teaching, it is not about imposing ideas. It is about making everyone pique their own curiosity and, above all, about their ability to think and to put that thinking into practice.

We all face reality from our own perspective. We experience different circumstances in scenarios that run at different speeds and we all have the possibility of thinking. This common element cuts across sectors, companies, levels of education, nationalities, cultures, speeds, interests, responsibilities and large, medium and small organisations.

My sessions on strategy run through specific cases, such as scenarios that occur in everyday business life that trigger questions and provoke reflection (the so-called Socratic method) with the intention of awakening the mind through conversations held in each session.

Three conversations take place in the sessions. The first is the one the professor keeps with participants, entailing intellectual contact with each of them. The professor, who by being at the podium is not in possession of the truth, has the role of stimulating thought. The second conversation is