Leading for the Future: How to Lead Strategy Across Three Time Horizons, Design the Corporate Dash-Board, Shape Context and Drive Execution in a Turbulent Environment

By Joe Mutizwa

Leading for the Future is a wakeup call for leaders to escape from rear view mirror driving and to get out of the comfort zones of the present so that they can shape the future of their organizations which is their greatest responsibility. A compelling account of the essence of navigating change and transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: May 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781482877977

Joe Mutizwa

The author is a leading consultant on leadership development in Southern Africa. He has authored six books on various aspects of leadership. He writes from insights developed over thirty years in senior executive positions in the private sector. A Graduate of the London School of Economics, University of Zimbabwe, HEC-Paris and Oxford University’s Said Business School. He is a certified executive coach and a certified mediator. He Lives in Zimbabwe

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Copyright © 2017 by Joe Mutizwa.

ISBN:      Hardcover            978-1-4828-7798-4

                Softcover             978-1-4828-7796-0

                eBook                  978-1-4828-7797-7

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Contents

Preface

Part I Leading Strategy across Three Time Horizons

Chapter 1 The Past and Its Legacies

Chapter 2 The Demands and Seductions of the Present

Chapter 3 The Challenges of the Emerging Future

Part II The Corporate Dashboard and How It Is Evolving

Introduction

Chapter 4 Creating Shareholder Value

Chapter 5 Business Model Viability

Chapter 6 Treating People with Humanness

Chapter 7 Creating Social Value

Part III Leaders as Context Shapers

Introduction

Chapter 8 Appreciating the Global VUCAH Context

Chapter 9 Understanding the Cultural Context

Chapter 10 Shaping the Context inside the Organization

Chapter 11 Shaping the Organization’s Transactional Context

Part IV Execution—the Bridge to the Future

Chapter 12 The Seven Disciplines of Superior Execution

Chapter 13 The Essential Leadership Instincts for the Future

About the Author

I dedicate this book to the many students that I’ve been privileged to teach in the leadership workshops and seminars run by my consultancy, Pathways Africa, across Southern Africa. There is a recurring theme in these encounters. It takes shape along the following lines: What does organizational success mean? And what can leaders of organizations do to ensure that their organizations succeed not just for the present but for the future?

I have written this book in my endeavour to provide that answer. The framework that I offer here has been enriched by my long experience as a practitioner in corporate leadership, as an observer of corporate leadership, and as a consultant and teacher working with hundreds of business executives who attend my leadership master classes.

I have learnt a great deal from the interactions with my students as well as with the executives that I coach and mentor. I therefore felt that it was only proper for me to dedicate this book to students of leadership—past, present, and future. What I have decided to share here is not a blueprint for success but a framework, an approach that may help to advance my abiding purpose in life. It is encapsulated in the purpose of my consultancy, Pathways Africa, which is ‘Uplifting leadership standards across Africa’.

This, I believe, is the challenge of my generation across the African continent. The generation that witnessed the decolonization period’s struggles, the generation that ushered in political independence, the generation that is grappling with the crucial test of translating political transformation into economic transformation. My intention in writing this book is to be forward-looking by providing a positive but practical framework that leaders can use to approach the job of leading and transforming business organizations into the future.

The manager has his eye on the bottom line. The leader has his eye on the horizon.

Warren Bennis (1925–2014)

Preface

On 12 December 2016, I was ‘blessed’ with a misfortune while attending a governance seminar in Dubai. I lost my passport. The process of securing an emergency travel document to enable me to travel back home to Zimbabwe was a challenging one given that Zimbabwe has no diplomatic mission in Dubai and the nearest embassy is located in Kuwait, one time zone away. In Dubai itself, one has to deal with a number of agencies, including the police, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Dubai Courts, and the Department of Immigration. To get everything sorted out and be on a plane home meant that I had to stay an additional unplanned three days in Dubai. Therein lay the blessing!

Being an avid learner, I decided to use my involuntary stay in Dubai to good effect—to absorb any lesson I could about what I was experiencing. I recorded my observations in my journal every night.

That Dubai is an extraordinary success story is in abundant evidence everywhere I went, my distress at being without a travel document notwithstanding! The infrastructure is awe-inspiring. I had visited Dubai several times before but had never really quite grasped how advanced it is in terms of infrastructural development. Dubai Mall is a marvel, currently the biggest shopping mall on earth. The degree of digitization in all the public institutions that I interacted with is very advanced. E-government is a reality. The world’s tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa, at 160 stories, adorns the Dubai skyline, while the world-class Dubai Metro provides efficient transportation across the city.

The city is clean—not a stray piece of paper on the street, no pothole in sight! There is order in Dubai. The traffic laws are obeyed. There are no cowboy drivers ducking and diving dangerously through traffic, going through red traffic lights, or picking up passengers at undesignated points.

The people I dealt with at the government institutions were efficient and civil. At police headquarters, the police officer who handled my papers reacted in a manner quite unfamiliar to my usual experience when I thanked him for the assistance he had rendered. He said, ‘That is what we do. That is our job. That is what we are here for.’ It was a different culture, a different work ethic.

I was wondering how this success story came about, and I had many unanswered questions. How was it that Dubai succeeded so wildly when most of Africa faced challenges of infrastructure decay, weak public institutions, and poorly managed businesses, particularly in the state sectors? What was Dubai’s secret sauce? Of course, my observations had formed certain impressions in my mind, but the observation period was too brief to proffer a comprehensive explanation for the phenomenal success I was seeing everywhere.

Then I came across the large Kinokuniya bookshop inside the Dubai Mall. Bookshops have always been my favourite shop regardless of wherever I may be in the world. There I find succour and replenishment. When I inquired from a library assistant which readings he would recommend for someone looking for a rational explanation of the reasons behind Dubai’s success story, he led me to a counter of current bestsellers and picked out a slender volume with the title Leadership Dubai Style, written by Dr. Tommy Weir. When I got back to my hotel and started reading the book, I was literally unable to put it down until well after midnight. The following day, I finished it. In many ways, this book helped me to sharpen my thinking in terms of enabling me to see more clearly the leadership issues that I had been grappling with for many years.¹

Dr Weir wrestles with this simple question: how did Dubai transform from being a simple pearl fishing village and piece of desert into a global powerhouse in less than fifty years? It was not because of oil. Dubai is the least oil endowed of the Gulf states, with much less oil reserves than Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar. Its economy is driven by services, tourism, shipping, travel, and financial services, among others.

Dr Weir’s thesis is that the secret to Dubai’s success is leadership—leadership with a big L. In his riveting account of Dubai’s success story, he identifies twelve leadership habits he believes to be the reasons for Dubai’s remarkable success. I have paraphrased these as follows:

• Lead today for tomorrow’s future.

• Create an environment where others can succeed.

• Stick with your strategy.

• Have an ambitious appetite.

• Act decisively and give strong direction.

• Keep the focus; where you look, your followers will look.

• Micromonitor without micromanaging.

• Be loyal in order to get loyalty.

• Consult to be informed while avoiding the limitations of consensus decision-making.

• Be brave to capture opportunities and benefit from crises.

• Don’t accept good enough as good enough.

• Develop future leaders today and pay special attention to succession.

My experience in Dubai emboldened me to write this book, which I had been planning for some time. I already had the broad map of the book in my mind and had done considerable research on it; what I needed was just the spark to get me going. After reading Leadership Dubai Style, I was more confident than ever that the framework that I had developed for a transformational leadership model that spoke to Africa’s special circumstances and needs would be both timely and relevant.

There are many lessons that sub-Saharan African leaders in all spheres of leadership can learn from the success story of Dubai. The basic lesson, however, is that it all goes down to leadership. For me, however, there were two lessons I took away with me from my unplanned stay in Dubai. The first is the phenomenal power of vision to transform everything. The second is the unstoppable momentum created by great execution. I liked, in particular, a line in a poem by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, cited in the book by Dr. Weir. The sheikh wrote:

A lion in majestic repose is not necessarily a great hunter. It’s the blood on his teeth that speaks of his deeds.

Central to my approach has been a focus on four broad themes at the heart of leadership. The first is to do with how leaders weave strategy in relation to the three time horizons of the past, the present, and the future. The second is to do with how leaders define the measures of success for their organizations. The preoccupation here will be to do with getting leaders to understand the choices they need to make about what matters for the organizations that they lead in relation to the evolving perspectives of key stakeholders. The third concerns the role of leaders as context takers and context shapers. There are some contexts that leaders can only survey and be aware of but cannot change. There are other contexts that leaders can shape in such a way that they can exert significant influence on their organizations. The fourth is to do with execution or getting things done. Leadership has limited impact unless it can translate its ambitions and strategies into results that register on the dashboard of corporate achievement. This is the blood on the lion’s teeth that the ruler of Dubai referred to in his poem.

What Does Successful Business Leadership Mean?

Underpinning this book are some assumptions about what the important measures of corporate success are. It is necessary to be clear about this; otherwise, the discussion will be rudderless. The questions that come back again and again have to be: To what end do organizations strive? What do they want to achieve and why? How do they measure success? What kind of ladder are they trying to climb? Why? What is the purpose of their endeavours?

Underlying Leadership Philosophy

Behind all these questions is my belief that the leadership mandate is fundamentally one of stewardship. Wikipedia defines stewardship as ‘an ethic that embodies the responsible planning and management of resources’. Dictionary.com defines a steward as ‘a person who acts as the surrogate of another or others especially by managing property, financial affairs, an estate etc.’. Leaders are stewards in the sense that their responsibilities are to do with exercising due care; preserving, protecting, or adding value to; and exercising judgement in keeping with the mandates that they have been entrusted with.

The issue of the nature of the mandate that corporate leaders have is an important matter which, if not properly understood, can lead to wrong corporate decisions. Regardless of the source of the mandate or who the authoriser is, be it the corporate charter (encapsulated in a company’s articles and memorandum of association), the owners of the company (the stockholders or shareholders), or a broader range of stakeholders, the underlying relationship between the parties is or, more accurately, should be one of trust. This relationship obtains in all leadership situations, whether one is the leader of a nation, a business, a church, a village, or a political party. There is an underlying contract whether it’s written or unwritten, legal or moral is really not the issue.

This is where I have drawn my concept of ‘leading for the future’ from. Stewards are, by their very definition, future orientated. They give an account of their stewardship at the end of their term. They know that their term of office is temporary and that the mandate they have been given is a test of how they will acquit themselves given the many temptations that stewards face during their tenure of office. What this means is that future-oriented leaders need to embrace a growth-and-improvement ethos, an ethos characterized by a desire to want to leave things—situations, environments, assets, people—in a better standing than that which obtained at the time they assumed stewardship.

Given this underlying philosophy, I am always at pains to explain to my students that leadership is a tremendous privilege accompanied by onerous responsibilities. To lead is to have the privilege to influence and affect, for better or for worse, the welfare and even destinies of individuals, families, organizations, and even nations. To lead is to be put to the test, to be tried and evaluated with regard to your capacity to contribute to growth and improvement, to be tested on how you use or abuse trust, and to be tested on how you use or abuse the power that comes with the position of leadership. Viewed from this perspective, it becomes clear just how demanding leading an organization is, because to abide by the expectations I have touched on here requires disciplined control of the natural instincts of human beings, which are inclined towards predatory dominance and self-serving behaviour.

To approach leadership with a rent-seeking sense of entitlement and a desire to eat as much as possible today without due regard for the future is to subvert the whole concept of stewardship and make it stand on its head.

Book Structure

This book is divided into four parts, which address the four themes mentioned above:

o Part I is about understanding the challenges of each age, each environment. The ages come in three forms—the past, the present, and the future. Each age requires leaders to make sense of it and to draw lessons from it as they feel their way forward. My focus here is to argue that while the past and the present are important and deserving of leadership attention, that attention should not