Professionals and managers at all levels are faced with the pressures and challenges of operating within a turbulent, business environment characterized by complexity, ambiguity, vulnerability and uncertainty.

Senior executives at business enterprises of all sizes and in all locations must lead with dual strategies—designed to conquer the present and claim the future—if they are to sustain profitable growth and consistently meet the expectations of investors.
 
In Swagger-Free Zone, I propose that, in order to raise the odds on keeping your winning streak alive, your focus today should be on making the right visionary calls and on putting in place the required superior implementation environment, capabilities and competencies. This applies to you whether yours is a large corporation or a small company. It even applies to you as an individual—if you really think about it.
 
One key benefit of reading the book is the opportunity to acquire a clear and consistent framework for evaluating the salient elements of the challenge. Another is the case I make for promoting a “balance” rather than a “tradeoff” orientation—in order to minimize the risk of getting blindsided by unanticipated threats or being ill-prepared to exploit unexpected, but potentially-attractive opportunities.
 
This is a reference manual for dealing with pervasive turbulence with confidence and effectiveness. In the first two parts of the three-part book, I start off by presenting a framework. I then proceed to address the key requirements for conquering the present. I conclude with a third part, where the focus is on continuous organizational renewal, which serves as the foundation upon which to build for claiming the future.
 
Now for Some Excerpts From Swagger-Free Zone
 
On Breakthrough Performance
The philosopher John Dewey once said, “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.” A new audacity of imagination—that, to me, sounds like a working definition of breakthrough thinking, a necessary prerequisite for breakthrough performance. Clearly, John Dewey’s statement has applicability beyond science. In business, the firms that seek to create and sustain breakthrough performance must, of necessity, foster a culture that promotes “a new audacity of imagination” and that is prepared to follow through on the changes that emanate from such imagination. Breakthrough thinking leads to breakthrough strategies, ultimately resulting in breakthrough performance. 
 
On Repackaging
It is well-known that fundamental breakthroughs in science and technology that lead to totally new product and service categories, sometimes even industries, are few and far between. The same is true of ideas that eventually lead to discontinuous change in the way that things are done. That being the case, how is the vitality of a business enterprise to be sustained during those periods of linear growth interspersed between the relatively few discontinuities that produce earthshaking changes? Let me point out here that the type of innovation required to tide the enterprise over until the next big tectonic movement is, in general, of the repackaging variety.
 
Repackaging for the purpose of renewal need not be limited to physical products. Services can also benefit from the tactic. The management consulting industry, which is essentially in the business of packaging and selling ideas, provides a ready example. New ideas that lead to paradigm shifts do not, in general, emerge at nearly the frequency at which new fads are spun out. Even such wildly popular ideas as reengineering represent an innovative basic core that is 20 percent or less of the total package that is being sold. In the case of reengineering, that basic core is the admonition to focus on processes and start with a clean slate, when the objective is the revitalization of a company’s operations. The rest of the package is made up of time-tested concepts…
 
On “Ultimate Performance Limits”—the Quest for “Zero”
However, “Best Practice” comes with considerable baggage and does not provide high performing companies the ultimate target for which to shoot. Indeed, the very idea of benchmarking itself is considered inadequate by organizations that prefer to set the pace themselves. Honda, the Japanese automaker, would rather outpace competitors than benchmark them.
 
            The alternative to best practice-driven benchmarking is for the individual enterprise to set its own absolute benchmark that is based upon theoretically inspired limits, which I will refer to as Ultimate Performance Limit (UPL)—an artificial upper limit on the performance possible for the particular process being considered.
 
            Examples of UPLs already exist. The exhortation to zero defects is one such example related to product quality—or rather, process quality. Other examples include zero defection as a UPL for customer retention and zero non-value-adding time as a necessary component of theoretical UPL targets for business processes. A possible and more recent UPL target is zero working capital.
 
            The concept of a UPL has many advantages for the purpose of setting performance targets vis-à-vis currently embraced best practice. These include elimination of artificial upper bounds on performance, stimulation of sustained creativity and innovation, avoidance of the reactive approach of chasing after the moving target of best practice, and avoidance of the de-motivation phase that can follow the attainment of current best practice, due to the lack of new performance targets for which to shoot or when competitors raise the bar once again.
 
            Basically, the process for arriving at a UPL for a business process is relatively straightforward. Begin with…
 
On Balance vs Tradeoffs
A tradeoff mentality fundamentally implies placing bets on the future, bets that do not really have to be placed. The gamble may or may not yield the expected payoff. A balance mentality, on the other hand, essentially implies active involvement in the major alternatives, equivalent to the holding of options on different possible futures, to be reevaluated as more information becomes available. The latter alternative, by its very nature of having more irons in the fire, is certainly more challenging to manage. This may explain, at least in part, the more traditional preference for the tradeoff approach.
 
            In the current global, intensely competitive business environment, it is increasingly impossible to achieve, let alone sustain breakthrough performance through the strategy of tossing a coin at each fork in the road in order to decide which path to follow. More often than not, both paths have to be followed. Some tools for deciding how that is to be done are presented in the next section.
 
In pursuing balance between two apparently opposing but nonetheless desirable objectives, strategies have to be developed for arriving at a balance, through a rational comparison of the objectives. Fuzzy logic theory and duality principle, both of which will be discussed shortly, meet such a need. Both these concepts offer alternatives to the either-or mentality of tradeoffs, and the alternatives they provide are complementary to one another.
 
On Making Serendipity Happen
The basic premise for Intellectual Equity Management and Exploitation (IEME) is the creation and capture of additional shareholder value through a deliberate, coordinated, and ongoing effort that is directed at leveraging a company’s portfolio of technologies, competencies, and capabilities across the enterprise and into new marketplace opportunities. In effect, this is directly related to the company “claiming the future” by focusing the company on bringing to market in a consistent and timely fashion a continuous stream of new products, services, and solutions…
 
…Intellectual Equity is made up of the knowledge base, technologies, competencies, and capabilities that reside in a business organization. It can be viewed as the sum total of the nonphysical assets available to an enterprise for eventual conversion into products, services, and solutions for the company’s customers or clients.
 
At a fundamental level, this is what business enterprises generally do: convert physical and nonphysical assets into products, services, and solutions. Most businesses focus on providing these products in those areas related to their core competencies, and rightly so. However, the same building blocks of Intellectual Equity available to an enterprise have an intrinsic potential to yield totally new products and services for applications and markets that are outside of the current focus of the company. This implies that the company’s intellectual equity can be managed differently and across the enterprise to deliver a totally new set of offerings into the marketplace. This represents some level of flexibility regarding a company’s portfolio of marketplace offerings or even the potential for generating additional revenues from existing intellectual assets—an opportunity that most companies fail to aggressively explore and exploit.
 
Of course, I am not suggesting that senior management should allow the company’s focus to become diffuse and its attention diverted away from its core businesses...
 
On The Dangers of the Swagger of Success
            In 1994, Peter Drucker introduced a word not commonly found in business circles—humility.  Yet, it is indeed a word that managers and professionals at successful companies ignore at their own peril. In fact, in reviewing the early response by the makers of mainframe computers to the birth of the personal computer, Professor Drucker commended the “flexibility,  agility and humility” that IBM demonstrated in accepting the newcomer, the personal computer. He noted, “Every big, successful company throughout history, when confronted with such a surprise, has refused to accept it.”
 
            For example, Mars Inc., a privately-held confectioner with estimated annual revenue of $13 billion in 1993, lost share in several product lines and experienced failed global marketing strategy and new product launches.A competitor’s assessment: “Their own hubris is their downfall. They are arrogant, and when arrogance exceeds your intellect, you’ve got trouble.”
 
            Peter Drucker’s advice for businesses to covet humility applies equally well to small businesses. Small companies are known to generate some dizzying growth numbers, partly due to the fact that those numbers are usually starting off from a low base. One reminder of how fleeting success can be is provided by the example of small computer software company, PowerSoft ($90 million in revenues for the last four quarters to the end of September 1994). Mitchell Kertzman, erstwhile CEO of PowerSoft, now partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, came to realize how important it is to ward off complacency. His terse statement: “The biggest sin is arrogance.”
 
            Indeed, “the most treacherous time for a business is after you’ve become successful.” That is the observation of Sally Frame Kasaks, former chairman and chief executive officer of Ann Taylor Stores Corporation. The company went from high profits to big losses in the early 1990s, and Kasaks does not intend to forget that painful lesson. “One thing we don’t do,” she says, “is kick our feet up and relax.”
 
            …The combination of arrogance and bureaucratic bloat can prove particularly corrosive and devastating, as IBM found out. Upon taking over the helm in 1993 and following input from IBM customers,  Louis Gerstner came to the conclusion that the company got out of touch with the market, “partly because of arrogance and partly because of a ponderous bureaucracy. Sales were being lost because ancient procedures or turf wars between different product divisions kept IBM from satisfying the customer.”
 
            It is gratifying to note that Gerstner was successful in bringing IBM back from the edge of the abyss. A key component of the strategy to revive IBM consisted in remaking the company as a service provider, away from its roots as a hardware salesman.
 
             With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, such diagnoses as made by Gerstner about IBM can be relatively straightforward to make. However, the real challenge and the potentially more beneficial contribution for business enterprises is the ability to anticipate and address the problem before it spreads and before its effect becomes increasingly devastating.