Consistent Priorities in Fast-Moving Markets

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This chapter explores the role of platforms or hubs in ensuring that companies in market-oriented ecosystem have a shared set of values and principles, emphasizing the importance of standardizing around these values. It also highlights examples of companies that could have benefited from understanding these principles, such as Kodak, Toys R Us, and Nokia.

What can we learn from fast-moving companies—like Amazon, Google, and Alibaba—about how to organize to promote strategic growth?

University of Michigan business professor Dave Ulrich went inside these companies to study how their internal structure keeps them nimble, innovative, and market-oriented.

“That mental model of what an organization is, it’s about power, it’s about control, it’s about clarifying decision rights,” he tells IdeaCast host Curt Nickisch. “I think that mental model of an organization as a control system has basically got to shift.”

In this episode, Ulrich outlines three key capabilities that these newer companies have developed: monitoring the marketplace, sharing that intelligence company-wide, and innovation.

Key episode topics include: strategy, innovation, business management, market intelligence, Google, Alibaba, technology, uncertainty, flux, agile.

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· Listen to the full HBR IdeaCast episode: How Companies Like Google and Alibaba Respond to Fast-Moving Markets (2019)

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