Outthinkers #36—Martin Reeves: Employing an Imagination Cycle to Keep Your Strategy Fresh
Martin Reeves is a Managing Director and Senior Partner in BCG’s San Francisco office and Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, where he explores ideas from beyond the world of business, which have implications for business strategy management.
He is the co-author of The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company's Future (HBR Press, 2021), the series Inspiring the Next Game: Strategy Ideas for Forward Looking Leaders, and arguably one of the best strategy books of all time: Your Strategy Needs a Strategy: How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach (HBR Press, 2015). He has also written numerous articles in top business journals like MIT Press and Harvard Business Review.
Martin joined BCG in London in 1989 and later moved to Tokyo, where he was responsible for BCG’s business with Western clients. His consulting career has focused on strategy – with equal emphasis on idea origination and development, and application by consulting with clients on their strategy challenges. A perennial generalist, Martin’s interest range widely.
In this podcast he shares :
- “Strategy Stacks”—what they are, and why you need to start thinking about them
- Six steps that creativity theory shows are needed to harness imagination in yourself and in your company
- Why business strategy can no longer follow a one-size-fits-all model.
- How ecosystem-based competition differs from the company to company battles most business strategy knowledge is based on
__________________________________________________________________________________________
" So, therefore, whatever generalization we might want to make about strategy is increasingly inapplicable to the whole. Therefore we need to ask, pluralistically not what the approaches to strategy in the modern business environment, but which approach is applicable under which circumstances."
-Martin Reeves
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Episode Timeline:
00:00—Introducing Martin + The topic of today’s episode
2:05—If you really know me, you know that....
2:30—What is your definition of strategy?
3:29—What are you most known for?
4:40—Could you talk a bit about your strategy of strategies?
7:24—Do the sources of competitive advantage change in light of the rising dominance of ecosystems?
9:47—What does creativity in strategy have to do with play and imagination?
12:05—The first step of the Imagination Cycle: Seduction
12:50—The second step of the Imagination Cycle: Idea
13:44—The third step of the Imagination Cycle: Collision
14:22—The fourth step of the Imagination Cycle: Epidemic
15:40—The fifth step of the Imagination Cycle: Codification
17:10—The sixth step of the Imagination Cycle: Encore
17:50—How can people connect with you, and what are you working on next?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Additional Resources:
Company Page: https://www.bcg.com/
Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast