Bakes Takes Volume 1, Issue 5

August 2024, Volume 1, Issue 5

Bake’s Takes: A KHA Management Consulting Recommended Reads by Jonny Baker, Strategic Consulting Partner.
Hot Take: "Today a reader, tomorrow a leader." – Margaret Fuller.  
As a leader you need exposure to varying perspectives, insights, and ideas. 

This month’s Top 3:

1. The Project Economy Has Arrived, Nieto-Rodriguez
   • This article talks about the need to balance both operations (today’s profit) and projects (tomorrow’s profits). It challenges the executives that often choose the familiar over the required and find themselves complacent and behind.
   • The article introduces a broad application tool known as the Project Canvas for clarifying roles and rules throughout the project process.
   • It also identifies the six necessary things for a project leader to be successful in driving change in an organization: project management skills, product development and subject matter expertise, strategy and business acumen, leadership and change management skills, agility and adaptability, and ethics and values. With a leader that does not possess all six of these, the change project is highly unlikely to succeed.
2. Core Competence of the Corporation, Prahalad and Hamel
   • Article laced with examples of companies who have failed to find, develop, and exploit their core competencies.  
   • Oftentimes, we think of competencies at the end product level, the article corrects this line of thinking back to the core products and ultimately to the inherent competencies in the organization. It also provides insights on how to build these competencies.
   • A top line: “Competence carriers should be regularly brought together from across the corporation to trade notes and ideas. The goal is to build a strong feeling of community among these people. To a great extent, their loyalty should be to the integrity of the core competence area they represent and not just to particular businesses.”
3. A Smarter Way to Network, Cross and Thomas
   • Article that makes networking objective and measurable through a 4-part process: Analyze, De-layer, Diversify, and Capitalize.
   • A great breakout here on the wrong things to do in networking such as pursuing the wrong structure, relationships, and behavior.
   • It uses a six-frame tool to reimagine the right network across areas such as people who offer new information/expertise, formally powerful people who mentor, and those that provide developmental feedback. Most satisfied executives also have ties to people who provide personal support, a sense of worth or purpose, and those who promote work/life balance. It is also adamant about filling your network with energizers of high character, which is the former is often overlooked.

Why Bake’s Takes: I have been accused by friends, colleagues, and clients of pelting people with articles and book recommendations. Some of my mentees have stacks of books they will never get through (some of my mentors too). As such, I have decided to curate a monthly summary that holds what I deem to be the 3 best articles or reads of the month (when I read them, not published that month). I do love Harvard Business Review and you will see much of it as my work is focused on equipping leaders for the tough tasks ahead of creating vision, alignment, and execution. I have yet to find a better resource for equipping that work well.

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