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Michael Watkins says the shift toward geopolitical turbulence began with the war in Ukraine and has been accelerating.
“It started, I think, really with the Ukraine war, which has been going on for a while, but it's only accelerating.”
Topic
Michael Watkins
14 facts from 1 episode, in date order. These are what speakers said on the shows, each linked to the moment it was said. They aren't independently verified.
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Michael Watkins says AI is increasingly eliminating entry-level positions, which worsens the compression of leadership pipelines.
“And AI is exacerbating this in a very interesting way, right? Because it's increasingly eliminating entry-level positions.”
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Michael Watkins says organizations are abandoning the traditional 'ready now' succession-planning standard in favor of 'ready enough' with support.
“I see organizations kind of throwing that out the window, right? It's ready enough, and what can we do to support you”
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Michael Watkins says enterprise generalists must now be deep enough in core technologies to operate across the organization.
“You've also got to be deep enough in core technologies to operate as a generalist across the organization”
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Michael Watkins reports his survey found close to 75 percent of senior leaders said events were moving faster than their planning cycles could account for.
“I did some survey research on this, and close to 75 of the leaders that I surveyed at senior levels said events were moving faster than they could account for in the planning cycles”
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Michael Watkins cites Amazon as a classic example of designing an organizational sensory system for understanding the outside world and the company itself.
“Amazon being a a classic example of literally designing the architecture through which you understand what's happening out there and inside your organization”
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Michael Watkins says adaptive talent, psychological safety and trust are the essential foundations of an adaptive organization.
“adaptive talent and psychological safety and trust turn out to be the absolute essential foundations of adaptive organization”
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Michael Watkins early in his career was a professor of negotiation at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he taught international diplomacy.
“So very early in my career, I was a professor of negotiation at the Kennedy School at Harvard, right? And I taught international diplomacy and studied major diplomatic negotiations of the time.”
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Michael Watkins says the best executives who move from functions like CFO or general counsel to CEO stay as far away from their old function as possible.
“One thing that absolutely they share in common is they stay a as far away from that function as they possibly can.”
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Michael Watkins says he and colleagues at IMD frame leadership development as outer leader skills and inner leader skills.
“the way we've come to think about it is in terms of outer leader skills and inner leader skills.”
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Michael Watkins says a new edition of The First 90 Days is coming out early in the new year.
“Stay tuned for the new edition coming out, uh, early in the new year.”
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Michael Watkins says strategic thinking requires 'attentional range', the ability to shift perspective between levels such as big picture and details.
“you need to have what I think of as attentional range. You've got to be able to shift your perspective between different levels”
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Michael Watkins says the Hogan Development Survey, which measures so-called derailers, can offer insight into emotional regulation challenges.
“So the Hogan Development Survey, the so-called derailers, or sometimes people call it the dark side, can give you useful insight into, potentially”
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Michael Watkins says healthy organizations always bring in some outsiders for fresh perspectives, and current conditions have raised that share.
“healthy organizations always bring in some percentage of outsiders because they bring perspectives in”
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