October 09, 2003

be the ball

Jerry Michalski posts a paper by Russell Ackoff titled “A Brief Guide to Interactive Planning and Design.” It’s essentially a business person’s guide for creative destruction; reimagining an organization in an idealized state in order to facilitate the achievement of that idealized state. Ackoff’s clear and present prose reminds the leader that incremental improvement is not the road to enlightment; instead, create the future state here, in the present, as best you can. Pages 10 through 13 are brilliant “suggestions” for questions that every organization needs to ask, including simple ones like “How should the organization go about determining if a competitor has introduced a new and superior product? How should the organization respond to such introductions?”