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John C. Camillus
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Wicked Strategies: How Companies Conquer Complexity and Confound Competitors (Rotman-UTP Publishing) Kindle Edition

by John C. Camillus (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 8 ratings
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In business, some problems are so complex, intractable and threatening to organizations—or entire industries—that they are best described as “wicked.” These problems appear to be unsolvable and they render traditional analytical tools of strategy virtually impotent.

Wicked Strategies offers a comprehensive framework for identifying, responding to and profiting from wicked problems. John C. Camillus, drawing on detailed, real-life examples from companies across the globe, has skillfully woven together the analytical techniques, processes and organizational designs that will enable managers to navigate a disruptive marketplace.  His feed-forward framework for fashioning wicked strategies empowers firms to presciently transform their business models before they are made obsolete by the competition. Wicked Strategies is a practical and evocative guide that demonstrates how business leaders can profitably capitalize on unknowable futures.

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  1. Print length
    201 pages
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    Rotman-UTP Publishing
  5. Publication date
    July 28, 2016
  6. File size
    4324 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book is a must read! Wicked Strategies is truly useful for enlightened practitioners as well as academics."―Prof. Dr. Peter Lorange, Honorary President, Lorange Institute of Business
"Wicked Strategies offers innovative and powerful prescriptions to some of the most challenging and confounding business problems of our time."―Ira J. Gumberg, President & CEO, J.J. Gumberg Co.
"John's advice and this book have enabled me to identify 'wicked problems' and how to managerially attack them, not as a problem but, in fact, as an opportunity."―William E. Hunt, President & CEO, Elmhurst Group
"Professor John Camillus's ability to translate complexity into actionable guidance for executives continues to amaze me."―Dr. Luís María R. Calingo, President, Holy Angel University, Philippines
"Wicked Strategies addresses an important practitioner challenge, which is how to develop strategies in a fast-moving, uncertain world. John C. Camillus has written a work that builds upon concepts and frameworks that are accessible to general readers interested in business and management."―Brad Mackay, Director of Corporate Management and Chair in Strategic Management, University of Edinburgh
"I specifically urge you to embrace the recommended feed-forward approach – unless you want to end up in the list of disrupted companies!"―Dr. N. Venkatraman, David J. McGrath Jr. Professor in Management, Boston University Questrom School of Business

About the Author

John C. Camillus is the Donald R. Beall Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Pittsburgh. He earned his doctorate at Harvard Business School, his MBA at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He has served as consultant on strategic management to over 100 organizations on four continents, including many Fortune 500 companies.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01L2G6ARM
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Rotman-UTP Publishing (July 28, 2016)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 28, 2016
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4324 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 201 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.3 3.3 out of 5 stars 8 ratings

About the author

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John C. Camillus

John C. Camillus

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http://www.business.pitt.edu/katz/faculty/camillus.php

Dr. John C. Camillus, author of Wicked Strategies®, earned his doctorate in business administration at Harvard University. He was a gold medalist in the MBA program at the Indian Institute of Management (IIMA), Ahmedabad, and received a bachelor of technology degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

He has held the Donald R. Beall Endowed Chair in Strategic Management at the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh since 1991. Previously, he served as Professor of Management at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

He has served as a consultant to the top management of over 100 organizations on four continents, including several Fortune 500 companies, professional firms, and nonprofit organizations. He has also served on several boards of directors/trustees.

​

John has received numerous awards for teaching including, most notably, the University of Pittsburgh’s “Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award” and the “Best Teacher Award” at the Indian Institute of Management. He has received the University of Pittsburgh’s “Chancellor’s Distinguished Public Service Award,” the “Inaugural Diversity and Global Leadership Award” at the Katz School, and the “Distinguished Alumnus Award” from IIMA.

Customer reviews

3.3 out of 5 stars
3.3 out of 5
8 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

SC
5.0 out of 5 stars Great read for senior-level strategic managers!
Reviewed in the United States on September 11, 2016
Verified Purchase
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and particularly appreciated the real-world examples of how "wicked strategies" have helped other companies succeed.

The author truly has his finger on the pulse of the forces that cause strategic managers to tear our hair out on a daily basis. He acknowledges that there are no easy solutions, but provides a number of easy-to-understand frameworks, decision-making models, and tactical protocols that we can consider for tackling these issues. I look forward to sharing these perspectives with colleagues and (hopefully) convincing them to read it, so that we can work together to implement the approaches that are best suited for our business model.
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Robert Morris
5.0 out of 5 stars How to embrace change and transformation, yet maintain an enduring and proud identity
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2016
To what does this book’s title refer? According to John Camillus, “some problems are so complex, so intractable, and so threatening organizations — or entire industries — that they are best described as ‘wicked.’ These problems resist easy interpretation or understanding; they pose questions which seem, to observers, to be unsolvable; and, they render traditional analytical tools of strategy virtually impotent, requiring new approaches to analysis…The hallmark of a wicked situation is a rapidly transforming business environment in which established models of profitability and success are undergoing unpredictable threats and sea changes.”

What to do? Formulate a strategy that will solve a “wicked problem” in the given situation and then execute it successfully. Camillus again: “Wicked Strategies prepare firms and managers to prevail over paradoxes and to create and profitably exploit disruptions. Wicked strategies are designed to enable firms to achieve two apparently conflicting, yet utterly necessary goals…ensure economic sustainability by positioning a firm to (1) aggressively seek to enhance the competitive advantage of their existing businesses, while at the same time (2) resolutely transform to make the existing businesses obsolete before the context or the competition does it to them.”

In this context, I am reminded of concept introduced by Vijay Govindarajan in his latest book, The Three-Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation, published by Harvard Business Review. He provides what he characterizes as “a simple framework that recognizes all three competing challenges face that managers face when leading innovation.” That is, simultaneously managing today’s business while creating tomorrow’s and letting go of yesterday’s values and beliefs that could keep the company stuck in the past. “It’s a powerful guide for aligning organizations and teams on the critical but competing activities required to simultaneously create a new business while optimizing the current one.”

I agree with both Govindarajan and Camillus that business leaders today face more and far more threatening challenges that at any prior time that I can remember. To paraphrase the title of one of Marshall Goldsmith’s recent books, “What got you here won’t get you there. It won’t even allow you stay here. To survive at least for a while, you must do even better what you do now and, meanwhile, you must also come up with something new that dominates your next competitive marketplace before someone else does.”

These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to me, also listed to suggest the scope of Camillus’ coverage:

o The Seeds of Wicked Problems (Pages 9-12)
o Crafting the Framework for Developing Wicked Strategies (12-15)
o From Disruptive Technologies to Innovative Business Models (20-35)
o Building Alliances (44-45)
o The Innovation Ecosystem for Co-Creating Value (46-48)
o From an Unknowable Future to Feed-Forward (52-58)
o Developing the Organizational Identity (75-82)
o Types of Uncertainty (85-89)
o Transformational Scenarios and Enablers (97-101)
o Enabling Transformation: Building the Feed-Forward Vision and Business Model (104-113)
o Characteristics of the Feed-Forward Process Alignment (112-113)
o Module to Stimulate and Support New Businesses (116-118)
o Module to Develop and Deploy New Competencies (119-121)
o Linking Identity and Feed-Forward (128-142)
o Forging Wicked Strategies (146-148)
o Walmart and the Three Mega-Forces (156-169)

Whatever their size and nature may be, all organizations need Wicked Strategies, not only to survive but to thrive in a global marketplace that has become more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall. They must be custom-designed to nurture new business initiatives and facilitate transformation while continuing to support existing business initiatives. In the last chapter, Camillus addresses the process of implementing the feel-forward framework to achieve those two interdependent rather than mutually exclusive objectives. He provides an abundance of information, insights, and counsel in this book to guide and inform the implementation process. More specifically, he explains

1. How to develop an identity that affirms and expresses your organization’s core values, assumptions, aspirations, and competences.

2. How to establish the fast-feed framework that leverages that identity to attract the talented people, profitable clients, and formidable allies you need.

3. How to design a modular structure that is dynamic, flexible, resilient, and durable, no matter how many wicked problems emerge.

“What your efforts are designed to create is a firm that embraces change and transformation, yet maintains an enduring and proud identity; that prizes its employees as the creators of celebrated societal benefit and superior economic value for its shareholders; and that unflinchingly faces and indeed exploits an unknowable future.”

As John Camillus well realizes, it is no coincidence that companies annually ranked among those that are most highly admired and best to work for are also ranked among those that are most profitable and have the greatest cap value in their industry category. With rare exception, these companies have created and then nourished a workplace culture within which personal growth and professional development thrive. That is why they conquer complexity and confound their competitors.
5 people found this helpful
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John Gibbs
5.0 out of 5 stars Strategies for handling chaos
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2016
The hallmark of a “wicked” situation is a rapidly transforming business environment in which established models of profitability and success are undergoing unpredictable changes, according to John Camillus in this book. These complex, intractable and threatening wicked problems cannot be addressed by conventional strategies; instead, wicked problems require wicked strategies.

In the world of wicked strategy described by the author, conventional competitive strategies are replaced by wicked strategies:

• Feedback, or learning from the past, is replaced by Feed-forward, or learning from the future
• Resistance to external disruptive change and doubling down on sustaining innovation are replaced by embracing disruptive change and exploiting opportunities for competitive advantage
• Episodic organisational transformation occurring only as a survival response is replaced by stimulation and support of continuous organisational transformation
• Competitive strategy which is threatened by external disruption and organisational transformation is replaced by intrinsically enduring organizational identity which transcends disruptions and transformations.

The author does not provide neat solutions for difficult problems, but it does provide some general categories of wicked problems and some general categories of strategies that can be used for addressing them. Problems such as unknowable futures, disruptive technologies and conflicted stakeholders can be addressed by strategies such as feed-forward, innovative business models, and co-creation of value.

In my view this book is likely to be appealing to a reader who likes to think conceptually and is happy to plunge forward into an uncertain future, while it will be frustrating for a reader who likes to make precisely defined evidence-based strategic decisions.
3 people found this helpful
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Dick
5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and Revolutionary - this book is invaluable
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2016
A definite must read for anyone involved in strategic decision-making! Insightful with concrete steps for implementation in your business. This book has revolutionized the way I think about challenging problems.
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Josh
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommend!!
Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2016
This author was recommended to me by a trusted colleague and "Wicked Strategies" did not disappoint! This book will be required reading for the entire management team at my firm.
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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer
2.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyed it, but left asking "so what?"
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 11, 2016
Verified Purchase
For a business person, this book may be of assistance. I didn't find the book helpful personally, though the figure on page 42 about stakeholders and outcomes re: co-creation was the most interesting (repositioning self and stakeholders) and the types of uncertainty highlighted on page 85 onwards was also interesting.

His construct, "the feed forward framework", is interesting to a degree; but the construct is not overly new. It is very traditional set of recommendations, a focus on collaboration, visioning and co-creating the future and planning back from there. Dodging the unknowable future by bringing what you want into existence and managing risks / investment decisions appropriately as you go.

The modular organisation introduced due to literature on isolating transformational and innovation from sources that may stifle it, wasn't a surprise. The figure on page 122 was interesting, the idea of linking the modules to a core module focused on competency development.
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