Vigilant organizations excel at seeing looming threats and embryonic opportunities sooner than rivals, which prepares them to act faster when needed. Four drivers distinguish vigilant from vulnerable organizations, which can be used to design a roadmap to improve organizational acuity and preparedness.…Read More
Why do some firms survive or even thrive during challenging times, while others fail? Paul Schoemaker, a pioneer in the field of decision science and former Mack research director, explains two of the key concepts that firms must master to anticipate problems, challenges, and competitors. Paul Schoemaker on Vigilance Paul…Read More
When digital turbulence is the new normal, vigilant organizations prevail by following three navigation principles. …Read More
George Day, Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor Emeritus, The Wharton School, Paul J. H. Schoemaker, Q2 Technologies LLC, and Govi Rao, Phase Change Solutions Strategy & Leadership, 2020 The case of Philips Lighting shows how management coped with the ambiguous but real threats and opportunities of a highly disruptive emerging technology…Read More
Our work on vigilant leadership is being extended to the domain of foundations. We have collected data from 97 major foundations operating in the U.S. …Read More
Why are vigilant organizations better at developing foresight than their rivals and acting faster on the insights and alerts? Four attributes were hypothesized to explain the difference between vigilant and vulnerable organizations.…Read More
When turbulence is the new normal, an organization’s survival depends on vigilant leadership that can anticipate threats, spot opportunities, and act quickly when the time is right. …Read More
Businesses must develop a sustainable competitive edge in order to succeed in the long run. One way to achieve this is by leveraging technology-enabled insights with a sophisticated understanding of decision making, judgment, and reasoning to make smarter decisions in the face of uncertainty.…Read More
Though uncertainty is a fixture in our fast-changing world, organizations can strengthen their forecasting capability and manage for an unpredictable future.…Read More
Imagine that you could dramatically improve your firm’s forecasting ability, but to do so you’d have to expose just how unreliable its predictions — and the people making them — really are. That’s exactly what the U.S. intelligence community did, with dramatic results.…Read More
Our most recent conference examined the intangible factors that can make or break a company’s innovation outcomes.…Read More
Read an excerpt of the new book, “Winning The Long Game: How Strategic Leaders Shape The Future,” co-authored by Research Director Paul Schoemaker. …Read More
If you’re not thinking about your business as part of an ecosystem, you should. Mack Institute Co-director George Day and Research Director Paul Schoemaker identify four substantial benefits of adopting an outside-in mentality.…Read More
Paul Schoemaker’s latest article for Inc. Magazine, How to Know If a New Strategy Will Work, offers practical advice to help managers check the viability of new project plans. In the piece, the Mack Center research director shares a 12-point diagnostic exercise, designed to assess upfront if your strategy is…Read More
Paul Schoemaker explains how to integrate the new wave of digital technologies into your workplace in his latest Inc. Magazine piece, “A Better Way to Work Technology into Your Business.” Co-written with Scott Snyder, author of The New World of Wireless, the article advises on best practices in three critical…Read More
Developing last week’s Inc. Magazine column on the risks of metaphor, Shoemaker’s latest article is titled, “Is Poker a Good Metaphor for Business?” In this piece, he turns a critical eye to the high-stakes game’s usage as a popular analogy for product development. Drawing upon his discussions of metaphor with…Read More
In his latest article, titled “How Metaphors & Analogies Influence Your Thinking,” Schoemaker details the ways in which figures of speech can distort or hide information that may be useful to understanding complex subjects like the economy, competition, or teamwork. In addition, he provides several steps one can take to…Read More
Mack Center Sr. Fellow Paul Schoemaker has written an article for Inc Magazine, reproduced below, in which he describes six ways to become a credible leader. His advice includes strong vision, involvement, being part of the solution, and high integrity. He also makes the case that credibility is an important…Read More
Inventors from Archimedes to Thomas Edison and Jonas Salk have made mistakes that caused their discoveries to develop in surprisingly helpful directions. Now the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School is trying to capture mistakes like this, with the idea that making mistakes on purpose is something that all of us…Read More
There will never be a shortage of dumb mistakes. Fortune magazine once compiled a list of the “101 Dumbest Moments in Business” that included Merrill Lynch’s investment in subprime mortgages just before the market meltdown in 2008, Mattel’s recall of 20 million toys treated with lead paint in China and…Read More
