{"id":1812,"date":"2018-05-04T08:00:01","date_gmt":"2018-05-04T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/?p=1812"},"modified":"2018-05-04T16:12:54","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T20:12:54","slug":"creating-new-value-frontiers-through-future-first-leadership-by-heather-bowden-and-katie-ellman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/2018\/05\/04\/creating-new-value-frontiers-through-future-first-leadership-by-heather-bowden-and-katie-ellman\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating New Value Frontiers through Future First Leadership–by Heather Bowden and Katie Ellman"},"content":{"rendered":"

Republished from GreenBiz<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

They embrace sustainability as an innovation challenge. They combat presentism. They develop integrative thinking. They expand the values that drive their business decisions. They collaborate with competitors.<\/p>\n

Organizational psychologist Alice Mann<\/a> talked with over 60 sustainable business leaders to find out how they\u2019re innovating in the face of today\u2019s global challenges. Her new book, Future First: How Successful Leaders Turn Innovation Challenges into New Value Frontiers<\/em>, distills what she learned into these five business practices.<\/p>\n

In Future First<\/em><\/a>, Mann argues that the three biggest challenges we face\u2014climate change, resource scarcity, and social dynamism\u2014offer opportunities for business to get out ahead of tomorrow\u2019s market demands and beat the competition, while making a positive impact on the world.<\/p>\n

The Bard MBA\u2019s Heather Bowden spoke with Mann about her work and Future First<\/em> for the Impact Report.<\/p>\n

The following Q&A is an edited excerpt from the Bard MBA\u2019s <\/em>May 4th <\/em>The Impact Report<\/em><\/a> podcast. The Impact Report brings together students and faculty in <\/em>Bard\u2019s MBA in Sustainability<\/em><\/a> program with leaders in business, sustainability and social entrepreneurship.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Alice Mann<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

BARD MBA: How did you become involved in organizational design?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I started my career working on global operating models. Then, I moved to New York and started my Masters and then my Ph.D. in organizational psychology at Columbia University, which is how I really got introduced to organizational design. In 2005, I started my own consulting firm, Mann Advisors, and for the last 13 years I\u2019ve done all kinds of organization design work with big corporate clients as well as non-profits and social enterprises and mission-driven companies. I\u2019ve seen how the tools and frameworks work across different sectors and different sized companies in different stages of development.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

BARD MBA: What led you to create the Future First <\/em>principles or \u201cleadership mindsets\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My book, Future First, <\/em>came out of the combination of my background in tech innovation, financial services, and social science research and then organizational design. But what really catalyzed the idea of the book was Hurricane Sandy in 2012.<\/p>\n

It was a disaster zone where I lived. It hit me then that climate change was creating more and more extreme weather events, that this was just a taste of what was to come, and that if left unchecked, storms such as these would really impact my kids\u2019 generation.<\/p>\n

So I started to think about what I could do. I went and talked to over 60 business and thought leaders in the field of sustainable business in one form or another. That\u2019s how I started to identify what these companies were doing right in terms of their mindset, business capabilities and business practices. It\u2019s also how I identified the things that I could help companies that wanted to develop these be successful.<\/p>\n

So the Future First <\/em>mindset, the elements in my book, and the practices are really what I\u2019ve discovered from leaders who are already doing this.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

BARD MBA: What are some of the Future First <\/em>principles?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the practices is embracing sustainability as an innovation challenge. Another is what I call \u201cpresentism,\u201d which is about not just short-term thinking in business, but about how so many of us are overwhelmed with information and data. We\u2019re captured in the present to the point that it\u2019s actually hard to wrap our minds around the changes that are coming in the next ten or more years.<\/p>\n

Next is developing integrated thinking. This one I love. It\u2019s basically not polarizing either thinking from a traditional business perspective in terms of financial metrics, or thinking about things only in terms of doing good\u2014when scaling solutions to global challenges, it\u2019s about how you do both. How do you come up with solutions that integrate both of these mentalities? It\u2019s a real solution to the polarized thinking that we see in our political and cultural climate now.<\/p>\n

The fourth element is expanding the values that drive business decisions. The idea here is that, if you\u2019re more explicit about your values and also draw from the values of your stakeholders and customers, you may find that you can drive more value by speaking to a broader set of values in your decision making.<\/p>\n

The final one is going beyond one company and one leader at a time. More and more customers are looking for solutions from more than one company and want companies to be collaborating and partnering. This is what drives innovation, this collaboration across entities.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>BARD MBA: What sets some of the more successful companies apart from the others?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The companies and leaders who embrace these challenges as innovation opportunities get excited about them. They\u2019re able to innovate within the framework of social and environmental limits. The innovation comes out of saying that there are limitations to the materials we can use, or how we can impact the environment, or how we invest in the people who produce whatever it is that we make.<\/p>\n

Instead of pushing those limits aside, they treat them just like any other limit you might think of in a commercially successful enterprise, which is to make it profitable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Republished from GreenBiz They embrace sustainability as an innovation challenge. They combat presentism. They develop integrative thinking. They expand the values that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":360,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,535],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories","category-the-impact-report"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/360"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1812"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1821,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1812\/revisions\/1821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bard.edu\/mba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}