Topics:
Innovation
Management
Organizational Development
Strategy

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Vijay Govindarajan's area of expertise is strategy, with particular emphasis on strategic innovation, industry transformation, and global strategy and organization. Prior to joining the faculty at Dartmouth, Govindarajan was on the faculties of The Ohio State University and the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad, India). He has also served as a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France), the International University of Japan (Urasa, Japan), and Helsinki School of Economics (Helsinki, Finland).

Govindarajan works with CEOs and top management teams in Global Fortune 500 firms to discuss, challenge, and escalate their thinking about strategy. He is often called to be the keynote speaker at events, conferences, CEO forums, and leadership development programs. Representative clients include: Boeing, British Telecom, Chubb, Colgate, Corning, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, International Paper, J.P. Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, New York Times, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Sony, and UBS. He has been a keynote speaker at the Business Week CEO Forum, the Economist Conference, Confederation of Indian Industry Conference, US Chamber of Commerce, and Human Resource Planning Society National Conference.

Govindarajan was ranked by "Management International Review" as one of the Top 20 North American Superstars for research in strategy and organization. One of his papers was recognized as "one of the ten most-often cited articles" in the entire 40-year history of the prestigious "Academy of Management Journal". Govindarajan has also received numerous other scholarly awards, including the Glueck Best Research Paper Award in Business Policy and Strategy from the Academy of Management. He has been honored with inclusion in the "Academy of Management Journals" Hall of Fame (under the "Honorable Mention" category). He was invited to deliver the Fifteenth Annual Presidential Lecture at Dartmouth College.

More than 60 articles by Govindarajan on strategy and organization have appeared as book chapters and in journals such as "Academy of Management Journal"; "Academy of Management Review"; "Strategic Management Journal"; "Accounting, Organizations and Society"; "Decision Sciences"; "Journal of Business Strategy"; "Strategy and Business"; "Business Horizons"; "Harvard Business Review"; and "MIT Sloan Management Review". He has published seven books, including Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators from Idea to Execution (Harvard Business School Press, Fall 2005).

Govindarajan received his doctorate from the Harvard Business School and was awarded the Robert Bowne Prize for the best thesis proposal. He also received his MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School where he was included in the Dean's Honor List. Prior to this, Govindarajan received his Chartered Accountancy degree in India where he was awarded the President's Gold Medal for obtaining the first rank nationwide.

Changing the Rules of the Global Game

We now live in an era of constant change, driven by the dynamic forces of technology, globalization, the Internet, changing demographics, and shifting customer preferences. As a result, companies find that their strategies need almost constant redefinition-either because the old assumptions are no longer valid, or because the previous strategy has been imitated and neutralized by competitors. Rooted in these premises, the strategic and organizational challenges become:

• How do we identify the market discontinuities that could transform our industry?
• How can we create new growth platforms that exploit new market realities?
• What are our core competencies and how can we leverage them to generate growth?
• What new core competencies do we need to build?
• What organizational DNA will allow us to anticipate and respond to changes on a continual basis?
• How do we execute breakthrough strategies?

Organizational Capabilities for Global Leadership

The ideas of this presentation are drawn from his book, coauthored with Anil K. Gupta, The Quest for Global Dominance: Transforming Global Presence into Global Competitive Advantage. The book is an outstanding guide for executives charged with global expansion and maximizing the potential of a global organization. Securing global presence is anything but synonymous with possessing global competitive advantage. Presence in strategically important markets is certainly a precondition for creating global competitive advantage. To convert global presence into global competitive advantage, the company must pursue three value creation opportunities: adapting to local market differences, exploiting economies of global scale, and maximizing the knowledge transfer across borders. Pursuing these value creation opportunities requires the firm to design the right type of organization (in terms of structure, systems, people, process, and culture), an organization that can simultaneously optimize local responsiveness, global scale,and knowledge transfer. During Govindarajan's interactive presentation, participants develop an understanding of the following issues:

• How does global presence create three potential avenues for value creation: adapting to local markets, capturing economies of global scale,and leveraging knowledge across subsidiaries?
• How to design the structures, systems, incentives, people and processes to realize the three value creation opportunities?
• How to build a global organization that promotes a "global mindset"?

Building Breakthrough Businesses Within Established Organizations

Leading strategic experiments is the triple-flip-with-a-quadruple-twist of general management. No matter how talented and experienced the leader, chances are that this is a new and unfamiliar challenge. VG can help you understand the three fundamental challenges faced by strategic experiments, and can offer several specific recommendations to help you overcome them. Even world-class companies with successful business models eventually hit the ceiling on growth. That's what makes emerging industries so attractive. These markets represent huge opportunities for capturing long term growth and competitive advantage. But because they lack a proven formula for making a profit, they are risky and expensive-with dire consequences for failure. Vijay Govindarajan argues that every organization's survival depends on strategic experiments that target such untested markets, but few firms understand how to implement them successfully. Too many managers think that a great idea is enough to get them from business plan to profitability, but somewhere in the middle of the innovation process, most organizations stumble. Govindarajan reveals where firms go wrong on their journey from idea to execution-and outline exactly what it takes to build a breakthrough business while sustaining excellence in an existing one. Based on an in-depth, multiyear research study of innovative initiatives at ten large corporations, Vijay Govindarajan identifies three central challenges to strategic innovation:

• Forgetting some key assumptions that made the current business successful
• Borrowing assets from the established organization to fuel the new one
• Learning how to succeed in an emerging and uncertain market

Govindarajan illustrates ten rules to help organizations overcome these challenges, and show how firms must rewire their "organizational DNA" across four main areas: staffing, structure, systems, and culture, in order for a promising new venture to succeed. He also spells out the critical role senior executives must play in managing the inevitable tensions that arise between today's business and tomorrow's. Breakthrough growth opportunities can make or break companies and careers.

Govindarajan can present a guide to execution in unexplored territory.