PCMA CONVENING LEADERS PREVIEW
W
hen PCMA 2013 Convening Lead- ers’ Opening General Session speaker Morten T. Hansen takes the stage in
Orlando this January, he will be drawing from several areas of experience. A former Harvard Business School professor who earned his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, Hansen’s perspective is global: He is a management professor at the University of Cali- fornia, Berkeley, and at INSEAD, France — and has also served as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in London, Stockholm, and San Francisco. Mainly, though, Hansen will be sharing what
he has learned from researching and writing two critically acclaimed business books: Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, published in 2009, and the New York Times bestseller Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, which he co-wrote with Jim Collins, and which has sold four million copies since it was published last year. Great by Choice is based on nine years of
research, in which Hansen and Collins undertook a “rigorous, systematic study of leaders in indus- tries that have historically been disruptive, who achieve great performance,” Hansen told Convene in a recent phone interview, compared “to those that didn’t.” Among the book’s surprising results:
“It isn’t the most innovative companies that do the best,” nor the ones that changed the most, Hansen said. “In a world full of change — because innova- tion is a response to change — there is a certain path of innovation that seems to be much more powerful than others.” We asked Hansen to show how meeting pro-
fessionals can take that path — and to apply his hard-earned insight from both books specifically to this industry.
You have written that one of the biggest surprises that came out of Great by Choice was that the best leaders were not necessarily the most bold, visionary, or creative, but were more disciplined, empirical, and paranoid than their competitors. Meeting planners have those qualities in spades — they prepare in a disciplined way for conferences based on what has worked in the past, keeping worst-case-scenario plans in mind. What would you say to them about their bigger challenge, which is being innovative about their meeting design?
84 PCMA CONVENE OCTOBER 2012
A surprising finding: Fast decisions and fast action in a fast world are good ways to ‘get killed.’
That’s a good question. I travel a lot on the speak- ing circuit and I do a number of conferences. I am pretty amazed at their complexity and what is behind a very well-produced conference, so [I have great] respect for that work. There are so many moving parts and there are many things that can go wrong. So [it serves meeting professionals well to pay] an unbelievable amount of attention to detail and to be productively paranoid, and dis- ciplined, that’s for sure. How they innovate matters more than how
innovative they are. And what matters is what we call the “fire bullets, then cannonballs” approach to innovation. In the world of conferences, meet- ings, and events, the way it would work is to try out ideas in [changing, say, the] format [of a meeting] in a pilot, in controlled experiments that may not be ready for prime time. I can imagine as the planner, you say, “For the
next big conference, I must try out this [idea].” That to me is an uncalibrated cannonball — you try something new on the big stage, in prime time, and it might not work out. Our approach would be that you might want to try that out in a less impor- tant conference. Then once you have enough proof that this thing is going to work, fine-tune it, and launch it on the big stage. In other words, you’re very disciplined in the way you innovate.
That’s what you mean when you talk in the book about scaling innovation, yes? Exactly. The other way you could do it potentially is to be much better at learning from others. There might be other organizations that have done a number of different [things at their events], so you see what works and what doesn’t work and try to learn from that. Learning from other people’s fail- ure is a good way to accelerate your own learning. But it is really important to have that dis-
cipline around innovation, not to rush things through. The companies [that we studied for the book] didn’t stand still. They weren’t paralyzed — quite the opposite. [They said,] we will try things that won’t work out, but we will move forward by constantly trying out things. And once we get it right, then we can scale it up. [The difficulty with meetings is that] you’re like a Broadway produc- tion, but you don’t get to run the same show a hundred times. It’s got to be a great conference the one time
you put it on. But if you allow yourself to [do] pilots — it could be a smaller audience, lower-level
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