Heidrick & Struggles, the international executive search and leadership consultancy firm, has already given its backing to the book and will roll it out as part of its global thought-leadership strategy.
What do successful organisations and smart leaders have in common? They deliver outstanding value to their stakeholders.
Over the past five years, Andrew Kakabadse has carried out a study of strategic stakeholder engagement across 14 countries where he found that organisations where stakeholder engagement was highest were not those led by charismatic and visionary leaders, but by a culture of evidence-based value delivery.
Through his research, he found two different approaches at work. In strategy-led organisatons, senior management has a clear notion of how value can be created and enacts a strategy to achieve it with the support of key managers and board members.
Value-delivery-led organisations approach value creation differently. In these organisations, the leadership gathers evidence from internal and external stakeholders to determine the value the organisation is delivering today and can deliver in the future. A strategy is then put in place to support those findings - and is deliberately exposed to challenges from stakeholders to create engagement.
The latter types of organisations generally outperform the former. To understand why, the authors carried out in-depth interviews in both types of organisations. That research led to a fascinating insight - superior stakeholder engagement is a happy by-product of superior value delivery. The Success Formula is illustrated with fascinating examples drawn from interviews with over 80 leading organizations in private, public and third sectors from all over the world, including Anglo American, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, Jaguar/Landrover, Microsoft, BMW, Cabinet Office, Kuna and Alfa Bank. It demonstrates: . Why strategy led organisations are highly politicised and often end up trapped by their own internal dynamics . Why organisations find it so hard to collect meaningful evidence . How the world's best organisations deliver value to their stakeholders . How leaders can improve the way they gather evidence to create a value-delivery culture that maximizes the benefits for the organisation and its stakeholders.
