Preparing our new Strategy VO65 boat for Leg 8. Strategy Corporate Renewal.

eleonoraescalantestrategy 10 Apr 2018 Leave a Comment

spring Good Morning to all of you! Wishing you are now enjoying the spring. Spring is a beautiful season. I might be biased for autumns which are my favorite months of the year, but spring season is never below the ideals of perfect weather. It is amazing to enjoy the Spring Season because it is a beautiful gift nowadays. I remember Spring as the season I had the chance to meet my beau Alejandro Guillermo Lozano Artolachipi… Me enamore de el en Primavera.

Let´s do a scoreboard wrap-up of the last Leg 7. Team MAPFRE finished Leg 7 as the last one, and it has lost its leadership in the overall race scoreboard. Before Leg 7, MAPFRE was leading in total points, but now Dongfeng is the first place. Third place belongs to Team Brunel, and Team Akzo Nobel is fourth. The next teams are SHK-Scallywag, Vestas 11th Racing and the last one is TTOP. Despite that SHK-Scallywag and Vestas 11^th retired from this Leg, they are still competing with all of us. Look at the scoreboard here:

Scoreboard after Leg 7.jpg

Vestas 11^th is now out of the Falkland Islands on the way up to Itajaí. The US-Danish team has invested the resources and efforts with the help of the local community to set up the mast again.

SHK-Scallywag will continue in the race and has left Puerto Montt, Chile. It has passed the Strait of Magallanes with the hope to arrive to Itajai Port before our next departure date. 22^nd of April is the expected day to leave Brazil for our next destination, Newport.

Now let´s go to our domain of attention. Strategy. We have been writing about business strategy during the last 7 legs. This coming Leg is different than the rest. Completely distinct. We will cover themes about Corporate Strategy, and Strategy Corporate Renewal. I decided to include this theme in this race because it is crucial to understand the role of the Corporate Office when leading growth. It is there where the scope of the firm is defined. Corporate Strategy decisions include investment in diversification, vertical integration, acquisitions, the evolution of product-services for new generations, new ventures, allocation of resources between the different businesses of the firms and of course, divestments.

Professor Don Sull.

Twenty years ago, I was a simple Student at London Business School for the Full-Time MBA Spring Semester 1998. And I took a course called “Strategic Leadership and Corporate Renewal”. This course was taught by Professor Sumantra Ghoshal and Professor Don Sull. Don Sull, who is currently a Senior Lecturer in Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management at MIT Sloan School of Management guided us through an integrated set of lectures which helped us to pull together many of the things we learned in the MBA Program. At that time Professor Sull was one of the youngest professors at LBS, and we liked this course very much.

Professor Sull ideas deserve to be mentioned in this blog. In 1998, the course “Strategic Leadership and Corporate Renewal” was designed in a way that every student (I was one of them) had the pleasure to “think” in the class. His lectures were all about giving us space to “think” how companies transform themselves by leveraging the momentum of the past to capture the promise of the future. See a video from Professor Sull below.

During our journey from Itajaí to Newport, I will use a couple of the ideas I learned from Professor Donald Sull in one of his classes, about “Leveraging the momentum of the past to seize the promise of the future”. His ideas are still current and even though 20 years have passed, many of his teachings are still outstanding.

We will cover the following topics:

What is Corporate Strategy?: The Domain Selection of the Business Ocean
Corporate C-Suite Leaders: Are you ready to sail a Volvo Ocean Race?
From the Past to the Future: Corporate Strategy Renewal
Corporate Entrepreneurship
Corporate Leadership when Change Happens
Summary and Conclusions

If you wish to download the coming Leg 8 outline, feel free to click here: Eliescalante Leg 8 Outline from Itajai to Newport.

I certainly hope we can enjoy this coming Atlantic Ocean leg, as much as we are already fascinated with the Volvo Ocean Regatta. With Twitter, you can start to follow me at @eliescalantech ( https://twitter.com/eliescalantech ). Thank you so much. This is all for today. paddling with whales.gif