Old framework in new package

Book review of The Phoenix Encounter Method: Lead Like Your Business Is On Fire

Times of great crisis and chaos tend to shake people’s confidence and make ordinary mortals turn towards astrologers or self-help books for answers and solutions. Corporations go to management gurus and strategy consultants for the same reason.

Quite often, the management guru or consultant does not offer any blindingly new insight. What s/he offers instead is a structured approach or exercise for the CEO and the top team that allows them to find the answers with which they are comfortable. If the answers do not actually save the company, the consultant can always shrug and say the solution offered was right, but the execution by the management was faulty.

Covid-19 would have been a stress test for the average CEO even if it had come during an otherwise normal period in the business’ life. As it happens, it hit corporations when they were already reeling under the onslaught of technology revolutions and business disruptions. And The Phoenix Encounter Method  is being offered as just the process that can help a corporation deal with such disruptions.

The Method has been put together by a formidable team. Three of the co-authors — Ian C Woodward, V “Paddy” Padmanabhan and Sameer Hasija — are INSEAD professors. Ram Charan is, of course, a well-known management guru and best-selling author of multiple management books.

The name of the book has been given to advise the corporation to be like the Phoenix, which can rise from the ashes, and not like the Dodo, which became extinct. Corporations are in the middle of a firestorm, say the authors, and the only way they can survive and thrive is if they learn lessons from the Phoenix. Just in case that is not enough of a metaphor, the authors also throw war-gaming in the mix. Thus, the corporation has to do a three-part exercise — for which the authors simultaneously invoke Phoenix and the Battlefield. Salvation is supposed to lie at the end of the three phase exercise.

The authors are honest enough to admit that their offering is not a substitute to the many contemporary strategic planning tools and analytical frameworks available to leaders already but call this an essential complement to those. So the CEO is expected to also do the normal SWOT analysis but within the framework of the Phoenix Encounter battlefield. It is not a magic bullet, the authors agree, but it helps generate a wider number of options and ideas.

Shorn of the jargon and the info-graphics peppering the volume, the method is essentially a fairly straightforward exercise. The first step is to clearly envisage and articulate every kind of threat, including all the non-traditional ones that can destroy the business. Part two is another brainstorming session to come up with defence strategies to deal with multiple threats. The last part is the innovations and breakthrough thinking that will help the company survive when their peers are faltering.

The Phoenix Encounter Method: Lead Like Your Business Is On Fire 

Author: Ian C Woodward, V “Paddy” Padmanabhan, Sameer Hasija, Ram Charan

Publisher: McGraw Hill

Pages: 338; Price: $28

The authors use a great many examples to make their points; unfortunately, many of these are old and jaded and have been used in multiple books. The fall of Sears and the rise and rise of Amazon make their obligatory entrance fairly early. The fall of once successful companies that got far too complacent and fell by the wayside is a recurring theme.

The authors use examples of disruptors that are hastily thrown at the reader. At one point, the authors use Jio as the disruptor in telecom and Alibaba’s Ant Group in finance. The problem is that a lot often happens between the time a book goes to print and the time when it finally hits the bookshelves. Reliance, for example, after taking the market by storm with the help of some fortuitous regulations and an enormous injection of capital, suddenly finds itself blindsided by the bad publicity caused by the farmer agitation, which has painted the corporation as a villain. So it has to deal with a slew of customers who are porting out of its services and going to other telecom service providers to show their solidarity with farmers. The Ant Group had to shelve its IPO plans after falling afoul of the Chinese government and regulator.

It is not that the book is useless. It provides a neat framework for anticipating threats and working out a strategy. Unfortunately, it ignores many risks — from sudden policy changes to the requirement of enormous capital in some cases, and sometimes, just the invention of a new technology. From the Antitrust cases against Silicon Valley’s Big Tech Quartet to the increasing concerns about data privacy — all of these can completely disrupt many of the current disruptive business models.

The book could have been one-third its size if the authors had not chosen to try and force-fit everything into their chosen metaphors. It would also have been far more interesting if the authors had tried looking for new examples instead of the same old hackneyed ones — of Sears and Amazon or Apple and Nokia — all of which have been used multiple times.

It can be picked up if you are a die-hard fan of new analytical frameworks and strategy planning tools. But ultimately, saving the corporation is the job of the CEO and the top management — not that of consultants even if they think so.