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hi I'm Nandu nanka Shore and I joined

ISP recently as a professor of practice

but at age 61 now most of my career has

been working in companies and I retired

from Nestle having worked there for 30

years as the head of Asia Africa Middle

East and Oceania a few years ago and

then joined academics in addition to

consulting one of the questions that

fascinates me now is understanding

better what is the purpose of business

and what is the purpose of companies we

have seen a lot of challenges coming in

this particular area that are very

recently last week a few CEOs who went

out and said that shareholder value

creation is no longer important and in

this context I invite you to read a the

editorial of The Economist from last

week which says be very careful when you

say something like this because the

biggest engine for transformation that

we have had social transformation in the

last 150 years has been capitalism and

the shareholder driven profit motive now

there are many ways to understand the

purpose of business you could start with

shareholder value you can talk about the

creating shared value model talked about

by Porter and Cramer and Harvard

Business Review I'm working on a a

refinement of this to say in fact the

real value and objective of a business

is to have sustainable value creation

sustainable over time value creation for

shareholders primarily and then

employees and business partners and then

society but sustainable has two

dimensions one to be sustainable over

time you have to make sure that the

ecosystem that you operate in remain

sustainable and profitable and you don't

take advantage of

and this ecosystem extends in fact to

the environment so sustainable value

creation is a very interesting topic

that I introduced and I'm writing a few

articles about that

one of the interesting topics that I am

currently working on and trying to write

a book about is the different life

stages of companies and my co-author who

retired from P&G Jim Lafferty and I

we've written an article about this

writing a book about it basically it

posits that companies go through four

different phases the first phase is

creation what we call stage one there's

a lot of experimentation small teams

rapid failures and learning from

failures Stage two is when once you have

an initial prototype or a model or an

equation that works with consumers and

customers and how do you scale it up

here the focus is no more

experimentation but they're all out what

you have already developed and do it

efficiently as fast as possible and the

speed of scale UPS has actually

accelerated with time with the

technological cycles being ever faster

these days then companies enter stage 3

and stage 3 is where the original ideas

have run out of steam or they've been

copied and you have a lot of competition

coming and then the whole focus is on

value stream optimization on

cost-cutting on transferring jobs to

lower-cost locations labor arbitrage and

so on and finally when that runs out of

steam companies enter stage 4 and stage

4 is all about trying to create value

through M&A you sell off bits of the

business that you think don't make sense

by new businesses that you think make

sense

each of these four stages calls for a

different leader to succeed they call

for different cultures to succeed they

call for different competencies from the

people who are required to make these

stages work now that these stages is

good or bad inherently they just stages

that companies go through can companies

who are in stage four reinvent

themselves and go back to being stage

one yes it has been done not awful but

it can be done

one of the topics that has fascinated me

in my entire career is the whole

implication and understanding of

leadership and culture of organizations

if you haven't already seen it I invite

you to go to youtube and check out an

eight minute video entitled the smell of

the place it's by the late Professor

Sherman Trudeau shell who was a

professor of strategy founder of the

department at London Business School one

of the starting Dean's in fact ad Indian

School of Business for just a few months

or something and he talks about how the

culture of a place ultimately determines

how well strategy is executed you might

have heard this people talk about

culture eats strategy for breakfast

basically what it says is you can have

great strategy

but ultimately the culture determines

what strategy succeeds and how well

strategies are executed so one of the

areas in of interest for me and

something I have helped companies to do

is how to transform themselves

culturally how to first read what

culture they are at and how to then go

through a journey to transform

themselves culturally to a company a

culture that is far more agile

cooperative and forward-looking from one

that is essentially bureaucratic

backward looking and protecting the past

I will also talk about this and many

other topics in my course on CEO

perspectives that I will be offering in

January February of 2020

you