Strategy is NOT Enough to Reach the End-State

As he is not his opinion, Dr. Stephen Lee can easily separate the objective, or strategic side of leadership, from the subjective, or culture side of leadership, as to what affect human behavior in an organization. A few stakeholders are invited to help develop such an organization to reach the End-State of the electricity industry.

Strategy is NOT Enough to Reach the End-State

By José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, Ph.D.
Systemic Consultant: Electricity

Copyright © 2007 José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, without written permission from José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio. Please write to javs@ieee.org to contact the author for any kind of engagement.

To readers interested in the generative dialogue to help reach the End-State of the Electricity industry for quite some time. I will write the general message in a letter to Dr. Stephen Lee, as a comment to his article How Incentives Affect Human Behavior?

Dear Dr. Lee,

With all my respects to you, I think you have an opinion which you should change. I want you to help me find opinions about EWPC that I should change. For your illustration, in the post A Generative Dialogue Without Illusions Part 1, I introduced some of Adam Kahane’s ideas about generative dialogues, which I think will interest you.

You and I can change our “faulty” opinions very easily, by using the generative dialogue principle "you [I] are [am] not your [my] opinion." That is a key principle to help wholes emerge, which I have used to help emerge EWPC.

As for the opinion you should change, according to Peter Koestenbaum, in his book "Leadership: the inner side of greatness," which has help me understand and apply business philosophy, you are perpetrating a "category mistake." He claims there are two realms: objectivity and subjectivity, each with their own languages and logic. That is what differentiates strategy from culture. Please find Koestenbaum’s book and read the section "strategy is not enough," on page 95 in the first edition.

I would say you are very intelligent and important person that have gotten into a non-trivial subject, just like the eminent economist Bill Hogan, that didn’t understand the non-trivial VIUs paradigm (see 2nd Disruptive Technology Crossed Chasm for details).

To develop a culture, all we need is a critical mass of leaders, for which you are certainly a great candidate, to form an organization. EPRI could be one of the best stakeholders, as are Silicon Valley companies interested in electricity, gas and water utilities innovation and the National Association of Manufacturers, to name a few. That organization could be the recipient of the Worldwide Generative Dialogue Funding Sought, which I envisioned two month ago.

These are just hints of what should be emerging to get to the End-State of the electricity industry. As EWPC is the winner of the first phase of the competition, the generative dialogue to reach the End-State could be based on my Carnegie Mellon University Presentation (please hit the last link).

Best regards,

José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, Ph.D.