book review
By Alyson Nyiri, CHRL
FUTURE FIRST: HOW SUCCESSFUL LEADERS TURN INNOVATION
CHALLENGES INTO NEW VALUE FRONTIERS
BY ALICE MANN
ROUTLEDGE, 2018
We are facing huge global challenges: resources are
becoming scarce, climate change is increasingly vol-atile
and our culture is rapidly evolving. All three
demand that we accelerate solutions in clean energy
and manufacturing, create new materials and means of production
and redefine how people work, eat, travel and live.
“Through a combination of storytelling and statistics, Future
First delivers a 21st century roadmap to leaders and HR profes-sionals
for helping companies develop the leadership mindset
and business capabilities to win at the innovation long-game,”
said Alice Mann. “Using the experiences of companies ranging
from Unilever to Method Products to Opower, Future First illus-trates
the distinctive talent strategies and business practices
that executives and organizational development practitioners
can use to design companies that embrace global challenges as
innovation opportunities.”
BUSINESS PRACTICES
“Future first” companies get ahead by innovating within the limits
of commercial success while making a net positive material impact
on the world’s biggest challenges. Their positive impact comes
from reducing harm and scaling benefits to the environment and
people’s lives. Future first leaders are those who, regardless of the
size of their company, the size of their vision and the scale of their
impact, are large enough to remake the markets and industries
in which they operate. Future first innovation transforms entire
business ecosystems, like food, cars, energy, clothes and technol-ogy
because it happens through a network of exchange among big
and small companies. Globalized companies are more compelled
to evolve away from operating as self-contained entities with one
commander-in-chief at the top than in previous decades, collabo-rating
more with their competition.
TALENT STRATEGIES
Central to addressing future first talent strategies is acknowledg-ing
the pervasiveness of “powerful leadership roles and jobs in the
most lucrative and authoritative industries are still predomi-nately
held by white men.” Mann doesn’t back away, arguing that
this “self-perpetuating dynamic is dangerous” and ignores the tidal
wave of shifting demographics and power dynamics across coun-tries,
cultures and business ecosystems around the world. She
argues that future first leaders must go beyond the one-dimen-sional
view of diversity and develop a broad set of strategies to
empower their talent from pipeline to promotion. Power and
authority must be more distributed throughout a network of rela-tionships.
Committing to inclusive talent now is crucial because as
demographics continue to shift, white and male leadership will no
longer be automatically recognized as relatable and trustworthy
since they do not reflect what society looks like.
To compete on talent now and in the future, leaders have to
be comfortable overcoming implicit biases in job descriptions,
in recruiting and hiring processes and in developing people. If
companies don’t get to a healthy level of inclusivity, they risk los-ing
the diverse employees they do hire, increasing turnover costs
and losing competitive talent. Inclusivity requires adopting the
most important values of employees into their workplace culture
as well as meeting the values and expectations of their custom-ers.
More diverse companies reach a larger number of consumers
from different backgrounds or communities, which is vital in a
globalized world. n
38 ❚ MAY 2018 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL