The Power of Associative Thinking
Limitations on strategic leaders’ ability to spot, act on, and legitimize distant opportunities stem from a common root: the challenges of managing one’s own and other people’s mental representations. Charlie Merrill’s competitors scrabbled for a position atop the same mountain, failing to come up with new lenses on banking that would reveal distant opportunities. George Fisher failed to persuade Kodak employees that their representation of the company as a film company was outdated. And Lycos abandoned a good strategy because it could not persuade Wall Street that its conceptualization of the new business was best. In each case, the failure was directly related to whether strategic leaders could manage their own and others’ mental representations.