Michael Raynor to deliver keynote address at BusinessDay CEO Forum

Michael Raynor, best-selling author and expert on strategy and innovation will be delivering keynote address at 13th annual edition of BusinessDay CEO Forum, scheduled to hold on September 30, 2021 in Lagos.

Michael Raynor is the author of management bestsellers, including The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (And What to do About It), The Innovator’s Manifesto: Deliberate Disruption for Transformational Growth, and The Three Rules: How Exceptional Companies Think.

At the end of his presentation, he will join a fireside chat with select chief executives to discuss how his ideas square with the Nigerian business reality.

Raynor has built a reputation around helping companies escape the whims of chance, which can upend the best executed strategy.

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, he observed that “much of the strategy and management advice that business leaders turn to is unreliable or impractical. That’s because those who would guide us underestimate the power of chance.”

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BusinessDay has hosted the CEO Forum every year since 2009.

It is a must-attend event for decision-makers in Nigeria’s private sector to dissect key trends, best practices and successful business models. The CEO Forum provides a unique platform for debate around the prevailing challenges they confront in running their organisations.

Raynor, who was described by the Financial Times as “one of the most articulate and interesting thought leaders in innovation today” brings a uniquely data-driven approach to the development and implementation of cutting-edge concepts.

He is a trusted, highly sought-after advisor to senior executives in many of the world’s leading corporations across a wide range of industries, focusing on questions of strategy and innovation.

An engaging speaker, Raynor provides executives around the world with a powerful compass that they can use to chart their companies’ paths to exceptional performance. He is a director at the Boston, USA office of Deloitte Services LP, and the innovation theme leader for the firm’s Eminence function.

He is a former teacher in the MBA and Executive Education programs at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada and at the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Raynor is perhaps best known for developing the concept of the Strategy Paradox. The main idea is that whenever you develop a strategy to achieve a specific objective, you are also automatically making some implicit assumptions about what the future market forces will be.

If that forecast of future market conditions turns out to be incorrect, then your strategy which had a reasonable chance of success might turn out to be an absolute failure.

This is the essence of the strategy paradox.

The same behaviours and characteristics which maximize your probability of success also maximize your probability of total failure at the same time.

Raynor teaches that to overcome the strategy paradox, companies must build in some flexibility and adaptability into their business strategy. Managers must develop multiple choices which can respond appropriately to the different requirements of several market conditions. In simple terms they should hedge their strategic bets by creating a number of strategic options which can be harnessed depending on the actual marketplace conditions.

He is also famous for codifying in the simplest terms the fundamental rules that companies must follow to become great.

After performing statistical analysis of more than 25,000 companies over more than forty years, he came to the conclusion that there are basically just three rules companies need abide by to excel.

First, they must strive to offer better products and services before price. Those who compete on differentiators rather than price stand a better chance of standing out and succeeding in the long-term.

Second, they need to put revenues above cost. In other words, they must prioritize increasing revenue over reducing costs.

Finally, there are no other rules so companies must embrace disrupting their own business models and standard practices to achieve the first and second principles.

Attendees at the CEO Forum will leave empowered with the knowledge to implement these in their organisations.

Raynor joins a long list of distinguished international keynote speakers at the CEO Forum. Past speakers include Hal Gregersen, Executive Director of the MIT Leadership Center (2020), Peter Tufano, Dean, Said Business School, Oxford University (2019), Dominic Barton, Global Managing Partner of McKinsey & Co., Richard Dobbs, Senior Partner at McKinsey & Co., Richard Ingleton, CEO of TNS, one of the world’s largest market research and market information groups (2016), Rich Lesser, CEO of the Boston Consulting Group (2016), Paul Collier, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford (2015), and Michael Porter, the world-acclaimed economist and researcher at the Harvard Business School, and best-selling author (2009).