What Wise Leaders Understand About Business Ecosystems

It’s safe to say that most people who rise to the top of their companies like to win. A healthy competitive streak is energizing and motivates individuals and teams to do their best — to find their edge and sharpen it. But sustained, long-term success and industry leadership often rely on the ability to look beyond your self-interests and see where, in the bigger picture, your contributions to building up your sector can make your own company stronger.

That theme emerges from several articles in this issue, although in different contexts. We see the benefits of early-stage engagement with emerging technology, the buffering effect of business ecosystem connections in a crisis, and how one company models sharing lessons learned with a community of practitioners.

On the emerging-technology front, Avi Goldfarb and Florenta Teodoridis issue a call to managers to get off the sidelines of quantum computing and contribute to developing practice. The authors remind us that with all enabling technologies — as was the case with the internet and electricity — value is cocreated by early users of the technology. Users’ experiments contribute to feedback loops that identify promising application areas and clarify how the complementary ecosystem around the enabling technology needs to evolve.

Goldfarb and Teodoridis emphasize that in quantum computing, this is a collective effort among organizations that apply the technology and those that aim to supply it. Practitioner involvement now, even though it’s early days, is crucial to the development of the ecosystem that must grow up around this technology to make it broadly usable by businesses. Companies that get involved in and contribute to this development will certainly be helping others, maybe even their competitors, but they will also be demonstrating that they are leaders in their sectors.

Cultivating the ecosystem around your company can also improve your resilience in a crisis. Rick Aalbers, Killian McCarthy, and Arjan Groen interviewed senior leaders across government, multinational companies, and the military to understand what made them successful at crisis management. From their research, they distilled not a set of heroic personal traits but rather a framework of organizational capabilities that those leaders had put in place well before a crisis arose. Those leaders were able to weather storms because they could rely on well-prepared people and well-tested processes when disruption occurred. One subtle but significant element that isn’t part of the framework but does show up in crisis stories: Having good working relationships with other players in the broader business ecosystem clearly gives leaders more options when the chips are down.

Finally, one of the most significant ways to contribute to the health of your business ecosystem is to share your own hard-won lessons. That’s not the subject of our article about how CEOs need to engage deeply with data transformation initiatives. But the article itself is a result of Caterpillar’s willingness to allow researchers (led by Barbara Wixom, principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research) to follow its massive, multiyear transformation in great depth. The company permitted executives involved in the initiative to join the researchers in writing about their experience for MIT SMR in order to share what they learned with the wider practitioner community. That kind of generosity contributes to collective learning via an ongoing conversation among practitioners and scholars that, over time, improves management practice to everyone’s benefit.