Retired Emerson Marketing VP Dave Beckmann presented The Future of Process Management. His abstract:

I will show that the Command and Control management style of the past 100 years is drawing to a close. Increasing complexity in our plants calls for a new management style – one that fosters creativity at all levels.

Dave shared some examples of venerated companies that have shrunk over time by not continuing the process of innovation. When you miss the window of innovation, it can cost billions to catch up.

Dave believes what’s needed from company leadership is to foster a culture with more flexibility, less hierarchy, distributed decision-making, and creativity driven. What worked yesterday will not work tomorrow.

Operational excellence, product/service superiority, and marketing innovation don’t carry you as far as leadership innovation. Using Apple as an example, Dave noted that the margin of building and pricing highly differentiated products greatly exceeds operational excellence programs to squeeze costs out of the product. Product and services are quickly copied, as is marketing innovation.

Vision without action, without picking a path, and without excluding what’s not on the path leads nowhere.