Fight the firestorm of change

The ‘Phoenix Encounter Method’ is a sure-shot way to leverage disruption and reimagine businesses, thereby creating a new future.

- IAN C WOODWARD, V “PADDY” PADMANABHAN, AND SAMEER HASIJA

'Disrupt yourself first’ is so five years ago. The new motto is ‘Burn your company to the ground then rebuild it’.

COVID-19 has rapidly bent, if not broken, virtually all certainties about business.

We do not know how long the crisis will last, but even the most optimistic projections say that we are in for many more months of wrestling with the virus. And the broader ramifications are likely to be with us for significantly longer.

We have designed a paradigm to help companies rise to this era’s wicked challenges. At the heart of it is a simple idea: The essence of disruption-ready leadership is being able to ruthlessly identify current weaknesses, envisage destruction of the current business model with unconstrained resources to break the legacy blinkers, and then rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes with a new vision of renewal. Hence, its name ‘The Phoenix Encounter Method’, which is also the title of our recently released book.

Over the last few years, we have run highly successful Phoenix Encounter field trials involving over 1,500 senior C-suite executives of firms spanning the globe and a broad range of industries. Many of these resulted in a fundamental revision of the strategies of organisations—banks, agricultural conglomerates, retail chains, engineering equipment manufacturers, healthcare providers, utilities, insurers, to name a few.

A three-stage journey