About Peter Compo
Peter Compo is the author of The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Execution (Business Expert Press, May 2022). The book lays out a new theory and detailed practice of strategy built on an adaptive view of change and innovation, in contrast to “planning” the future.
Unlike many authors of strategy theory and practice from universities and consulting firms, Compo’s professional experience was spent working in the “corporate trenches.”
Starting with musical training, and then a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering (City College NY, 1989), he joined E. I. DuPont as a research scientist.
He went on to hold leadership positions in product management, marketing, supply chain, and business management.
He left the company after 25 years to work full time on developing the Emergent Approach.
Compo comes from a multi-generational family of musicians in the New York City metropolitan area, where he was born and raised. He currently lives in Arden, Delaware.
For more information: Emergentapproach.com
You can find me online at: LinkedIn
Why did you write the book?
The collision of two threads/experiences/forces…
1. Frustration with the state of strategy theory and practice—strategy is still not defined, and the field is plague by buzzwords and marketing.
2. A lifelong interest in the adaptive nature of innovation.
While many authors have shown a link between strategy and complex adaptive systems, the Emergent Approach is the first book to derive a theory of strategy from a model of systems.
What was your biggest surprise or aha moment when writing your book?
How much is written about strategy and about Darwinian adaptation, and how little alignment there is.
Who is your ideal audience for the book?
The primary audience is corporate businesses where organization are multi-functional and geographically spread out.
But the emergent approach is completely general and applies to small business, entrepreneurs, and non-business too.
How do you deal with fear?
The same way I encourage organizations to deal with fear: by sticking to the fundamentals.
How do you deal with rejection?
Play the piano for a few hours and wake up the next day and get back to it.
Tell us two concepts or ideas you want audience to takeaway?
1. Stop confusing (long) lists of goals, subgoals, plans, and initiatives with strategy, and instead create a framework with a central strategy rule. Add subgoals, plans, metrics, and initiatives as guided by this rule.
2. Fully embrace the adaptive view of change and innovation, as opposed to the “planning the future.” Strategy writers incorporate the adaptive view to varying extents, but we must go further with new techniques, and modifications to traditional ones.
3. All planning us under uncertainty, and all transformations emerge.
Name one of the biggest challenges you have faced writing your book and how did you overcome it?
The Emergent Approach is a complicated book that covers a lot of ground and presents new views of many topics relating to strategy, change and innovation. It is an enormous challenge to work around existing concepts and terminology.
So, I use an array of examples to illustrate the theory and practice. I use not only the simple story of launching bike shop, but also discuss more sophisticated example like the strategies of Henry Ford and Apple. I even use sports and music examples, for instance the strategy used by NFL coach Bill Belichick, and the innovation ideas of Charlie Parker, the great saxophonist.
What’s a personal self-talk, mantra, affirmation, or self-belief that contributes to your success?
Focus on causes, not outcomes.
