What VUCA Really Means For You - Harvard Business Review

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SKIP TO CONTENTHarvard Business Review LogoStrategic planningWhat VUCA Really Means for You

by Nate Bennett and G. James Lemoine

From the Magazine (January–February 2014)
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It’s become a trendy managerial acronym: VUCA, short for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and a catchall for “Hey, it’s crazy out there!” It’s also misleading: VUCA conflates four distinct types of challenges that demand four distinct types of responses. That makes it difficult to know how to approach a challenging situation and easy to use VUCA as a crutch, a way to throw off the hard work of strategy and planning—after all, you can’t prepare for a VUCA world, right?

A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review.Nate Bennett is a professor with the Robinson College of Business at Georgia State University. He is the author of Your Career Game and Riding Shotgun: The Role of the COO.G. James Lemoine is an assistant professor in the organization and human resources department of the School of Management at the University at Buffalo.
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