leaders are time-strapped, but a major part of transformation efforts includes leaders making time to provide the extrinsic motivation necessary to kindle the intrinsic motivation that may have extinguished inside your people.
Just as innovation-focused restaurants have realised it is better to structure reinvention in a different way to repetition, established companies must empower different teams to manage and conduct reinvention efforts within their organisations. Once they have stumbled upon a successful product, then they can transfer it to an execution team to perfect, refine and replicate. These are different modes of being, thinking and measuring.
The title of Aristotle’s “Politics” literally means “the things concerning the city”. It is the origin of the modern English word politics. In the book, he tells the story of a 7th century BC tyrant named Thrasybulus. Thrasybulus asked his fellow oppressor, Periander of Corinth for advice on how he should govern his people. Without uttering a word, Periander walked over to a grove of poppies and lopped off their flowering heads. The message was clear “do away with eminent citizens” and “don’t let them grow above their station.” This is (one of) the origins of the term Tall Poppy Syndrome. Tall Poppy Syndrome refers to the mindset where those people who stick their head above the parapet are resented, criticized, and cut down.
I am preparing a workshop for a client designed for a group of newly minted leaders. I want to demonstrate the differences between leaders and managers. However, I also want to highlight that being a leader and manager is also contextual, in certain cases we need to be more “managerial” (or theory X) in our approach while in other scenarios, we need to exercise our leadership skills (theory Y). Beyond these contextual situations, we must be aware that we manage things, but we lead people. Furthermore, when we operate in a world where both the problem and solution are known, management is useful. However, when we live in an unpredictable world, our inner leader must emerge.
We have the real pleasure of exploring what it was like trying to innovate from within Kodak with none other than the Inventor of the Digital Camera – Steve Sasson.We discuss so many aspects of Innovation and the struggle to let go of a successful business model.
Incremental improvement is no longer sufficient in helping organizations navigate the complexity, uncertainty, and volatility of today’s world. Our guest today explores how to create non-linear, dramatic change in organizations. He explores the emerging science of change that teaches us about how to build organizations – from businesses to governments – that change and adapt rapidly. It is great pleasure to welcome the author of “Change: How Organizations Achieve Hard-to-Imagine Results in Uncertain and Volatile Times”, John Kotter.
More about John: https://www.kotterinc.com
Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet by Michelle Weise focuses on the disruptive and burgeoning innovations that are laying the foundation for a new learning model that includes clear navigation, wraparound and funding supports, targeted education, and clear connections to more transparent hiring processes.
When we refer to the miraculous metamorphosis of the caterpillar into the butterfly, we often use the words “Chrysalis” and “Cocoon” interchangeably. However, they do not describe the same thing. In my book “Undisruptable”, I detail some of the similarities of the transformation of the caterpillar and the transformation of organisations and individuals alike. For this Thursday Thought, I’d like to zoom in on one specific element of this transformation: the difference between “Chrysalis” and “Cocoon”, an element I removed from the book in a bid to make it shorter.
Fear is a construct of the mind, fed by our experiences, upbringing, genes and more. Because fear is subjective, each of us experiences fear in different ways.
Just like the well-worn gate must be prepped for renewal, so must an organisation be prepped for any meaningful change.