At some level, change is always about the stories we tell. We like to think that we humans are objective arbiters of the facts, but that’s not really true. We think in narratives. In one study, juries considered experts that shared stories far more credible than those that merely offered an analysis of the relevant facts.
Every organization tells stories, some deliberate, some not. General Electric was able to tell successful stories for decades, yet it was a false narrative and, when the facts caught up, the firm collapsed. On the other hand, Satya Nadella was able to change the narrative at Microsoft even though, objectively, the company was already doing well.
Hollywood mogul Peter Guber describes stories as “emotional transport” and that’s why we need to be purposeful about the ones we tell if we are to bring about genuine transformation. Stakeholders need to be able to see themselves as heroes in the stories we tell, working within shared values to achieve a common purpose. Our story needs to be their story.
Pretty much everywhere you look, you’ll find bullshit. We are constantly bombarded with politicians and “experts “on TV, at conferences and on social media, spouting bullshit. An economist would tell you that it is simply impossible for so much bullshit to exist, because the market values truth, but of course that’s bullshit.
One possible reason that there is so much bullshit in the world is that there are so many bullshitters. Yet that explanation has a critical flaw. People spouting bullshit are, in most cases, completely sincere. They believe that they are truth tellers, uncovering and sharing critical wisdoms that add value and meaning to our lives.
In his famous essay, On Bullshit, philosopher Harry Frankfurt makes the case that “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are,” because liars need to actually ascertain the truth to misrepresent it. Bullshitters, on the other hand, show complete disregard for facts. I would argue, however, that’s only half the story. We bullshit because it serves a crucial purpose.
Shortly after I first arrived at college, my wrestling coach told my teammates and me that we would all be attending a freshman technique camp. It turned out to be something quite different than what I had expected. He didn’t teach us any advanced or esoteric method, but instead demonstrated the basics.
It was incredibly humbling. The fact that we were there in the first place, competing for a Division 1 program, meant that we had all demonstrated outstanding accomplishment. And now we were supposed to revisit the stuff we learned in peewee programs? It seemed insulting at first, but turned out to be one of the best lessons I’ve ever learned.
The truth is that in any endeavor, you are only as good as your fundamentals. While it’s easy to get enamored with grand strategies and fancy tactics, whether you succeed or fail is far more likely to depend on doing simple, basic things consistently well. In much the same way, I’ve found that simple rules can, if applied sensibly, help make you incredibly effective.
In The Knowing Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton, the two Stanford professors show, in painstaking detail, that most enterprises fail to act on what they know. They point out that many are set up to reinforce the status quo, because mastering conventional wisdom is key to advancement.
There is a similar gap when it comes to transformation and change, but for somewhat different reasons. Decades of research and insights are largely ignored. Transformational initiatives are seen as exercises in persuasion, with practitioners designing slogans to “create a sense of urgency around change” and shift attitudes, assuming that will change behaviors.
Today we are in a change crisis. Businesses need to internalize new technologies like AI and adapt to new realities like hybrid work, but still struggle to adopt decades old skills related to lean manufacturing, agile development and cultural competency. If we are going to drive the transformations we need to compete, we need to take an evidence based approach.
“Imagine, if you will, a factory as clean, spacious and continuously operating as a hydroelectric plant. The production floor is barren of men,” Fortune magazine declared in its November 1946 issue. Soon the world entered a new world of mass production and mass retail. Then came a green revolution, a space race, genomics, computers, the Internet and now artificial intelligence.
Today it’s become an article of faith that everything moves faster. Business pundits tell us that we’re living in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). These are taken as basic truths that are beyond questioning or reproach. Yet are things actually moving any faster than in earlier eras? The evidence is surprisingly scarce.
The inescapable truth is that some things move faster today and others move slower. We don’t have—nor should we want—more change today than before. We need to be more thoughtful about change, more deliberate about the ones we undertake and more tenacious in our pursuit of them. We should aim to have less disruption and more progress.
One of the most frustrating statements I come across is that “we had a good strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” That’s nonsense. Obviously, if you couldn’t execute, there were some important factors that you didn’t take into account. You miscalculated in some significant way. So how was that a good strategy?
This raises an important question: What makes a strategy good? The concept of strategy gets thrown around so much and so incompetently, few stop to define the term. Strategy often becomes self-referential, a consensus-driven story that no one dares to question, but everyone is duty bound to carry out, for better or worse.
One helpful concept is the German military principle of Schwerpunkt, which roughly translates to “focal point.” You need to pick the battles that will prove decisive, the ones that matter and which you can win. Or, as Richard Rumelt has put it, good strategy puts relative strength against relative weakness. Figuring that out is what makes the difference.
On a cold November day in 2013, frustrated by recent events in Ukraine, a journalist named Mustafa Nayyem posted to Facebook, “Okay guys, let’s get serious. Who’s ready to go to the Maidan today at midnight? ‘Likes’ will not be counted. Only comments under this post with the words ‘I’m ready.’ Once there are more than a thousand, we will organize it.”
Nothing needed to be explained. Everyone knew exactly what he meant. Nine years earlier, hundreds of thousands of people flooded Independence Square in Kyiv, locally known as “the Maidan,” to protest a falsified election in a movement called the Orange Revolution. Mustafa was now calling on his fellow citizens to do the same.
It was a moment that changed history. Yet it’s not that moment we should focus on, but what came before. It was what happened in those ensuing nine years—the development of unseen networks, the learning and the cultural change—that made the moment possible. The truth is that for genuine change to take place, significant cultural shifts need to come first.
Pundits tell us that the world is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. It’s the VUCA gospel. Under the banner of “innovate or die,” massive transformation projects are being kicked off constantly. Executives around the world scramble to reorganize and reinvent their organizations, only to reorganize and reinvent them again.
It gets worse, consider a 2014 report by PwC that revealed 65% of respondents in corporations complained about change fatigue, 44% of employees complained they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it. A more recent study by Gartner in 2020 found that propensity for change fatigue doubled during the pandemic.
Executives, wanting to be seen as dynamic leaders, are launching too many initiatives, very few of which lead to positive impact, while at the same time the rest of the workforce struggles with increasing mental health challenges. The answer is less, not more. We need to focus on fewer initiatives, with more commitment to ensure their success.
When Lou Gerstner took over at IBM in 1993, the century-old tech giant was on its knees. Many thought it should be broken up into smaller, more focused companies. Others had different ideas. So at Gerster’s first press conference, people were curious about his strategy and disappointed when he failed to deliver one.
“The last thing IBM needs right now as a vision,” he said. What he meant was that IBM’s culture was broken. “Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game,” he would later write. “It is the game. What does the culture reward and punish – individual achievement or team play, risk taking or consensus building?”
What Gerstner saw was that IBM had lost sight of the values that had made it successful in the first place. He wasn’t “disrupting.” He was making IBM culture safe to innovate again and, by doing that, he achieved one of the most remarkable turnarounds in corporate history. If you want to achieve truly radical change, you need to start with shared values.
Not too long ago, I had a post about the danger of trusting your feelings go viral on LinkedIn. The reason it was so popular wasn’t necessarily that everyone liked it, but because many wanted to voice their disapproval. A surprising number of people vehemently objected to the idea that they should interrogate their feelings or keep them in check.
Make no mistake. While it is true that our emotions can alert us to dangers that our rational mind fails to recognize, they can also lead us wildly astray. Our hippocampus, where our memories reside, has a bee line to our amygdala, which plays a role in governing our emotions, circumventing our rational brain in the prefrontal corpus.
We tend to assume that good judgment is a function of intelligence and education, but often it’s not. We need to recognize that there are glitches in our neural machinery and that our gut feelings can be triggered by random events as well as by people who seek to manipulate us. That’s why we need to be careful. It’s always the suckers who think they’re playing it smart.
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