Chances are, you work in a square-peg business, because that’s the best way to make money. You work diligently to improve the pegs and to get them to where they need to go better, faster and cheaper. It is through quality and consistency that you can best serve your customers, beat your competition and win in the marketplace.
The problem comes when your square-peg business meets a round-hole world. When that happens, following traditional best practices will only result in getting better and better at doing things people care about less and less. Round holes don’t concern themselves how good your square pegs are or how efficiently you can produce them.
Make no mistake. Eventually, every business eventually finds itself in a round-hole world. That’s why good companies fail. Not because they become stupid and lazy, but because the world changes and they lose relevance. Clearly, in the midst of disruption the only viable strategy is to adapt and shift from a traditional manager mindset to a changemaker mindset.
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In 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama published an essay in the journal The National Interest titled The End of History, which led to a bestselling book. Many took his argument to mean that, with the defeat of communism, US-style liberal democracy had emerged as the only viable way of organizing a society.
He was misunderstood. Fukuyama pointed out that even if we had reached an endpoint in the debate about ideologies, there would still be conflict because of people’s need to express their identity. What many thought to be a justification, was actually a warning to expect people to rebel against an order imposed on them.
If you believe history is on your side, you’re likely to throw caution to the wind, get mixed up in things you shouldn’t and, eventually, you’ll pay a price. That’s the problem with big ideas, their nuance is often lost on those who hear them third or fourth hand and the high-stakes game of broken telephone tends to end badly. We need to approach ideas with more care.
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I still remember the bright autumn day in 2014 when I turned off of the main road in Exton, Pennsylvania onto a remote path. I was going to meet Brian J. Robertson, the creator of a hot new “flat” management approach called Holacracy. I was skeptical, because it seemed to be a cumbersome way to go about governance, but I was open to learning about it.
Many companies, most famously Zappos, were enthusiastically adopting it and there was no shortage of hype among the punditry about abolishing hierarchies. Brian, for his part, was gracious and patient with me, explaining how and why everything worked. Still, I had my doubts and remained unconvinced.
Recently, Stanford’s Bob Sutton pointed to Ronnie Lee’s research that confirmed my (and his) suspicions. While flatter structures can promote creativity, we need hierarchies to execute well. The truth is that hierarchies form naturally and, rather than trying to ignore that basic fact, we need to design enterprises with hierarchical networks in mind.
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On September 17th, 2011, protesters began to stream into Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and the #Occupy movement had begun. “We are the 99%,” they declared and as far as they were concerned, it was time for the reign of the “1%” to end. The protests soon spread like wildfire to 951 cities across 82 countries.
It failed miserably. Today, a decade later, it’s hard to find any real objective that was achieved except some vague assertions about “building awareness” and Bernie Sanders’ two failed presidential campaigns. Taking into the count the billions of dollars worth of resources expended in terms of time and effort, that is abysmal performance.
As I explained in Cascades, there were myriad reasons for #Occupy’s failure. One of the gravest errors, however, was the insistence on ideological purity and the lack of any effort to understand those who had different ideas from their own. If you expect to bring change about, you need to attract, rather than overpower. Empathy is a good place to start.
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I’ve always been inspired by ideas. Some, like Aristotle’s logic, shape the world for millennia. Others, like Einstein’s relativity, completely change our conceptions of what is possible. Still others, like mRNA vaccines, seem to emerge at just the right time. Ideas are what have marked humanity’s progress from living in caves to civilizations.
Yet bad ideas can destroy just as completely as good ideas can create. Fascism led Europe to effectively wipe itself out in little more than a decade. Communism relegated hundreds of millions of people to poverty and struggle. Corporate debacles like like Enron, WeWork and Theranos, have shown us that the wrong idea can cost billions.
We need to handle ideas with care, being open enough to new ones so that we don’t miss out on opportunities, but skeptical enough that we don’t get taken in by ones that do harm. What I’ve learned researching innovation and change is that creating, parsing and evaluating ideas is a skill that must be practiced and honed over time. Here are 4 things to keep in mind.
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The global activist Srdja Popović once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. That’s what true transformation looks like.
Yet many leaders approach innovation and change as if they were swashbuckling heroes in their own action movie. Companies like Theranos, WeWork and Uber squandered billions of dollars on business models that never made any sense. People post their latest ChatGPT prompts on social media while Elon Musk trolls Twitter.
These days, innovation has become, far too often, solipsistic and self-referential, pursued for the glory of the innovators themselves rather than for the benefit of everyone else and there is increasing evidence the venture-funded entrepreneurship model is crowding out more productive investments. We need to move away from hype and focus on impact.
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In 2004 I found myself running a major news organization during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. It was one of those moments when the universe opens up, reveals a bit of itself and you realize the world doesn’t work the way you thought it did. What struck me at the time was that nobody with any conventional form of power had any ability to shape events at all.
One of the myths that is constantly repeated is that change needs to start at the top. Clearly that is not true. It wasn’t true of the Color Revolutions that spread across Eastern Europe. Nor was it true of social movements like the fight for LGBT rights. Despite what you may have heard, it doesn’t hold true for organizations either.
What is true is that if you are going to bring about genuine change you need to influence institutions and that means you need, at some point, to involve senior leaders, but it rarely starts with them. The myth that change has to start at the top is a copout—a reason to do nothing when you can do something. Make no mistake. Change can come from anywhere.
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It’s hard to believe that summer is already here. Where I live, outside of Philadelphia, the nights in May have been pretty cold, so I’m still trying to get used to the idea that the time for backyard barbecues and hanging out by the pool has already arrived. Still, summer is by far my favorite season, so I gotta have faith!
It also appears that we’ve entered the dawn of a new age of artificial intelligence. New services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, while not exactly great leaps forward in technology, have introduced generative AI to the greater public. Every day millions of people are using these services to do real work.
Like it or not, we’re all going to have to learn to navigate this new age and figure out what it means for us. Much like earlier innovations, such as smartphones and the Internet, AI will alter our lives in ways that are hard to predict and we’ll all have to figure out how to navigate the opportunities and the dangers. Here are 11 books that will help you do that.
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When I was in Panama last year for a keynote I had the opportunity to speak with Erika Mouynes, the country’s former Foreign Minister, about the war in Ukraine. Her ministry had strayed from its traditionally neutral stance by calling for “respect for the sovereignty, political independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine based on international law.”
She told me that when she later met with Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, he asked her why she cared about a country thousands of miles away where Panama has no tangible interests. What did she expect to gain? She told him that sometimes you need to make decisions based on values that are important to you.
Her position was not without risk. Panama depends on broad international support for its canal. Yet many of the executives at the event told me how proud they were of her support for sovereignty, an issue that Panama has sometimes struggled with in its history. The truth is that, to mean something, values always cost you something. Otherwise they’re just platitudes.
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The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt developed the metaphor of the Elephant and the Rider to describe the relationship between our emotional and cognitive brains. While the rider (representing our cognitive brain) may feel in control, it is the elephant (our emotions) that is more likely to determine which direction we will go.
That’s why it feels so good to act on our emotions. Rather than struggling with the reins to get the elephant to go where we want it to, we can just give in and race with abandon towards our destination. It’s usually not until we’ve run off a cliff that we realize that we should have exercised more restraint. By that time, it’s often too late to undo the damage.
The truth is that our brains are wired for survival, not to make rational decisions for a modern, industrialized economy. That’s why we shouldn’t blindly trust our feelings. We should see them as warning signs to proceed with caution because, while they can alert us to unseen dangers, they can also be triggers that others use to manipulate us.
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