On September 17th, 2011, protesters began to flood into Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Declaring “We are the 99%” they planned to #Occupy Wall Street for as long as it took to make their voice heard. Similar protests soon spread like wildfire across 951 cities in 82 countries. It seemed to be a massive global movement of historic proportions.
But it wasn’t a movement. It was merely a moment. Within a few months, the streets and parks were cleared. The protesters went home and nothing much changed. #Occupy was, to paraphrase Shakespeare, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Certainly, no tangible aim was accomplished.
Failure has costs. Thousands of people for hours a day across several months adds up to billions of dollars worth of man-hours that could have been put to some useful purpose. Make no mistake. Creating positive change in the world takes far more than mobilization. You need a vision and a strategy, guided by values, designed to accomplish clear objectives.
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When I lived and worked in Ukraine, it was commonplace to see men in camouflage fatigues and Uzi’s in the waiting rooms of offices around town. They weren’t there as security, or to rob the place, but to help transfer money between businesses. It was cumbersome and inefficient, but in an atmosphere of mistrust, it was a necessity.
In most countries, we’re still a long way from armed couriers as a daily routine, but according to Edelman’s recent Trust Barometer, we’re headed in that direction. Entitled “The Cycle of Distrust,” it details an overall collapse of confidence, finding that roughly two thirds believe that journalists, government leaders, and business executives, are “purposely trying to mislead.”
That’s a problem for all of us. Mistrust is corrosive to the norms that help our society run efficiently and the costs are very real. Our lack of trust in government prevents us from making needed investments. Suspicions about law enforcement undermine public safety. Mistrust in the workplace undermines performance. We desperately need to rebuild trust.
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All too often, we see change as a communication exercise. We think that if people really understood our idea, they would embrace it. In this view, bringing about change is really just a matter of messaging. Find the right slogan and deliver it in the right way, and you will ignite the passions required to drive transformation.
Nothing can be further from the truth. If a change is important and has real potential for impact, there will always be some people who won’t like it and they will work to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded, and deceptive. Change rarely fails because people don’t understand it. Most often it is actively sabotaged.
A more elegant slogan won’t save you. What you need is a sound strategy to overcome resistance to change. Fortunately, we know from social and political movements that radical, transformational change is possible and, as I explained in Cascades, their principles can be highly effective in organizations. Here are three strategies that you should know.
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When the Business Roundtable issued a statement in 2019 that discarded the old notion that the sole purpose of a business is to provide value to shareholders, many were dismayed. Some thought it was just another example of misguided altruism by “elites.” Others saw it as a cynical and disingenuous ploy.
Yet the primacy of shareholder value is hardly a well-established economic principle. The concept does not appear even once in Adam Smith’s seminal treatise, The Wealth of Nations. In fact, it is a relatively recent idea and when the economist Milton Friedman first proposed it in 1970, it was considered radical, even subversive, certainly not to be taken as gospel.
It has also been tremendously unsuccessful. Since Friedman’s essay we have become less productive, not more. One reason for the poor results is that Friedman and others like him failed to recognize that our economy is made up of people, not inanimate pieces of data that make up economic charts, and these people search for meaning and purpose in their lives.
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Today, it seems that almost everyone wants to be the “Uber” of something, and why not? With very little capital investment, the company has completely disrupted the taxicab industry and attained a market value of over $100 billion. In an earlier era, it would have taken decades to have created that kind of impact on a global scale.
Still, we’re not exactly talking about Henry Ford and his Model T here. Or even the Boeing 707 or the IBM 360. Like Uber, those innovations quickly grew to dominance, but also unleashed incredible productivity. Uber, on the other hand, still gushes red ink even after more than a decade and $25 billion invested. Just last year it lost more than $6 billion.
The truth is that we have a major problem and, while Uber didn’t cause it, the company is emblematic of it. Put simply, a market economy runs on innovation. It is only through consistent gains in productivity that we can create real prosperity. The data and evidence strongly suggests that we have failed to do that for the past 50 years. We need to do better.
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The Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed that “There is nothing permanent except change” and events over the past few thousand years would seem to prove him right. Yet while change may endure, the rate of change fluctuates over time. Throughout history, forces tend to cascade and converge on particular points.
By all indications, we are in such a period now. We are undergoing four major shifts in technology, resources, migration and demography that will be transformative. Clearly, these shifts will create significant opportunities, but also great peril. The last time we saw this much change afoot was during the 1920s and that didn’t end well.
Yet history is not destiny. We’re entering a new era of innovation in which our ability to solve problems will be unprecedented and can shape our path by making wise choices. Still, as we have seen with the Covid pandemic, the toughest challenges we will face will have had less to do with devising solutions than with changing behaviors and conquering ourselves.
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More than anything else, 2021 seemed like a year-in-waiting. We waited for the vaccine and then we waited for herd immunity to take hold. We waited to go back to work and school and then we waited for the supply chain crisis to pass. Most of all, we waited for things to go back to normal. We’re still waiting.
Yet while we’ve been waiting, things have been changing. We’ve learned how to work and collaborate remotely. Scientists learned that the mRNA molecule had more potential than most thought. We learned that building resilience into our systems was more important than just moving fast and breaking things.
Most of all, we learned that things need to change, that living unsustainably is, for lack of a better word, unsustainable. We simply cannot go on as before. Still, needing to change and accepting change are two very different things, which is probably why my many most popular posts this past year focused on the challenges of overcoming the status quo. Here they are:
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Many hoped that this year would be a return to normalcy and in some ways it has been. The trend toward popular authoritarianism seems to have ebbed and, for the most part, economies are back on track. People have largely returned to work and kids have mostly gone back to school. At least in the US, shops are open with decent foot traffic.
Still, what’s perhaps most striking is the challenges that remain. Covid deaths in 2021 outpaced 2020 and there’s always the possibility of more severe variants. Despite all the hype around technology, we remain in a productivity crisis. We continue to struggle to maintain competitive markets. The specter of climate change still haunts us.
I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that many of the books I read this year focus on those challenges. We are in the midst of a demographic handoff from the Boomers to the Millennials, who are much more focused on the long-term. So we should expect more seriousness in how we tackle problems. Genuine solutions, however, still elude us.
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Throughout history there have been certain times and places that have given rise to phenomenal intellectual activity. The Vienna Circle and Cambridge’s Bloomsbury Group in the early 20th century are certainly examples, as is the Golden Age of Russian Literature in the mid-19th century and the post-war existentialist movement in Paris.
In a certain sense, these seem random, but they aren’t really. In each case, we can see undercurrents of politics, economics and other forces that gave rise to tensions people were trying to resolve. Great thinkers would explore, meet and influence each other, creating new directions and possibilities.
Yet it isn’t only intellectual life that converges in this way. History has a way of assembling forces around certain points of time and space, when long-standing trends intersect and give rise to new things. That’s why we study past events and learn about the lives of great personages long gone, so that we can hope to proactively recognize these forces and adapt.
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When I first moved to Kyiv about 20 years ago, I met my friend Pavlo, who is from Belarus. Eventually our talk turned to that country’s leader, Alexander Lukashenko, and an incident in which he turned off the utilities at the US Ambassador’s residence, as well as those of other diplomats. It seemed totally outlandish and crazy to me.
“But he won,” Pavlo countered. I was incredulous, until he explained. “Lukashenko knows he’s a bastard and that the world will never accept him. In that situation all you can win is your freedom and that’s what he won.” It was a mode of thinking so outrageous and foreign to me that I could scarcely believe it.
Yet it opened my eyes and made me a more effective operator. We tend to think of empathy as an act of generosity, but it’s far more than that. Learning how to internalize diverse viewpoints is a skill we should learn not only because it helps make others more comfortable, but because it empowers us to successfully navigate an often complex and difficult world.
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