No matter what’s going on during the year, I always look forward to summer. I love the heat and, despite spending 15 years in frigid Eastern European countries, I hate the cold. Every year I find myself counting the days before I can slap on gobs of sunscreen and while away the hours underneath the sun.
Of course, one of my favorite things to do at the beach or by the pool is to read. There’s something about summer that helps me block out whatever else is going on and focus on the book in front of me. So every year I find myself looking for good books that will make the time and effort worth it.
Today, the world is focused on a country I know well, but most people are unfamiliar with. To a surprising extent, Ukraine finds itself at a crossroads of world affairs, with conflicts between east and west, democracy and authoritarianism, populism and globalism in the balance, it’s a war we must win. This summer’s list focuses on understanding why.
What can be hardest about change, especially when we feel passionately about it, is that at some point, we need to accept that others will not embrace it. Not every change is for everybody. Some will have to pursue a different journey, one to which they can devote their own passions and seek out their own truths.
Yet there’s something about human nature that makes us want to convince those who vehemently oppose our idea. That’s almost always a mistake. Often, the reason for their opposition has less to do with any rational argument than their identity and sense of self. For whatever reason, it offends their dignity.
Still, we can learn to love our haters, because they can often help us find the way forward. All too often, we end up preaching to the choir instead of venturing out of the church and mixing with the heathens. That’s how change efforts fail. On the other hand, if we can learn to use their tactics and rhetoric to our own advantage, we have a powerful weapon for change.
When I lived in Moscow, my gym was just a five-minute walk from my flat. So rather than use a locker, I would just run over in my shorts and a jacket no matter what the weather was. The locals thought I was crazy. Elderly Russians would sometimes scream at me to go home and get dressed properly.
I had always heard that Russians were impervious to the effects of weather, but the truth is that they get cold just like the rest of us. We tend to mythologize the unknown. Our brains work in strange ways, soaking up patterns from what we see. Often, however, those experiences are unreliable, such as the Hollywood images that helped shape my views about Russians and their impenetrability.
One of the most annoying things I hear from leaders is that “we had a great strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” That’s simply not possible. If you can’t execute it, it’s not a great strategy. Most likely, it was a fantasy cooked up by some combination of consultants and investment bankers which was enshrined in PowerPoint.
As Richard Rumelt points out in his new book, The Crux, planning is not strategy. Yet that’s what managers are good at, so when they set out to create a strategy they build a plan, starting with objectives and working back to resources and operational directives, rejiggering assumptions along the way to make everything fit.
Good strategy doesn’t rely on assumptions. It changes them. When you look at visionary leaders, like Ray Kroc and McDonalds, Charles Lazarus at Toys “R” Us or Thomas Watson Jr. and the IBM 360, they all focused on solving an emerging problem. The truth is that the next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. Good strategy creates something new.
Probably the greatest misconception about change is that it fails because people don’t understand it. The truth is that change usually fails because it is actively sabotaged. The status quo has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. Anytime you ask people to change what they think or how they act, you can expect resistance.
Yet not all resistance is the same. Some people are merely skeptical about change, they are looking for evidence based, rational arguments that the proposed action will achieve positive results. Often, however, resistance is irrational and no amount of evidence will be persuasive. People are actively working to subvert change efforts.
We can’t let our transformation efforts be defined by those who want it to fail. Not everyone will embrace change. Instead of wasting time and effort to convince the opposition, we should focus our efforts on empowering those who want it to succeed. However, we need to learn to recognize different kinds of resistance so that we can address genuine issues.
Yet as AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, around the same time that Porter’s ideas were ascending among CEOs in the establishment industries on the east coast, a very different way of doing business was gaining steam in Silicon Valley. The firms there saw themselves not as isolated fiefdoms, but as part of a larger ecosystem.
Competitive advantage can no longer be reduced to the sum of efficiencies in a value chain, but is embedded in webs of connections. To compete in an ecosystem-driven world, Leaders need to do more than adapt how we deploy assets, we need to look at things differently. It is no longer enough to merely plan and direct action, we need to inspire and empower belief.
Some years back I was invited to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Over the years many of the world’s greatest minds have taken up residence there. It was where Einstein worked till his death in 1955. It is a place, for me at least, in which stories permeate from every corner and crevice.
There is a common room in the main building, Fuld Hall, where tea is served every afternoon and, if you know the stories, you can almost hear the din of legends arguing, cajoling and discussing pathbreaking ideas when you enter. That is the power of story. It can imbue even inanimate objects with meaning.
Look at great leaders throughout history, from General George Patton to Martin Luther King Jr. to Steve Jobs, and they all used the power of story to anchor an enterprise with a sense of mission and destiny. It was undoubtedly a big part of their success. We need to learn to tell better stories, if we are to give meaning to others and build faith in a common endeavor.
Today it’s become an article of faith that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Business pundits tell us that we must “innovate or die.” These are taken as basic truths that are beyond questioning or reproach. Those who doubt the need for change risk being dismissed as out of touch.
This is the change gospel and it is worshiped with almost religious fervor. Yet the evidence suggests exactly the opposite. An even relatively casual examination of relevant data would reveal that, for incumbent businesses at least, the era we live in now is far more stable, less innovative and less productive.
In a nutshell, we are talking about change more, but doing it less. That’s a problem. Managers who want to be seen as change leaders launch too many initiatives. Employees, for their part, get jaded and wait for the newest idea to fail, just as the others before. The result is inevitably innovation theater, rather than meaningful change. We desperately need to fix this.
Leaders need to make decisions and we rarely get to choose the context. Most often, we need to take action without all the facts, in a rapidly changing environment and a compressed time frame. We need to do so with the knowledge that if we get it wrong, we will bear the blame and no one else. It will be our mess to clean up.
That’s a hard bridge to cross and many, if not most, are never quite able to get there. I think that’s why we admire great leaders so much, because they have the courage to take responsibility on their backs and be accountable, to inspire confidence even in an atmosphere of confusion and to point the way forward, even if they aren’t sure it’s the right direction.
The truth is that you can never really be certain until you take that step forward. The simple and inescapable truth is that to accomplish anything significant you need to travel on an uncertain journey. It is tautologically true that the well-trod path will take us nowhere new. We can never fully control uncertainty, but we can learn to lead through it.
Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to lead a number of organizations and each one involved a series of steep learning curves. Even the most successful operations do some things poorly, so managing an enterprise involves constant improvement. You always want to figure out where you can do things better.
One way to do that is to identify other organizations that do something well and adopt best practices. Copying what others do won’t make you world class, but it will get you started on the right road. Over time, you can learn which practices are a good fit for your organization and which are not. As you progress, you can begin to develop your own capabilities.
What you don’t want to do is to take bad ideas that have failed try and force them through, yet it happens all the time. Business pundits and consultants don’t stop selling zombie ideas just because they don’t work and people don’t stop getting taken in by slick sales jobs. We need to be much more discerning about the ideas we adopt. Here are some to watch out for.
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