On February 12th, 2004, at the direction of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and in defiance of California Law, city officials began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in what would come to be known as the Winter of Love. Coming just in time for Valentines Day, it captured the imagination of the LGBTQ community.
Yet the backlash was swift. Within weeks, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment declaring that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Conservative groups swung into action and in 2008 were successful in placing Proposition 8, a law so harsh that many believe that it paved the way for marriage rights.
Saul Alinsky warned that every revolution inspires a counterrevolution. Out instinct is to try to silence dissent, but that will always backfire. There is a better way. Rather than try to overpower those that oppose your idea, you can create a dilemma that forces them to discredit themselves. By inciting a crackdown, that’s exactly what Newsom’s ploy did.
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When I was living in Moscow in 2003, I couldn’t help thinking, “This must be what Weimar Germany felt like. These people don’t know that they lost the Cold War. They think their leaders betrayed them and surrendered. They will try to dominate again.” At the time, I wondered if I was being a bit alarmist. Today, it’s clear that I was not.
I had come to Moscow with the perspective of having spent more than 6 years in the region, most of it in Poland, where the country was rapidly modernizing and westernizing. The fall of the Soviet Union was seen as unambiguously positive there. In Moscow though, you could deeply feel its sense of loss of imperial identity and its visceral desire to restore its national pride.
It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, like the end of history. The conflict between communism and capitalism had come to an abrupt end. Just one model remained. But, as Fukuyama also noted—and as I saw firsthand in Moscow—the human urge to assert identity remained. What we were witnessing wasn’t an end, but the beginning of a major realignment.
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My friend Jessica Kriegel often warns leaders about the action trap, the mistaken belief that if we just do something we’ll get results. We’re conditioned to have a bias for action, to do something rather than nothing. Yet actions without a sound strategy are doomed to fail. We need to avoid the trap of doing stuff just to make ourselves feel better. Action is no substitute for discipline.
The truth is that good ideas fail all of the time for all kinds of reasons. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. There are also cultural norms and rituals that are rarely obvious. And beneath the surface, there are always unseen obstacles that can derail even the best-intended efforts.
Until you identify, analyze and understand exactly what your actions are targeted at, you’re just wasting time and resources. Even worse, as you lurch from one failed action to another, you create stress, erode trust and fuel change fatigue, making future actions even less likely to succeed. Smart leaders learn to avoid this cycle. Here’s how they do that effectively.
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People who are passionate about change usually start with answers. They have a solution to a problem they are enthusiastic about and are excited to implement it. Questions usually revolve around communication. They want to make people aware of their idea and give them the knowledge and understanding to make good use of it.
That’s why change management consultants tell us to to start by building awareness, desire and knowledge before moving on to training to provide people with the ability to implement change. They assume that if people just understand the idea, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true and it usually doesn’t end well.
The truth is that a big awareness campaign is likely to trigger those who hate the idea to immediately start working to undermine what you’re trying to achieve in order to kill it before it even starts. To bring genuine transformation about you need to see the world as it really is and ask yourself hard questions. Here are three that you’ll want to start with:
It’s hard to believe that ChatGPT launched in November 2022, just two and a half years ago. In that short span, AI has become deeply embedded in our personal and professional lives, often serving as a constant companion: answering questions, offering feedback, and sometimes even pointing us in new directions.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that many are asking what it all means for the future. Are we heading toward a utopia of super-productive machines and widespread abundance? Or are we hurtling inevitably toward a Matrix-like dystopian nightmare in which we are subjugated by machines and the oligarchs who control them?
History is long and varied, so there are plenty of examples to support both the utopian and dystopian view. The future is unknowable. Yet by this point, we know a lot about innovation so we have some good models to make judgements. When it comes to technology, jobs and the economy, we need to look at three effects: displacement, productivity and reinstatement.
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In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive and fast. The second is rational, deliberative and slow. As humans we evolved to make split-second decisions in life-or-death situations. Our slow-moving rational minds don’t automatically engage unless we deliberately focus.
Cal Newport, in his new book Slow Productivity, makes a similar point about work. In our hectic modern lives, we need to optimize tasks, such as returning emails, dropping off kids and managing schedules, to keep things moving. We need to do this quickly, because there are other people depending on us to get things done.
Yet there is also a different mode of working. Often, this type of activity is not pursued with a specific goal in mind, but rather as an exploration. There are stops and starts, dead ends and blind alleys, as well as long fallow periods that can span months or even years. This, however, is the kind of work that makes significant impacts on the world. Not all who wander are lost.
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One observation I’ve made is that countries tend to have their preferred season for rising up. In Ukraine, quite maddeningly, it is the dead of winter. I still remember freezing with so many others on Kyiv’s Maidan during the Orange Revolution in November 2004, then seeing so many of my friends freezing the same way on the same place a decade later.
We Americans, at least in this one respect, are far more sensible. We protest when it’s warm. From the first signing of the Declaration of Independence and Freedom Summer to the Stonewall Uprising and Martin Luther King’s famous March on Washington, we wait till the weather heats up to go out into the streets.
With tensions in the country running high we can expect our fair share of unrest this summer. Unfortunately, most of these will have more passion than good sense. Protestors rarely learn from those who preceded them, which is a shame. There is no shortage of accumulated wisdom. With that in mind, here are 17 books that are worth learning from.
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Anybody who’s ever pursued significant change of any kind knows that some of the opposition can be absolutely nuts, with no rational basis at all. Change consultants often suggest we look for a “root cause,” but that’s often a fool’s errand. You’ll not only drive yourself crazy running in circles, you’re also likely to lend credibility to their attacks.
Consider the Semmelweis effect,, the human tendency to reject new evidence because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms. It gets its name from Ignaz Semmelweis, a young doctor who discovered that hand washing at hospitals could prevent infections and was driven literally insane for his trouble.
The simple truth is that when you are trying to get people to change things that they think or do, many won’t be ready to hear you. Some will never accept what you are trying to achieve and will actively work to undermine you. But by better understanding irrational resistance, we can develop strategies to overcome it. Semmelweis’s story is a great place to start.
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During the 15 years I spent in Eastern Europe, I saw more than my share of upheaval. When I arrived in Poland in 1997, there were monuments to dysfunction everywhere you looked. In Warsaw, Stalin’s horrid Palace of Culture dominated the skyline. In Krakow, the abandoned frame of the Szkieletor building stood frozen since the 1970s.
I was there during the 1998 Ruble crisis that shook the former Soviet Union and, two years later, the dotcom crash rippled throughout the world bringing down former corporate juggernauts such as Enron and Worldcom. During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, I saw first-hand how a society could turn itself inside out and come out the other side a better, more hopeful place.
Yet I’ve never seen anything like this. I think what’s different now is that America is seen as a primary source of disruption, instead of a source of stability. We’ve made terrible mistakes before, such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, but we never lost the world’s trust like we have today. This time, the problem is us and we need to understand how we got here.
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Breakthrough innovation typically comes from the edges. Albert Einstein had published his miracle year papers when he was an obscure 26 year-old Swiss patent clerk. Some of McDonald’s most popular products, such as the Big Mac and the Egg McMuffin, originated with franchisees before getting adopted nationally.
That’s why a lot of management experts advise leaders to spend time on the edges of their enterprise and some, Walmart’s Sam Walton comes to mind, can do that effectively. Most, however, cannot. The problem is that the time spent “out on the edge” has to come from other priorities, such as product development, culture, customers, investor relations and so on.
Often a more viable alternative is to empower the edges to advocate for themselves. Over the years, I have worked with dozens of organizations and I’ve never seen one that lacked ideas nor leaders who want to leverage them. The real challenge is that ideas stay hidden, because few middle or junior employees know how to build traction and move them forward.
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