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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the 1950s, a number of researchers began exploring how innovations spread. Why do some ideas catch on while others fizzle out? And why do certain ideas gain quick acceptance in some places but struggle in others? To find out, they studied successful innovations like hybrid corn and tetracycline.
What they found was that innovative ideas tend to come from outside the community, with early adopters being those most connected to the outside world. The first farmers to adopt hybrid corn were also the ones who often traveled to the city, doctors who read medical journals and attended out of town conferences tended to be those who first prescribed tetracycline.
From there, things followed a distinct pattern, often described as an s-curve. While most ignore the idea—and some show downright hostility to it—those early explorers begin to experiment with it and it is their success that determines whether it will spread. That’s why to successfully lead change, you need to identify, nurture and empower those early few.
When Portuguese colonists first came across manioc in South America, they were a bit perplexed by the elaborate, multi-day process the indigenous people followed before consuming it. Some steps, like boiling the raw tuber to eliminate its bitterness and prevent digestive issues, appeared practical. Others, however, seemed more driven by superstition than anything else.
So when they transferred the crop to West Africa they streamlined the process. Yet, as Joseph Henrich explains in The Secret of our Success, the original ritual was more practical than it seemed. As it turns out, manioc, if not properly processed, has low levels of cyanide, which accumulate over time and cause chronic poisoning.
What the Portuguese didn’t realize was that they were seeing survivors—those who had inherited the knowledge to process manioc safely. Others who ignored these practices had died out. This same dynamic plays out in business. Leaders often see long-standing practices as outdated inefficiencies—when in reality, they may serve a critical, unseen function.”
In the 1990s, newly minted Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen began studying why good companies fail. What he found was surprising: They weren’t failing because they lost their way, but because they were following time-honored principles taught at institutions like his own. They listened to customers, invested in R&D and improved their products.
As he researched further he realized that, under certain circumstances, a market becomes over-served, the basis of competition changes and firms become vulnerable to a new type of competitor. In his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he coined the term disruptive technology to describe what he saw.
It was an idea whose time had come. The book became a bestseller and Christensen a global business icon. Yet many began to see disruption as more than a special case, but a mantra, an end in itself rather than a means to an end and, at this point, things have gone horribly wrong. We need to abandon the disruption mindset and focus on what really matters.
One of the most puzzling things that I’ve come across in speaking and writing about change is the denial that resistance exists. While I never hear this from leaders that I coach, who face resistance every day, there is a cadre of consultants and pundits who insist that resistance to change is some sort of illusion.
This should be ridiculous on its face. Certainly, the resistance we encountered during the Orange Revolution was very real. In Lou Gerstner’s account of his historic turnaround at IBM, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance, he’s very clear and candid about the resistance he faced. I can’t recall any major transformation that hasn’t had opposition.
Yet when you look at popular change management models such as Kotter’s 8 Steps or Prosci’s ADKAR, they have little to say about overcoming resistance to change and, wittingly or not, promote the idea of transformation as a communication and skills problem, as if you just give people the right information and training they will embrace change. They will not.
In 1998, Srdja Popović walked into a Belgrade cafe to meet some friends. A biologist by training, he also played bass in a goth rock band called BAAL. Lately though, his passion turned to politics. He’d become an organizer, eventually rising to lead the youth wing of Serbia’s Democratic Party. It was that passion that brought him to the café that day.
A few years earlier, and half a world away in Ithaca, NY, a young graduate student named Duncan Watts walked into the thick woods surrounding Cornell University to record the chirping of snowy tree crickets. He had recently entered the graduate program in theoretical and applied dynamics and was studying a strange, obscure phenomenon known as coupled oscillation.
Srdja’s meeting led he and his friends to start the activist group Otpor, spark the color revolutions and create a repeatable model for overthrowing dictatorships. Duncan’s nightly sojourns lay the groundwork for a new science of networks. Although they never met, their journeys would become intertwined with mine and reveal the hidden dynamics of change.
Pundits often encourage us to find our tribe, but that has its downsides. Tribal thinking can make us suspicious of outsiders and can lead us to ignore new information and evidence that challenges our existing beliefs and paradigms. Sure, there is safety in sticking with our tribe, but we are unlikely to learn anything new.
Experimental evidence has long shown we are hardwired to be distrustful of others we see as different than ourselves. In a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to out-group members. Similar results were found in a study involving five year-old children and even in infants.
Yet in his new book, Tribal, behavioral psychologist Michael Morris suggests a more hopeful view. He points to three tribal instincts—the peer instinct, the hero instinct and the ancestor instinct—that leaders can leverage to pursue common purpose. We can expand our tribe beyond simple conflicts of “us and them,” to forge bonds and move forward as “we together.”
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