Before 1789 the world was ruled by the divine right of kings. The economy was driven by a feudal system of lords, vassals, and fiefs. Your economic prosperity and personal security were based on land ownership and personal loyalty. There was little you could do to change your lot in life, so you just had to accept your place in the world.
Yet 1789 would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution and the French Revolution would forever change how the world was governed. The Industrial Revolution, already underway since James Watt’s introduction of the steam engine in 1776, would begin to shift power to a new class of industrialists.
These events unleashed a series of countervailing forces as the European continent struggled to adapt to shifts in technology, economics and identity. These forces would build and clash until eventually things came to a head in the revolutionary year of 1848. Today, we seem to be in a similarly liminal space, as we decide what kind of future we want to live in.
2024 was an exhausting year. I don’t remember any period that seemed so chaotic. Roughly 70 countries had elections this year, encompassing half the world’s population, which was a record. In just about every one, the vote went against the incumbent office holder. People made clear that they want something different.
We seem to be in that liminal space between one era and another with the four shifts of technology, resources demography and migration putting enormous stress on existing systems. What’s not clear is what comes next. Are we headed for the sort of crypto-libertarian society that people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk envision, or something entirely different.
Looking back on my writing this year, these things were definitely on my mind. How should we approach transformation? When is change a good idea? Where is AI taking us? Perhaps most importantly, what lies ahead? As you look through this list of what I wrote and what people most responded to, what comes to your mind? Please let me know in the comments.
“Thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my ‘thoughts’ are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them,” Fareed Zakaria once wrote. Others have said similar things, but I like how he said it best.
It is especially true when writing books. You can keep an email or a blog post in your head, but tens of thousands of words are too much for a single brain to hold at once. You need to approach writing a book like you would building a ship or a house, starting with a basic structure and then carefully crafting each detail to work together.
That’s why in our climate of digital distractions reading books is more important than ever. Reading, like writing, is a form of thinking. You are not only taking in information, but reflecting on it and forming opinions about it. The slow pace enables that private, intimate dialogue between you and the author. Here is the list the books I spent time with this year.
Today, we remember Mohandas Gandhi as an icon, but he didn’t start out that way. As a young lawyer, he was so shy he had trouble mustering up the courage to speak in open court. Undisciplined, with a violent temper, it took him years to gain a measure of self control. It would be difficult to look at the young Gandhi and see the man he would grow into.
The truth is that we revere Gandhi today not for some eternal essence, but who he became and that is what we can best learn from. It wasn’t any mysterious, superhuman quality that made him such a legendary figure, but the things he learned along the way and he learned those lessons from the mistakes he made.
He would later write, “Men say that I am a saint losing myself in politics. The fact is I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint.” He was, in truth, a master strategist, luring opponents into a dilemma that would put them in the impossible position of choosing either surrender or damnation. If you want to pursue change, Gandhi is a model to follow.
We spend most of our time with people who see things largely like we do. They work in similar industries, have similar educations and live in similar places. When confronted with areas of disagreement, we can usually bullshit our way through it and keep the peace. That’s how we normally go through life.
Yet difficult conversations are sometimes unavoidable. There are fundamental differences in values and perspectives as well as issues surrounding identity and status that underlie and shape every professional and personal relationship. At some point these need to be addressed in order to move forward with any ability to function effectively.
The good news is that there are sound evidence-based principles for how to have difficult conversations and resolve them in a positive way. Three strategies include identifying shared values, addressing status dynamics, and matching the conversation the other person wants to have. Mastering these concepts will help you lead, collaborate, and connect.
In 2012, two young activists in Kyiv, Vitalii Shabunin and Dasia Kaleniuk, set up the Anti-Corruption Action Center with a bold mission: to expose and tackle corruption in Ukraine. Their strategy was simple but powerful: investigate corruption, publicly “name and shame” those responsible, and work with international NGOs to advocate for specific reforms.
To most people at the time, their work seemed hopelessly naive. The Yanukovych regime, was not only hopelessly corrupt, but deeply cynical. Yanukovych himself was a convicted felon, serving two prison sentences in his youth for violent crimes. The rest of his administration followed suit, freely exploiting power for personal gain.
I was living in Ukraine when Yanukovych was elected and I remember how a helpless feeling loomed over the country. Yet, as it would turn out, Vitalii and Dasia’s work was not naive, but incredibly important. Later, Vitalii shared with me a crucial insight: In dark times, the key to making a difference is to keep preparing for the next window of opportunity.
When Greg van Kirk was finishing up his two-year Peace Corps stint in the small town of Nebaj, Guatemala, he had a simple idea that could have a major impact. By replacing the traditional campfires that families cooked on inside their homes with cookstoves, the lives of the people in the region could be immensely improved.
Yet although the benefits of cookstoves are well documented, getting people to adopt them is more difficult than it might seem. First, while cookstoves save money over time, there is an initial expense that, given the poverty in the region, is a significant barrier to adoption. Second, it asked people to alter centuries of tradition.
This is a problem that change agents of all stripes run into all the time. For change to truly take hold, people need to embrace it for their own reasons. That takes more than a good idea. To make change truly scale to impact, we can’t rely on slogans and incentives, people need to be empowered to co-opt it and make it their own.
There’s a famous passage in Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 novel, The Sun Also Rises, in which a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he answers. “Gradually, then suddenly.” The quote has since become emblematic of how a crisis takes shape. First with small signs you hardly notice and then with shocking impact.
This is related to what mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot called Noah effects and Joseph effects. Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, plunging everything into chaos before a new order can emerge.
A simple truth is that change isn’t always possible. History tends to converge and cascade around certain points. However, a corollary to this truth is that as forces gather, they eventually create a window of opportunity. One key strategy to bring about transformational change is to prepare for that moment and be ready to seize the opportunity when it arises.
Former Intel CEO, Andy Grove, described the decision to switch the company’s focus from memory chips to microprocessors as a “strategic inflection point” that arose from a single conversation between he and CEO Gordon Moore. Armed with that vision they transformed the company in three years.
Yet when Lou Gerstner set out to transform IBM eight years later, he took a very different approach, declaring that, “the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” What he meant was that the firm’s culture was broken and behaviors needed to change. Until he could achieve that, the strategy wouldn’t matter.
Strategic transformations and behavioral transformations require vastly different approaches. Leaders, like Grove and Moore, can make unilateral decisions about strategy, but they can’t impose behaviors in the same way. You can communicate a vision and create alignment about a strategy, but to change behavior you need to shape networks.
I still remember how, during the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, everything took on an air of inevitability. It seemed that the forces of history were on our side and that the corrupt powers that had ruled the country were breathing their last gasps. Their old ideas and tired ways would have to succumb to the new wave of democracy.
Of course, none of that was true. Five years later, the old regime would be back in power. The reality was that the Orange Revolution wasn’t a revolution at all. It was a political revolt. True revolutions are rare. As Fareed Zakaria points out in his recent book, Age of Revolutions, they involve shifts in technology, economics and identity.
What is also likely to be true is that we are, today, in an era of global revolution in which things are changing on a fundamental level. Many of the changes underway are political, but to understand what’s going on we need to look at those three underlying forces. Revolutions tend to happen when they gather underneath the surface, fester and, eventually, explode.
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