We are in the midst of a storm that has been increasing in intensity for decades, driven by advancing technology and global integration.
No company is immune. A new competitive threat or a big opportunity emerges. You quickly create a strategic initiative in response and appoint your best people to make change happen. And it does--but not fast enough. Or effectively enough. Real value gets lost and over time things drift back to the status quo.
Leading firms have been looking for and deploying new ways to deal with these new realities. In some cases, these practices have worked but today's "best practices" are producing less and less satisfying results.
Why is this?
The first answer is the nature of management and the nature of leadership. Our misunderstanding of this issue makes us believe that a management-driven hierarchy with competent executives at the top ought to be able to guide an organization to move faster, be more agile and thrive. It can't anymore.
The second issue surrounds the way enterprises naturally evolve over time. We tend to think that organizations go from very small hierarchies with few and relatively unsophisticated managerial processes to very large hierarchies with much more formal and sophisticated processes. And that is simply not so.
Leadership is about setting a direction. It's about creating a vision, empowering and inspiring people to want to achieve the vision, and enabling them to do so with energy and speed through an effective strategy. In its most basic sense, leadership is about mobilizing a group of people to jump into a better future.
A new book, "ACCELERATE: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World," by author John P. Kotter provides a powerful new "dual operating system" framework for competing and winning in a world of constant turbulence and disruption.
"The solution is not to trash what we know and start over but instead to reintroduce, in an organic way a second system--one which would be familiar to most successful entrepreneurs. The new system adds needed agility and speed while the old one, which keeps running, provides reliability and efficiency. The two together are actually very similar to what all mature organizations had at one point in their life cycles, yet did not sustain," argues Kotter, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School.
Source: John P. Kotter: Accelerate: Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World
John Agno: Develop Leadership Skills: A Reference Guide