Blog

SPEED – Waiting for Joe II

In April 2014 John Kotter published “Accelerate!”. Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School and eminent international voice of leadership and change, Kotter was looking for an efficient solution to help businesses stay competitive in the midst of turbolence due to disruptive innovation. Being competitive appears to be impossible for all the companies that, once got over the start-up phase, are focused on optimization, efficiency and risk-averse attitude , rather than strategical agility.

Kotter stated that hierarchies and managerial process are crucial for the management, but are not sufficient to identify in time risks and opportunities and therefore to find and implement creative strategical initiatives at the required pace.

His original solution was the creation of a “dual operating system”, two systems that work in tune inside the companiy: the first one dedicated to the operations, to the “hic et nunc”, and the second one dedicated to the design and realization of strategies through a network structure in constant communication with both the first one and the outside world, composed by volunteers of the several business functions and roles.

Moving from the galaxy Organization to the planet Individual, Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman have investigated the complicated forest of organizational behaviours and distictive aspects of a leadership that comply with both speed and quality.

Among these aspects, powerful communication stands out. When leaders make others understand (not only receive) directions as well as risks and opportunities to be faced with, both speed and quality esponentially increase.

Another distinctive trait is courage to change. Speedy leaders with high quality output become the champions of change, in opposition to slow leaders, who produce poor quality and so strongly resist to change.

STAY TUNED to get an insight into the other dictinctive behaviours discovered by Joe Folkman and Jack Zenger…
Barbara Demichelis