Orbit Change Conversations

Innovation drives commoditization. It forces companies to reinvent themselves, to go through periodic orbit change. But times are changing. Now one needs a different leadership model to bring about radical organizational change.

Chris Anderson describes the changing times in his recent post, In praise of Radical Transparency. This is what he says:

One of the most fascinating features of the blogging era has been the inversion of corporate norms. As the tools of production and distribution are democratized, institutions lose power and individuals gain it… And as the same trends play out within the firm, businesses are shifting from command and control to “out of control”, distributing more and more power to the rank and file.

This new power structure requires a new notion of leadership to effect radical change. The reality is that the concept of leadership has continuously evolved over the years. Many, many years back people used the war metaphor for leadership. It was all about formulation of good strategy with limited information in the fog of war, and then getting effective execution through command and control. Some business publications and business leaders even today rely on that metaphor but it’s become increasingly outdated. Leadership then borrowed from the sports coach metaphor. The idea here was that if you take bright people with potential and coach them well, you can get teamwork that will elevate the performance of the organization in a way that you didn’t anticipate before. So leaders were expected to be great coaches who could get outstanding performances from average people.

We need to go beyond the coach metaphor to a collective transformational metaphor that is based on change being pulled rather than being pushed. This is important in the world of dispersed tacit roles that are knowledge rich as well as interaction rich. How do we get every employee to visualize a personal change gap that creates the bias for action? How do we make every employee feel empowered to make the adaptive change? How do we synchronize the adaptive change of lots of employees into the desired organizational change? Old school thinking about confronting legacy mindsets won’t do anymore.

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