Thats Not How We Do It Here! A Story About How Organizations Rise and Fall--and Can Rise Again

John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber accept us out into the desert of Africa to teach united states of america some valuable lessons about leadership and alter.

That's Not How We Practice Information technology Hither!: A Story about How Organizations Ascent and Autumn—and Can Rising Again by John Kotter & Holger Rathgeber, Portfolio, 176 pages, $25.00, Hardcover, June 2016, ISBN 9780399563942

If you're looking for instruction, advice, and inspiration on leadership and change, John Kotter should always exist your starting time stop. The professor emeritus at Harvard Business School has many decades of research and many books on the topic under his chugalug. Our founder and former president Jack Covert named his volume Leading Change as one of The 100 All-time Business Books of All Fourth dimension, and that is just ane of a multitude under Kotter's name that could be considered a classic in the genre.

In his new book, he and coauthor Holger Rathgeber tell of a problem common across many organizations beset by increasing change and challenging times:

They could not seem to agree upon, much less bring alive, any new big ideas to deal with the new problems. For Matt and many others, that was incredibly frustrating. Making matters even worse, getting the most routine daily work washed was proving more and more than difficult.

This story is a bit different than near we read in business organization books, because it takes place in the Kalahari Desert, and Matt is a Meerkat. Yep, it'due south a fable. Kotter and Rathgeber have given us a fable earlier, and it is one of the best—Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Whatsoever Conditions, which was recently re-released by Portfolio and has a 10^thursday ceremony edition planned for 2017.

The star of this new fable is Nadia. The Meerkat clan she belongs to has grown to more than than one hundred and fifty members, which we are told is "a remarkable size that is far from typical." To keep it functioning well, specific plans, schedules, procedures, measures, rules, best practices, and layers of bureaucracy—a certain way of doing things—have been adult over the years.

But these were management tools developed for a very specific and favorable environment, and that environment is changing. The rain has seemingly vanished, the insects and reptiles Meerkats eat are becoming harder to find, and vultures—which most Kats in the clan had only ever heard of, Vultures having left the area when a brushfire cleared the land they telephone call domicile a generation agone—have not only returned, they have changed from mere scavengers picking up scraps into predators.

In response, the alphas and betas of the association spend more and more than time meeting well-nigh the new dangers, shuffling management teams, and reviewing procedures. The organization of Kat-management that had been so reliable and useful in the past is failing them. New challenges and problems are arising all effectually them. They didn't take any established policies or procedures to bargain with the new threats, and the ones they did have weren't working anymore—often, they were impediments.

When Nadia'due south best friend Ayo, a guard, comes up with the revolutionary idea of climbing tress to meet further and become a ameliorate view of potential dangers to the association, he is disciplined for violating guarding procedures and removed from his post. As beingness a guard is the only thing Ayo has ever wanted to practise and all he thinks near (the authors refer to him as a guard nerd), he decides to leave the clan, just as the all-time couch maker and 2 of his friends had two days earlier. The clan is shedding talent and losing hope. Believing that there has to exist a clan out there that has faced like challenges and found a better way to meet them, Nadia decides to leave with Ayo to search for it and acquire from them.

They find other clans quickly, just most are either fifty-fifty more dysfunctional or not welcoming new members because of the drought. Finally, they happen upon Matt, a young man rover from another association that has disintegrated in the confront of all the new threats and changes. Matt has heard of a clan doing well and accepting new members, and they set out together to find it. The clan is recently formed and only has a dozen members. It is pocket-sized and nimble and new in its means—the clever and crafty startup to the big and closely managed corporations Nadia, Matt, and Ayo were used to in their former clans. Led past Lena, this new clan is facing the reality of the drought by focusing on coming up with new ideas that turn the challenges into opportunities. They develop innovations in food sharing and creation. It is a clan with more than energy and passion than any of them had ever witnessed before, an idea-generating machine coming up with many new fashion of doing things, chirapsia the odds and growing quickly even in the middle of the drought. It is revolutionary.

But when the clan grows to fifty members, things begin to intermission down. It is a lightbulb moment for Nadia. She realizes that high spirit and high ideals aren't enough to go along the burrows in adept social club, that Lena'due south visionary leadership was peachy at inspiring innovation and ideas, but that more structure would be needed to back up a larger association. After a eye to heart with Lena in which Nadia shares her insight, she and Ayo set out for home with all they've learned. Nadia thinks she has found a middle path, a way to exist smart and disciplined, while also being able to create and change—to be creative, responsive, and open to new initiatives and projects that keep the clan at least evolutionary if not revolutionary, while also keeping it stable and safe. She believes she can assistance replace complacency with a sense of urgency to continue improving and growing the clan, the association'south quality of life, and its ability to weather change.

Instead of diving into the weeds of management theory and rote business examples, Kotter and Rathgeber take the states out into the desert, and give u.s.a. a legend that is simple and short yet powerful. I'm glad that Kotter has teamed up with Rathgeber once more and returned to the fable format. Fiction has the power to stretch our minds in ways that more straightforward business books do not. The characters' experience resonates with our own, and the situations they find themselves in reminds the states of elements inside our own organizations. Instead of giving us a numbered list to check off, or specific takeaways or programs to implement, they let us to complete the picture for ourselves, to make our ain connections, to find our own lessons and how to use them. There is most xx pages of more straightforward business lessons at the end of the book that wrap it upward and explain some of the ideas, research, and theory behind the story, but the greatest power resides in the story itself. And, even if nosotros tend not to take these stories for adults very seriously at first, that shouldn't surprise us. After all, the earth's nigh famous fables, Aesop's Fables, be not simply to impart moral lessons and education, but to expand our moral imaginations, and it has been doing that for over ii thousand years. That's Not How Nosotros Do It Here! does the same thing for our organizational intelligence and imagination today.

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Source: https://www.porchlightbooks.com/blog/editors-choice/that-s-not-how-we-do-it-here

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