We Have Always Done It That Way

There is a great article on leadership in Harvard Business Review (I also blogged about it on my blog). It suggests four basic areas of leadership (not all of which need to be mastered by that sole leader at the top of the system):

Sensemaking
Relating
Visioning
Inventing

We must make sense of the world and our particular context, we must have positive relationships with others, we must create a compelling story about the future, and we have to make it happen. These all seem to resonate with what we wrote about in the book, but the last one, inventing, has a distinctive WHADITW ring to it. Here’s a quote:

In fact, inventing is similar to execution, but the label “inventing” emphasizes that this process often requires creativity to help people figure out new ways of working together.

The article provides four tips for cultivating inventiveness:

1. Don’t assume that the way things have always been done is the best way to do them. [Amen!]
2. When a new task or change effort emerges, encourage creative ways of getting it done.
3. Experiment with different ways of organizing work. Find alternatives methods for grouping and linking people.
4. When working to understand your current environment, ask yourself “What other options are possible?”

Tags: The Way We Lead, We've Always Done It That Way by Jamie
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Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer has a great WHADITW column in Business 2.0 this month. It talks about the “competency trap”:

“The concept is deceptively simple. Organizations try things. If what they do succeeds, they ‘learn’ that what they have done breeds success. So they persist, becoming ever more focused in what they do, and ever more specialized in the skills they acquire.

But two things invariably happen to undermine success. Competitors soon learn how to do the same thing, and conditions change, so that what worked in the past no longer applies. Companies have trouble adapting because they often build competencies that don’t advance new products, markets, or strategies,. Hence the phrase, ‘competency trap.’”

His response? Avoid excessive specialization, develop peripheral vision, and understand that success breeds its own problems.

Tags: The Way We Lead, We've Always Done It That Way by Jamie
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We are very pleased to let you know that the cover story in the current issue of Association Meetings Magazine focuses on WHADITW, and includes quotes from four of us. We want to thank fellow blogger Sue Pelletier, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, for approaching us with this idea and for interviewing us for the article. It was great fun!

I especially like the prompt the magazine uses to encourage its readers to provide their feedback on the article and on the ideas we share:

Tell us what you think: Are these folks on the money? Prophetic? Deranged? Naive?

Personally, I’m pulling for deranged. In all seriousness, though, we’d very much like to know your reaction to the article. We hope you will post your comments below.

Tags: The Way We Manage, The Way We Execute, The Way We Work Together, The Way We Involve Others, The Way We Lead, The Way We Think, Leadership, Innovation, Professional Development, Technology, We've Always Done It That Way by Jeff
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The Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper just decided to go digital only and stop printing a paper version of their newspaper. It was started in 1645 by the Queen of Sweden as a way of updating the populace on government affairs. Now it consists primarily of legal notices from companies and government agencies in Sweden (up to 1,500 a day) which is really better suited as a database application in any case.

Just goes to show that you can make significant change even when bucking centuries of tradition.

Tags: The Way We Execute, We've Always Done It That Way by David
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