Thriving in the Decade of Radical Transformation - Thursday, December 04 2008
Submitted byspherica on Mon, 2005-04-04 20:45.
O’Hara-Devereaux uses the metaphor of traveling through the badlands of the American West to describe the next 10 years of struggle and transition that organizations face today. To help companies bridge the space between the end of the Industrial Age and the “full promise of the Information Age,” the author provides them with tools and warnings that can prepare them for the road ahead. Her goal, she writes, is to soften the ride to creating a “vibrant, equitable, and fully integrated global society underpinned by robust economic growth worldwide.” She explains that today’s leaders and organizations are mismatched with the needs we will face in the new global reality.
O’Hara-Devereaux draws her observations and prescriptions for success from her extensive research, which has taken her from the villages of Africa to the businesses and governments of Asia and Latin America to the technology centers of California’s Silicon Valley. With a team of researchers that included economists, technology experts, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and historians, she examined the turbulent times of the past to make better sense of the foreboding future terrain.
Navigating the Badlands is organized around four themes that are both interlinked and distinct: globalization, new leadership crucible, organizational metamorphosis, and social choices. Regarding social choices, O’Hara-Devereaux explains that stepping up to the international plate and “making the right choices to create a global commons is essential.”
Eight Principles of Transformation
Although she covers all these themes with many suggestions, she primarily focuses on the journey of organizational leaders across the badlands and the transformation that organizations will need to undergo to achieve success. O’Hara-Devereaux writes that a successful journey requires principles of transformation to guide the way, as well as “a new leadership paradigm to anchor them.” Her set of principles is made up of the following:
● Scan, Scout, Steer. Strategically improving all leaders’ readiness to identify opportunities and risks, and providing necessary resources, enables them to act quickly on emerging opportunities.
● Act With Integrity. Integrity includes honesty, coherence, connectedness, wholeness and vitality.
● Seek Collisions. Surprise encounters with outsiders create the optimal diversity firms need.
● Learn Rapidly. Trial and error efforts constitute a critical pathway for accelerating learning.
● Engage Cultures. Authenticity, courage, resilience, adaptability, persistence and a sense of humor will help.
● Innovate Radically. Seek out heretics and mavericks.
● Make Decisions Fast. Leaders must nurture an action-oriented stance throughout their whole company.
● Execute With Discipline. Survival requires organizations to create cultures that can execute masterfully with focus, self-possession, poise and confidence.
