What does dying look like for businesses?

This brief video from The End of Business is a sketch of what happens when organizations don't change quickly enough to survive. Businesses have always failed in some proportion but the stat from Forbes about 70% of Fortune 1000 companies failing by 2031 is pretty sobering. None of them think it can happen or are living like it will happen. But it will.

Adaptation Doesn't Equal Fun

Change is often driven by some form of necessity. And that means it isn't often what we choose. Are you part of a boring, under performing, status quo organization? Do you have aspirations to make it something different? Do you want to help create a more dynamic, team-driven and passionate culture?

People will give you grief.

Some will dig at you slowly, dragging their feet, others will come at you with Howitzers, ready to splatter you. All the people who have settled for a calm, slow death will be upset that you are doing something that agitates their complacency.

You will gain some friends but you'll gain enemies as well. Add to that a sizable middle group that will treat you with baffled indifference, applauding when the winds blow your way, picking up rocks when it doesn't.

Certain individuals will, despite your successes, remind you only of your failings. You'll put together a great project, worry over it, toil in seeing it come to life, protect it, fight for it, pull it off, and then some of those who don't want you to succeed will invest their energies in making sure that whatever you missed is clearly communicated. 


You will sometimes be alone in your pursuit (but don't get all lone-ranger egotistical about it because sometimes when you are alone it's because you really are off the bubble).

Make sure you aren't running solo if you can help it (we all need freaky friends, as Tom Peters reminds us) but, still, you'll find from time to time that you are pulling the bulk of the load as people second guess, get scared, get angry, or get jealous. That isn't fun, not at all.

But working for change means that you are saying that what was there isn't enough, or, to be more hopeful, that there could be a more fulfilling and effective way of living, being a family, or working. And that will anger people who have a mostly-sure stake in the current system and uncertain prospects in the system you are proposing. Avoiding change is a high priority for some while for others constant disruption is an addiction. Most of us experience the moving target between those extremes.

Keep moving. Stay committed. Be humble. Laugh.

New book: Complexity and Sustainability

This looks like an interesting read. Has anyone seen it or read it? The editors are Norberg and Cumming. There's one piece by Buzz Holling and many of the other contributors appear to be affiliated with the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Thanks to the FourCultures blog and the recommendation.

Ingenuity Arts Paperback - update

The experiment in on-demand publishing continues. Here's a quick summary. Cafe Press books had some kind of weird problem with the cover art - working on rectifying that but it does point out that when you use this route, it really is a case of you pushing the buttons and whatever comes out will do so without further human intervention. Good to know.

I've also been working with Mark Lefebvre, Book Operations Manager at Titles Bookstore McMaster University. He is in charge of their new Espresso on-demand print machine and has been great to work with. The first run looks really good and having a human being involved on the output side does make a difference. McMaster is in Canada which means shipping costs and exchange rates aren't a concern for Canadian customers. Here is a direct link to the book on their site.

A Suitably Grand Undertaking

Looking for something to inspire your lifework? How about this challenge from Tom Peters:

"It is the foremost task - and responsibility - of our generation to re-imagine our enterprises and institutions, public and private." (Re-Imagine, 2003)

There are the lifetimes of a generation in that gauntlet.

Complexity Theory and Psychology

If you have an interest in areas where complexity theory is being explored to help solve problems and respond to change, you may want to check out psychologist, Dr. Dave Pincus, who writes about Batman, economic markets, and relationships with complex adaptive systems lenses on. An underlying idea that informs his posts involves answering the question, "How do we deal with life when it seems like the interacting elements are more like a plate of living spaghetti than a neatly ordered daytimer?" Being adaptive, resilient, participative, open, and hopeful makes a difference. In his October 1 post, Dr. Dave waxes eloquent on the role of confidence in economic markets and links it to the role that confidence has in our psychological health as individuals.
What do you think about the elements that are necessary to thrive in a rapidly changing environment, financial or otherwise?

Does thinking really matter? (YES)

Patti's post in The{App}Gap about the research activities of Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman highlights the need for leaders to better balance the 'do something now' attitude in business with a 'think deeply' wisdom that can only come from informed reflection. And if your concern is the bottom line? Well, thinking deeply will contribute more to that over time than careless and automatic reaction. She notes the role that complexity theory thought and delibration has played in helping us become more aware of harmfully simplistic solution sets that we as leaders can depend on. US financial structure anyone?

Web 2.0 - Org 2.0

Cultural Operating System

I was reading the April 2007 issue of WIRED tonight while supervising the final exam for my World Civilization course and came across the phrase 'cultural operating system.' While cultures are not software programs, I understand that the idea is intended to help us understand that there are identifiable factors that shape how a culture looks and feels and thinks.

This includes the micro-cultures of organizations and businesses and, like the operating systems on our computers, is invisible to most people (advance apologies to the Linux/Windows/OSX combatants for whom that isn't the case). Designing for change in organizations includes raising cultural operating systems to a conscious level and understanding how to re-shape those systems.

Individual ingenuity is critical but if it is seen as an isolated function, it will have limited impact in most cases. Understanding and learning must occur at the scale of both the personal and collective. The relationship involves applying your personal ingenuity capacity to the right part of the larger system at the right time, learning the moves of the surfer to approach a much larger entity in a way that leads to success rather than disaster.

And there aren't any legitimate out-of-the-box ways to do that. There are simply too many factors. But that doesn't imply we are without the means to actually influence change. There are disciplines and styles of thought and action we can employ. We need both the hard science and the imaginative in this process, learning a style that gives us the footing of an ingenuity artist.

Emergence and Network Building

In a recent email from the Berkana Institute, I discovered a link to a great article on the relationship of complex systems theory, emergence and social change. It's only about eight pages long and provides a great overview of very pratical ways to think through and act complexity theory applications and ideas.

If you want to read the article click here and it will take you to a PDF. If you'd like to take a look at the Berkana Institute, you can click here to get to the site and then navigate to the article that way. My leadership experience tells me that there is valuable insight in this approach, something that can increase your ingenuity index for whatever problems confront you as you attempt to change your world.