How to challenge yourself & Tweak your organization

Number 163

William C. Taylor, a co-founder of “Fast Company,” knows a lot about how enterprises succeed – and fail – when they try to change things. As a journalist and management guru, he has interviewed innovative leaders in many enterprises, from the global crime fighter Interpol to the spectacular online vendor Zappos.

In “Practically Radical,” Taylor summarizes questions and techniques that have helped organizations make remarkable strides during the last few difficult years. Drawing upon academic research as well as his own interviews with bosses at 25 companies and nonprofit groups, he describes strategies for bringing about lasting change.

An important theme for Taylor is that you cannot create change unless you first change your perspective. If you want to stimulate creative new approaches, begin by asking questions and challenging normal assumptions. By inspiring a new mindset you can pave the way to innovative proposals.

Here are more of Taylor’s principles for change:

• What you see shapes how you change. Successful leaders may eventually lose ground because of tunnel vision. They may be tempted to keep looking at the organization, the industry and the competition in the same old way. But innovation may not arise from little, incremental changes. Sometimes you need to ask big questions about the way things are done, breaking out of conventional thinking and finding ways to get an entirely new look at what your group is all about. Taylor suggests some potentially game-changing questions like, “If your company went out of business tomorrow who would miss you and why?”
• Where you look shapes what you see. One way to get a fresh view is to see what is working in different fields. Taylor says that the most creative leaders don’t aspire to learn from the “best in class” in their own industry. Instead, they try to learn from innovators in other areas. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another. For example, Taylor describes how Lexus learned about luxury branding by sending its dealers to training at a Four Seasons Resort.
• There’s nothing wrong with your organization that can’t be fixed by what’s right with your organization. Taylor says, “For even the? most determined change agents, history and tradition can be unrivaled sources of strength—as the foundation for an enduring sense of purpose that newcomers can’t begin to copy.” He says a big reason “for the failure of so many change programs is that by focusing almost solely on what’s wrong with their organizations…. leaders undervalue what’s right with their organizations, and overlook home-grown strategies rooted in the wisdom of the past.” As an example, he describes how the Girl Scouts of the USA transformed themselves during the last decade by looking to the philosophy expressed in 1912 by the group’s activist, firebrand founder.
• It’s not enough to be “pretty good” at everything – you need to be “the most” at something. Taylor says that even if you do things well, if you do them the same way everyone else does then “why would you expect to do any better?” Super successful organizations have something distinctive, some idea that sets them apart. For example, maybe they are the most elegant, most colorful, most responsive or most focused.
• Care more than the competition. Long-term success is not simply about thinking differently than others. It is also about caring more—about customers, colleagues and values. Taylor suggests that behind every great brand there is an authentic sense of purpose. And, he says, a vital path to competitive advantage is to engage with customers in a meaningful way, creating opportunities for “emotionally charged employees to capture the imagination of emotionally drained customers.”