Serial Innovators by Claudio Feser

Started: Nov. 5, 2012
Finished: Dec. 16, 2012
Pages: 186

Some organizations are very open to change.   Others, not so much.   I've been curious about that, and whether it's possible to move an organization from one state to the other.  But when you go trolling for books on "change management", much of what you find is patronizing and trivial.  Both Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson and Our Iceberg is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions by John Kotter are gag-inducing parables that I couldn't force myself to read.  I attended a seminar based on The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg, but either the seminar or the source material trivialized reasons why people might resist change.  It makes sense that habit can play a role, but the example in the seminar had everything to do with the fact that the change being resisted actually removed control over parts of people's work, so calling their resistance "habit" was either dumb or disingenuous.

But I liked Serial Innovators.  It's popular non-fiction:  it's a brief book that summarizes and synthesizes a lot of research about  and how and why most organizations "age" and often vanish (viz Eastman Kodak), while others adapt and thrive over longer periods of time (viz Apple).  It does include a "story" (NOT a parable), but explains why it does so in terms of human psychology, and then uses the story to directly illustrate the principles that it discusses.

Maybe it helps that it's not a "change management" book per se.  Instead it talks about the factors that cause most businesses to fail over quite short timeframes: the average post-listing lifetime of a publiclly traded company in the US is apparently 15 years.

So what does it have to say?  Basically that corporations naturally tend to rigidity.  Your initial success is always due to following a certain set of strategies.  But nothing stays the same.  Your own success changes the marketplace you participate in, and your competitors may emulate you, counter you, or outpace you.   Internally, as your organization grows you're likely to impose more structure on its operations.  But it's human nature to continue and even reinforce what brought you success in the first place.  So you're very likely to continue with counter-productive marketing strategies, and to fail to recognize that the amount of hierarchy and process you've introduced has strangled your ability to act, let alone adapt.

How do organizations avoid failure?  By encouraging a learning culture and a diversity of viewpoints.  By giving teams the autonomy to organize their own work.  By making sure that the organization as a whole has a clear sense of purpose, that is reflected at every level of the organization.

Those are just a few of the points that have stuck with me, probably because they especially reminded me of the glory days at CREO.  And are a few of the things I've seen be spectacularly absent elsewhere.