Goodbye to All That
It’s easy to see the end of things, to grasp intuitively that you’re standing astride some sort of stark rupture in the historical timeline, a point between rot and genesis, to know that you’ve stayed too long at The Fair.
“We don’t know if we’re going to succeed, but we do know is what’s in place today isn’t working,” says Novartis president Marie-France Tschudin,. “We need to take a different approach.” She was describing the need to re-conceptualize strategy for the launch of a new heart drug (see here in the Wall Street Journal last month), but her vision echos an ask for something deeper, more fundamental, that’s bouncing across the halls of nearly all business and government and academic settings in the West: a complete overhaul in the nature of “strategy” itself.
And so what's emerging as the building blocks for professional success today are management teams who can work with a new set rules that have imposed themselves (or been imposed by others) on the old order of things,
Rather than simply riding the bouncing ball and fighting to avoid being on the bottom when it bounces, it’s time for “leadership” to start working with a new cognitive pattern, a Punk Rock ethos for disruption.
“As 2022 draws near, it is time to face the world’s predictable unpredictability,” write The Economist in The New Normal is Already Here. Get Used to It, its commentary closing out 2021. “The pattern for the rest of 2020s is not the familiar routine of the pre-covid years, but the turmoil and bewilderment of the pandemic era. The new normal is already here.. Any boss who thinks their industry is immune to such wild dynamism is unlikely to last long”
Change comes in three wavelengths: There are changes to the game, changes in the rules of the game, and changes in how the rules are changed.
It's legacy thinking -- not technology -- that's maybe the biggest barrier to navigating the transition space to a new era. Leadership teams become kinetically-trapped in outmoded structures, orientations, incentives and schools of thought, doomed to be, always, in defense of whatever business model allowed them to be successful in the first place. Most "digital transformations" reinforce the obsolete.
Said differently, we tend to put the new operating model ahead of the new thinking model.
We keep re-submerging ourselves in familiar storylines. Having normalized cliche, "old" narratives have veto power over the new, keeping us running on the watery residue of the past. Incrementalism edges out exploration.
We tinker in proven domains.
Existential crises abound (look no further than Biogen trying to sell itself to Samsung after its disastrous rollout of Adhulem, cryptocurrencies threat to central banks, or at the geopolitical level, the cracking of United States leadership and the rise of China “remaking the international system” according to its rules). The world is now littered with dying companies, markets and industries buying into the myth of a simple recipe, the allure of new technology, and an obsession with tradition as they search for optimal solutions that don’t exist.
It’s the ‘leadership margin’ that now separates: you have to be comfortable crossing the river as you’re feeling for the stones. The skill in short supply is not technical, but visionary, able to articulate and propagate a new direction, a ‘modern strategy’ to manage a new interface layer with the world.
We have to rearrange the comfortable mental furniture from which we sit and guide thought and action, hoping for the best from legacy operating models. The hard thing is to “break the golden rhythm” of the place in our minds that we know has stopped working for us intellectually, creatively and spiritually.
“I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight. Everything that was said to me I seemed to have heard before, and I could no longer listen. I could no longer sit in little bars near Grand Central and listen to someone complaining of his wife’s inability to cope with the help while he missed another train to Connecticut. I no longer had any interest in hearing about the advances other people had received from their publishers, about plays that were having second-act troubles in Philadelphia, or about people I would like very much if I just came out to meet them. I had already met them, always.”
Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That
It's time to sweep the old concepts out of the saddle, start working with a new category of ideas🤘
/ jgs
John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon Consulting, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry ecosystems.