Next Generation Business Handbook: New Strategies from Tomorrow’s Thought Leaders

Why is corporate renewal so difficult, and what can leaders of change do to improve their batting average and accelerate this process? Corporate renewal does not just imply a fast improvement in financial performance but involves a qualitative change in organizational capabilities, a lasting transformation in the way all employees interact among themselves and with external stakeholders. It exhibits a sustainable quality that mobilizes employees’ creativity and goodwill to achieve ambitious organizational goals. Renewal as a continuous process occurs when both insiders and outsiders concur that organizational capabilities have significantly improved, such as (1) the way in which various functions and business units coordinate and handle conflicts among themselves, which affects individual employees’ ability to make things happen beyond their own narrow work boundaries; (2) how the organization learns and deals with new ideas coming from all internal levels as well as from outside, which affects the organization’s ability to innovate; and (3) concern for people, which affects how strongly employees identify with the organization as an institutional whole and their willingness to mobilize the extra ounce of energy that would transform adequate work into extraordinary achievement, awing competitors as much as customers. Based on the author’s six years’ field research, in which he interviewed and followed hundreds of managers at all levels in a large information-technology firm, then validated the findings with managers and case research data from 18 other organizations worldwide, he suggests that leaders of change who are ambitious enough to undertake this rewarding but challenging task should energize change by activating the following thrusts: 1. The instrumental thrust, which attends to the concrete and ordinary 2. The cognitive thrust, which attends to people’s minds 3. The emotional thrust, which attends to people’s hearts 4. The moral thrust, which attends to people’s aspirations for the sacred All four thrusts must be activated to improve the likelihood of renewal.