Accelerate : building strategic agility for a faster-moving world

219 Pages·2014·3.435 MB·English

by  Kotter, John P

(Continued from front flap) management US$25.00 / CAN$28.00
the eight Accelerators that drive it. Perhaps most
This is a book about pioneers, for pioneers.
crucially, the book reveals how the best companies Is it even possible to stay ahead of today’s
focus and align their people’s energy and urgency dizzying pace of change?
In Accelerate, the world’s preeminent expert on leadership and change provides
around what Kotter calls the Big Opportunity.
a fresh, persuasive take on achieving strategic agility in the face of constant I
If you’re a pioneer, a leader who knows that t’s a familiar scene in organizations today:
turbulence.
bold change is necessary to survive and thrive in a competitive threat or a big opportunity
Based on his award-winning article in Harvard Business Review, John P. Kotter
an ever-changing world, this book will help you emerges. You quickly create a strategic
urges organizations to create a dual operating system that combines the still-crucial
accelerate into a better, more profitable future. initiative in response and appoint your best
corporate hierarchy with a second, more agile, network-like structure. This, he says,
people to make change happen. And it does—
is the key to succeeding in the face of today’s fast-moving, volatile environment.
but not fast or effectively enough. Value gets lost,
This book is for leaders and professionals ready to embrace the bold change
and things drift back to the default status.
necessary to succeed today, no matter your business or industry. Why is this scenario so frequently repeated—
not only at big companies like Borders and
RIM, where leaders saw change coming—but in
organizations like yours?
PrAISe for JohN P. koTTer In this groundbreaking new book, leadership
expert and bestselling author John P. Kotter
man ranked among the world’s Top Ten Management gurus provides a fascinating answer—and a powerful
are by Bloomberg Businessweek new framework for winning in a world of
t
t
o constant turbulence and disruption.
c
s Leading Change named as one of “The 25 Most Influential business
Kotter explains how traditional organizational
John P. Kotter is the Konosuke Matsushita Management books” of all time by TIME
hierarchies evolved to meet the daily demands of
Professor of Leadership, Emeritus, at Harvard
running an enterprise. For most companies, the
Business School, and is widely regarded as the Called “. . . the business world’s favorite guru on the subject of change”
hierarchy is the singular operating system at the
world’s foremost authority on leadership and by the Financial Times
heart of the firm. But the reality is, this system
change. In recent years Kotter and his firm,
simply is not built for an environment where
Kotter International, have helped numerous
change has become the norm.
organizations, both public and private, build dual
Also by John P. Kotter Kotter advocates a new system—a second,
operating systems to drive growth and accelerate
more agile, network-like structure that operates
strategy. He predicts that such systems are the key
in concert with the hierarchy to create what he
to sustained success in the twenty-first century—
calls a “dual operating system.” This network is
for shareholders, customers, employees, and
dynamic and free of bureaucratic layers. Its core
organizations across all industries and sectors.
is a guiding coalition that represents each level
in the hierarchy. And its drivers are a “volunteer
For more information please visit
army” of people energized by the coalition’s vision
kotterinternational.com/accelerate
and strategy. The dual system allows companies
to capitalize on today’s rapid-fire strategic
jacket design: brian levy and stephani finks ISBN-13: 978-1-62527-174-7 challenges—and still make their numbers.
90000 The book vividly illustrates the five core
stay informed. join the discussion.
principles underlying the new network system and
visit hbr.org/books
follow @harvardbiz on twitter
find us on facebook, linkedin, youtube, and google+ hbr.org/bookS 9 781625 271747 (Continued on back flap)
AccelerAte
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john p. kotter
AccelerAte
Building StrAtegic Agility for
A fASter-Moving World
Harvard Business Review Press
Boston, Massachusetts
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Copyright © 2014 John P. Kotter
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior
permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to
[email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Busi-
ness School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
The web addresses referenced in this book were live and correct at the time
of the book’s publication but may be subject to change.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kotter, John P., 1947–
Accelerate : building strategic agility for a faster-moving world /
John P. Kotter.
pages cm

1. Organizational change. 2. Strategic planning. 3. Management.
I. Title.
HD58.8.K6447 2014
658.4′012—dc23 2013050671
eISBN: 9781625272546
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the Ameri-
can National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Publications and
Documents in Libraries and Archives Z39.48-1992.
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contentS
Preface vii
1. limits of Hierarchy in a
faster-Moving World 1
2. Seizing opportunities with a
dual operating System 19
3. the Stakes: A cautionary tale 41
4. leadership and evolution 57
5. the five Principles and
eight Accelerators in Action 75
6. relentlessly developing and
role Modeling urgency 109
7. the Big opportunity 131
8. getting Started: Q&A 153
9. the (inevitable) future of Strategy 173
Appendix A: Can Your “Best Practices”
Save You? An Assessment 181
Appendix B: D o You Need to Take Action
Now? An Assessment 195
About the Author 205
v
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PrefAce
We are crossing a line into a territory with unpredictable
turmoil and exponentially growing change—change
for which we are not prepared. Here I describe what
some pioneers have successfully done to win, and win
big, in this emerging environment.
Accelerate is about how to handle strategic challenges
fast enough, with agility and creativity, to take advantage
of windows of opportunity which open and shut more
quickly today. It shows how people in some leading,
innovative organizations move ahead of fierce competi-
tion, deal with unprecedented turmoil, and cope with
the constant threat of technological discontinuities—all
without sacrificing short-term results or wearing out
their workforces.
My conclusions as presented here are fundamental.
The world is now changing at a rate at which the basic
systems, structures, and cultures built over the past cen-
tury cannot keep up with the demands being placed on
them. Incremental adjustments to how you manage and
strategize, no matter how clever, are not up to the job.
You need something very new to stay ahead in an age of
tumultuous change and growing uncertainties.
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accelerate
The solution is not to trash what we know and start
over but instead to reintroduce, in an organic way,
a second system—one which would be familiar to
most successful entrepreneurs. The new system adds
needed agility and speed while the old one, which
keeps running, provides reliability and efficiency.
The two together—a dual system—are actually very
similar to what all mature organizations had at one
point in their life cycles, yet did not sustain (and have
long since forgotten). There is a practical way to cre-
ate this dual operating system, and it can be done very
in expensively. Results come quickly. I have seen people
do it. It works.
The origins of this project build on previous research
I have done on large-scale change: work funded by the
Harvard Business School, where I have been teach-
ing for many decades. A report on that research was
first published in my book Leading Change (1996) and
extended with follow-up reports in The Heart of Change
(2002), Our Iceberg Is Melting (2006), A Sense of Urgency
(2008), and Buy-in (2010). That work, in turn, was built
on my early examinations of leadership, which go all
the way back to 1974, with perhaps the most important
report on that subject published in 1990 as A Force for
Change: How Leadership Is Different from Management.
I am sometimes amazed at how robust the conclusions
from these studies remain today—how they still speak
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Preface
to us even though the world facing business leaders (and
those in government, the nonprofit sector, and educa-
tion) has changed so much. What I present in this book
adds to my prior work. This is not a case in which new
realities mean that old ideas are no longer valid. It is
more a case of adding to previous conclusions in a way
that takes us to some very big new ideas.
Up until this project, all of my past work, research
now spanning many decades, has used the same for-
mula. Find cases representing the highest 10% or 20%
of performers. Observe what they do. Talk to people
who have lived in those situations. Then do the same for
the average performers and for the laggards. Look for
patterns that show the differences. Report those patterns
with an emphasis on factors that you can change—to
take average performance to high or lagging results at
least up to the norm.
With this project, for the first time in my career,
I have tried a formula that is different in two fundamen-
tal ways. Here I begin by looking at people truly push-
ing the envelope. I mean only the top 1% or so—those
who have achieved extraordinary successes through
very new ways of operating. Then I watch as others
(usually with the assistance of the Kotter Inter national
consulting group) try to replicate the very best, in their
own way, in their own industries or organizations.
This shift feels sort of like going from basic research
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