Leading Organizations: Ten Timeless Truths

Leading Organizations starts by identifying the top ten topics that every leader of an organization must tackle, whether 50 years ago, today, and as they will be 50 years from now. This focuses the rest of the book on providing answers to these timeless questions:

Talent and teams

1. How do I attract and retain the right talent?

2. How do I develop the talent we need to win?

3. How do I manage performance to unlock our full potential?

4. How do I create a high-performing leadership team?

Decision making and design

5. How do I improve the quality and speed of decision making?

6. How do I reorganize to capture maximum value quickly?

7. How do I reduce overhead costs sustainably?

Culture and change

8. How do I make culture a competitive advantage?

9. How do I lead organization-wide transformational change?

10. How do I successfully transition into a new leadership role?

Each of the timeless questions posed are then crisply and conclusively answered in three sections:

• The business case (why it matters): here you’ll find a treasure trove of facts to help you judge the value-creation potential of the topic for your organization. Take talent, for example. Top talent is up to eight times more productive than average performers. There will be a double-digit percent shortage of high-skilled workers in the United States and Europe and of medium-skilled workers in developing economies by 2020. Only 18 percent of leaders in today’s organizations report that their companies recruit highly talented people and only 7 percent believe they retain them. The verdict: talent, while a timelessly important topic, will only become more important in the years to come.
  
  
• The big ideas (what do to): these are the most important insights related to the topic at hand—not common-sense basics, but the counterintuitive truths that account for why so few leaders capture the full value at stake. Take for example the three big ideas related to culture change: First, focus on nine areas, not just employee engagement (and, in doing so, increase your odds of success by 1.4 times). Next, look beneath the surface to identify the underlying mind-sets that account for why generally smart, hardworking, well-intentioned employees are choosing to do what they do today. (After all, as Einstein is often credited for saying, “Today’s problems can’t be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.”) Third, methodically influence needed shifts using the four levers available to leaders: role modeling, storytelling, reinforcing mechanisms, and building skills and confidence. Similarly potent and practical ideas are provided for each of the ten timeless topics covered.
  
  
• The path to impact (how to do it): nothing is worse than getting excited about ideas that can’t be implemented. The authors know this, and as such provide a vivid description of the steps required to put the big ideas they share into practice. These steps aren’t academic—they’re brought to life by pithy and punchy case studies from real companies that got it right. The step-by-step approach on each topic draws on the “5As” (aspire, assess, architect, act, advance) made famous by Scott’s previous book, Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage, which has proven to more than double the odds of successful implementation and value capture in change programs.

The authors recognize that few leaders have the time or desire to wade through lengthy text. In Leading Organizations, answers are kept to the essentials—hard facts, counter-intuitive insights, and practical steps—all presented in an accessible, highly visual format. The result is an up-to-the-minute guidebook, easy to navigate, and decidedly modern in its presentation. Drawing inspiration from social media, each idea is first conveyed with a Twitter-friendly summary of the key takeaway: if you remember anything, remember this. Next, the idea is expanded in a blog-style format full of helpful analogies and examples, accompanied by powerful infographics that visually reinforce the central points. In sum, each chapter delivers an intellectual adrenaline-rush equivalent to witnessing a great TED Talk. Leading Organizations can be consumed in one sitting, snacked on over time, or used as a handy reference for specific issues as they emerge.

The highest purpose of Leading Organizations is to enable leaders to unlock the full performance potential of their organizations. These aren’t new, theoretical approaches, but timeless truths from battle-hardened experience and refinement. For example, by applying these learnings, leaders should expect to achieve 50 percent faster decisions that are up to 40 percent higher in quality. Their odds of implementing a successful organization redesign will improve from 23 to 86 percent. They will be able to achieve 25 percent more in sustainable overhead-cost reductions. Their odds of successfully transitioning into a new executive role will increase by 40 percent. And so on.