Leading Out of the Downturn
by Rob Norton

7/21/09


I found this to be an intriguing article on the challenges leaders face when confronted with the current business environment. I strongly urge reading this interview with Steve Zaffron, the co-author of "The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life" …..http://www.strategy-business.com/li/leadingideas/li00134?pg=all

"The most important task for corporate leaders, says consultant and author Steve Zaffron, is to reorient the minds of their employees toward a positive vision of the future. The last 18 months have been the most trying in decades for corporate leaders. The conditions that normally make running a company, a business unit, or a team rewarding — market expansion, revenue growth, rising pay, and incentives — have been absent for most, replaced by the unrelenting tasks of survival, retrenchment, and cost cutting……

…….The main task, they argue, is to recognize that people normally have an unconscious, gut-level idea of where they — and their company — are at, and where they’re likely to go. Zaffron and Logan call this “the default future” and show how it is deeply rooted in people’s assumptions, hopes, fears, and past experiences. The first task of leadership, they argue, is to identify the default future, discuss it, and analyze it, and then go about reimagining — and, in effect, rewriting — the future……

……EXAMPLE QUESTION: The three laws of performance in your book deal with understanding — and changing — the way people think about that default future. How does following your advice change the way a leader would react in the situation we’re discussing?
ZAFFRON: Instead of this fear — “I’m cutting my budget and what’s going to happen” and so forth — I could look at the same situation and see that this is a great opportunity to create a new business model, or to cut away things that haven’t worked but that keep going on, and to actually design something new. So two people can look at the same situation and see different realities: They see opportunities or the lack of them, possibilities or the lack of them."