Finding the right place to start change

When implementing an organization-wide transformation, focus your efforts on the most connected employees to help generate momentum and accelerate impact.

NOVEMBER 2011 • Marco Gardini, Giovanni Giuliani, and Marco Marricchi

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Change_Management/Finding_the_right_place_to_start_change_2890

A very insightful article to a major challenge—how to change an organization of any size in the direction the leaders want.

Changing an entire large organization is never easy; only about a third of all such transformations succeed. One problem many organizations run into as they implement a change program is faltering momentum because employees just don’t change the way they work. Sometimes they don’t want to, and sometimes the reason is a poorly structured plan that makes change harder. Our recent experience at a European retail bank shows the benefits of starting to implement change by focusing on the employees who have the most influence over the daily work that needs to change. This approach can ensure that a successful transformation happens faster and that employees remain engaged in the long term…..
….Who were those people? ….. look at three criteria:
 ·         Which roles have a direct, substantial impact on the desired business results?
·         Which roles are connected with a large number of different subgroups in the organization?
·         Which roles can decide how people get the relevant things done?

                                

Winning, Losing, and Collaboration

10:18 AM Monday June 13, 2011
by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer | Comments (19)

http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2011/06/winning-losing-and-collaborati.html

Extremely insightful!!!

"...how does performance affect collaboration? In sports, it is a truism that winning can temporarily overcome various problems between teammates. For instance, the relationship between Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal was strained while they were teammates with the Los Angeles Lakers, even during their three consecutive NBA championship seasons. However, when the team was winning, the tension dissipated and the pair got along better — at least when they were working together on the court. In fact, during the 2000 championship series, Shaq referred to Kobe as "The Big Little Brother" when Kobe led the team to a win after Shaq had fouled out.
But when the Lakers were losing, the animosity between the two superstars mushroomed. They lost trust in each other, and before long, the whole team was infected with suspicion. Without trust, the team was unable to work together and win another championship.........All the bad things, the warts, are much more apparent in a losing streak or a bad streak and the flaws are not as apparent when you're winning a few games...
....Breakdowns in performance can lead to diminished collaboration inside business organizations, too. We have found that setbacks in the work can have a profoundly negative impact on inner work life — the continuous stream of emotions, perceptions, and motivations that occur during the work day. Perceptions are especially relevant here, since they include how people judge their work, their colleagues, and the organization. Especially in close collaborative situations, setbacks can lead workers to see their colleagues as incompetent or untrustworthy. When this happens, they will become less supportive of those colleagues, less openly communicative, and less likely to coordinate smoothly; collaboration will begin to break down.So, not only is collaboration critical to high performance, but maintaining high performance can be important to keeping collaboration going. Previously, we have talked about the importance of small wins — modest but meaningful successes along the pathway to achieving a major goal — in maintaining high performance and subjective well-being. They can also help workers maintain effective collaboration. When organizations support and celebrate small wins, employees feel like winners; the mistrust and conflict that can accompany losing will be avoided. Without those interpersonal problems, it will be much easier to achieve consistent and effective collaboration. "

Remapping your strategic mind-set

Pankaj Ghemawat

McKinsey Quarterly, 2011 Number 3

This is an extremely interesting perspective on creating global strategies.

Executives can shake up their thinking, identify hidden opportunities, and spot lurking threats by looking at a novel type of map that depicts the world from the perspective of a particular country, industry, or company.Senior executives need better mental maps to navigate our unevenly globalized world. Although a wide variety of metrics show that just 10 to 25 percent of economic activity is truly global, executives disproportionately embrace visions of unbounded opportunities in a borderless world, where distances and differences no longer matter....
...I want to focus on the potential for a special kind of map—one I call a “rooted map”—to help leaders enhance their intuition about the opportunities and threats inherent in our semiglobalized world.Rooted maps correct a misperception reinforced by conventional ones: that the world looks the same regardless of the viewer’s vantage point or purpose. In the real world, though, geographic distance and differences in culture and policy matter. To better reflect this reality, rooted maps depict the world from a specific perspective and with a particular purpose in mind....
....depiction of the world as seen from New York City¹ is a humorous example, but more data-driven versions—particularly those drawn at the industry or company levels—have serious business applications.