I recently read a business book by John Kotter called 'Our iceberg is melting'.
In a bubble, the book tells a fable about penguins living on an iceberg who are on the brink of becoming a seal's wet dream, because their iceberg is melting and they don't realise.
One of the penguins discovers a crack in the iceberg, but he is low down in the penguin society, so nobody listens to him.
The head penguins, when he finally gets to talk to them, tell him that he is crazy, and that they know best. For them the iceberg will not melt because it has never melted before.
"What a crazy idea, an iceberg that melts..."
Our penguin who discovered the crack is hence ridiculed and his findings completely ignored, or at least almost.
Luckily, because influential and charasmatic penguins with other specialities actually listened to him, a team was created to come up with a plan to save the colony.
Despite much resistence, they succeeded...
The book is about change, and more notably how it happened from the bottom-up, thanks to the ability of one penguin who discovered the problem to speak to other penguins in the colony with whom he would otherwise never have communicated.
It made me think about why some companies manage to stay so flexible, even though they're huge, and why others don't.
They trust employees (are people-centric), regardless of their level, to solve problems and to share, for example through internal social network tools, their ideas with other people in the company they didn't even know existed...
Others who could use their ideas, or even who could solve their problems for them because they had the same experiences before...
More info on the book can be found at http://www.ouricebergismelting.com/html/iceberg.html
I also recommend this article on the mckinseyquarterly website (it's worth the one minute free registration) for those interested in the future of management... http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Innovative_management_A_conversation_between_Gary_Hamel_and_Lowell_Bryan_2065
Posts
Hello sholto
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the book, but by reading your article on it, i recognised so many of the ways collaboration happends:
The nobody listening aspect, the 'we already know everything, you crazy idiot', the resistance, so strong in big companies, especially with people affraid by changes.
I don't know if your book mention something like this, but i think the Top-down initiatives have 2 times less chances to succeed compared to botom-up initiatives.
However the problem is the Botom up initiatives mainly stay in the box > "we should do that a day..." "yeah... an other coffee?"
Hello sholto
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the book, but by reading your article on it, i recognised so many of the ways collaboration happends:
The nobody listening aspect, the 'we already know everything, you crazy idiot', the resistance, so strong in big companies, especially with people affraid by changes.
I don't know if your book mention something like this, but i think the Top-down initiatives have 2 times less chances to succeed compared to botom-up initiatives.
However the problem is the Botom up initiatives mainly stay in the box > "we should do that a day..." "yeah... an other coffee?"
5 décembre 2008 06:51