Whats your recipe

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Whats your recipe?
Charles Leadbeater
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Which are you?
Whats Your Recipe?
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Everything seems to be changing

• Science and technology
• Values
• Demography
• Environment
• Geography
• Social structures

Whats Your Recipe?
4
Change a cause for pessimism

• Environment degrading
• Morals in disarray
• Family collapsing
• Culture dumbing down
• Politics by media sound bite
• Democracy corrupted
• War always on the horizon
• Globalisation a gale of disorder

Whats Your Recipe?
5
Change causes for optimism

• People living much longer lives
• Democratic cultures spread by media, Internet
• World more interconnected
• Education spreading
• Position of women improving, somewhat
• Technological innovation critical to environment
• Asia tens of millions lifted from poverty every
  year

Whats Your Recipe?
6
Change optimism pessimism

• Private optimism, about our lives, families
• Public pessimism about the state of the world
• The two come together in organisations
• Organisations provide people with a sense of
  private identity
• But critical to how we cope with the world
  together

Whats Your Recipe?
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Change optimism pessimism in society
Confrontation Retreat
Radical
Reactionary
Whats Your Recipe?
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Change optimism, pessimism organisations
Confrontation Retreat
Radical
Reactionary
Whats Your Recipe?
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Why change?

• Is it really necessary?
• Leadership as teaching, breaking up closed
  mindsets

Whats Your Recipe?
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Why change?

• Is it really necessary?
• Leadership as teaching, breaking up closed
  mindsets
• Is it really rational?
• Confronting conventional wisdom in successful
  organisation

Whats Your Recipe?
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Why change?

• Is it really necessary?
• Leadership as teaching, breaking up closed
  mindsets
• Is it really rational?
• Confronting conventional wisdom in successful
  organisation
• Is it really possible?
• Building capacity for it the more you do the
  easier it gets

Whats Your Recipe?
12
Why change?

• Is it really necessary?
• Leadership as teaching, breaking up closed
  mindsets
• Is it really rational?
• Confronting conventional wisdom in successful
  organisation
• Is it really possible?
• Building capacity for it the more you do the
  easier it gets
• Does it make sense?
• Companies often act to confirm their view of the
  world

Whats Your Recipe?
13
Why change?

• Karl Weick Sensemaking in Organisations
• Rational sense making only works when conditions
  are stable
• Often rational sensemaking is a façade
• We make sense of the world to justify the roles
  we play
• Live life forwards but make sense of what we do
  backwards
• Act first, make sense later
• Changing how we make sense of world is v
  protracted and emotional
• Not just because the world is hard to understand
  but we are

Whats Your Recipe?
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Understanding forces of change

• Systematic
• Accelerating
• Non-linear
• Viruses and epidemics
• Margins become the mainstream
• From complicated to complex systems

Whats Your Recipe?
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Rise of the knowledge economy

• 1912
• US Steel Anaconda
• Exxon General Electric
• Coats Singer
• Pullman Navistar
• Shell Sears

Whats Your Recipe?
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Rise of the knowledge economy

• 1998
• Microsoft Intel
• General Electric Shell
• Merck Exxon
• Toyota IBM
• Novartis Coke

Whats Your Recipe?
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Rise of the knowledge economy

• 1912 1998
• US Steel Microsoft
• Exxon General Electric
• Coats Merck
• Pullman Toyota
• Anaconda Novartis
• General Electric Intel
• Singer IBM
• Navistar Shell
• Shell Exxon
• Sears Coke

Whats Your Recipe?
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Organisations of change

• Adaptive, nimble, agile organisations able to
  learn fast about environment around them, sense
  opportunities and mobilise resources to exploit
  them

Whats Your Recipe?
19
Organisations of change

• Adaptive, nimble, agile organisations able to
  learn fast about environment around them, sense
  opportunities and mobilise resources to exploit
  them
• But organisations that just do that would be in
  perpetual turmoil, constantly reinventing
  themselves

Whats Your Recipe?
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Organisations of change

• So as well as being adaptive, nimble and agile
  organisations need to have a sense of stability,
  continuity and purpose
• But a sense of stability that does not inhibit
  ability to adapt
• What does that optimum mix of stability and flux
  come from?

Whats Your Recipe?
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Recipes and cakes

• Are you a cake maker?
• Find the one best way to make your cake as
  cheaply as possible
• Markets with low innovation and uncertainty
• Structured, hierarchical coordination

Whats Your Recipe?
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Recipes and cakes

• Are you a recipe maker?
• Combine ingredients to create new services and
  markets
• Markets with faster, fundamental innovation and
  more uncertainty
• New business recipes require new business models

Whats Your Recipe?
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Recipes and cakes

• Can you make cakes and create new recipes, one
  feeding the other?
• Being a cake maker is increasingly competitive
• And new ideas are going to come from many more
  sources

Whats Your Recipe?
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Organisations that change and stay stable

• Simplicity and reliability
• Efficient and low cost
• Limited hierarchy and bureaucracy
• But also capable of learning and adapting at all
  levels

Whats Your Recipe?
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US Army

• Lessons learned to simple rules

Whats Your Recipe?
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e-Bay

• The community leads the company

Whats Your Recipe?
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Heathrow Airport

• How would you stay in control if you were running
  it?

Whats Your Recipe?
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Nokia

• Common culture and values, networks and open
  leadership

Whats Your Recipe?
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Lego organisations

• Modularity allows many different tasks to proceed
  in parallel
• Central architecture allows the modules to click
  together
• Arup The Second Avenue subway project

Whats Your Recipe?
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Southwest Airlines

• Dare to have a point of viewwhats your recipe
  whats your story?

Whats Your Recipe?