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4 Things Business Leaders Can Learn About Transformation From Social And Political Movements
In 2004, I was managing a major news organization during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. One of the things I noticed was that thousands of people, who would normally be doing thousands of different things, would stop what they were doing and start doing the same things all at once, in nearly complete unison, with no clear authority guiding them.
What struck me was how difficult it was for me to coordinate action among the people in my company. I thought if I could harness the forces I saw at work in the Orange Revolution, it could be a powerful model for business transformation. That’s what started me out on the 15-year journey that led to my book, Cascades.
What I found was that many of the principles of successful movements can be applied to business transformation. Also, because social and political movements so well documented — there are often thousands of contemporary accounts from every conceivable perspective — we can gain insights that a traditional case studies miss. Here are four principles you can apply.
1. Failure Doesn’t Have To Be Fatal
One of the things that amazed me while researching revolutionary movements was how consistently failure played a part in their journey…
