Corporate leaders today are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Nobody can see events play out in the streets in Minnesota and elsewhere and not be moved in some way. At the same time, they have a fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interests of their stakeholders, regardless of their personal feelings.
I know this dilemma because I experienced it myself. In 2004, I was managing Ukraine’s leading news organization during the Orange Revolution, the third in a series of nonviolent uprisings known as the color revolutions that overwhelmed autocrats in Serbia and then the Georgian Republic before arriving in Kyiv.
As I explained in my book, Cascades, these things follow a specific pattern of contagion, adoption and defection driven by networks. Eventually, the nonlinear nature of network cascades overwhelms regimes and compels institutions to act. Now, that pattern is unfolding right here and, for corporate leaders, it is no longer something you can afford to ignore.
Change often fails and that rarely has anything to do with whether the concept is a good one or not. As Howard Aiken famously put it, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throat.” Having pioneered the Harvard Mark, one of the world’s first computers, Aiken was speaking from experience.
The truth is that any time you set out to make an impact there’s going to be some who won’t like it. They’ll seek to undermine what you are trying to achieve and they will do it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. It’s a hard truth, but one we all need to accept: resistance is inevitable when you try to drive change.
Once you internalize that, you can begin to move forward. When we work with organizations trying to adopt and scale new ideas, one of the first things we do is work to anticipate and build strategies to overcome resistance. We start by working to anticipate where resistance is most likely to come from and devise a plan to address the issues even before they arise.
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Nikolai Tesla was a revolutionary thinker with bold, transformative ideas. Yet it was George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison who shaped how electricity was brought to the world. The personal computer was invented at Xerox PARC, but it was Apple who brought the Macintosh to market. William Coley pioneered cancer immunotherapy, but Jim Allison made it a reality.
We grow up believing that if an idea is good, it will naturally rise to the top. Yet that’s rarely, if ever, true. To make an impact, you need to understand power and influence. It isn’t about titles, authority, or formal position. It’s about understanding how decisions actually get made, how people get mobilized, and how systems really change.
To do that, you need to master three forms of power: hard power, soft power and network power. Hard power compels. Soft power persuades. Network power amplifies. Real influence comes from knowing how to combine all three. That’s the difference between having a good idea and building the traction you need to bring about the impact you want to see.
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In the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber noted that the sweeping industrialization underway would transform how societies worked. As small, informal operations gave way to large, complex organizations with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, leaders would need to rely less on tradition and charisma, and more on organization and rationality.
He also foresaw that jobs would need to be broken down into specialized tasks and governed by a system of hierarchy, authority, and responsibility. This would require a more formal mode of organization—a bureaucracy—in which roles and responsibilities were clearly defined. Power would be entrusted to institutions, not individuals.
Yet today, according to Gallup, our faith in institutions has been shattered. From political institutions to schools to big business, support has fallen sharply, and now only the military and small business enjoy majority support. In essence, the process Weber described has been reversed: we’ve discarded institutions and embraced individuals. It is not serving us well.
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The oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was rumoured to have said that his three rules for how to become rich were: Rise early. Work hard. Strike oil. It’s one of those eminently quotable remarks because it captures something we all know to be true, that luck and chance have as much to do with success as anything else.
Yet we don’t value people for their luck. We don’t exalt those who win the lottery or walk away from a roulette table flush with cash. Instead, we praise talent, skill, and dedication. And that creates tension, because although luck plays a big role in outcomes, it is only the effort we put into developing our abilities that we can control.
That is the nature of what the French writer Albert Camus called existential rebellion. It is through our own efforts and actions that we find meaning in an indifferent universe, even if the rewards for those efforts have a significant random element. Believing in luck, then, an act of defiance. To work, to strive, to build skill in such a world is not naïveté, but rebellion.
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Over a long and industrious career, the investor George Soros developed a theory he calls reflexivity. The basic idea is that expectations don’t form in a vacuum. They are shaped, in part, by our perceptions of what other people believe. The more widely an idea is accepted, the more likely we are to accept it ourselves and that, in turn, reinforces the collective zeitgeist.
If many believe that, say, the stock market will go up or that AI will create an economic boom, we’re more likely to believe it too. That belief then drives behavior: investors buy stocks, companies pour money into AI, and the prediction begins to fulfill itself. All of this only adds fuel to the fire. Nobody wants to get left out of a good thing.
Soros made a fortune betting against reflexivity. Once the pattern of self-reference and self-reinforcement takes hold, things are bound to overshoot. Expectations drift far beyond underlying reality—and eventually snap back. It seems something similar is brewing. As big institutions accumulate unprecedented power, a growing backlash seeks to take power back.
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It’s become almost a cliché to talk about how consistently organizational change fails. Study after study finds that roughly three-quarters of change efforts don’t achieve their objectives. There are underlying forces that work against us adapting to change—including synaptic, network and cost effects—that lead to resistance.
Another problem lies in how we study change itself. Typically, researchers at an academic institution or a consulting firm interview executives that were involved in successful efforts and try to glean insights to write case studies. These are famously flawed, lacking controls and often relying on self-serving accounts.
One unlikely place to find insight is an obscure academic named Gene Sharp, who wasn’t interested in business, but political revolutions. What he found was that there are sources of power that support the status quo and these have an institutional basis. As long as they remain in place, nothing will change. But if you can shift them, anything becomes possible.
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Every good salesperson knows the 7-step process in which you identify and qualify a prospect to understand their needs, then present your offer, overcome objections, close the sale and follow up. It’s proven so consistently effective that its concepts have been the standard for training salespeople for decades.
Many business leaders come up through sales and marketing, so it shouldn’t be surprising that they try to use similar persuasion techniques for large-scale change.They work to understand the needs of their target market, craft a powerful message, overcome any objections and then follow-through on execution.
Unfortunately, that’s a terrible strategy. The truth is that the urge to persuade is often a red flag. It means you either have the wrong people or the wrong idea. Effective change strategy focuses on collective dynamics. Rather than trying to shape opinions, you’re much better off empowering early enthusiasts and then working to shape networks.
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Change is often presented as an enigma. Unlike a traditional management task, you can’t just devise a plan and execute it. To be an effective change leader, you need to embrace a certain amount of uncertainty because change, by definition, involves doing new things and that always involves some measure of unpredictability.
Still, that doesn’t mean change is mysterious. We actually know a lot about it. In Diffusion of Innovations, researcher Everett Rogers compiled hundreds of studies performed over many decades. Around the same time, Gene Sharp led a parallel effort to understand how large-scale political movements drive social and institutional change.
So while any change effort involves no small amount of uncertainty, there is also quite a bit of consistency. Much as Tolstoy remarked about families, successful transformations end up looking very much alike, while unsuccessful transformations end up failing in their own way. Here are four numbers to keep in mind as you embark on your change journey.
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Every year since 2010, I’ve posted an article about what trend I expect to dominate the next twelve months. Throughout the 2010s, these forecasts usually focused on emerging technologies or new currents in management thinking. But around 2020, that began to shift. The annual trends increasingly centered on how we cope with change rather than the change itself.
Last year, it was “The Coming Realignment.” History tends to propagate at a certain rhythm and then converges and cascades around certain points. Years like 1776, 1789, 1848, 1920, 1948, 1968, 1989—and, it seems, 2020—mark these inflection points. The years that follow are then spent absorbing the shock and navigating the fallout.
Today, everything is up for question. Will AI boom or bust? Will it take our jobs or bring new prosperity? What kind of economic system will we adopt for the future? We are in the midst of a great realignment. We know from previous inflections that what comes after will be profoundly different from before and what we most need to watch now is our institutions.
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