Accelerate

Building Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World

by John P. Kotter

Number of pages: 224

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

BBB Library: Operations Management

ISBN: 978-1625271747



About the Author

Regarded by many as the authority on leadership and change, Dr. John P. Kotter is a New York Times best-selling author, award winning business and management thought leader, business entrepreneur, inspirational speaker, and Harvard Professor. His ideas and books, as well as his company, Kotter International, have helped mobilize people around the world to better lead organizations and their own lives, in an era of increasingly rapid change.

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Editorial Review

It’s a familiar scene in organizations today: a new competitive threat or a big opportunity emerges. You quickly create a strategic initiative in response and appoint your best people to make change happen. And it does—but not fast enough. Or effectively enough. Real value gets lost and, ultimately, things drift back to the default status.   In Accelerate, Dr. Kotter explains how traditional organizational hierarchies evolved to meet the daily demands of running an enterprise. For most companies, the hierarchy is the singular operating system at the heart of the firm. But the reality is, this system simply is not built for an environment where change has become the norm. Kotter advocates a new system—a second, more agile, network-like structure that operates in concert with the hierarchy to create what he calls a “dual operating system”—one that allows companies to capitalize on rapid-fire strategic challenges and still make their numbers.

Book Reviews

“To succeed in today's fast-moving economy, traditional corporate structures are holding back companies, even great companies, from being creative enough and speedy enough to compete effectively. What's needed, argues Harvard Business School Professor John P. Kotter in a new book, is an organizational design that has not one, but two "operating systems." One system conducts the everyday business of business, while the second system, more like an agile network, sits alongside to focus on the opportunities and demands of the future.” Harvard Business School

“No other business thinker in recent years has made a greater contribution to our understanding of what continues to be a highly competitive, tumultuous global marketplace. In his latest book, Accelerate, he explains how almost any organization can move quickly enough to stay ahead in ‘an age of tumultuous change and growing uncertainties.’” bobmoris.biz

“Traditionally, organizational processes are built around running what’s directly in front of them. John P. Kotter maintains that ingrained processes can’t quickly respond to changes or seize opportunities. He advocates a networking system that operates in concert with processes and procedures. Why the dual system? People accelerate progress; processes and procedures impede it.” Dallas Morning News

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Wisdom to Share

Virtually all successful organizations on earth go through a very similar life cycle.

Accelerate is about how to handle strategic challenges fast enough, with agility and creativity, to take advantage of windows of opportunity which open and shut more quickly today.

The basic structure is self-explanatory: hierarchy on one side and network on the other.

In a truly reliable, efficient, agile, and fast enterprise, the network meshes with the more traditional structure; it is not some sort of “super task force” that reports to some level in the hierarchy.

We already know how to execute new strategies and have done so many times. Why would we want to move away from methods that have worked in the past and that people are comfortable with?

The game is about vision, opportunity, agility, inspired action, passion, innovation, and celebration—not just project management, budget reviews, reporting relationships, compensation, and accountability to a plan.

Create a sense of urgency around a Big Opportunity. Building a dual system starts here. This is, in many ways, the secret sauce which allows behavior to happen that many who have grown up in mature organizations would think impossible.

When people have a true sense of urgency around a big strategic opportunity, they instinctively look for something they can do each day to push the enterprise toward exploiting that opportunity.

A management-driven hierarchy, built for reliability and efficiency now, leans against significant change—and leans hugely against a change as significant as the implementation of a dual operating system.

Nothing is as powerful in opening masses of minds, supplying relevant information, drawing out passion, and then creating a great sense of urgency around a big competitive opportunity than role modeling.

Almost all highly performing organizations have in their futures the possibility of continuing to prosper greatly despite moving into a world where the rules have changed.

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