STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP AND BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

Strategic Leadership and Business Transformation

Abstract

Globalisation and the technological revolution have transformed our world. It is exciting and offers abundant possibilities. For leaders it is hugely challenging. It is characterised by constantly shifting global competition, faster and faster change, increasing complexity, unpredictability, instability, ambiguity, interdependence and growing global crisis. This means learning how to handle and thrive on chaos. In this situation, old didactic or management training approaches for developing leaders are not likely to be effective. Over the years one has been working with one's clients, helping them learn and transform their companies in ways that reflect the different skills they need today. One has worked hard to create an approach that really works, making mistakes, learning and gradually getting it to work better and better. This is now shared with the readers.

Strategic Leadership and Business Transformation

Introduction

The only way to lead when you don't have control is you lead through the power of your relationships. You can deal with the unknown only if you have enormous levels of trust, and if you're working together and bringing out the best in people (Wheatley, in the Greenleaf Centre for Servant-Leadership, 2002).The main contrast is between the metaphor of organisations as machines and that of organisations as living systems (Capra, 2002).In our experience, enormous struggles with implementation are created every time we deliver changes to the organisation rather than figuring out how to involve people in their creation (Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers, 1998).The right way to do things is not to persuade people you're right but to challenge them to think it through for themselves (Chomsky, 2000).

Management Development

For Shorts there was a major need for investment and a new beginning. Also, very obviously, there was a major need for management development and the development of a senior team who could work together to bring about radical transformation of the company. This was absolutely critical because, in the words of the CEO:

Losses were very significant.

The competitors were undoubtedly well ahead of us.

Customers were getting more and more frustrated with our lack of performance.

Human relations/industrial relations were not good (us vs. them).

Government policy was privatization (an opportunity).

The feeling within the organization was that we were ready to change.

The new CEO realized that the company had many competent and committed staff but they were not currently led, managed and organized in ways that used their creative energies to the full. He began to create a cultural environment similar to quadrant A (see Figure 1) in order to encourage innovation and enterprise and to replace the rampant individualism of the past. The first senior management conference held by the new CEO in May 1987 agreed that radical change was urgently required. As part of this early process of change and learning a number of the senior management team were tasked to study and take lessons from other global companies such as British Airways, Ford, Boeing, Lucas, Rolls Royce, IBM and a number of Japanese ...