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160 SNAKES IN SUITS
The leader’s job becomes increasingly complex but far less well
defined during these times of change—itself a frustrating thing.
Traditional strategic planning, organizing, and motivating skills are
of limited use. While a good deal of this change is perceived to be
necessary for the company’s survival, can executives, managers, or
employees survive as well?
Who Succeeds?
Who succeeds in this environment, in this new culture of change?
Most management experts agree that in order to survive the chaos,
employees, managers, and executives must adopt constant change as
a work style and lifestyle—the management term for this is embrace
change. They must become faster thinkers, more assertive and persuasive.
They must become much more creative, capable of designing,
developing, building, and selling new products and services to
meet ever-changing demands in a world of fierce competition and
highly selective buyers. They must learn to feel comfortable making
faster decisions with less information, and recover from mistakes
more quickly. They must be willing to live with the consequences,
even if they risk failure. They must take control of their own careers
by reassessing their talents and skills and then repackaging them for
the new marketplace. While our parents and grandparents worked
for one or two companies for their entire lives, we must be ready to
move through six or seven.
Organizations that survive chaotic times are those whose employees
not only grow comfortable with uncertainty, but can build
systems, processes, and structures capable of anticipating it and flexible
enough to respond to it (that is, change again, as necessary). In
order to do this, successfully transitioning companies need fewer superfluous
rules (which hold back progress) and clearer missioncritical
rules (which keep the business on track). They need a much
more meaningful set of guiding principles that managers can use to