Do they see their organization as
a well-oiled machine with clear structures and roles, command and control, certainty, agreements etc.? This requires linear thinking.
Or do they see their organization as
a complex adaptive eco-system with distributed networks of teams with informal influencers, dealing with surprises, uncertainties disagreements, paradoxes, stimulating creativity etc.? This requires complexity thinking. Their view influences HOW they structure and lead their organization.
The pressure to change has been building for years, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Boards and senior executives worried their organizations were too slow, too siloed and too bureaucratic. What many leaders feared, and what the pandemic confirms, is that their companies were organized for a world that is disappearing, an era of standardization and predictability is overtaken by four big trends, a combination of:
weekly newspaper.
In 1964, Harper’s Magazine published an essay by Richard Hofstadter entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Hofstadter’s essay originally delivered as a lecture at Oxford the previous year appeared against the backdrop of Barry Goldwater’s failed bid to win the US presidency as the Republican Party candidate. Hofstadter wrote that the Goldwater movement, which included the extreme-right John Birch Society, demonstrated “…how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority”.
Hofstadter is regarded by many as the most influential American historian of his day, and this essay shows why. Written more than a half-century ago, its insights are as penetrating today as they were then. “I call it the paranoid style,” he wrote, “… simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind”. Those wor
United States | Former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton attend inauguration Washington (TIP)- Democrat Joe Biden was sworn in as president of the
Joe Biden yesterday became the 46th president of the United States with a call to unity, vowing to bridge deep divides and defeat domestic extremism two weeks after a mob attack tried to undo his election victory. On a frigid but sunny day at the very Capitol building that was assaulted on January 6, Biden swore the oath of office moments after Kamala Harris, who became