Leading Out of the Downturn

Leading Out of the Downturn

Strategy+Business
Booz & Co

Excerpts:

Leading Out of the Downturnby Rob Norton 7/21/09The most important task for corporate leaders, says consultant and author Steve Zaffron, is to reorient the minds of their employees toward a positive vision of the future.

The last 18 months have been the most trying in decades for corporate leaders. The conditions that normally make running a company, a business unit, or a team rewarding — market expansion, revenue growth, rising pay, and incentives — have been absent for most, replaced by the unrelenting tasks of survival, retrenchment, and cost cutting.


What should leaders do in this depressed environment? Strategy+business recently put the question to Steve Zaffron, CEO of the Vanto Group, a global consulting firm. In The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life (Jossey-Bass, 2009), Zaffron and coauthor Dave Logan, who teaches at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, offer a set of simple rules to show how leaders and their companies can prosper, even when the odds are stacked against them. The main task, they argue, is to recognize that people normally have an unconscious, gut-level idea of where they — and their company — are at, and where they’re likely to go. Zaffron and Logan call this “the default future” and show how it is deeply rooted in people’s assumptions, hopes, fears, and past experiences. The first task of leadership, they argue, is to identify the default future, discuss it, and analyze it, and then go about reimagining — and, in effect, rewriting — the future. The book examines a series of management cases at companies around the world where rewriting the future has led to real business transformation. And the lessons are just as applicable to individuals.

Read full article: http://www.strategy-business.com/li/leadingideas/li00134
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This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.