Ashish Kothari argues that command-and-control leadership fails in fast-changing environments. Instead of controlling everything, leaders need to embrace looseness and empower people throughout the organization to respond and adapt quickly.
Chapters
The volatility, the uncertainty, the complexity in the world is exponentially rising. And unless we fundamentally figure out a way to shift leadership, make every person in the organization care as much, be on tune with what's happening, to be willing to make changes, we are going to be too slow. And the only thing that happens to slow organizations is they die either a fast or a slow death. But death is what comes.
Yes, I agree, and I think this is maybe surprisingly for the two of us, but I believe this is a very real conversation to be had because the CEO response, when confronted with this situation I'm going to enact the control response is still very real. And yet the control response is a false response. It's not a response. There's no path there. And so we have to help people work through and go beyond the control response and move towards something new and better, which is, let's celebrate looseness. And then it takes you down the path, okay, how do we then help our people? And then you're in business. But in order to do that properly, you have to overcome and abandon the control response. And I think that's not yet everybody is really doing that.
