Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself [Hardcover]

 

 

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Dan Pink has characterized this book as being "the most powerful and instructive change manual you'll ever read" and I certainly share his high regard for William Taylor's book. Most change initiatives fail and reasons vary from one situation to the next. However, as Taylor explains in this book, organizations cannot be transformed unless and until those who lead them first transform themselves and thereby serve as exemplars to others. He also points out that organizational transformation requires having effective change agents at all levels and in all areas, not only in the C-suite, what Cynthia Barton Rabe characterizes as "zero-gravity thinkers" - innovators "who are not weighed down by the expertise of a team, its politics, or `the way things have always been done.'"

Taylor agrees with Rabe that zero-gravity thinkers have "psychological distance" from the setting in which they work, "renaissance tendencies" that draw on a range of interests and influences, and "related expertise" that allows them to find the points where blue-sky ideas intersect with real-world opportunities. They are visionary pragmatists: they see possibilities and realize how difficult it will be to make them realities.

For example, Taylor cites what he calls "Five Truths of Corporate Transformation" (Pages 83-93):

1. Most organizations in most fields suffer a kind if tunnel vision, which makes it hard to envision a more positive future.

2. Most leaders see things the same way everyone else sees them because they look for ideas in the same places everyone looks for them.

3. In troubled organizations rich with tradition and success, history can be a curse - and a blessing. The challenge is to break from the past without disavowing it.

4. The job of the change agent is not just to surface high-minded ideas. It is to summon a sense of urgency inside and outside of the organization, and to turn that urgency to action.

5. In a business environment that never stops changing, change agents can never stop learning."

Later in his lively and eloquent narrative, Taylor cited and discusses "Five New Rules for Starting Something New" (Pages 172-182) and then "Five Habits of Highly Humbitious Leaders (Pages 245-254). As Taylor explains, he first encountered the term "humbitious" when a 30-year veteran of IBM, Jane Harper, used it to describe herself, together with the term "possibilitarian." She claims the term "humbitious," a blend of humility and ambition that drives the most successful business people, was coined by researchers at Bell Labs. Of course, more than two centuries earlier when Socrates was described as the world's wisest man, he replied that if that were true, it was because all he knew was that he knew nothing. Of course, effective change agents know a great deal but correctly realize what aspiring leaders at IBM were told, that "by far the lion's share of world-changing luminaries are humble people. They focus on the work, not themselves. They seek - they are ambitious - but they are humbled when it arrives. They know that much of the success was luck, timing, and a thousand factors out of their control." That is essentially how Jim Collins describes the mindset of Lever 5 leaders in his book, Good to Great.

Taylor achieves brilliantly his stated objective to do more than share with his reader what he has learned about "the hard work of deep-seated change"; he also provides a wealth of information about the behind-the-scenes efforts of change agents in a real-world circumstances who helped to transform their organizations and, more often than not, the industries in which their organizations compete. The major themes and core messages he gained from his association with these visionary pragmatists is distilled in the "Practically Radical Primer," a set of ten questions that can serve as a self-audit for aspiring change agents.

In this book, Taylor has identified and defined the challenges of change; he has also made every effort to prepare his reader to confront them in "not-so-crazy" but nonetheless radical ways. First, however, those who read this book must overcome what James O'Toole so aptly characterizes in his book, Leading Change, as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom."

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