Revolutionary Leadership

“Reform is as much about changing mentality as about redesigning structure.”

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge The FourthRevolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

In their book, The Fourth Revolution, Micklethwait and Wooldridge look at the need within the current national state to reinvent itself to be more efficient and provide the real services that its citizens desire. Even though the book is focused on national governments, there were some practical pieces that could be picked up for leaders in other industries.

Leadership is the key component to an organization’s successes and failures. Current leadership in some industries operates in ways to pacify specific groups so they are happy rather than maintaining the value, vision, and mission of the organization. The maintenance of the organization's value, mission, and mission often requires leaders to make decisions that might not be favorable to all but are required for the overall success of the organization. Additionally, organizations that have leaders willing to make the hard decisions are often organizations that also have leaders that develop environments of risk taking.

This risk taking is important if the organization has the mission and vision of being a leader in its industry, a front-runner, and innovator. Risk does not always mean success, failures do occur. However, innovative organizations and leaders do not use the failures to suppress risk takers but as learning opportunities to create something better. Better processes. Better products. Better employees. Better. Better.

What happens if you are not a part of that type of organization? This can be a difficult environment to work. It might seem logical that the lack of innovation in a organization is tied to the unwillingness of the leadership to be innovative. However, it is that an organization often moves away from its stated values, vision, and mission and replaces it with short term strategies that patch holes in the organizational fabric. This short sightedness leads to a slow death of an organization, often times causing it to become extinct. The organizations that tend to have this type of leadership often look out to save what they have acquired and push an organization to work in silos, whereas innovative organizations breakdown those silos to work together (example).  

As a leader, the decisions that are made revolve around the impact that the organization is going to make on its industry, its customers, and its employees. The willingness to make decisions based on old practices and processes often leads to an organization falling behind, becoming extinct. The decisions that are based outside of the values, vision, and mission of the organization leads to internal organizational distrust. Or, the decisions can be “outside the box” ideas that lead to pushing the organization to operate in innovative ways that cause change within their industries. It is this type of leadership that are industry leaders rather than the organization that only says it wants to be the leader but their decisions do not bare the same results.

What type of leader are you? What type of leadership do you want to be under? Is that where you are now or do you need to move on? Moving on is not running away, it is understanding that the desire to be under great leadership might mean sacrificing the place you current are employed.