Hack:
The One-Step Approach to Change Management

By Alastair Dryburgh

November 2, 2011 at 3:07am

Moonshots

Reinvent the means of control

Rethink the philosophical foundations of management

Summary

It's idiosyncratic...

Problem

I remember the most difficult CEO I ever worked with - authoritarian, dogmatic, unpersuadable, the ulitmate control freak.

But I found a way to persuade him to do almost anything, almost effortlessly.

Solution

The clue came to me reading the company's marketing literature. One word kept leaping out at me: control. This was what he cared about, and dropping that one word into the conversation would convince him of almost anything. "We need to recruit more people in the finance department to get better control of receivables." Agreed. "We need to invest in systems to get proper control of X.." Authorised.

Practical Impact

The general point here is that we often try to use generic approaches, and if they don't work blame idiosyncratic factors. What if instead, we searched out the idiosyncratic factors as the key to the situation?

First Steps

I'm going to contradict myself here, and present a recipe for not thinking in recipes. It's three steps.