Kotter – Accelerate

Posted on October 15, 2013 by Lee White

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I just finished reading John Kotter’s HBR article Accelerate! If you are interested in how to build an organization for success in the 21st century, this is a must read. The basic content in the article will be published as a book  in the spring of 2014. I suggest reading this now and getting ahead of the curve.

This is an evolution on his previous landmark work “Leading Change”. It incorporates what he has learned from his 15 years of delivering the “Kotter Methodology”.

One of my favorite quotes:

People have been writing for 50 years about unleashing human potential and directing the energy to big business challenges. But who, outside the world of start-ups, has succeeded? So few do because they’re working within a system that basically asks most people to shut up, take orders, and do their jobs in a repetitive way.

So much of what he says resonates with my own experience. It is about openness, transparency, and trust; but structured in a way as to not loose focus on the intent and direction of the organization.

Until further notice the organizational “dual operating system”  is becoming my new way of thinking. The article is free to read if you register on the site.

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Curation as a Key Competency

Posted on October 10, 2013 by Lee White

Last month I wrote a post that stated “content curation must become a core competency”. I want to expand on that a bit, and point you to a related post that Euan Semple put up last week, Curatorship. In it Euan says:

This process of curating stuff that appeals to you allows you to be found by people who share your interests. This helps start relationships and build networks. This is how you get to do interesting things with interesting people.

In essence, curation is a way to tell your story. By highlighting and commenting on content that you find interesting or compelling, you are letting others see inside your head. Writing to tell your own story is difficult and time consuming, and the truth is that most of us do not take the time to do it. (My own sporadic entries in this blog bear witness to that.) Curation on the other hand is easier and typically an enjoyable experience, and it yields much the same endpoint as writing your own narrative.

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Now for the best part. When you curate content, you are making the online world a better place. Your stamp of approval on content makes it inherently more interesting to those that care about your opinion. In the workplace this process becomes invaluable, as good content is surfaced, and bad content drifts to the bottom of the stack, where  it belongs.

Connected organizations will thrive on being able to surface the best ideas, and curation is the best path to that end. Organizations that do not see curation as a key competency will eventually drift to the bottom of the stack…

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