The Chain

Business life-cycles continue to get ever shorter - outperformance quickly fades to the mean. In the 1990s only 10% of top quartile corporate performers were average performers 5 years later, whereas today 90% of outperformance has decayed within 5 years. There is a consistent imperative to reinvent your organisation, to continually have the hunger to do things differently - entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship is often scrappy and chaotic, which is anathema to highly structured organisational behemoths - so there is an inevitable tension between the internal culture and the external context (which is closer to scrappy and chaotic, with events and issues such as the pandemic, climate change, inequality disrupting carefully laid plans). Imagination is both the root of and the route to new solutions - but as the authors note, those solutions almost inevitably bring the next set of challenges too. First though we need to reorganise the organisation to harness our human ability to enable higher-level cognition.

Ryne Sherman is Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessment Systems. He is also a professor of psychology but started out studying history - which may explain his interest in how early human beings organised themselves and how we have become more hierarchical and structured as societies ever since the advent of agriculture - and the impact and effect that has on modern organisations. In this conversation Ryne explores the impact of the Neolithic Revolution, and connects that to the modern-day requirement for getting to the top of organisations as being a political skill. He also shares his thinking around the growing mid-management issue of Absentee Leaders.

Former captain of the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe, David Marquet, talks about how he developed the Intent-based Leadership approach while on the ship to enable devolved decision-making in complex situations - and how it can be applied to all complex environments.