My office is adorned with the usual military paraphernalia found in the workplaces of most uniformed leaders. Plaques and memorabilia from past assignments, mementos from combat zones in faraway lands, and a military print or two, meticulously framed and matted. There’s even a HAL 9000 Bluetooth speaker on the corner of my desk and a football autographed bySeattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll. All in all, a fairly ordinary office.
Then there’s the bookcases.
I keep two barrister bookcases in my office. In one, you'll find a wide array of military history books that range from Thucydides to Stephen Ambrose, from the Battle of the Little Bighorn to the War on Terror. Intermixed with those volumes are the thinkers that shape my approach to “the job” — Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Mahan, and countless others — capped with a select collection of biographies that run the gamut from our founding fathers to the memoirs of Andrew Exum and Nate Fick.
But it’s the other bookcase — the bookcase in the corner — that usually draws the most attention. Beneath a miniature concrete “Texas” barrier and a custom rosewood humidor rest several shelves of books that capture what is arguably our most daunting leadership challenge: leading change.
Why leading change? Because few other undertakings require such a wide spectrum of leadership attributes. Leading change requires imagination, perseverance, and commitment. It requires decisiveness, social intelligence, and humility. Leading change requires an ability to communicate vision and direction, build teams, recruit and develop talent, engender trust, foster innovation, motivate and inspire others, and anticipate, recognize and manage changing conditions. Leading change can take place occur on a mountainside in Afghanistan or in an insurgent stronghold in Iraq. It can happen in garrison, during deployment, or at a CTC. It unfolds in the office, in the field, and on the hood of HMMWV in the motor pool.
The bookcase in the corner contains a compilation of knowledge gained over the course of a career leading change. The doors have been opened and closed so many times that the corners of the wood shelves are worn bare. The books themselves are dog-eared from handling, with long passages highlighted, tabbed, and folded over. Within the pages of those books you'll find boarding passes, business cards, and hotel stationary. The margins are filled with notes, often written in a cramped seat in a military aircraft transiting from one corner of the country to another. For good reason, these books have seen “a lot of love” over the years.
The bookcase in the corner is a curiosity, more at home in a university business school than a military headquarters. But at some point, most leaders find themselves discussing, debating, or even writing on the same subjects. Because at the very core of each volume is a key component of leading change. This is what we do. When asked — because, inevitably, someone asks where to start and what to read — I typically recommend a short list to whet the appetite.
The start point is Iconoclast, by Gregory Berns. The difference between leading change and watching it pass you by comes down to three factors: vision, perseverance, and social intelligence. Berns draws on some terrific historical examples to demonstrate how leaders who possess all three traits can drive change under any circumstances, and those who lack them inevitably fail.
Trust is fundamental to successfully leading change, so it should come as no surprise that Stephen Covey’s The Speed of Trust would make the short list. What sound cliché on the surface isn't: Covey goes into great detail explaining that trust can not only be cultivated, it can be measured as well. What some write off as a bumper sticker is, in reality, a core driver for change.
Next on the list is The Starfish and the Spider, from Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom. Traditional hierarchical “spider” organizations (cough, cough… bureaucracies) tend to resist change, while flat “starfish” organizations that leverage peer relationships are able to adapt quickly to change. If you truly want to drive change, then you need an organizational structure that enables change. This is your blueprint.
A few books over on the shelf, you'll find Dan Coyle’s The Talent Code.Talent management — recruiting, developing, and leveraging talent — tends to be the single greatest obstacle to change. The Talent Code is the idiot’s guide to talent management. It’s the talent, stupid.
Rounding out the top five is Good to Great, by Jim Collins. In high-performing organizations, even minute changes can achieve significant gains. Collins focuses on five key factors that, in the hands of a transformative leader, can produce equally transformative change. Not surprisingly, the KISS principle prevails.
Drop down a shelf, and you'll find Influence without Authority, by Allan Cohen and David Bradford, parked next to a set of coffee-stained Gulf War maps. Face it, not everyone you need to drive change will work for you, so you need to hone the skills that allow you to lead without any authority. Dig deep into your wellspring of social intelligence and start building the informal teams who will help you achieve your goals.
Frankly, Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick could fall anywhere on this list. The tagline of the book says it all: “Why do some ideas survive and others die?” If you've ever heard the phrase, “She could sell ice cubes to Eskimos” then you get the key idea. Leading change begins with selling your ideas; if your ideas don't sell, then you're out of the change business.
Next on the hit parade is Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, the Boy Scout Handbook of decision-making. I like to park this book next to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Successfully leading change is about making tough decisions that produce lasting results, trusting your instincts to guide you when ambiguity and chaos prevail. Which is, after all, pretty much the norm in our line of work.
How do you close a list like this? With panache, that’s how. Success is all about not failing, so understanding why we fail is kind of an important concept to grasp. For that reason alone, it doesn't get much better than The Logic of Failure, by Dietrich Dörner. No other book provides a clearer understanding of “why things go wrong” or a better roadmap on how to “make them right” again.
The bookcase in the corner is a little dusty, a little worse for wear. The glass is chipped in a few spots. But it’s a leader’s bookcase, so it’s okay.
Yeah, reading is sort of fundamental.
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