Seth Kahan on Leadership // Monday Morning Mojo
Revolutionizing the World of Work
Here in Washington, DC, just two blocks north of the White House I co-hosted a two-day workshop with Steve Denning last Thursday and Friday, Revolutionizing the World of Work. The event was sold out with participants from Goddard Space Flight Center, Deloitte, Johnson & Johnson, American University, Comcast, Homeland Security, Kaiser Permanente, and others. We are already planning another for 2012.

I continue to collaborate with other thought leaders on bringing the future to forward-looking companies, helping leverage what's on the horizon for success and impact today.

William Gibson made the astute comment, The future is already here. It's just very unevenly distributed. Well, at this conference we caught a pretty solid glimpse of the future. It is radically different than common practice in most organizations today. Case studies from Salesforce.com, Amazon.com, Gore, Cisco, and NASA highlighted both highly successful work force practices and arcane attempts at control in the face of overwhelming change.

Turbulence is everywhere: inside the organization, among the customers, and in industry. Change is happening so fast the word disruption is commonplace. Those organizations that are holding onto the past or buckling down to try and weather the storm are seeing their margins erode and their talent leave.

Those that are playing a bigger game, participating in and contributing to the change are seen as players and attracting top talent.  Jeff Bezos so aptly illustrated this last week. At the Consumer Report event on Wednesday he was asked when Amazon would release an iPad killer.  Here's an excerpt from his response:

Most business is not usually like a sporting event. It's very common to read blog or newspaper headlines, and the words "X Killer" is very, very common. I assume because it works--it must get more clicks. But in real life industries usually rise and fall together. When it comes to competing products, however, success isn't always so black and white. In a sporting event, there really is a winner and a loser. I think in business people use that metaphor--the sporting event metaphor is ingrained in us. Any kind of new product introduction, probably the company is not hoping to completely kill any other company. They're hoping they can be part of something big.

Many CEOs I know feel they are in a killer competition and work against the other organizations that share their space. What if, like Bezos, they could read the market as a larger force? And what if they could leverage their competitors to co-create the future?

Most of us may not feel we have the luxury of Amazon. But Bezos was thinking this way before he was successful, as was Steve Jobs. Perhaps it is their mindset that we should be giving more attention to, rather than their products and services.

I covered the event, Revolutionizing the World of Work, live - with articles posted on both Fast Co and Forbes' websites. Forbes registered well over 1,000 views of each post (1st post, and 2nd). There was also a live twitter feed at #revwork with insights from participants and our practice partners, Madelyn Blair, Rod Collins, Michelle James, Deb Mills-Scofield, and Peter Stevens.

More to come - if you would like to stay current with developments on Revolutionizing the World of Work, drop me a line.

In the meantime, are you helping build tomorrow?
What future is calling that requires your participation to emerge?

All past issues of Seth Kahan's Monday Morning Mojo are available on the web here.
All my white papers, essays and published articles are available on my Free Resources page.
The foreword, introduction, and first chapter of my Washington Post bestseller, Getting Change Right, How Leaders Transform Organizations from the Inside Out can be downloaded here.

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