How to run a company with almost no rules

If you’ve ever tried pushing big change through a hire and fire culture you’ll know that it can be a brutal process and not for the faint hearted. This article explores change resistance and where it comes from.

A powerful talk that shows how easily we are tricked into beliefs and perspectives that turn out to be different to what we initially thought.

Apparently 85% of what we do is driven by habit. Think about driving a car or doing mundane chores at home, often we’re lost in thought and only barely conscious of what we’re doing. Habits can work for us or against us. In this excellent book and TED talk Charles Duhigg shows us how we can hack our less useful habits to create new, better ones. And the real eye opener for me was the realisation that an organisation can have group habits too and they can equally be productive or destructive.

Why do we fear change so much? Why do we routinely put up barriers to progression, and instead decide to settle for less? What is it that is getting in the way?

Whether it’s a large Lean transformation initiative or a rapid improvement event, it’s very easy to focus on getting to the end state solution design and, in doing so, to miss the point completely.

Covid-19 has taken our attention for the past 18 months, rightly so, and now we need to turn our attention back to our next existential challenge, our climate and reducing emissions. This excellent book gives us cause for optimism that many of the solutions we need are within our reach.