Management Advice From Charles Darwin; Forbes, 6/25/09

Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky, Forbes; Management Advice From Charles Darwin:

"As leadership consultants, we work with many corporations. Every one of them is facing unanticipated and unprecedented turmoil right now. General Motors is not the only company with a tried and true operating model that's collapsing. General Electric is not the only company that has ended a proud streak of never having cut its dividend. "Business as usual" no longer exists.

Forbes published its first list of the 100 largest U.S. corporations in 1917. More than 60 of those 100 companies have ceased to exist. Only 20 are still in the top 100. Adaptation to changing times is very, very difficult, and it's harder than ever today.

What makes adaptation so hard, and what can you do about it? Ask Charles Darwin.

Darwin's On The Origin of Species was published 150 years ago, in 1859. Its insights about natural selection in plants and animals offer lessons that can provide guidance for coping with business challenges today. Darwin observed that species survived changing environments by making adaptations to their new realities. Each adaptation required experimentation (modified DNA sequences) to create new traits.

When an organization tries to adapt, it steps out of its familiar mode of existence that has worked so far, much as a plant or an animal species does by random mutation. The new mode may help or hinder an organization--or an organism's progeny. Not all adaptations work in the long run. Some survive and thrive; many fail, and many organizations and species die off.

Every adaptation involves giving something up, some part of the DNA that the species or the organization relied on in the past. You cannot make progress if you can't learn to sacrifice something in order to adapt to the unknown future.

What is called Adaptive Leadership was developed by members of the faculty at Harvard University and has been refined by more than 30 years of practical application at corporations all over the world. It draws on Darwin and the work of evolutionary biologists to understand how corporations can act to survive and thrive in rapidly changing environments and conditions of great uncertainty.

Here are three key lessons of Adaptive Leadership, drawn from the work of Darwin and applicable to every business today.

Find Small Variations that Create Advantage...

Create Micro-Adaptations...

Find Your Ecological Niche"

http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/25/darwin-natural-selection-leadership-managing-advice.html