Change and Challenge 195Where does a business set its point of stability? With any
change it is just as important to know what to keep the same,
what core processes to organize around, as it is to know what
to change. Here a leader has the role of a steward. There are
four fundamental questions any company needs to answer:
- What is our purpose? What are we trying to accomplish?
- How do we stay competitive in the market?
- How do we deliver a high performance?
- How do we cope with change?
The answers to these questions are what a business has to
self-organize around. A business needs the stability that fixed
procedures bring, but enough room for creativity and inno-
vation to keep it alive and balanced. How much of each is
right?
Scylla and Charybdis
There are two great dangers for leaders while navigating the
dangerous waters of a rapidly changing market. On one
hand there stands the dead weight of too much procedure
and not enough flexibility. Such a business cannot respond
to outside changes quickly enough. This does not depend on
the size of the company (Microsoft, a huge company by any
standard, turned around its Internet policy inside six
months in 1996), but on how much the company is gov-
erned by fixed policy and procedures.
The second danger comes from the opposite direction –
too much innovation and change. Such a business is chaotic,
the employees are confused and disorientated. What they do
and how they do it changes too rapidly, as the business heads
for the equivalent of a nervous breakdown.
These two dangers are like monsters ready to swallow and
destroy an organization. In Greek mythology Scylla and
Charybdis were two sea monsters that lived on either side of
a narrow strait. A ship had to brave the dangerous passage,