Business literature is often populated with the ignominy of failure.  The stories are many; the demise of Kodak and Blockbuster, the blinkered chipmakers at Intel who failed to adapt to mobile, the destructive avarice of greedy bankers and the misguided bets that come back to haunt charismatic CEOs doubling-down on strategies that have no counter to disruption.

The alternative to these tales is often the heroic visionary, who builds a trillion-dollar enterprise from his garage, through sheer determination, much genius and a desire to make a dent in the universe.  Three hefty tomes have recently been published about Amazon, and now its founder Jeff Bezos, is reportedly freeing up his schedule to pen his own memoir. These deep dives into an extraordinary enterprise can be illuminating but, by definition, their perspective is narrow.

In his new book, Organising for the New Normal, Markides takes a different path, reassuringly and densely populated with a myriad of well-told stories of different leaders and many varied organisations.  He includes some well-known names, but also some unsung change-makers, who somehow managed to make organisational change happen, pivot to new markets and survive the seismic shocks of disruptive innovation and increasingly fickle consumers. 

At the heart of Markides’ new book is a positive thesis; that disrupted organisations can change and thrive again and that there are definitive, actionable strategies that leaders can adopt that will enable and accelerate that response. The trick is not knowing the things that need to be done, but actually doing them and, crucially, doing them well. For example, leaders may know that they need to instil an urgency for change, or create the right environment for innovation, but there is a clever way to do it and a stupid way; and unfortunately, most organisations, when faced with disruption, respond in the wrong way. Markides’ new book guides us through this minefield, to find the right way.

He starts with a familiar story of doing it right, with Satya Nadella’s transformation of Microsoft since 2014.  But the problem for Microsoft (and for all enterprises) he argues, is that the nature of accelerated disruption means “it barely has time to take a breath” before the next wave of “even more radical disruption” hits and the future becomes unpredictable again.  So how do mature organisations get ready to adapt and respond to these continuous waves of radical change?

At first sight, many of the approaches Markides advocates do not seem particularly radical or extraordinary (clarity of vision, experimentation, a sense of urgency, the right mindset, etc), but what he shines new and compelling light on is the importance of making these things so much more visible, tangible and emotionally engaging to the wider organisation.  He tells a neat story about the CEO of the Belgian bank KBC, Johan Tjhss, who does not just talk about his “digital strategy” as some far-off horizon event but, in response to the threat of Google and Amazon entering local banking, launches a digital Personal Assistant app, so his employees and customers could instantly sense, touch and see where KBC’s strategy was heading.

Markides tells us what we surely already know; that organisational change is enormously hard to initiate and almost impossible to sustain.  But rather than leave us there to flounder, he argues that understanding immutable behaviours is key to forming strategies and approaches that take people with you.  For example, leaders should learn from the best deployments of deep emotional engagement (as used in the best consumer advertising) for their internal change communications, not just rely on rational data presentations, or corporate speak.  It is this fusion of behavioural cues and strategic thinking that makes the book a rich resource.  But Markides is also brutally honest about the difficulty leaders face in trying to change “behaviours”. To illustrate, he starts one section not with a business anecdote, but with two real-life stories that show the appalling human response to a deadly hit and run and a young woman’s murder. 

An early segment deals with external disruption and why this should be treated as both an opportunity and a threat.  The subtle magic here of the “and” is easily missed, but for Markides it’s a crucial attitudinal issue, which if grasped, is fundamental to how organisations should respond. The organisations that succeed in their response to disruption should adopt a dual strategy of defence and attack.  He cites the pivot of Auto Trader in the UK (originally a print publication that has become a digital platform worth over £4billion), Walmart’s move to leverage its extensive location infrastructure (rather than close stores) to provide a fast, localised distribution network to compete with Amazon, and TAG Heuer’s innovation of sophisticated “modular” elements to compete with the Apple Watch. 

One of the joys of this book is the sheer breadth and depth of ideas covered, while told with such brevity and clarity. Each chapter is framed around a particular question; for example, “How do you know your strategy is a good one?”, so it suits dipping into, depending on which dilemma is front of mind.  No chapter though out-stays its welcome and true to one of the change maxims that Markides advocates, he uses ‘variety’ as a tool, making the journey more interesting as the book unfolds.  As such, he saves the best to last with an elegant and simple illustration of what he calls the Why, What and How (in that order) of Strategic Transformation, which someone should make into a desk-tidy, or fridge-magnet for every CEO.  

In a world where we can easily see the gloom of many corporate failures, Markides is candid and realistic about the challenge of continual radical disruption. But by illuminating his argument with an array of memorable stories, as well as numerous tools and proven approaches that work, he provides a hopeful prognosis for tackling the challenges of the new normal. 

John Dore