metaphors of transformation
by vinay kamat
Objects have a strange way of telling stories. They can be metaphors for actions and objectives; they can even be reflections of real issues. Film director Ang Lee is said to have come up with a box of metaphors to create a film. During the making of Hulk, he gave his animators four objects to deliver what he wanted. The four keys to the animation puzzle: driftwood, sand, wet rock, and rake. Together, they represented a persona called Hulk: strong, sentimental, adaptive, bottled up, wounded, uncared, a split personality. Lee was on the dot with the odd items he had collated to help create a complex personality. His symbols helped bring the comic superhero alive: a human being caught between frailty and superpower.
What if CEOs asked their COOs, or strategists, to create an organisation they really desired? And what would be the ideal objects they would give these designers? At a meeting, four friends—all aspiring to be Ang Lees—came up with ideas to create blockbuster organizations. Separately, the ideas are at odds with one another. Together, they represent a new way of scripting success.
First friend: “ICE should be one of the objects. Ice explains the difference between curiosity and detachment. Ice is a metaphor for innovation. You can’t afford to be clinical and detached in the workplace; you must get curioser and curioser. Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes the joy the villagers of Macondo experience when a gypsy introduces them to ice, in his book One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Ice was the spirit of discovery and imagination in the colonial village. It made Macondo so very different.”
Second friend: “There’s nothing better than DUSTER. Always start with a clean slate. If you want to change something, first rub your organisation clean. You can’t change what exists. Here’s what Tom Peters has to say on learning: ‘Organisational learning is one of the hottest management topics of the 1990s (some say even beyond). But I say forgetting is far more important. Cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson said it best: You can’t leave without an eraser. Gentlemen and women…are you erasers ready? They better be.’”
Third friend: “Personally, I prefer MUD. It is nothing but waste. If you think mud, you think ahead. It’s an individual initiative: Keep your desk clean, keep your shop-floor clean. Contract the obsessive compulsive disorder of cleanliness if you want to change your organisation. Inventory management doesn’t start in warehouses; it starts and ends in your inbox. Have you finished all your tasks today? Is your personal inventory piling? Get the mud off your conscience, gentlemen.”
Fourth friend: “Since I am not into metaphors, I’ll suggest a simple, easily attainable, object. It’s called Execution, and it’s written by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. I quote a small passage from the book: “Much has been written about Jack Welch’s style of management—especially his toughness and bluntness, which some people call ruthlessness. We would argue that the core of his management legacy is that he forced realism into all of GE’s management processes, making it a model of an execution culture.”
Whichever way you look at them, ice, duster, mud, and execution are essential to the process of differentiation. After all, three metaphors and a meta tool are all it takes to create an Ang Lee in the organization, whose lean, simple, ideation can create a grand metaphor for execution. It can hulk up the company you work for.
Objects have a strange way of telling stories. They can be metaphors for actions and objectives; they can even be reflections of real issues. Film director Ang Lee is said to have come up with a box of metaphors to create a film. During the making of Hulk, he gave his animators four objects to deliver what he wanted. The four keys to the animation puzzle: driftwood, sand, wet rock, and rake. Together, they represented a persona called Hulk: strong, sentimental, adaptive, bottled up, wounded, uncared, a split personality. Lee was on the dot with the odd items he had collated to help create a complex personality. His symbols helped bring the comic superhero alive: a human being caught between frailty and superpower.
What if CEOs asked their COOs, or strategists, to create an organisation they really desired? And what would be the ideal objects they would give these designers? At a meeting, four friends—all aspiring to be Ang Lees—came up with ideas to create blockbuster organizations. Separately, the ideas are at odds with one another. Together, they represent a new way of scripting success.
First friend: “ICE should be one of the objects. Ice explains the difference between curiosity and detachment. Ice is a metaphor for innovation. You can’t afford to be clinical and detached in the workplace; you must get curioser and curioser. Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes the joy the villagers of Macondo experience when a gypsy introduces them to ice, in his book One Hundred Years Of Solitude. Ice was the spirit of discovery and imagination in the colonial village. It made Macondo so very different.”
Second friend: “There’s nothing better than DUSTER. Always start with a clean slate. If you want to change something, first rub your organisation clean. You can’t change what exists. Here’s what Tom Peters has to say on learning: ‘Organisational learning is one of the hottest management topics of the 1990s (some say even beyond). But I say forgetting is far more important. Cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson said it best: You can’t leave without an eraser. Gentlemen and women…are you erasers ready? They better be.’”
Third friend: “Personally, I prefer MUD. It is nothing but waste. If you think mud, you think ahead. It’s an individual initiative: Keep your desk clean, keep your shop-floor clean. Contract the obsessive compulsive disorder of cleanliness if you want to change your organisation. Inventory management doesn’t start in warehouses; it starts and ends in your inbox. Have you finished all your tasks today? Is your personal inventory piling? Get the mud off your conscience, gentlemen.”
Fourth friend: “Since I am not into metaphors, I’ll suggest a simple, easily attainable, object. It’s called Execution, and it’s written by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. I quote a small passage from the book: “Much has been written about Jack Welch’s style of management—especially his toughness and bluntness, which some people call ruthlessness. We would argue that the core of his management legacy is that he forced realism into all of GE’s management processes, making it a model of an execution culture.”
Whichever way you look at them, ice, duster, mud, and execution are essential to the process of differentiation. After all, three metaphors and a meta tool are all it takes to create an Ang Lee in the organization, whose lean, simple, ideation can create a grand metaphor for execution. It can hulk up the company you work for.
posted by vinay kamat at 5:37 AM
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