FOR DECADES, leaders have relied on solutions propagated by the business mainstream. Want to improve profitability? Outsource everything that isn’t part of your core business. Want to build an efficient organization? Create the right organizational structure. Want to become a great leader? Involve yourself in all key decisions. The list goes on and on.
In the past, these mainstream strategies often worked well. The received wisdom was based on observations of what worked in practice and sometimes drew on years of experience. In other cases, they were just a passing trend or a reflection of some business thinker’s personal biases. In the worst cases, apparently contradictory strategies coexisted.
But time marches on. As we all know by now, yesterday’s solutions no longer work in today’s complex world. Something unexpected happens — a global pandemic, say, or a war — and tried-and-tested mainstream approaches stop delivering.
For many of us, doing business today feels like being on a different planet. Our past observations and insights into how to act no longer produce the expected results. I like to draw a parallel with science: Isaac Newton observed that an apple falls from a tree to the ground at a certain speed, depending on its mass. But if we put Newton’s apple tree on the Moon, the apple will fall at a different speed. So, were his previous observations wrong?
The answer, of course, is No. But in today’s challenging environment we need to look beyond our past observations and experiences and find out what lies beneath them. We need to search for ‘first principles’ — the basis from which all things are known, to paraphrase Aristotle.
In Newton’s case, his observations what made the apple fall to the ground at a certain speed. And that universal law applies whether we’re on Earth or the Moon. This is an example of a first principle. It holds true however much the context changes, wherever we are in the universe.