Hone

Chapter 14Reflections on a Trilogy

 

We had simple goals when we started this trilogy eight years ago. The primary one was to capture our experiences and observations working with some of the world's largest companies. We wanted to explain the behaviors that made them simultaneously among the most successful businesses in history, and those most threatened by disruption. We sought to enable leaders to move faster and be less encumbered by past decisions without destroying the business in the process. What we hoped to do was show that one could move fast without breaking the wrong things. We had no clue whether the ideas would resonate – or even whether we'd like each other after spending so much time arguing. We think we do, but we still argue. And we certainly didn't set off to write something that could be viewed in the rearview mirror as a coherent trilogy about more effective leadership in a world where previous practices aren't always a useful prologue.

The germ of this set of work can be traced back to a workshop we co‐facilitated in Chicago in 2016, where we started discussing the possibility of writing something together. Steve said he had an article in mind – maybe for HBR, something like that. Geoff offered a guest slot on a blog he was writing at the time; Steve politely declined and said he had something a bit more ambitious in mind. When Wiley started calling Geoff looking for ideas for books based on insights from the practice he was running at the time, we decided ...