I came across Adizes’s work some 10 years ago. The concepts he promoted made sense and I started reading his work extensively. After buying 8 videos from the Adizes Institute and working through these over time, I got to understand his views.
In 1999 he published “Managing Corporate Lifecycles” that provides great insights into how organizations evolve over time. He has the ability to articulate clearly some complex change phenomena making him quite unique. You can also do a self test on his website to determine where you fit on his model; Understanding the Corporate Lifecycle: Get an Instant Online Lifecycle Analysis.
Today we have a need to rethink business and not apply the dogma of the day, but find new methods and approaches, and question the basics of how leaders take their businesses forward. There is a new world emerging and those that believe in a static set of concepts will follow the academic rhetoric of the past. This creates the situation trap that most managers find themselves in. I’ve been questioning the basics of much of where modern strategy and innovation is developed from; and the picture is still pretty bleak. It took major global catastrophes, climate change and a few crisis’s to get people to sit up and question their ways.
… that’s why I like this entry from Adizes…
This is from his latest posting:
[snip]
Waiting for a plane in Kiev, Ukraine, I picked up the Harvard Business Review from January 2009. Although I do not typically read this magazine, because it is so alien to my way of thinking, I did so because I was bored.
As I should have predicted, I became quite intellectually disturbed reading some passages and wondering, am I on the wrong track or is “the establishment,” as represented by Harvard, on an old, outdated track?
For example, page 21 on what it means to be a leader: “Leaders on the front line must anticipate merely what comes after current projects wrap up. People at the next level of leadership should be looking several years into the future. And those at the C suite must focus on a horizon some ten years distant.”
Well, being proactive requires anticipating the future, granted. Predicting the future is a necessary variable, but not sufficient in itself to make one a successful leader. The variables have to also be sufficient to produce the desired results, in this case to lead the company to success.
[snip]
Have a look at his web site at www.adizes.com.