Disruption Is An Opportunity for Multipliers

For the past 35 years of being a business coach, I’ve tested and proven the multiplier approach to organizational transformation with thousands of entrepreneurial firms in 60 different industries around the world. I’ve done small business coaching with firms of just two or three people right up to entrepreneur coaching with the leaders of multinational organizations employing several thousand. The Multiplier Mindset has worked wherever it was tried.

Jumping to new levels of productivity.

As soon as the entrepreneurial owners of a company set out on the path of increasing what they love doing on a daily basis, their example spreads quickly through their support team, and everyone jumps to a new level of productivity.

“Productivity” means two things: doing something valuable in less time, and doing it with less effort.

Increases in productivity have a multiplying effect on an organization’s performance and results. When anyone is encouraged to innovate and become more productive, they quickly develop a Multiplier Mindset toward everything they do. The improvements can be big or small, but they have a positive effect throughout the organization. Again, in my entrepreneur coaching, I stress that the people at the top must have this mindset in order for others to develop it.

Achieving bigger results in bureaucratic organizations.

Until recently, it’s been easier and quicker to introduce new strategies and methods at the entrepreneurial level rather than within much larger bureaucratic organizations. Entrepreneurs have greater control and power, and they lead more by personal example than is usually the case with bureaucratic executives and managers.

Yet nothing prevents bureaucratic leaders, such as corporate CEOs, from developing The Multiplier Mindset and using the greater scale of their organizations to achieve far bigger results in the world. The moment any leader becomes committed to greater personal innovation, productivity, and creativity, the message and the method quickly spread throughout the ranks.

Overcoming crises of failure.

During good economic times, it’s difficult to transform large organizations with The Multiplier Mindset because there’s far less incentive for the top executives and managers to do so. Success breeds complacency, which then hardens into a status quo mentality that resists attempts to change anything.

However, as science historian Thomas Kuhn observed, when the paradigm of the status quo no longer works, and the crises of failure increase, the changeover to new approaches can be quite rapid.

We are now experiencing organizational crises in large organizations, both private and public, around the world, which makes this the perfect time for the leaders of these organizations to try new approaches.

What is your organizational crisis?

What are some of the challenges you face and how are you dealing with them? Tell us in the comments and we may address the issues in a future article.