A critique of Accelerate (XLR8) by John Kotter

So you can either work staff really hard to get a project out and then accept an unproductive time to follow, or you can accept a more average effort over a longer period.

Personally the hardest mix is 9-5 of regular work and then having to come up with inspirational ideas and solutions. This keeps me up all night and burns me out.

This 150% nonsense sounds like trying screw an extra bit of work out of your staff in terms of innovation, without giving them the space to think.

Good blog OP

Most organisations above Dunbar's number have some level of unacknowledged problems in the "formal" system. It ends up not being as productive as the formal figures would indicate. So people use the informal system to back-fill their quotas. This means the informal system isn't available to increase visible-to-management production, because it's already being used to make up for the deficiencies of the formal system.

It sounds like XLR8 isn't wrong in that identifies the two main activities of a growing business: 1) Making their bread-and-butter work as efficient as possible and 2) Innovating to multiply opportunities and inefficiencies. In short, a company needs to streamline and explore. But, advocating that the networking and exploration required for #2 is an offline, voluntary activity is foolish, dangerous even.

I've worked in a variety of organizations of different sizes, in different industries and different states of startup or maturity and found one consistent pattern for failing organizations: They start to routinely tell people to "stay in their lane" at work and respond to new ideas with "Sounds great! As soon as these low value, high effort activities are done you can work on those high value, low effort ideas in your spare time." That's the beginning of brain death for a company. The body soon follows.

Instead, strong companies with strong leadership know that it isn't their employees responsibility to be more efficient and productive at low-value, high-effort activities. It is the leadership's responsibility to root out and eliminate those activities either by automating, out-sourcing or de-prioritizing them. The right way to streamline a business is to listen to employees and relentlessly cut, kill, and destroy routine or low-value work.

As you do that, you free up and empower employees and the organization to leverage high-value work in front of them and explore and pursue high-value opportunities on the horizon. In a healthy, growing organization those are everyday (during the day) activities not after-hours, side-projects that force employees to sneak time from work or steal time from their families.

I work in a Further Education college in the UK (like a community college in US). We are seeing a lot of people paying full cost for evening/weekend courses on dress making, hairdressing/barbering, welding, decorating &c. Might try a questionnaire to see where the students are coming from in new year. Hypothesis: a lot of badge folk.

Well it's also the behavior of revolutionary heroes in a dystopian novel who inevitably get either betrayed, corrupted, or killed. So there is also that.

I should have known better. As soon as I read your advertisement I felt like I had been had, like this was all an elaborate rouse to sell hr management services.

Bummer