Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor at Harvard Business School, believes the world demands a new kind of business leader. She says so-called “advanced leaders” work inside and outside their companies to tackle big issues such as climate change, public health, and social inequality. She gives real-life examples and explains how business leaders can harness their experience, networks, innovative approaches, and the power of their organizations to solve challenging problems. Kanter is the author of the book Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Small Innovation at a Time.
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ALISON BEARD: Welcome to HBR On Leadership, case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. I’m HBR executive editor Alison Beard.
We’re grappling with a host of big and complex global problems. Climate change, political division, social inequality.
Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter believes that business leaders should step-up and help tackle these issues using their skills, networks, and organizational power to pursue better solutions. In this 2020 IdeaCast episode, Kanter speaks with host Curt Nickisch about how “advanced leaders” can make progress on specific challenges.
Here’s Curt.
CURT NICKISCH: I was just reviewing the intro to the book where your first two words are irritation and impatience. And you call your book “a manual for moving leadership to a whole new level,” which is simple, but also audacious maybe. Why does there need to be a call to action like this?
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER: We have such big problems in the world. Some things are clearly getting better, but they’re getting better unevenly and these problems are effecting the ability to do business. Forget about whether business has anything to do with the problems to begin with. And these are issues that come inside companies and they become things that everybody has to deal with.
And of course climate change, anybody who lives on or near a coast has to deal with that and that risk is a big risk for businesses. So, these are big problems. And when I said irritation, I was irritated at the passivity. That is, people like to talk about the problems, they don’t necessarily want to get up and do something about it. And I’m impatient for action and solutions. Because in all the decades we’ve been talking about some of these things – and by the way, I did find that a famous change guru, 50 years ago, an impossible time to even think about, 50 years ago was listing the same problems – partisan divides, political conflicts, the environment. So, with those problems around for such a long time, it’s time to do something about them.
CURT NICKISCH: What you’re hearing now is this chorus for businesses to take action, for CEO’s to be activists. But I kind of get from the title of your book, Think Outside the Building, that you think it takes more than within what we’ve been hearing lately.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER: Well, I think CEO’s certainly can take action. I think middle managers can take action. Professionals can take action. But when you take action you have to think beyond the silos and divides and walls. Because you cannot take action all by yourself.
For a big problem, even the biggest company in the world can’t do it by themselves. So, IBM wants to take on the problems of primary and secondary education and they do it globally. They’re a global company. They have various innovations that they deploy in just about every geography of the world. But they don’t do it by themselves. They have to do it partnership with the public officials, the governments. They do it in partnership with other companies that they need to join them.
So, this art of building coalitions outside the things you directly control are the art of solving problems in general. That’s what innovation has always been about. When I started out my career and I was just looking at smaller innovations, modest innovations, now we need big innovations. Industries are being disrupted. They have to be transformed.
And so, when one thinks about these bigger change problems, you’re always thinking beyond the boundaries. That’s what I mean about outside the building. It’s not literally whether it’s outside the walls of your company, although it might be. I think going out for a little fresh air from time to time and traveling and seeing new things becomes very important. But it’s outside the boundaries of convention, the walls that restrict us from change because they’re the walls in our minds. They’re the walls that make us say, nothing could ever be different.
CURT NICKISCH: Do you think it’s the job of business and business leaders to do this now?
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER: I do think that business leaders have a special responsibility because they’re under attack, because credibility and legitimacy are waning. I mean it used to be that people were extremely proud to work for certain companies. And when that starts declining, some people don’t want to go home and tell their neighbors what they do.
So to win back trust, business has a big role. But so do elected officials. I talk about a mayor, I talk about many lawyers. Lawyers feel that acutely because many people went into law in the first place because they cared about justice and then they started to work for a corporate law firm and that isn’t what they were doing. They were helping those businesses with their securities lawsuits, or their mergers and acquisitions.
CURT NICKISCH: Or, scientists nowadays who find the academic career pretty tough and they end up working for companies that are building algorithms or systems, right.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER: The other reason I think business, besides the fact that people like scientists are employed by them, is that business has an awful lot of power and I first became interested in business and in improving the quality of management and creating more leaders because of that power, that institutional power.
People do listen to business executives and I think everybody listening to this podcast who works in a company should think about the automatic resources available to them that aren’t necessarily available out in the community, and how they can take advantage of those resources to tackle a problem like climate change, do an educational campaign, mount a little effort to create an innovative product that helps people with say, keeping the lights off a little bit longer.
I mean there are so many things that for which business can be a solution. And so even if a manager, an early career person isn’t necessarily the CEO, but can start attending meetings, rallying the community, you can begin to have a voice and make a difference.
CURT NICKISCH: So, just to put a point on this, at a time when people feel like they’re helpless and they can’t change these big things that are happening in the world, if you work at a company, you have a piece of that power.
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER: I don’t think we’re helpless. I think it’s easy to feel helpless. And when you feel helpless, you feel a little depressed, you don’t do anything. You say the problems are so big, that’s a typical sign of a losing streak. That’s what happens when companies start declining. Everyone says oh, it’s somebody else’s responsibility. We need a turnaround, but there’s nothing I can do about it because it’s inevitable. We’re losing customers. And that’s depressing. And so, when you’re depressed you lose energy and then nothing happens. It’s a vicious cycle. But if you find even one action and get started, you just have to get moving. Just try it. If it doesn’t work, fix it. Try something else. And that is an enormous source of energy.
CURT NICKISCH: To use that action analogy and of course combine it with the image of thinking outside the building, why is taking a small step outside the building important? What what does that set in motion?
ROSABETH MOSS KANTER: Oh, if you step outside, I mean first of all you see the world differently. There are many executives and managers who are insulated. They live in little bubbles. I went to Brazil once and I never saw the street because I was picked up at the airport in a helicopter, helicopter to the top of a corporate headquarters, went down in an elevator, but I thought if you’re insulated from the streets, if you’re not out with the people you often don’t see possibilities.
And in that same bank in Sao Paulo by the way, there was a leader that I talk about in Think Outside the Building who pointed out to the bank, the bank was about to take a stance on climate change, on the environment. They were going to be known as a green bank. And this leader pointed out to them that’s all very good in theory, but right next door was an alley that was full of drug dealers and trash, and maybe they could start by cleaning up the alley, doing something about the alley next door. And they did. And that alley is now filled with artwork and people and street vendors. It’s a very pleasant place to go and it’s a transformation. And the people that worked on that transformation felt so empowered and so positive, they began to feel that they co