Читать книгу Accountable Leaders - Vince Molinaro - Страница 23

On March 31, 2014, I was meeting a colleague for lunch at a popular restaurant in Toronto. As we sat down at our table, I looked out through the restaurant windows. “Look at what’s happening up there!” I said to my colleague. I immediately pulled out my smartphone and took a photo.

Have you ever seen something happen and known right away, in your gut, that you were witnessing something significant?

In the distance, about six stories up in an adjacent building, I could see a couple of workers taking down a company’s outdoor sign. The sign consisted of five giant white letters, S – E – A – R – S, atop Sears Canada’s flagship store in one of the country’s largest and busiest shopping centers.

Throughout our lunch, I found myself glancing out the window to track the progress of the two workers as they painstakingly pried loose each letter. As the letters came off, I could see the imprint of the company’s name that remained on the brown building’s façade due to decades and decades of sun exposure. These phantom letters were a sad reminder of a once-great company, one of the most enduring retail brands that the world has ever known.

What I witnessed that afternoon was more than just a sign coming down. To me, it signaled the massive unraveling taking hold in the retail industry. That’s why that moment felt so important to me. That moment also underscored the kinds of challenges that leaders face today. Fast-forward to January of 2018. All the Sears stores in Canada would close. Sixteen thousand employees would lose their jobs. Their pensions would be at risk. By the end of 2018, the company in the United States would face a similar fate, only to be saved at the eleventh hour.

In many ways, the story of Sears is not unique. In the world of business, there has always been an understanding that the companies and leaders who can’t adapt, can’t spot opportunities, or can’t change quickly enough, end up paying a severe price. The graveyard of once-great companies is full of examples of organizations that have not been able to sustain their relevance and are now long extinct. In the end, they were unable to see the need to adapt in a changing environment. Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen shared a terrific insight at a recent conference when he said, “The new game begins even before you can tell anything is wrong in the old one.”¹ This is a brilliant idea that to me captures a fundamental challenge leaders must be mindful of when leading. All leaders must be accountable for leading their organizations through change, and this is what we’ll explore in the rest of this chapter. To get us started, we’ll examine the story of Sears in more detail to show what can happen when leaders fail to see the new game emerging.