A demand for transparency, globalization, and instant communication have impacted the way business is done nowadays. As well as for information consumption habits, the speed for business evolution has increased. Consequently companies need new structures for new paradigms. At startups and small companies, change is an easy task. But at large companies,  how do you effectively achieve fast adaptability and change? Who should decide the different strategies, and how these should be implemented?

At this point, professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a figure we must refer to. This expert in sociology and innovation, teaching Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, has analysed and advised many companies, and written many books.

According to Kanter, “successful companies develop a culture that just keeps moving all the time.” But the challenge is to organize this constant moving. Here you have some tips that might be useful!

• Company’s culture: “company’s culture becomes very important, as does its ability to communicate, for its people to communicate with a common vocabulary.” And communication is a vital skill for explaining the need of change and movement.
• Social responsibility: “show that you’re also responsive to the places where your employees live and work.” according to the expert, this interaction with the environment leads to an interesting exchange.
• Transparency: More information disclosed about more things in more places.
• Networking: More alliances and partnerships and external collaboration in the future.
• Imagination: Creativity and imagination will help you to discover possibilities.
• Diversity: “You need people who are more cosmopolitan, who don’t speak simply from within a single world view but can understand and create bridges of thought.” This is crucial to develop new ideas, enrich old ones, or as Kanter says, create original connections.
• Individuality: understood as the your own voice value. “Your voice is as good as anyone’s, and you don’t have to wait until the person in power tells you what the right answer is.”
• Experiment and the will to always do better: this attitude rests in the core of change.
• Encourage ideas as a manager: reward the number of new ideas that people develop,” if their managers don’t encourage them to develop new ideas and applaud them when they do…” This encouragement, according to the expert, must be done within a formal program like “Idea of the month”. Consequently, “this behavior is embedded in the culture. Companies need a formal program to kick it off”, explained Kanter. And, most of all, because “there’s nothing more demoralizing than having nobody notice good performance.”

“Successful companies develop a culture that just keeps moving all the time.”

– Rosabeth Moss Kanter 

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