That's Not How We Do It Here: A Story About How Organizations Rise and Fall - and Can Rise Again

But this scenario isn't quite as clear cut as it may seem. Having established structures, policies and practices isn't all bad. In fact, it's quite the opposite – they do serve a purpose, and a hugely important one at that. They're often crucial to an organization's success, even as the 21st century world changes at lightning speed.

So, there's a conundrum here. If traditional structures can lead companies to fail, how can they also be vital in an ever-changing business environment? How can rigid management concepts like efficiency, order, rules, reliability, and stability be compatible with transformation, speed and responsiveness? How can an organization thrive in its daily business while, at the same time, revamping itself into something new?

According to this book, the answer is to build a "best-of-both-worlds" dual operating system, which marries effective management with inspirational leadership.

"Management" and "leadership" are often confused. They're actually two very different beasts, and most organizations benefit from being effectively managed and energetically led. You can combine the mature hierarchies of established organizations, reliant on good management, with the agility and dynamism of entrepreneurial startups, driven by inspiring leaders. You can be reliable and efficient, at the same time as generating passion, flexibility and responsiveness.

The authors choose a "business fable" format to convey these strategic messages, and this may not appeal to everyone. It's simple, verging on simplistic, but this does make the book a quick read, with some easy-to-digest take-home messages.

So, who's this book for? Despite the accessible approach, it's mainly aimed at people at the top of the organizational tree, who have strategic responsibility. But these days, you pretty much have to be a hermit to be immune from complexity and change, so we could all learn something valuable from this book. Change can knock anyone, and this book shows that you can capitalize on it – indeed, that you might have to, in order to survive.

The lead author, John Kotter, is professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, and he's a prominent expert on leadership and change. He's also the founder of Kotter International, a consultancy that helps people to lead organizations and stay ahead of the game in this era of continual change.

Kotter is also an author, with no less than 12 bestsellers to his name. "That's Not How We Do It Here!" is his 19th book, and it picks up on his last one, "Accelerate." You'll find a podcast about that book, and an Expert Interview with Kotter, on the Mind Tools site.

The co-author, Holger Rathgeber, is a principal at Kotter International. He worked with Kotter on his previous business fable, "Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions."

So, keep listening to find out how to turn challenges into opportunities, why even successful organizations can struggle, and what the meerkats of the Kalahari can teach us about dealing with change.

"That's Not How We Do It Here!" kicks off with a brief introduction. Then we get straight into the fictional tale that takes up most of the book. Not everyone likes business fables – something the authors acknowledge. We were certainly skeptical but we found that, in this case, it's worth setting your reservations to one side and persevering.

Fables may not give you "concrete," up-front information, but they can stretch your mind in ways that conventional business books don't. They can engage you imaginatively, so you make connections between what you read and the real world. You find your own lessons in the story, and that makes them all the more powerful.

After this fable ends, there's a short chapter that will appeal to fans of more traditional business books. Here, the authors help us see how the fable applies to the world of work. They also provide a take-away tool to use after you've read the book.

So what's the story about? The first lines transport you to the "warm, dry stretch of land" in southern Africa known as the Kalahari, where we meet a clan of meerkats. Their story can be loosely split into three parts.

In the first, we learn about their colony. It's unusually large but it works, because it's well organized and managed. It's disciplined and structured. It has rules and procedures, plans and schedules. All the meerkats are expected to do as they're told and to follow the rules. And at the center of things is Nadia, the heroine of the fable.

Already, readers will see where the story is heading. Here is a colony that sounds a lot like a well-ordered, top-down organization, in which everyone has a place and there's a certain way of doing things.

For these meerkats, this works well and life is good, until things start to change rapidly for the worse. The rains fail, bringing drought and making food hard to find. Worse still, they find that they're suddenly coming under attack from hungry vultures.

At first, the clan keeps its cool. The meerkats are confident that their structures and rules will cope with the new dangers. They convene meetings, discuss plans, and review procedures. But their tried-and-tested rules and structures quickly begin to fail. The colony may be organized, but it's slow moving and bureaucratic, and it can't find effective ways to combat the new threats to its existence. Sometimes, the meerkats' rules and procedures even make things worse.

One ray of hope comes from Ayo, a guard meerkat, who discovers a new technique for protecting his clan. But his boss quashes his initiative, saying, "That's not how we do it here!" It becomes clear that the colony's own inflexibility is putting its very existence at risk. Ayo decides to leave, taking Nadia with him.

There are parallels here between the clan's dogged single-mindedness and real life. You only have to think of Blockbuster, the video rental chain that passed up the chance to buy Netflix, or the British high-street store Woolworths, which collapsed as shopping habits migrated online. These are examples of organizations that didn't adapt to change quickly enough, or grasp opportunities as they arose.

In the second part of the fable, we follow Ayo and Nadia as they join another meerkat clan, which couldn't be more different. It's younger, smaller and more like an energetic "startup" than an established "corporation." There's a leader, called Lena, whose vision of how the clan should operate defines it, but the colony exists as a team of equals. It's a flexible, agile collective with a strong and vibrant team spirit.

These meerkats face the same new dangers as Ayo and Nadia's old colony, but here they're encouraged to be proactive, to explore, to be creative. As more meerkats flood in from other failing clans, the colony copes, but problems begin to emerge when it surpasses the 50-member mark.

Despite Lena's efforts to lead, burrows deteriorate, enthusiasm for volunteering dips, and guard duties are performed erratically. The clan's problems worsen until a catastrophic disaster strikes and Nadia decides to leave. She realizes that leadership and vision may inspire innovation, but they aren't enough to prevent decline or avert disaster.

Nadia recalls her old clan's structure and discipline, and realizes that management is what her new clan needs. She sees how each clan has different strengths and weaknesses, and tries to figure out a way to merge the two systems.

Again, our meerkats are living out situations that we've seen happen for real. Organizations that start out small in size and "flat" in structure operate in dynamic and innovative ways, but their success often leads them to scale up. Soon, the lack of hierarchy and structure that helped these companies grow begins to cause problems.

In the last part of the fable, we watch as Nadia and Ayo return home, eager to pass on the lessons they learned about leadership to the Alphas and Betas who manage their old colony. They're met with resistance and skepticism, but the senior meerkats end up giving Nadia a chance to try out her ideas.

And here's the spoiler. Nadia and the clan manage to harness the benefits of management and leadership, while avoiding the downsides of both. They rebuild their clan to make it reliable and efficient again. But they make sure it can respond with agility and innovation when it runs into challenges. As time passes, the colony expands sustainably. Innovation now coexists with structure, and passion coexists with organization. The clan prospers.

In an online video that accompanies the book, Kotter tells us that the book's publishers are a shining example of what this type of organization looks like in real life. In the video he also explains why he and Rathgaber chose the fable format.

Toward the end of the book, we leave the Kalahari and move into more familiar business-book territory. This section runs to just 20 pages but, for anyone with more questions than answers after reading this far, these last few pages will be crucial in turning an entertaining read into a practical, take-away tool.

Here, the authors extract the two central themes from the fable and lay them bare. First, there's the idea that leadership and management aren't synonymous. Many people use the two words interchangeably, but the authors demonstrate how different they are in terms of actions, processes and behaviors.

We're reminded that leadership and management serve different functions and achieve different things, and, importantly, that they can happily coexist. For most organizations, it's crucial to embrace both.

Secondly, the authors provide a process for building best-of-both-worlds organizations, with structures that incorporate management and leadership approaches. The process starts with creating a sense of urgency around opportunities, and ends with embedding changes within your organization. The authors suggest that these steps could help you build an organization that is simultaneously well run and adaptive, and one where you'll be able to overcome anyone who says, "That's not how we do it here!"

If you're familiar with Kotter's work, you may already be up to speed with this "best-of-both-worlds" process but, if it's new to you, it could be enlightening. Like we do as individuals, companies get stuck in their ways and struggle to adjust as the world changes around them. If nothing else, Kotter's eight-step process shows that it's possible for companies to grow and adapt to new circumstances, without having to give up all that's familiar and effective. Where there's a determination to survive and a commitment to adapt, change doesn't have to be traumatic.

So what's our last word on this book? Well, if you like your business books to be "crunchy" or academic, this one may not appeal, with its fictional story of furry animals. But many people do appreciate the fable format, and if you've enjoyed similar books, such as Spencer Johnson's "Who Moved My Cheese?" or Patrick Lencioni's "The Ideal Team Player," then this book could work for you. As long as you take the fable for what it is, and you don't expect too much else, you can gain something valuable from it.

"That's Not How We Do It Here!" is definitely not a "how-to" book. It may inspire you, but it won't instruct you. If you want more information about the management-plus-leadership dual system, check out Kotter's previous book, "Accelerate," instead.

The greatest strength of "That's Not How We Do It Here!" is that it's thought-provoking. It stimulates questions about everything from adapting to change to team working across silos, from learning to lead to dealing with adversity. It encourages you to step back and think about the challenges and opportunities you face, how you might typically deal with them, and how you could improve.

So if you approach this book with the right mindset, it could be a powerful addition to your library.

"That's Not How We Do It Here!," by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber, is published by Portfolio, a Penguin Random House imprint.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.