The Responsibility Virus: Stop Taking Charge or Taking Orders and Start Making Critical Decisions Book

Your business faces a challenge. The usual management suspects lock themselves in a meeting room and frantically create a plan. The plan is, of course, secret. They try to do everything themselves. They fail. Meanwhile, everybody else sits around waiting to have the problem solved for them by the heroic managers. They don't get the full picture; they don't buy into the plans. Recognize these symptoms? It's the responsibility virus at work. What makes some people in organizations run from blame while others claim credit for everything? Why is it that so many important decisions get left to so few managers? Why do some people always take charge while others simply take orders? The Responsibility Virus is a cycle of failure driven by people who take too much or too little responsibility for results. Here's how to cure you and your company of the fear of failure. From one of our most original business thinkers comes a diagnosis of the fear of failure that traps all who work in organizations - from the board room to the mail room . Complete with tried and tested tools to help everyone make better choices and decisions, The Responsibility Virus will help you to share the burden of leadership and spread responsibility. World-class consultant and business school dean Roger Martin leaps outside the box of contemporary management thinking to offer a provocative diagnosis of the problem that infects all too many organizations: the Responsibility Virus. Drawing upon his years of experience advising companies on strategy, planning and action, Martin shows how most poor decision-making begins at the level of individual behaviour. Because most of us will do anything to win, maintain control, and avoid embarrassment, we constantly adapt our behaviour to those around us. Trapped in this dynamic, we vacillate between taking charge and backing off, causing those around us to vacillate too. Over-responsible leaders need under-responsible followers. And under-responsible followers need over-responsible leaders. Each provides the energy the other needs to sustain their part of the Virus. The critical reality is that every one of us, in each specific situation, holds the power to stop the Virus in our own hands. All we have to do is refuse the opportunity presented to act over-responsibly or under-responsibly. With lively case studies based on real experience, Martin lays out the tools that all of us can put into practice as we contemplate business choices and decisions. His sophisticated and impassioned belief in the power of one will be required reading for any of us who think about how we function in organizations, from the boardroom to the mail room. In this book you will find tactics and personal strategies to overcome fear of failure and get everybody willing and able to take decisions for themselves.Read More