Jon Katzenbach passed away recently. Many will know Katzenbach as the author of The Wisdom of Teams and several other books. Katzenbach had a unique ability that some might call “beginner mind.” He could approach a subject fresh, unburdening his mind from previous research and scholarship, and just observe and think. He once told me how he got the idea for his most famous book, The Wisdom of Teams.”

“I was on an airplane. ‘Teams,’ I thought. ‘Everybody’s talking about teams. But what is a team? I think I’ll go look at some.’”

What emerged was a unique point of view of a team as different from a single leader group. He saw a “real team” as a performance unit, consisting of a small number of members, with a shared goal, and collective work product, where leadership rotated to the leader with the most appropriate skill.

“Katz,” as he preferred to be called, was a former McKinsey senior director, who had passed the mandatory retirement age of the firm, when he and two partners, Marc Feigen and Niko Canner, formed Katzenbach Partners. I joined Katzenbach as employee number seven and consultant number six, after being the head of the Leadership, Mobilization, and Renewal Discipline at Gemini** Consulting, predecessor to Cap Gemini.

In the four years I worked at Katzenbach the firm grew to around fifty people. That time was all startup exhilaration and the fervent belief that we were doing something unique, combining strategic and organizational consulting, melding analytic content with implementation process excellence.

In my view, the firm never really fulfilled that promise. It is an alluring concept that sucked me in four times over my career. The truth is content consultants conduct analysis to give “the answer,” and process consultants ask questions, so that the client arrives at what must be done, and then help do it. The only thing these two kinds of consultants have in common is that they each have little use for the other.

I never really fit in at Katzenbach Partners. The three founding partners were all ex-McKinsey. We thought differently, and perhaps I was as highly invested in my own point of view as they were with theirs. I spent too much time not-so-secretly believing they were wrong.

Still, I really liked the people. They were incredibly bright and fun and I am still friends with some of them. The firm grew to more than 200 people until they were battered by the 2007 Financial Crisis and acquired by Booz& Company, which soon became part of PwC, where Katz started the Katzenbach Center, which survives him.

In the summer of 2002, we were preparing for the Katzenbach summer offsite, and Marc Feigen, asked, “Alan, would you do some research and present a point of view on the design of a High Performance Organization.”

I suppose I was flattered. I was seventeen years older than Marc, but the power differential between us was palpable.  I internalized our conflicting viewpoints as disdain for my capability. I came from Gemini where I was “the strategic guy” in the organizational discipline to Katzenbach where Marc once described me as “the best facilitator I’ve ever seen, but the guy hasn’t got an analytical bone in his body.” Relative perspective is everything.

So I dug in. I reread organization design books by David Nadler, Michael Tushman, and Jay Galbraith. I reread Katz’s book Peak Performance, along with Jim Collins’ Built to Last, and Tom Peters and Bob Waterman’s In Search of Excellence. I dove into the McKinsey 7-S model, their High Performing Organization framework, the Burke-Litwin Model of Organizational Dynamics, the Galbraith Star, and Nadler and Tushman’s Organizational Architecture.

I concluded that all these design frameworks were similar. They were all:

• Strategy or goal driven,
• Composed of not just structure, but many elements:
  • The formal and planned – structure, systems/processes, management, leadership,
  • The informal and serendipitous – networks, flexible units, culture,
• Where alignment and integration are critical success factors.

Each of these frameworks is a study in alignment, built for doing one thing well, one type of goal and strategy with every aspect of the organization lined up in support. These organization frameworks are NOT built for change.

 I found this presentation on my hard drive, and was amused at the graphics I used to make this point:

Responding to changes in the environment required different thinking, and a different organization, one with built in innovation capability.

I posited a balanced set of metrics:

• Customer Metrics – g., revenue growth, re-buy, or referral rate, market share, new products
• People Metrics – g., # applications/job, productivity/person, internal promotions vs. outside hires, new skill development/tenure in job
• Shareholder Metrics – g., ROI, share price growth, existing business productivity improvement and new business development process

And I urged a “best in the world” comparison beginning with leadership.

Finally, I preached balance.

Balance between strategic clarity and adaptability. The improvement and innovation world now calls this Agility.

Balance between CEO leadership and distributed leadership. The coffee cup slogan is now “Leaders don’t create followers; they create other leaders.”

Balance between enterprise performance and worker fulfillment. ‘Benefit’  or ‘B’ corporations now expand this to community service.

Most importantly I urged balance between alignment discipline, required to have the organization move as one, and what I called then innovation capability, required when a change in direction was required.

Starting in the Dot-com  boom of the late 1990s, entrepreneurs extolled the virtue of the “pivot,” a change in direction when the first wasn’t working.  YouTube was originally started as a video-dating app, but pivoted to publish user video content supported by advertising. Amazon, on the other hand, doubled down on disciplined alignment and built a near-trillion dollar empire.

Marc asked for this research to build a new service offering. I structured a forty minute presentation, small group discussion, and large group consensus building on further action, a slot totaling two hours. I think most organizations aren’t very good at planning internal conferences. Consultants are the worst. Consultant conferences are what the US Army used to call a “blivet,” ten-pounds-of-shit-in-a-five-pound-bag.”

I was scheduled for 2:00 pm on Day Two of a two-and-a half-day conference. You guessed it. Everything ran over. “Can you present it in thirty minutes?” I could, and I did, but of course without much audience engagement. There were no action items to include in the next morning’s planning.

Katz was fifteen years older than me and he and I were never close. I witnessed the general positive regard everyone in the firm had for him. I heard from friends about spirited intellectual conversations with him and how he promoted their ideas and supported their careers. Katz and I were, at best, cordial. After my fast-talk presentation, while everyone else ran for the bar, he sought me out.

“You might have something worthy of publication there.”

That  felt good at the time. I never followed up with him about it, nor he with me, but it felt good nonetheless.

I went looking for those slides because a LinkedIn connection, Dr. Eric Zabiegalski, wrote a book called Unthink wherein he proposes two different thinking styles, exploitative, analysis, to-do lists that get stuff done, and explorative, when it’s time to look for a different way. I was impressed by Eric’s book and said so in a review.

Alignment and Innovation jumped into my mind! Then I discovered that Eric’s first book is

The Rise of the Ambidextrous Organization: The Secret Revolution Happening Right Under Your Nose

I haven’t read this book yet, but in talking with Eric, I can tell that he has thoroughly researched and developed many of my first “beginner mind” thoughts. So Katz was right after all.

Alignment and Innovation mindsets, exploitative and explorative thinking, the ambidextrous organization.

Perhaps this is an idea whose time has come.