Do Your Commitments Match Your Convictions?
Authors: Prof. Dominic Houlder, Prof. Don Sull, London Business School
How many of us keep pace day to day, upholding our obligations to our bosses, families, and the community, even as our overall satisfaction with work and quality of life decline? And yet, our common response to the situation is: “I’m too busy to do anything about it now.” Unfortunately, unless a personal or professional crisis strikes, very few of us step back, take stock of our day-to-day actions, and make a change.
Gaps between your commitments and your convictions can develop and widen with time. Understanding how these gaps can emerge is helpful in preventing them from growing too large. Sometimes the gap results from a reluctance to commit time, energy, or money to what we value. A much more common reason for the gap is that people are entangled in commitments they made in the past. We have observed an analogous phenomenon in corporate strategy. We use the phrase “active inertia” to describe managers’ tendency to respond to even the most dramatic changes in their competitive environment by relying on and accelerating activities that worked in the past. Like the driver of a car with its wheels stuck in the mud, executives notice a change in the environment and step on the gas. Ultimately, they end up digging their organizations deeper into the quagmire.
In this Harvard Business Review article, London Business School strategy professor and co-author, Dominic Houlder examine the reasons why a gap often exists between the things we value most and the ways we spend our time, money, and attention. They also suggest a practical approach to managing the gap. The framework they propose is based on their study of organizational commitments—the investments, promises, and contracts made today that bind companies to a future course of action. Such commitments can prevent organizations from responding effectively to change.
For more detailed reading, refer to: https://hbr.org/2005/01/do-your-commitments-match-your-convictions
