Leadership is the single greatest variable in the health and success of any organization, and a leader’s role is to ensure that his or her organization will endure.

The first book from Hal McLean, The Enduring Organization: How Leaders Revive and Sustain Relevance outlines a four-step process that any business leader can use to cultivate a lasting organization. Changing economic conditions and the natural corporate growth cycle are inevitable, yet many organizations fail to prepare—and therefore fail to adapt and survive.

From my decades of work with evolving corporations, I've developed a simple, elegant model for creating organizations that grow and thrive in a changing market. In The Enduring Organization, I go into detail about the mistakes I’ve seen leaders make over and over, and how any leader can create a business that thrives for years to come.

 

An organization's ability to change and improve begins and ends with the leader, who must ensure that:

• A relevant business model is in place and the next generation business model is already in development, with recognizable triggers to begin the migration to the new business model.

• An appropriate-minded leadership team is at the helm, as opposed to a team operating with fundamental assumptions based on conditions that no longer exist.

• An insightful organization can exist, with employees at every level surrounded by information and experiences that encourage ongoing insights into the organization’s performance and relationship to the industry.

• The organization can gain real traction for results, going beyond the bravado of demanding cost reduction and instead embedding key elements in the organization that consistently identify high-leverage changes.

 

These “anchor bolts” are the foundation of our model, and we’ve used them to improve profits by between 50 and 300 percent in a variety of fields, including the furniture manufacturing, chemical, capital equipment manufacturing, printing, and health care industries.
 

In The Enduring Organization, I delve into how leaders can assess the opportunities within their companies, design processes to reach new levels of performance, and adjust these processes until the key metrics move and are stable at new levels.
 

If you can’t understand the causes and effects of a problem with a high degree of clarity, you won’t be able to design a simple and elegant solution. And if you can’t find a simple and elegant solution, you won’t be able to create sustainable change.
 

That’s why I wrote The Enduring Organization—to provide leaders like you with the tools and philosophies you need not only to create change, but to sustain it.