Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End
Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End
Rosabeth Moss KanterRandom HouseISBN 1844135918£20
Some businesses seem to be lucky: they suffer fewer knocks, they swim with the tide and the tide races with them. They endure winning streaks.
If you take a look at the business exemplars of 20 years ago, quite a few of them are not around now. Even those in Tom Peters’s In Search of Excellence – those identified as being the best of the best. It seems as though winning streaks come to an end.
“Why?” is the question at the heart of this book.
In addressing the issue, Kanter quotes many examples drawn from businesses of all sizes and from sport (unfortunately American sport) – from where we get the analogy of the “winning streak”. She even uses the example of South Africa as she explores the ending of losing streaks.
She concludes that winning streaks are created by confidence, which she describes as a combination of factors such as self-belief, motivation and empowerment. She suggests that teamwork, open communication and strong systems are essential to building a winning company. Much of this is not new, but it is probably worth repeating … and repeating.
The book gets more interesting when Kanter explores the factors that result in the end of a winning streaks – representing the difference between a few manageable setbacks and the start of a downward slide into failure. Not surprisingly, those factors, she suggests, are the opposite of those involved in“confidence” – panic, arrogance and neglect of systems. Together these can create a dangerous, downward spiral where managers stop sharing knowledge, where systems crumble, where a blame culture takes hold,where talented people leave and confidence evaporates.
Kanter then talks about the journey back up the hill. There is a need to restore self-belief for the short-term without losing sight of the need for long-term change. Short-term results are needed to help restore morale.
Kanter’s examples are mostly interesting; occasionally (as in the overuse of American sports organisations) annoying (especially to non-US readers) but they do serve to illustrate the underlying concept – and they make this an interesting and enjoyable book!
