In every company there is this irrepressible drive for change.

People like you, in influential roles, have the ideas, the skills and the strong will to develop the company – an enormous drive that is superior to the often cited tendencies towards inertia with these endless conferences, inconsequential new leadership systems, useless reorganisations, vision and mission debates. For over a year, people like you can simply act. Implement. They do it. They look for and find like-minded people in an uncomplicated way. Together they use the urge to change. You digitise core processes. Reduce complexity. Release decision-making rights. Support home offices with extra budgets. Abolish forecasts (there is nothing left to predict …). End wrong strategies and start anew.

The possibility space has become an immanent change space.

Change-enthusiastic leaders, like you, join forces and from this new WE the new corporate culture continuously emerges: more individual time sovereignty, greater freedom to shape and make decisions, more transparency, hybrid remote working models, etc. All together, this is a profound upheaval. The mania for control is subsiding. Not everywhere, not linearly, not without counter-movements, but inexorably, towards more variety, greater inventiveness, more personal responsibility and more drive for top performance.

We have conceptualised this paradigm shift for great and greatest careers. Christina Kestel, Senior Editor at Harvard Business Manager, has had many conversations with international career experts such as Herminia Ibarra, Bettina Al-Sadik-Lowinski and with us and describes it as follows: „In the past, the organisation was responsible for individual careers. It selected talent based on defined competencies, designed development paths and moulded talented people into exactly the employees it wanted. Today, people take more responsibility for their own careers … The ability to plan is abandoned in favour of freedom.“ (translated by the authors)[1]  In her very insightful HBM article,https://www.manager-magazin.de/harvard/selbstmanagement/erfolg-wie-viel-karriere-passt-zu-mir-a-baf8d6b4-0002-0001-0000-000178696567?context=issue we say: „Working alone does not advance a career at all, but striving for the WE.“[2] The WE is decisive for any change, for success in the top league. Warm, trusting and generous contacts are the security in the uncertain, the prerequisite for more personal responsibility and freedom. They stabilise the psyche and strengthen individual influence in times of great change.

In our book FREEDOM FOR MANAGERS https://www.amazon.de/Freiheit-f%C3%BCr-Manager-Unternehmenserfolg-Book/dp/3593509113 we analyse this dynamic and show what the WE has to do with great careers and successful changes in companies.

Dorothea Assig and Dorothee Echter have decoded the success dynamics of great careers and have been using their knowledge to accompany ambitious personalities on their way to a fulfilled, connected and economically successful  life in the global top league for two decades. The organisations led by their clients enjoy peak performance and growth. Assig and Echter share their insights in lectures, books and professional journals.

[1] Kestel, Christina: Wie viel Karriere passt zu mir? Harvard Business manager, September 2021, Seite 20

[2] Ebenda, Seite 22