Sumnatra Ghoshal and purposeful action

I went over to Leeds University Business School last night to see a lecture by Prof Sumantra Ghohsal of London Business School (and Harvard Business School and MIT and so on and so on…) - it was part of the AIM research programme which some of the LUBS faculty are involved in.

If he’s typical of the LBS and Harvard and MIT faculty, I can see why their MBA courses cost so much. The subject of the lecture was ‘Developing a bias for action’, which doesn’t sound like the most wildly exciting of subjects - but in actual fact it was fascinating stuff. Deceptively simple, which made it very easy to find yourself thinking “yup, that’s a bit like me” when given an example of why most managers actually actively avoid making decision and taking action. His style of lecturing was far more energetic than I’d become used to on the MBA, so he managed to keep my attention for the whole 90 minutes.

I made a load of very rough notes during the lecture - there were quite a few diagrams, so I’ll probably end up scanning those. In the meantime, a bullet-point summary:

Eight lessons of purposeful action

* Only 10% of managers take purposeful action
* Business is the central hazard to purposeful action
* Purposeful action requires active management of demands, choices and constraints
* Willpower, not motivation, drives purposeful action
* The foremost task of leaders is to engage their own willpower
* Willpower is not a personality trait
* Organisational energy drives collective action
* To unleash purposeful action in an organisation, leaders need to do some very different things

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