Latest Book Review: Leading Through Disruption, by Andrew N. Liveris

Change... its the only constant in life! Well perhaps not the only constant in life but it should be constant in business. As many a leader has professed and claimed, "if you don't change, you die." But is there a right type of 'change' we should be striving for?

There's one thing certain right now and thats the fact that change is everywhere. Geopolitical change. Economic change. Government change. Policy change. We're operating in increasingly turbulent times where change is everywhere, all the time it would seem. We're in a period of high disruption and organisers require effective leadership to navigate periods of high disruption and change.

One of the leading - and most experienced - voices on the subject of navigating disruption is multi-award winning business mogul Andrew Liveris.

Former CEO and Chairman of the Dow Chemical company, today he sits on the boards of numerous companies and is a pivotal voice and point of influence in the push to bring manufacturing back to home soil in countries like the US - a topical point of interest in the world right now especially. In 'Leading Through Disruption' Liveris lays out his opinion that organisations and leaders have lost the ability to do proper long term planning. That today, organisations live quarter-to-quarter, bound by the highly process-driven quarterly earnings reports that ultimately act as a barrier to investing in long term R&D and growth initiatives. Gone are the days where businesses laid out 5, 10 or even 15-year business plans and in its place we work in continuous 90-day increments as leaders desperately pushing to deliver on earnings targets and margins.

Liveris shares that we're at inflection point in time where we need to consider doing something different; that we need to get back to investing in long term aims and ambitions and that boards need to be bolder and braver in enabling (and backing) their leaders to take risks and push for ambitious goals even if it means taking a short term hit on profitability and margin.