Analysts wondered when this restructuring would end,â he said, âand they didnât like our answer: never.â He was highly cognizant that âentropy is the rule in organizations, as it is in the physical universe. Over time, all organized systems evolve toward chaos. Unless you pursue change relentlessly, your efforts will eventually wither away.â Cote didnât let that happen.
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Entropy makes it necessary for leaders to constantly work on maintaining an organizationâs purpose, form, and methods even if there are no changes in strategy or competition.
Entropy
It is not hard to see entropy at work⌠Despite all the high-level concepts consultants advertise, the bread and butter of every consultantâs business is undoing entropyâcleaning up the debris and weeds that grow in every organizational garden.
Once leaders realize the necessity of change, they can begin to explore the possibilities of change. The second phase involves considerable discomfort and a good deal of frustration because new skills take more work to build than anticipated. Falling back into old habits is common, especially when dealing with high-pressure situations. Backsliding should be expected and not taken as an indication of failure. Progress unfolds through an iterative process of steps forward, lapses backward, and then steps forward again.
With perseverance, positive reinforcement kicks in, which provides sustaining fuel for continued effort through the third phase of leader evolution.
In the year ahead, he surveyed the broader employee base as well as customers and learned that âwe didnât have that same emotional connectivity with our guests.â Or with Hyatt colleagues out on the front lines. Hoplamazian dedicated time to meeting with many of them. Through his own and othersâ probing into the colleague experience, he realized that the company evaluated employees largely based on their compliance with an elaborate set of rules and that âwe tracked success in our hotels by compliance with a list of brand standards, not guest feedback.
As former Intel CEO Andy Grove wrote in his influential book Only the Paranoid Survive, âBusiness success contains the seeds of its own destruction.â CEOs who make it to the Complacency Trap stage have navigated the rough-and-tumble of the Launch, Calibration, and Reinvention stages of the first few years. One unintended consequence of leading their firms adroitly can be an overly assured attitude about the course theyâve set and the organizational improvements theyâve made.