Tipping Point Leadership

by W. Chan Kim, Renee A. Mauborgne

Source: Harvard Business Review
14 pages. Publication Date: Apr 01, 2003. Prod. #: R0304D-PDF-ENG

When William Bratton was appointed police commissioner of New York City in 1994, turf wars over jurisdiction and
funding were rife, promotion bore little relationship to performance, and crime was out of control. Yet in less than two
years, and without an increase in his budget, Bratton turned New York into the safest large city in the nation. And the
NYPD was only the latest of five law-enforcement agencies Bratton had turned around. In each case, he succeeded
in record time despite limited resources, a demotivated staff, opposition from powerful vested interests, and an
organization wedded to the status quo. Bratton's turnarounds demonstrate what the authors call "tipping point
leadership." The theory of tipping points, which has its roots in epidemiology, hinges on the insight that in any
organization, fundamental changes can occur quickly when the beliefs and energies of a critical mass of people
create an epidemic movement toward an idea. Bratton begins by overcoming the cognitive hurdles that block
companies from recognizing the need for radical change. He puts managers face-to-face with operational problems.
Next, he manages around limitations on funds, manpower, or equipment by concentrating resources on the areas
that are most in need of change and that have the biggest possible payoffs. He meanwhile solves the motivation
problem by singling out key influencers--people with disproportionate power due to their connections or persuasive
abilities. Finally, he closes off potentially fatal resistance from powerful opponents.
Tipping Point Leadership
What is Tipping Point Leadership?
Tipping Point Leadership is a rapidly-spreading framework for leadership development and major change inside an
organization. It constitutes the behavioral extension of the Value Innovation strategy and innovation process described
elsewhere on this site.
Tipping Point Leadership involves a four-step process. It starts by confronting the rank-and-file members of the
organization with the harsh reality faced by its external customers in their day-to-day life. In a second step, the process
translates this vivid picture of customers' issues into a new Value Curve for the business, leading to an internal re-
allocation of resources -- this is the link with the Value Innovation strategy framework described elsewhere on this site.
In a third step, the process identifies a limited number of key influencers inside the organization and places them in the
spotlight through a formal process of peer reporting. This step gives its name to the larger process, in that few
influencers can "tip" the entire organization toward change at comparatively low cost. In a fourth step, the process
focuses on the creation of new external alliances and the removal of political barriers outside the organization.
Where does Tipping Point Leadership come from?
The Tipping Point Leadership methodology was originally created by Chan Kim and Rene Mauborgne, both Professors of
Strategy at INSEAD, the leading European business school, located in Fontainebleau, France. Chan Kim and Rene
Mauborgne are Academic Partners of the MAC Partnership. Both are world-recognized thought leaders in academic and
business circles. Their work extends across the spectrum of strategy and innovation challenges (the "hard" part of
change) and behavioral issues (the "soft" part of change).
Together, they have authored multiple articles on Leadership, most notably:
"Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy", Harvard Business Review, July-August 1997.
"Tipping Point Leadership", Harvard Business Review, April 2003.
What's the difference between Tipping Point Leadership and other approaches to
Leadership or Large-Scale Transformation?
Most purely behavioral approaches to Leadership are ineffective because they fail to recognize the link between the
external reality of customers and the internal motivation of the organization for change. They also tend to underplay the
role of left-brained models such as conceptualizations of strategy, or understate the relevance of economic
considerations. The Tipping Point Leadership approach moves an organization across the full spectrum of external and
internal realities, using vivid images of customers' frustrations to mobilize the organization toward change. It also
addresses both the conceptual side of change through the articulation of a differentiated Value Curve and the
behavioral side of change through the use of targeted individual and collective processes.
The strength of the Tipping Point Leadership process lies in the attention it pays to resource considerations. Many
approaches to Leadership Development require a vast amount of resources to produce large-scale change: creation of
transformation teams, moving people off their jobs, etc. The Tipping Point Leadership approach offers a way to produce
large-scale change at comparatively low cost.
Who should sponsor Tipping Point Leadership programs?
CEOs and General Managers are in the best position to launch Tipping Point Leadership efforts, given the breadth of the
approach. Heads of Strategy, Chief Transformation Officers, or functional managers responsible for change inside their
organization also commonly sponsor Tipping Point Leadership efforts. The Heads of Organization Development or
Leadership Development also frequently play a major role in Tipping Point Leadership efforts, either as internal
pathfinders for the approach, or as functional support to CEOs or General Managers driving the effort.


Tipping Point Leadership
Effecting Change with Limited Resources
Dave! Do Something! , a front page headline in New York post screamed to the then Mayor of New York. In the early 1990s
New York city was veering toward anarchy. Murders were at an all time high. Muggings, mafia hits, vigilantes and armed
robberies filled the daily headlines. New Yorkers were under siege. With miserable pay, dangerous working conditions, long hours
and little hope of advancement in tenure promotion system, morale among the NYPDs thirty six thousand officers was at rock
bottom Many social scientists had concluded that New York was impervious to police intervention. This is when Bill Bratton wa s
appointed police commissioner of New York City in February 1994. In less than two years and with a frozen budget ,Bratton turned
New York into the largest safest city in the United States. Felony crime fell 39%, murders 50% and theft 35%. Public confidence in
NYPD leaped from 37% to 73%.
The question I want to address today is : how do you get an organization to execute a strategic change and achieve performance
gains when the resources at hand are limited . The concept I want to introduce you to is called Tipping Point Leadership.
Whereas , conventional wisdom suggests that increments in performance can only be achieved by proportional investments in time
and resources. So that bigger the challenge, greater the resources and time needed. We dont have the resources! We need more
resources ! are very commonly voiced arguments while effecting change in organizations. Tipping Point Leaders, in contrast, in
addition to securing more resources, also focusing multiplying the value of resources that they already have.
Tipping point leadership builds on a rarely exploited corporate reality that in every organization there are people, acts and activities
that exercise a disproportionate influence on performance. It is identifying and leveraging these factors of disproportionate
influence to tip over the organizational hurdles. When it comes to scarce resources, there are three factors of disproportionate
influence that executives can leverage to dramatically free resources on the one hand , and multiply the value of resources on the
other. These are hotspots, cold spots and horse trading. Hot spot s are activities that have low resource input but high potential
performance gains. Cold spots are activities that consume lots of resources but have low performance impact. Horse trading
involves trading your departments excess resources in one area for another units excess resources to fill remaining resource gaps.
Bratton identified the New York subway system as a major hotspot. If only the subway system, that had earned the reputation of an
Electric Sewer could be made safe, the impact on the percepti on of the city being safe or unsafe could be drastic. Whereas his
predecessors had argued that to make the subway system safe, they had to have a police officer ride every line and guard ever y
entrance and exit. This had never been possible given the budget and resources. Brattons analysis revealed that although the
subway was a maze of lines and entrances, the vast majority of crimes occurred only at a few stations and a few lines. With a
complete refocus of cop element on these few hotspots , crime on the subway lines came tumbling down.
Bratton found that one of the biggest cold spots was processing criminals in court. On average, it would take an officer sixt een
hours to take someone downtown to process even the pettiest of crimes. Bratton brought in the bust buses roving old buses
retrofitted with miniature police stations, that were parked outside subway stations. Now, the police officer only needed to esc ort
the criminal to the street level instead of dragging him across town to the court house. This cut the processing time from si xteen
hours to just one, freeing up more officers to be reallocated to the subway hotspots.
Bratton also found that the transit unit, which was starved for office space , had been running a fleet of unused cars in exc ess of its
needs. The New York division of Parole, on the other hand, had excess office space in the prime downtown building, but needed
more cars. The obvious trade, when proposed was gratefully accepted by both departments and had drastic impact on performance.
The point here is , that the value of resources that you already have can be increased by freeing up resources from your cold spots
and redirecting them towards the hotspots. What actions consume your greatest resources but have little performance impact?
Conversely, what activities have the greatest performance impact but are resource starved? When questions are framed in this way,
organizations can rapidly gain insight into how tip the hurdle of limited resources.
Blue Ocean Strategy FAQ's
|
Articles
|
Blogs
|
News
Copyright 2009-2010 Strategize Blue




How to achieve Tipping Point Leadership
14 SEPTEMBER 2011 LEAVE A COMMENT
How many managers face obstacles that include:
people locked into a stagnant culture,
limited resources,
demotivated staff, and
opposition from powerful interests?
A now famous article in the Harvard Business Review, titled Tipping Point Leadership (W Chan Kim and Renee
Mauborgne, April 2003) offers a helpful example of how to constructively tackle these issues, which I summarise here
together with practical steps to apply in your own or any situation.
Example
As Police Commissioner for New York City, William Bratton achieved what many thought was impossible. In two
years following his appointment in 1994, Bratton turned New York into one of the safest large cities in the country.
Felony crimes were down 39%, murders were down by 50%, and theft was down 35%. All this was done without any
increase in his budget, and at the same time staff morale increased dramatically.
Brattons achievements were so profound that they prompted Kim and Mauborgne to study his methods, which the
authors believe are able to be learned.
They believe that Bratton achieved what they have called Tipping Point Leadership which hinges on the insight that:
in any organisation, once the beliefs and energies of a critical mass of people are engaged, conversion to a new
idea will spread like an epidemic, bringing about fundamental change very quickly(p4)
To achieve Tipping Point Leadership, Bratton overcame four fundamental hurdles, which I summarise below.
1. The Cognitive Hurdle
Most CEOs try to argue their case for change by providing empirical evidence facts and statistics to back up their
claims. For some reason, this approach rarely works.
Leaders like Bratton dont rely on numbers. Rather, managers are confronted face to face with the problems they
are forced to confront reality.
When Bratton headed up the transit police in 1990, he made it a requirement that all senior officers, including himself,
ride the subway to work every day, rather than drive their cars. In many cases, this was the first time these senior
people had been in the subway and they didnt like what they experienced.
Faced with reality, the senior managers could no longer deny the need to change policing methods.
2. The Resource Hurdle
Bratton believes that limited resources are a given, so he achieves Tipping Point Leadership by focusing existing
resources on the issues that are most in need of change, and where there are likely to be the biggest payoffs.
Many argued that the New York subway crime problem was only able to be resolved through a massive injection of
funding.
Bratton thought that targeting was the key. Officers analysed crime statistics and found that most crimes occurred at
only a few stations. He allocated plain clothed police to these hot spots. Criminals soon realised that the absence of
uniforms did not mean an absence of police.
3. The Motivational Hurdle
Managers realise the importance of employee motivation as a way to effect change. Bratton addresses this by
focusing on key influencers ie. people with disproportionate power to influence or block initiatives.
As an example, Bratton identified commanders as key influences in the force. He instituted a mandatory meeting
every two weeks for all senior staff including commanders. One commander was given two days notice, then
interviewed by a panel of senior staff at each of these meetings to account for strategies and performance. This
quickly resulted in a culture of accountability!
4. The Political Hurdle
Bratton recognises that organisational politics is a given, which must be addressed.
His strategy is to identify and silence opponents early on. To do this, he recruits respected senior insiders onto his
team and he gathers facts to counter saboteurs.
For example, he anticipated the response from commanders to an impending exercise involving compilation of crime
maps. Knowing they would say it was unworkable because it would take too long and drain resources from fighting
crime, Bratton was able to counter this by showing evidence that the task would take 18 minutes a day, or less than
1% of a precincts workload.
Conclusion
Every organization could provide numerous examples of similar problems to those above which are affecting the
performance of their people and their business. If youd like help to address your own problems, contact me on0412
921 292.