A True Reinvention

In an exclusive interview with People Matters, Kate Sweetman, Founding Principal at the consulting firm SweetmanCragun and a former editor at Harvard Business Review talks about the age of disruption, reinvention, innovation, leadership and HR tech adoption.

- Suparna Chawla Bhasin

Kate Sweetman is a Founding Principal at the consulting firm Sweetman-Cragun, and teaches at MIT’s Legatum Institute for Entrepreneurship. She has been a former editor at Harvard Business Review, and has worked in Malaysia as Director of Research and Curriculum at the Iclif Centre for Leadership and Governance. Sweetman’s book credits include The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By (Harvard Business Press, 2009), co-authored with Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood. Her latest book, with Shane Cragun, is titled “Reinvention: Accelerating Results in the Age of Disruption”.

Kate has extensively researched, facilitated, advised, and published on multiple aspects of leadership and organizational development. She has been listed as a Thinkers50 for her body of work throughout her career and has co-authored the best-selling business book The Leadership Code.

What is of utmost importance in the age of disruption, both for leaders and for organizations?

A mind-set of extreme agility with the capability to act on it, and for leaders to keep their energy high and positive is of utmost importance in this age of disruption. In this age, you have to see the possibilities and move faster than the speed of change around you. Since there is no such thing as a steady state anymore, leaders and their organizations need to be in a perpetual flow of learning, shifting and growing – looking out ahead, figuring out what to do and how to do it. The faster that can happen, the better the chances are to stay ahead of others, to be in a position to disrupt rather than be disrupted. Managing this dynamic is the main job of leaders and the organizations that they lead.