The confidence game
Why winners win
Confidence is Kanter's 16th book; her better-known titles include The Change Masters , When Giants Learn to Dance, and World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy. Kanter says the seeds for her latest effort lay in the gloom that followed the bursting of the Internet bubble, with the heavy blow of that September morning three years ago providing an emphatic punctuation mark. "I was having this visceral sense of everybody, from economic prognosticators to business investors to the general public, going from exuberantly optimistic to being exuberantly pessimistic," she says. "I began to see there was this underlying psychology that had to be fixed." Lingering economic sluggishness, she reasons, can be blamed partly on a sag in confidence. "I began to see how important that factor is in driving behavior up and down," she says. "I began to see the need to understand these cycles."
Play ball. Thus, she divined from experiences as varied as pro sports (the Philadelphia Eagles), complex organizations (the British Broadcasting Corp.), and even nation-building (Nelson Mandela's post-apartheid South Africa) a way to view confidence and where an organization lies within a confidence life cycle that runs from low ebb, to recovery, and then to arrogance and fall. Any organization has problems, but winners catch them, solve them, and move on, she says, while losers deny them, cover them up, or let them pile up. While her inquiry into confidence covers a wide range, Kanter says the notion is probably most critical for business. Corporate America's status as a social institution today has plunged following seemingly endless scandal. Businesses need to restore trust and confidence, not only among their employees but also with customers, and not just because it's a nice thing to do. If nothing else, it's easier to attract good people and investment.
What's more, in today's knowledge economy, innovation is the way to grow. "And you don't get innovation," she says, "without the initiative of your people" --one of those critical three cornerstones of confidence.
In her long career, Kanter has covered a lot of ground, trenchantly describing and prescribing what's best for businesses and organizations. But with this new research, Kanter says, she's more convinced of its universality than anything else she's ever written.
You might say she's confident.
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