“Sir, What is the secret of your success?” a reporter asked a bank president.
“Two words.”
“And, Sir, what are they?”
“Right decisions.”
“And how do you make right decisions?”
“One word.”
“And, Sir, what is that one word?”
“Experience.”
“And how do you get Experience ?”
“Two words.”
“And, Sir, what are the two words?”
“Wrong decisions.”
Source: Tim Small at Compass sent me that. I think he got it from an agency he was working with called The Storytellers.
The new rules of business
“The rules of business are now different because of the great networked connections that bring us all together. There’s a kind of new Cartesian Darwinism at work. It used to be ‘I think, therefore I am’. Now, it’s ‘I didn’t think fast enough, therefore I was.’ “
SOURCE: I was invited to a closed meeting of one of the Big Five consultancy groups a while back – It was kind of a pep rally for their highly paid consultants, partners, and a jolly for their big ticket customers. Can’t remember why they let me in. It was themed based on The Matrix. The door staff all wore Smith agent suits, dark glasses, earpieces. The stage looked like a film set, with a copy of the dentist chair-thing you sit in to be plugged into the Matrix.
The back of the chair was to the audience as we filed in. It was all decidedly surreal. Then the lights in the theatre dimmed, the chair swung around to reveal the surprise speaker sitting in it, playing the role of Neo the messianic rebel, come to tell us where real truth lay and that what we thought was real about business and leadership was in fact an illusion.
It was Sir Bob. He embarked on an inspired rant about the new world of business and leadership that blew me away. Luckily I had my notebook in my pocket and could just about write shorthand in the dark. I just found the notes in a drawer this morning. Thought you might like that quote…I’ll post a bit more of it later.
“Almost everything I’ve ever done well I’d never done before.”
– Steve Wozniak, inventor of the Apple computer, talking on BBC Radio 4 this morning
Er, so what?
Successful innovation comes about at the intersection of experience and novelty. The two pull against each other and the leaders of organizations that want to foster innovation have to channel this tension away from conflict and into creativity. It’s the grit that forms the core of the pearl. Thomas Kuhn, the father of scientific thinking about innovation, taught us this. He called it ‘The Essential Tension’.
Leading innovation is one of the least understood and most challenging areas of leadership today. I’m working on a chapter on it for The 60 Second Leader book at the moment and on a ‘how to lead innovation’ module for the 60 Second Leader development system I’m, er, developing.
So, Wozniak’s comment spoke to me as I was making the coffee this morning after dropping Danny at school.
Incidentally, his new autobiography is brilliantly titled – iWoz. (iPod, iWoz, geddit? Better than Woz, Not Woz or whatever that band of David Was’s used to be called.)
Steve’s website is worth a look, too. It’s here
Ha! The link worked. Thanks to Johnnie Moore for showing me how to do that…
‘The Tripping Point’ refers to those moments in life where you land on your back side and suddenly realize, with blinding clarity, that you got it wrong.
For successful people, these are illumination points in life where the shock of failure sears into them, they adapt, get up and move on. Apparently.
I know, I wish I’d thought of it, too (the ‘Tripping Point’). But, I didn’t. It’s from Jerry Porras’ latest book Success Built To Last , which looks at the traits of highly successful people in the same way he and James Collins looked at the traits of highly successful companies in Built to Last .
“Bring me a one-armed economist,” said Harry Truman.
“I am sick of asking an economist for advice and every single one of them saying ‘Well, on the one hand…’ “.
Source: Tom Peters
Re: The ‘Secret of Happiness is’… post, below
Yes, more choice is making us miserable as consumers.
But, on the other hand…Malcolm Gladwell and others point to the fractionalization of markets as being a necessary part of the disintegration of the mass market, of allowing people to have their individual tastes catered for.
There is no perfect Pepsi, he says, just perfect Pepsis. Because different people want different things and have different tastes.
This blindingly obvious breakthrough accounts for all the different Cokes with lime twists, lemon twists and the gold one with no caffeine and no sugar that you can never find on the shelves and so you have to settle for the confusing new Coke One when you’re not really sure how that’s different from Diet Coke etc. etc. that you have to navigate through to find the one you want (or fail to if it’s the gold one).
There may be a compelling logic in the horizontal extension strategy but more choice still makes life more difficult to manage. On a personal note, Sainsbury’s needs to put more of that gold Coke on the shelves. I can never find it. The constant failure is ruining my trips to the supermarket. I feel like a hunter-gatherer who returns from the trip empty-handed…again. Erm, Schwartz is clearly right.
Phew…So I’m not mad after all.
I wrote a section in the book Seven Secrets of Inspired Leaders that came across as slightly unhinged. I was trying to make a point about the death of geography in global business. Now that you can be everywhere at once, we have to reframe global business leadership, stop thinking in terms of ‘import’ and ‘export’ of ‘here’ and ‘there’. As Gertrude Stein said about the Midwest, “There is no there, there.”
It was an obscure but important point – that too much global business thinking is still framed in terms of self and other – but I was struggling to make the point clearly and simply (I still haven’t made it as clear as it should be, even trying again here…).
So I used star-gazing to explain how you can be everywhere at once (thanks to internet, intranets etc.). The star you look at at night is actually part of you because matter from it has been converted into light which is hitting the back of your eye and is being absorbed into your body. Wherever you think you are, you are at the centre and connected to everywhere else.
I still cringe when I read that passage again. So, what a relief today to find a new book has just been published by a cosmologist and a philosopher of science saying something very similar.
It’s called View From The Centre Of The Universe. We are, in many ways, at the centre of the Universe, it says, and the principles that govern the Universe run through the fabric of our being. Kind of what I was trying to say about global business to help break us out of out-dated models for doing business with the rest of the world. I think.
More evidence that I’m saner than I thought on this link >>>
http://snipurl.com/ImNotMadAfterAll
99% of recruitment advertising is pants (UK word. US readers substitute ‘crap’). I used to write about advertising and marketing (sometimes still do) for Marketing, Marketing Week, the Independent and others, and despaired of ever seeing a creative recruitment ad.
But this is possibly the most moving and creative interweaving of images and words in a recruitment ad I have ever seen. Make sure to read what’s on the cricket ball in the last frame:
How does this relate to leadership? Well, it’s mentioned here mainly because I swoon over powerful written communication and it is so rare to see something as beautifully crafted as this. Leaders are storytellers, makers of meaning, and this ad does that beautifully.
I found it in Lee McEwan’s brilliant Serendipity Book having been led there by Johnnie Moore’s blog.
…low expectations.
Everything was better when everything was worse.
Because:
When you have no choice and you are disappointed, the world is responsible.
When you have 100s of choices and you are still not happy with the ones you make, you blame yourself.
The more options we have, the more we regret what we didn’t choose. This opportunity cost becomes a lingering regret that subtracts from the satisfaction of the choice,
I’ve been reading Barry Schwartz’s excellent The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less . The above is a distillation.
If your product expansion strategy is based on horizontal extension – increasing the choice offered to consumers – you need to be aware of this paradox, as you do if you’re a politician trying to push further choice into areas of our lives such as the health service and schools. (Hint: we want them all to be good, not to be able to choose between good schools and bad ones. You are passing the buck).
Schwartz cites research (also cited in Malcolm Gladwell’s talks and books ) showing that customers are more likely to buy from a choice of half a dozen jams on a supermarket shelf than they are from a choice of thirty, which they hurry past, confused.
Schwartz was prompted to write his book after counting 175 salad dressings and 75 iced teas in his local supermarket and thinking “This is crazy”.
Just a thought.
How different is your behaviour when no-one is looking or listening?
I heard a scientist this morning talking about how in quantum theory the very act of observing can change the thing being observed.
The cliched thoughts that brings crowding into your head include the obvious one: “If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a noise?” (The answer of course is that the fall makes vibrations in the air, but the very definition of a ‘noise’, as with a ‘sound’ is when those vibrations are received by an eardrum that resonates with them, so no there is no sound if there is nothing or no-one to hear it).
Or, as the educationalist Sir Ken Robinson puts it “If a man says something in a forest and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?”
But it also made me think that one definition of authentic leadership is that the people we respect and trust most as leaders are those whom we assume have the least ‘side’ as they say in political circles – who are when alone most like they are in public.
So, what are you like when no-one’s watching?
We don’t have to turn to leadership books for lessons in how great leaders draw out brilliant performances from people. There are examples all around us. So, I’ve picked a couple from sport and film-making that struck me over the past day or two.
The first is from the Manchester United footballer (soccer player to our American friends) Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, known as ‘the baby-faced assassin’ for his combination of innocent looks and ruthless ability to score goals. It’s from a Sky TV programme on the 50 greatest foreign players to play in the UK that was on last night:
Great leaders focus the attention on you, not them
“When I was a young player and had first come to Manchester United (the biggest football team in the world) I needed someone to look up to. That was Eric Cantona. We were all in awe of him. Yet he always looked after me. Before a match he would say to me: ‘Today you are going to score when we get out there. No question.’ To a young lad from Norway like me, hearing that from him gave me wings.”
I’ve bolded that last bit because it’s so great.
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