Phil's Leadership blog

‘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:

Social worker recruitment ad

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.

I found another nice illustration of how great leaders get extraordinary performances out of people, in this conversation between Matt Damon and Leo Dicaprio about how director Martin Scorcese inspires the cast and crew. It’s from a publicity clip about their new film The Departed:

Matt Damon on Martin Scorcese
“Everyone’s excited to be there (on the set), because he’s giving everyone space to do their best work…(He’s so) energised, disciplined and focussed, he brings out the best in everyone around him…Nobody wants to show up empty-handed.”

Leonardo Dicaprio on Martin Scorcese
“I can’t specifically identify anything he does particularly different than other directors. I just feel there’s such a respect level for him when people come on the set, even the minor characters, that everyone is just on their A Game. They know they’ve got to come completely prepared with something to offer that man.”

Dead Bachelors in Remote China Still Find Wives
– By Jim Yardley

New York Times, today.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to save you time as I read leadership books for you, find and select the best bits, then distil them. That’s the principle behind the whole 60 Second Leader thing.

In the spirit of letting me dig out the gems for you (hey, I’ve just realized that means I do all the hard work. Oh well, too late now…) here’s the 60 Second version of a book I’ve just mined as part of my research for the 60 Second Leader development system.

It’s The Leadership Crash Course by Paul Taffinder.

If you’re the methodical type and into self-assessments you might like this book. I found it slow-going, I’m afraid. But there are these four sharp insights in it:

Leadership is not always intentional
A brilliant observation.

A Quick Win can be a Slow Death…
…if you railroad it through so people feel it’s imposed on them rather than a change they had a hand in deciding on.

Leaders break rules. It’s their job.
Absolutely. Your job is NOT to enforce rules, it’s to let people break them where they need breaking.

Leaders are masters AND servants
As we all are, of course. Most forget the second bit and lord it with the first bit.

End of 60 Second book report.