Leadership and Management / Turning Adversity to Advantage

In my post ‘The Death of Dreams’, I delved into failure at a deeper, more fundamental level. Hugh recently tweeted Elisabeth Gilbert’s TED speech ‘Nurturing Creativity’.

Gilbert, author of mega-best seller ‘Eat, Pray, Love” talks about the emotional and other challenges of having seen exceptional success and knowing, as I described in my post, ‘this is as good as it gets.’ She describes...

“It’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. Jesus, what a thought. That’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9:00 in the morning and I don’t want to go there. I would prefer to keep doing what I love. And so the question becomes how....The tricky bit comes the next morning for the dancer himself when he wakes up and discovers it’s Tuesday 11:00 am and he is no longer a glimpse of god. He is just an aging mortal with really bad knees and maybe he is never going to ascend to that height again and maybe no one will ever chant God’s name again as he spins and what is he then to do with the rest of his life. This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life.”

Gilbert espouses a coping approach which segregates the exceptional accomplishments of the past from ‘one’s being’ and are thought about as ‘being on loan to you.’ Essentially, she is advocating taking ego out of the mix. First of all, taming the ego itself is as harsh a challenge as anyone will face in life. But, the approach seems similarly applicable to those whose dreams have not materialised in a ‘glimpse of the Gods’, but appear forever out of reach. A big part of the pain here too is the impact on the ego of feeling the failure personally.

Her parting advice is the gem of the speech which provides the truly pragmatic and inspirational direction to how to persevere and thrive regardless of how limited the future appears...

“Don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case [referring to a creative muse she talks about earlier], decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then ‘Ole’. And if not, then do your dance anyhow. And ‘Ole’ to you nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. ‘Ole to you nonetheless’ just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.”

The New York Times’ Adam Bryant interviews Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about leadership. Ballmer faces constant competitive pressures, new markets, new technologies, ever changing landscape, shareholder expectations and what does he say his biggest challenge is...

Q. What’s the most challenging part of your job?

A. Finding the right balance between optimism and realism. I’m an optimist by nature, and I start from the belief that you can always succeed if you have the right amount of focus combined with the right amount of hard work. So I can get frustrated when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated or that simply couldn’t have been foreseen. A realist knows that a certain amount of that is inevitable, but the optimist in me always struggles when progress doesn’t match my expectations.

Balancing upside and downside is one of the core executive issues requiring leadership (more upside) and management (less downside). 

I started this blog with a poem, but have not ventured into the lyrical explorations of failure since.  Last week, I watched the stunning Bollywood film Devdas (thanks Nina) with a script as richly crafted as its dazzling shots. In an inevitable moment of despair, the courtesan Chandramukhi speaks this lyrical line embracing the adversity (and Bollywood sure knows how to do adversity)...

“If sorrow be joy’s harbinger, every loss signals what gain shall be.”

Dan Gilbert’s memorable TED presentation talks about what really makes people happy and not happy with a special note that ‘failure’ has much less impact than everyone expects.

“From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test and on and on have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration, than people expect them to have. In fact a recent study – this almost floors me – a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggest that if it happened over 3 months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.”

He shares a range of stories of people who suffered astounding set backs and yet report great levels of happiness...

· Jim Wright – disgraced congressman who “lost everything” yet said “I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally, and in almost every way.”

· Moreese Bickham – 37 years wrongly incarcerated yet said “I don’t have one minute’s regret. It was a glorious experience.”

· Harry Langerman – missed out on the first McDonald’s franchise yet said “I believe it turned out for the best.”

· Pete Best – dropped from the Beatles and yet said “I’m happier than I would have been with the Beatles.”

He ascribes this paradox to our “psychological immune system” which can generate “synthetic happiness” - “We synthesize happiness, but we think ‘happiness’ is a thing to be found.” Synthetic happiness seems like a fancy term for ‘positive mental attitude’ or simply choosing happiness even in the face troubles. He does go through a number of curious scientific experiments dissect how this happiness generation takes place which does underpin the lofty claims with some impressive empirical evidence.

My interpretation is that the Impact Bias is linked to the 'Endowment Effect'.  In short, given two things, in this case 'lives' people will bias towards the one they have over the prospect of an alternative.

I finally had a chance to watch some of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures by by Microsoft Research Chief Research Scientist Chris Bishop that Steve recommended. Wonderful examples of demonstration and illustration of some quite complex and abstract notions (the best illustration, or should I say ‘portrayal’ of shared secret key encryption that I have ever seen).

One notion popped up in the description of Internet routing was Braess Paradox which showed how the failure in the system can make the system stronger overall. With both a colourful illustration of some road traffic as well as a striking demonstration with a weight suspended by linked bungee chords (minute 25:30 of the webcast which requires ‘buying’ the zero cost webcast, registering, checking out and then watching). In short, Braess Paradox states that in a given network (like a road system or the Internet), the route to take is affected not only by distance but also by congestion.

It is quite understandable that if every driver on the road follows the ‘most favourable’ path for them (without consideration of the impact of their decision on the overall traffic in the area), then there will likely be traffic jams around bottleneck in the most advantageous route. The paradox comes in as traffic can actually be reduced by eliminating roads. One would think that the more road capacity the better, but actually sometimes a road failure can actually increase traffic flow overall and reduce everyone’s journey.

Bishop actually cites a real life example where a tunnel was closed down and traffic actually improved:

“This strange effect can actually happen in real life. In Seoul, in Korea, they closed one of the three tunnels through the city and they actually found traffic flow improved.”

A colourful and curious example of a failure of a rope, road or link making the overall network stronger.