Leadership and Management / Turning Adversity to Advantage: Blog

Leaders in London 2008 – Garry Kasparov

Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:15:00 GMT

One of the headliners for the Leaders in London event was world chess champion and now Russian politician Garry Kasparov.He talked about a range of topics which straddled ‘Leadership and Management’ as well as ‘Embracing Failure’.

Kasparov talked of his “brash and arrogant” approach to Anatoly Karpov, but then how got down 0-4 in the first-to-6 match and had to switch to a strategy of ‘survival’. He asserted, “Never let a good crisis go to waste...Don’t just think of surviving, but of winning.” He continued saying, “setbacks are inevitable. You have to be able to recognise the situation in time and change your strategy.’”

While most observers thought Kasparov would be routed, he stuck in and drew then next 17 games only to lose game 27 and be down 0-5! Relentless, he drew the next 4 games and finally won his first at game 32. He persevered drawing more until winning games 47 and 48 at which point the match official controversially terminated the match ‘without result’ citing the health of the players. The previous record length for a world championship had been 34 games and this one was almost half again longer. Most experts feel that despite the toll on his own body (Kasparov lost 10 pounds during the match due to the strain), being younger and fitter he would have gone on to win.

Kasparov commented on the notion of ‘survival of fittest’ saying “Success as an innovator does not mean success as a survivor. The key to survival is adaptability to change...to adapt to a bad situation and take advantage of it. Adaptability trumps everything else.”

He concluded by translating this experience into a key balance to effective leadership “between self-confidence and self-doubt” which I think makes a nifty #23 Distinction: “Leaders have self-confidence; Managers have self-doubt. Both together trump everything with adaptability.”

Technorati Tags: Leadership and Management,Embracing failure,Garry Kasparov,Anatoly Karpov,1984 World Chess Championship

Leaders in London 2008 – Bill George

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:49:32 GMT

Bill George, former Chairman and CEO of Medtronic and currently Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, made quite a point of looking at the Leadership and Management distinction.

“Management is proving the map by which people can find the way, Leadership is providing a compass.”

The goal is to find “true north” or keeping focused on the core aims of the enterprise. Definitely one for the distinction list (up to #22 now).

While leadership provides the core compass, he made sure to underscore the equal role management played in success. “Management changes and change is a good thing...All change, yes all change. It enables opportunity. And Leaders and Managers need to show the way, not merely to find the way.”

Technorati Tags: Bill George,Medtronic,Harvard Business School,leadership and management

Leaders in London 2008 – Leadership and Management

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 08:55:39 GMT

This year was the 5^th Leaders in London I have attended and after a slowish start, the event turned out to be as thought provoking with as many star studded luminaries as ever. As expected, the insights covered all perspective of Leadership, but I am focused here on the dimensions of Leadership and Management and the perspective of risk approaches.

Perhaps my favourite line of the two days had nothing to do Leadership or Management per se, but rather how to cope with the resource shortfall when a manager lets an underperformer go. Richard Reed, founder of Innocent Drinks, could not have put it more clearly when he said, “I would rather have a hole than an asshole.”

I have added Gary Hamel to my list of ‘thought leader heroes’ (see left hand column) after listening to his uncannily insightful dissection of complex topics (on top of always having admired his writing). Gary did assert his own distinction - “Leaders are radical, Managers are prudent.” – which I do not feel is so far off my model which looks at upside (leader) and downside (manager) risk. You could say that both together 'manage the revolution' (combining the titles of his two most prominent works).

Mark Tucker, CEO of Prudential, described the role of ‘CEO’ as that of ‘stewardship’. I like that term because I think it connotes both dimensions of pursuing upside (steer the ship forward) and protecting downside (keep the ship afloat). And his further discussion on the topic demonstrated a deep appreciation for this balance which inspires my 22^nddistinction on the subject. He noted, “You have to have both a defence and an offence. The defence has got to be around cash and capital. The second element is communication. And then there is the offense...you have to look at where you can go...The balance is essential. You have to survive to have a future.” So I would say, a ‘Leaders run the offence; Managers run the defence. Both together make for the biggest margin of victory.”

Technorati Tags: Gary Hamel,Mark Tucker,Leaders in London,leadership and management

Ambitious Failure

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:38:50 GMT

Ambitious Failure

More reflections on risk taking by Guy Kawasaki in this recent USA Today profile: “Ambitious failure, magnificent failure, is a very good thing.”

Technorati Tags: failure,embracing failure,Guy Kawasaki

Alltop

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:06:49 GMT

‘Leadership and Management’ is now featured in Guy Kawasaki’s recent venture Alltop.com which selects top blogs in specific categories. It is one of 68 blogs on Leadership featured including the blogs of Tom Peters, Donald Trump and Forbes.

Technorati Tags: Guy Kawasaki,Leadership and Management,Alltop

Secrets from Failure

Sun, 23 Nov 2008 22:07:01 GMT

Unstructured Ventures did a piece called ‘How to Fail: 25 Secrets Learned Through Failure’ which obviously caught my eye. The 25 secrets cover a wide range of practical and often counter intuitive advice in the context of entrepreneurship which is a classic crucible of embracing failure. My favourites which touched most closely to the theme of ‘failure’ included...

“Learning through experience is far more valuable than learning through planning, prototyping or researching as nothing is more direct, meaningful and visceral than seeing how something works (or doesn’t).”

“14. [Don’t] be stubborn in the face of failure. Instead, be determined in the face of disbelief. The doubters are inevitable and the odds are stacked against entrepreneurs and startups, thus it is crucial to believe in yourself, your company and your solution. Yet that determination can become our biggest weakness when it manifests itself as stubbornness or inflexibility; we can learn more through failures than successes. The difference between determination and stubbornness is the difference between ignoring people and ignoring results. Flexibility is a virtue, not a weakness; error is inevitable, thus accept being wrong and make more mistakes to learn better and faster.”

“17. If you think you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re the fool. If you are indeed the smartest person in the room, then you’ve picked the wrong people to work with. If you’re not the smartest person in the room but think you are, then you’re simply (usually disastrously) wrong. Hire people smarter than you. Work with people smarter than you. Listen to them. Let them lead you. Take the blame for all failures, give away the credit for all successes.”

“18. If everyone takes the same decision using the same information then you’re probably not structuring the choices appropriately. Expose yourself to a more diverse set of opinions and interpretations to re-structure the choices. Differences of opinion are warning signs for decisions; use these warning signals to identify the areas where you need to structure more options in your investment decisions. Since nobody really knows the exact path to success, build flexibility and don’t depend on everything to go right for success.”

“21. Failure is an inevitable by-product of an innovative company, thus it’s important to reward people’s failures along with their successes. Ending a project can be as valuable as pushing forward, since misguided activity wastes resources, time and people’s passion.”

Technorati Tags: failure,entrepreneurship

Change Can Happen

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 13:18:05 GMT

What does a blog about ‘Leadership and Management’ say about perhaps the most significant leadership event of the 21^st century thus far? I’ve posted about the Obama/Biden campaign (The Mid-Life Crisis of the American Dream, Biden’s Getting Back Up), but those entries focused on the reflections about turning adversity to advantage. Now is an ideal juncture to highlight Obama’s strength as a paragon combination of Leadership and Management.

The Leader/Manager balance combination is a very rare breed. As highlighted before here, after years of examination, I have only come up a few examples – Red Auerbach, Richard Noble, Edmund Hillary, Allan Leighton, Konosuke Matsushita and Bill Gates. But in the 20 long months of spotlight scrutiny and endless challenges and challengers on the election trail, all indications are that Obama excels at both.

Obama is certainly a great leader. A leader optimises the upside. Right now, the upside is a ‘Change’ for a better America. His campaign hinged on the vision he was able to paint and the case he was able to make for positive progress from energy policy to foreign affairs.

But it is possibly Obama’s managerial prowess that got him to the White House. A manager minimises downside. And there was plenty of downside to manage. Perhaps the most prominent was the brouhaha over Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The issue had the chance to amplify many voters’ fears about Obama and his Afro-American background, but instead of the intense negativity undermining his momentum, he confronted the issue with poise and insight in a speech of historical proportions on the issue of race ‘A More Perfect Union’. Other downsides deftly managed include the potential defection of Clinton supporters, feared Biden ‘gaffes’ and a campaign of unprecedented scale, challenges and ambition. But the clockwork, grassroots campaign organisation redefined the very definition of a superbly run campaign.

On a very personal note, one of the most prominent impacts of this week’s milestone is that for the first time, our 17 year old son Chase is proud to be an American. Chase landed on the English shores as an infant and for as long as he was aware of things like countries and politics, the Bush administration is the only thing he has ever known. Not only did he chafe at policies that went against our family’s and his own progressive outlook, but the tension was amplified living abroad as the George W isolated America internationally. I especially enjoyed staying up until 4:00 am London time with Chase this Wednesday morning to watch the networks ring in Obama’s victory, experience history being made in America and a reborn American being inspired beside me.

Technorati Tags: Obama,Leadership and management

Digging Failure

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:55:32 GMT

New Leaders extols embracing failure in the context of leadership (a post after this blog’s own heart) in it’s recent article entitled, as you might guess, ‘Embrace Failure’. It calls out the example of Digg.com...

“One example of organic success I like to use is Kevin Rose’s creation of Digg. Kevin predicted that if he could develop a way for friends to link to news stories and vote up the ones that were the best, it would help filter out the really interesting stuff and discard the junk...The moral of the story is to incubate many different ideas in order to find the one or two that the public will embrace. This requires repeated failure until you nail down something that people actually want. If you fear failing, you’ll never progress. If you wait for the perfect time, it will never come. If you need the perfect idea, it will not materialize. If you need tons of cash and lots of people, then God be with you. It is always easier to succeed when someone gives you the capital to fulfil your desires, but when you need to start making money you’ll have no experience doing so.”

Technorati Tags: Digg,embracing failure,leadership and management

In Praise of Failure

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:35:22 GMT

One of the best essays on failure I have seen for some time now is Ode magazine’s In Praise of Failure piece this month. The piece covers territory I have posted on including JK Rowling’s Harvard Commencement address, Michael Jordan’s commentary on how he succeeds through failure, Failure Magazine.

But it also has lots of fresh new material I hadn’t come across before. It looks at Billy Beane who struggled as a baseball player with the New York Mets for years, but when he left playing and started managing the Oakland Athletics, he took them on an unprecedented winning run:

“Experiencing the first had led Beane to the solutions he used to achieve the second. Beane’s reflections on his own career had taught him to respect performance—largely because it was never demanded of him as an emerging player … Talent only matures when harnessed within a personality that is capable of self-improvement. And talent, ironically, has a nasty knack of protecting the talented from the urge to self-improve.” - former cricket star Ed Smith writes in his book What Sport Tells Us About Life.

It also looked at the work of Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck whose “studies show that failure, viewed as a learning experience—in other words, as an opportunity for self-improvement—can build and strengthen new neural pathways in the brain.” Most importantly, she showed that one can teach someone to embrace failure positively which significantly improves their ability to learn...

“In the second part of the study, Dweck conducted an eight-week workshop designed to teach the students with fixed mindsets that they could expand their thinking, describing the brain as a muscle that grows stronger the more it’s used. After the workshop, Dweck says, the group showed a marked improvement in their math grades and study habits. ‘It changed their fear of failure,’ she says. ‘It allowed them to work wholeheartedly and not protect themselves against the possibility of a meaningful failure.’”

The whole piece is filled with failure stories (eg. Viagra, vulcanised rubber, Betamax, Moe Norman, Buckley’s cough syrup), failure quotations (Henry Ford, Winston Churchill) and useful references. A must read for anyone embracing failure.

Warning: Investments may rise or fall

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 09:14:28 GMT

One recurring theme in my examination of ‘Leaders’ versus ‘Managers’ is the tendency of many to extol ‘Leadership’ but talk down ‘Management’ as some sort of inferior leader type. Somehow over the years ‘Management’ has taken on some negative connotations while ‘Leadership’ remains virtuous and aspirational. It will be interesting to see how those perceptions attitudes shift in the coming months and years of the dramatic financial and economic downturn.

The ‘Leader’ bias is fostered through an optimism, hope and preference for upside. So much so in recent years, that everyone – not just ‘those greedy bankers’ – pretty much turned a blind eye to the downsides. The banks were willing to lend, the buyers were willing to borrow, the insurers were willing to cover, the politicians were willing to overlook. No one was saying, ‘Wait here, what about the downside risks?’

You can’t turn on the television without seeing an explosion of graphs going steeply down, but one of the best descriptions of the overall ups and downs was brought to my attention by friend and colleague Steve Clayton in his post yesterday ‘The Economic Situation Explained’ which featured the Sequoia Capital presentation that the slide above was taken from. The presentation’s first half illustrates the up, up, up of the past years, but then it follows it with the downs, downs, downs of the present.

As people’s greed for upside is given a big dose of reality and an appreciation of simply preserving what one has starts to become a challenge in it own right, I wonder whether ‘Management’ (‘Managers minimise downside risk’) will start to assume a new cachet. Maybe at the end of it all, there will be a more even appreciation of the need to balance both Leadership and Management.

Technorati Tags: leadership and management,investment,risk

Endowment Effect

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 07:31:59 GMT

Last week, I attended a seminar sponsored by the London Business School’s Centre for Marketing by David Faro on the topic of the ‘Endowment Effect’...

“Research has uncovered various systematic biases in people's decision making. For example, studies have shown that once someone owns something, he/she places greater value on it than he/she would have before owning it (the "endowment effect"). This is probably one reason for people's inability to part with their unused possessions (The Economist, June 21, 2008). Another type of bias involves distortions of probability, which may explain why consumers often pay substantial sums to insure electrical goods that have only a very small chance of failing”

As the course description above notes, research shows that people have a disproportionate bias to avoid losing something versus the prospect of gaining something of equal underlying value. The concept is very similar to ‘Loss Aversion’ in Prospect Theory as described in Wikipedia...

“In prospect theory, loss aversion refers to the tendency for people strongly to prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains. Some studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains...This leads to risk aversion when people evaluate a possible gain; since people prefer avoiding losses to making gains...Conversely people strongly prefer risks that might possibly mitigate a loss (called risk seeking behavior).

Loss aversion may also explain sunk cost effects. Loss aversion implies that one who loses $100 will lose more satisfaction than another person will gain satisfaction from a $100 windfall. In marketing, the use of trial periods and rebates try to take advantage of the buyer's tendency to value the good more after he incorporates it in the status quo. Note that whether a transaction is framed as a loss or as a gain is very important to this calculation: would you rather get a 5% discount, or avoid a 5% surcharge?”

The ‘Endowment Effect’ and ‘Loss Aversion’ play right at the heart of attitudes to risk that this blog talks about in the two contexts of embracing failure as well as leadership/management. At an individual level, maybe a reason to ‘embrace failure’ is that our natural instincts are overly set to avoid it. Only by a concerted effort to accept the downsides gets us to have a truly rational balance between upside and downside. In other words, being more willing to take the downside risk of an electrical good failing will leave one economically better off in most cases. At an organisational level, a critical role of Leadership is to counteract people’s natural tendency to avoid loss by refocusing them on the inspiring potential and achievable path to upside opportunity.

Technorati Tags: leadership and management,endowment effect,London Business School,Davie Faro,loss aversion,embracing failure

As Present As Possible

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:38:04 GMT

This week my British colleagues ribbed me as the American in the room about the Ryder Cup which like my many of my fairway shots went right over my head landing deep in the rough of clueless obliviousness (I don’t watch much golf on TV). But timely to that international showcase, I thought I’d highlight a great piece on ‘embracing failure’ applied to golf in Hilton Tudhope’s ‘Golfer’s Journal’.

I’ve excerpted a few highlights below. In particular like his point that embracing failure helps one be ‘as present as possible in the moment of swinging’ a skill as critical in life as it is in gold. One of the legendary capabilities of Tiger Woods is his incredible concentration. This focus was not engendered through years of quiet reflection on a tranquil course. Instead, it was famously fostered by his father’s training who embraced every possible failure of tranquillity that could happen making loud noises and distractions while Tiger shot.

“A guy in my foursome stood behind his ball, looked up the fairway and said, ‘OK, Jack, don’t suck.’ Admittedly, it was a pretty effective release valve for first-tee jitters. The rest of us shared a not-very-convincing laugh that said, ‘yeah, please don’t let me suck today.’ Reflecting on both the comment and my immediate reaction to it after the tournament, it seemed to me that I was saying to myself, at some level of awareness, ‘you’ve messed up before, let’s hope it doesn’t happen today.’ And that got me to thinking about failure in golf, and perhaps anywhere else I care to look in my life. For most of us, golf is a game rife with failure.

Let’s face it: screwing up is integral to the game of golf for everyone and fear that it will happen again is one of the greatest producers of tension in the game. Here’s my question: Wouldn’t we be better off finding some way to embrace this essential nature of our games rather than being stuck in an endless cycle of hope and fear? Instead of stashing unintended outcomes to the large sack labelled ‘I Suck’ that we drag to the golf course, can we have some other form of relationship to our inevitable failures?

I believe there are ways I can make failure work for me rather than against me. Seems to me I need to be as present as possible in the moment of swinging. Most important, I believe, is forgiveness. I don’t stand over a shot with the intention to do less than my best. But I go unconscious. I have blind spots. I add effort. And failure happens. As someone sagely said, forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past – and how different golf would be with that frame of mind.”

Technorati Tags: golf,Ryder Cup,Tiger Woods,failure

'Produce Some Crap'

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 13:02:12 GMT

Graf Nature Photography has a piece on ‘Embracing Failure’ which underscores how failure is not just in inevitable, but it is ‘an actual requirement’ for great photography and ‘expanding creativity’…

“Quite a few folks talk about failure as part of the process of learning, especially when it comes to expanding creativity. The videos I posted from Ira Glass talk about it being part of the process - an actual requirement. One of the bottom lines I took away from those videos … you are going to produce some crap - so get over it.”

When I was a travel writer in West Africa, I had the opportunity to work with a number of professional photographers. While getting many of the fundamentals correct such as the lighting, angle and apparatus was important, I was struck at how much of getting that great shot was down to the brute force of simply taking large numbers of shots fully knowing that most of them would be failures and never used. I was astonished by the huge bags of film they brought and how quickly they went through a roll. Of course, now the age of digital photography has turned the ‘lots of shots’ into near limitless amount of shots as the failures have a near zero cost.

And if you are interested in photography, you should check out two budding Microsoft technologies – Deepzoom and Photosynth – which enable some pretty amazing things with digital photography.

Joining Leaders, Leaving Managers

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 19:43:30 GMT

Yesterday, I attended Microsoft UK’s semi-annual Manager Forum where all of the team and group managers get together for training, networking and various business updates. The centrepiece of the day was a session of ‘Top 10 Tips for Manager’ by Larry Shulman of TSO Consulting. He made one nod in particular to the balancing of upside and downside, leadership and management, describing the challenge as “The way we get ahead with all of the necessary policies and rules [management] while exploiting that artistic creativity [leadership]”

Larry covered a range of well presented prescriptions (eg. Enter the Fundamental State of Leadership. Ask them how they want to be managed. Gain respect by giving it. Be clear. Etc.) one of which included the Marcus Buckingham observation that “People join companies but leave managers.”

That simple statement got me thinking about the Leader-Manager distinction. Would it work to say that ‘People join Leaders, but leave Managers’? Or perhaps more clearly put, ‘People join great Leadership, but leave bad Management.’ The premise is consistent with one of the standard requirements for Leadership is ability to ‘bring people along with them,’ in other words, getting them to ‘join’.

I thought of my own experience joining Microsoft. I was definitely inspired by the leadership of Bill Gates in general, and Dave Cutler in particular with his vision for NT (I was a Mac user, Unix developer and the office was connected by Netware…the notion of an easy-to-use application-cum-networking server was a brilliant). That said, I did really hit it off with Simon Witts, my hiring manager who I thought would be great to work with. But it was probably the Leadership of Microsoft that really inspired me taking the Microsoft offer over others.

Technorati Tags: leadership and management, Marcus Buckingham

Changers and Contributors

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 08:18:02 GMT

There are three kinds of people in this world…

• Those who think there are 3 kinds of people in this world…
• And those who don’t…
• And, hey, where did this one come from?

I liked Hugh’s taxonomy on ‘Changers’ and ‘Contributors’ (and ‘Coasters’) and the categories map to ‘Leaders’ and ‘Managers’ dichotomy respectively. It feels as if Hugh has implicitly ranked his three categories in order of value. In that context, I would compare ‘Coasters’ to my own third category of ‘Politicians.’ ‘Politicians’ want to ‘get paid’, but have no real substantive change nor find a job to do well. As I have argued time and again, and despite being a card-carrying ‘Blue Monster’ acolyte, I think it that it is a dangerous assertion that ‘Changers’ are necessarily more valuable than ‘Contributors’. Depending on the context, either can add major value and a shortage of either can hamstring an organisation.

As the underground mascot of the Blue Monster implies, Microsoft is indeed ‘Changer’ heavy amongst its ranks. But that is not always the best thing. In the past, a big thing that hurt Microsoft’s reputation was predictability. A lot of our past unpredictability derived from being a company of intrapreneurs who were typically more interested in re-inventing their own new big idea than strongly executing and building on prior initiatives. In recent years, Microsoft has found more discipline and balance in this regard with the critical ‘contribution’ of the ‘Contributors’ who have focused on refinement, efficacy and iterative improvement more than the next shiny new object.

Technorati Tags: leadership, leaders and manager, Blue Monster

The ‘Mid’ Life Crisis of the American Dream

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:25:13 GMT

The part of Biden’s acceptance that really struck me was the centrepiece of his speech talking about the American Dream. He talked about the crisis affecting not pockets of America, but pervasively across ‘middle’ America. He talked about the essence of the ‘Dream’ being that ‘their tomorrows would be better that their yesterdays’…

“Ladies and gentlemen, but today, today that American dream feels like it’s slowly slipping away. I don’t have to tell you that. You feel it every single day in your own lives. I’ve never seen a time when Washington has watched so many people get knocked down without doing anything to help them get back up…And, folks, these are not isolated discussions among families down on their luck. These are common stories among middle-class people who worked hard their whole life, played by the rules, on the promise that their tomorrows would be better than their yesterdays. That promise is the promise of America. It defines who we are as a people. And now it’s in jeopardy. I know it. You know it.”

And just this week, even more reports came out underscoring Biden’s observations. The comments evoked so many of my reflections in what turned out to be one of my most popular posts last year – The Death of Dreams. One of my conclusions is that being faced with a ‘mid-life crisis’ where things are not working out as expected or hoped, calls for ‘Change’…which happens to be the very theme of the Obama campaign.

[I couldn’t resist illustrating today’s post with another of Hugh’s fine pieces on dream derailment though, in the context of the American election, it might read better as ‘America spent eight years…’]

Technorati Tags: Biden, Obama, dreams, American Dream

Biden's Getting Back Up

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 08:32:11 GMT

I have been an Obama fan since he was first brought to my attention by one of my great Leader/Manager heroes, Colin Powell long before the brouhaha of the presidential election. Back in 2006 at the Leaders in London conference, Powell was asked who he thought the great leaders of the day were and the first name out of his mouth was Barak Obama. The response had people like me scribbling in their notebook of this name most had never even heard of never mind held up by one of the great leaders of all time as one of the great leaders of present time.

As a result, I followed the recent Democratic National Convention with great interest and was delighted with the some great deliveries of some great messages. I was particularly taken by a central part of the speech by Joe Biden accepting his nomination for the vice presidential slot. He talked a lot about picking oneself up again after being knocked down.

“You know, my mom taught her children — all the children who flocked to our house — that you’re defined by your sense of honor and you’re redeemed by your loyalty. She believes that bravery lives in every heart, and her expectation is that it will be summoned. Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable. As a child, I stuttered, and she lovingly would look at me and tell me, “Joey, it’s because you’re so bright you can’t get the thoughts out quickly enough.” When I was not as well-dressed as the other kids, she’d look at me and say, “Joey, oh, you’re so handsome, honey, you’re so handsome.” And when I got knocked down by guys bigger than me — and this is the God’s truth — she sent me back out and said, “Bloody their nose so you can walk down the street the next day.” And that’s what I did. You know — and after the accident (car accident which killed Biden’s wife), she told me, she said, “Joey, God sends no cross that you cannot bear.” And when I triumphed, my mother was quick to remind me it was because of others.”

Catherine Eugenia Finnegan Biden fostered resilience, saw the silver linings in shortcomings and nurtured her quite remarkable son to rise each time he fell.

Technorati Tags: Obama, failure, adversity, Biden, Democratic National Convention

Champions Embrace Adversity

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 13:22:44 GMT

I attended my 14th Microsoft annual sales and marketing event, now known as ‘Microsoft Global Exchange’ or ‘MGX’ in Atlanta a week ago. The event is a chance to gather together, celebrate the successes of the recently concluded fiscal year and set the course for the one ahead. It combines a range of strategic plans, technology training, nifty demos and general inspiration for the troops. The host is COO Kevin Turner who always invests a good chunk to his keynote to the topic of ‘Leadership.’ It was music to my eyes to see one of his slides with the phrase ‘Champions Embrace Adversity’. He used to comment to discuss the increasing press around economic challenges ahead and while respecting the difficulties facing many companies and customers, the situation presents an all the more acute opportunity and imperative to demonstrate business value of technology and Microsoft’s offerings.

Technorati Tags: adversity, Microsoft

Blogged That, Got the T-Shirt

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:28:42 GMT

W+K London (“an independent, creatively-led communications agency…part of the Wieden + Kennedy worldwide network”) has now come up with the logo and T-shirt logo for “Embracing Failure”. Their corporate blog did a post on the topic and talked about how the sentiment inspired an agency to have the ‘confidence to be honest’…

“I think we're pretty comfortable with admitting that we're not perfect. We make mistakes. We lose pitches. We make bad decisions. We have the words 'embrace failure' written on a big illuminated sign in one of our meeting rooms. (Aptly, the illumination doesn't work.) We recognise that if you're going to test the boundaries then sometimes you'll fail. But that's OK. It's not trying that's not OK. You don't achieve extraordinary results through ordinary efforts.”

Technorati Tags: failure

First over the Trenches, Last over the Bridge

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 10:54:51 GMT

One of the most intense proving grounds of Leadership and Management is the battlefield. The risk based model of leadership is at its extreme where the risks entailed are life and death. It is a domain I have looked at before (eg. 100 Decisive Battles from Ancient Times to Present, Powell v. Rumsfeld) and I’ve found it curious that great leaders are often described as being the first as well as the last. They are the first ones out of the trenches, up the hill, leading the charge, but they are also the last ones ‘over the bridge’, off the battlefield or off the ship. This duality inspires my Distinction #19:

“The Leader is the first man out of the trenches onto the battlefield; The Manager is the last man over the bridge off the battlefield. Both together ensure committed and cohesive fight for a cause.”

One of the most eloquent oratories expressing this sentiment (and a brilliant example of ‘Level 5 - Personhood’ leadership) comes from the movie We Were Soldiers based on the legendary Lt. Colonel Hal Moore time in Vietnam.

“I can't promise you that I will bring you all home alive. But this I swear, before you and before Almighty God, that when we go into battle, I will be the first to set foot on the field, and I will be the last to step off, and I will leave no one behind. Dead or alive, we will all come home together. So help me, God.”

Technorati Tags: We Were Soldiers, Mel Gibson, Hal Moore, Leadership and Management, battlefield

Bill Gates' Last Day

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:33:18 GMT

The media have been awash with stories of Bill Gates’ ‘Last Day’ as a full time employee of the company he started 33 years ago, so it’s only suiting for me to chime in with my own reflections. I have already blogged about Bill on several occasions: ‘Unavoidable Pain’ (May 08), ‘Hiring Failures by a Retiring Success’ (Feb-08), ‘Luck and Skill’ (Jan 07), ‘Deliberate Mistakes’ (Sep-06), ‘Lousy Teacher’ (Jul-06), ‘Embracing Failure’ (Nov-05).

One of my most prominent posts was ‘The Bill-Steve Leadership Partnership’ (Jun 06) in which I speculated about a complementarity between Bill and Steve’s Strategic and Operational concentrations of focus. I does seem that in this well anticipated step-down, Microsoft have replaced those skills with not one person, but three. Craig Mundie and Ray Ozzie inject long-term strategic focus, while COO Kevin Turner has intensified a nearer term (quarterly) concentration on operational excellence

Bill has had a range of good-bye’s in what has become his farewell tour this past year, but one of the most poignant was the company’s internal ‘Town Meeting’ held on the very last day itself. It turned into double-act chat between Steve and Bill reflecting on times as far back as their childhood and looking ahead to the future of Microsoft and Bill’s work with the foundation. In the theme of this blog here, embracing failure, Bill once again reflected quite philosophically about the positive outcomes that have come from many failures endured…

“Microsoft is such a hard core company, we are always thinking about what we need to do better and thinking about the future. It’s not really in our culture to just sit around and think about what we’re achieved and what we’ve done well…Yes, we make mistakes and we know it, but we come back and learn from those things and a lot of our best work is a result of that…Do we think in our own office that this software is perfect?...No, not perfect. You know one of the newspapers had some email that I sent about how maybe Windows could have been better at something and they said, ‘This is a shocking piece of email…shocking!’ And I said, ‘What do you think I do all day?? Sending email like that, that is my job. That’s what it’s all about. We’re here to make things better.”

Then in the Q&A, “What was your biggest screw up at Microsoft and how did you learn from it?” Bill responded, “Our biggest mistake comes when we don’t see where software might go in the future. Where we’re working on it early. By the time something is really popular, it’s really maybe 3 or 4 years after you’ve done the work to get there and so when we got it right betting on graphic interface even though we told our competitors that they should, we tried to get them to do it, they didn’t. By the time it was clear it was a mistake, they were in deep trouble because we had done the work and we were there. So in software you’ve got to anticipate the turns in the road…But there are many (turns) that we missed. The search and advertising thing, they way that has grown up to be so important, that’s probably the one you’d pick right now and say ‘Geez, that’s a big mistake.’ And it’s going to be harder. If we had started 3 years earlier and seen how important that is, that would be a lot easier than having to do it coming from behind. When we miss a big change and we don’t get great people on it, that is the most dangerous thing for us…and it has happened many times. It’s okay…but the less the better.”

Steve Ballmer added a bit later, “In the old days, Bill and I used to have a list of our biggest screw ups. We stopped that after the list got too long…And if I think that we were to make it today, it would amount to hundreds of pages.”

These comments characterise one of the most prominent qualities of Bill…his sincere and constant humility. He leaves Microsoft one of the greatest business successes the world has ever seen, and yet his parting comments talk insightfully about his failures.

Technorati Tags: Bill Gates, Microsoft, failure, Steve Ballmer

Inviting Criticism

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:22:11 GMT

Speaking of Guy Kawasaki recalls another variation of embracing failure and that is embracing your critics – confronting your at least alleged failures face to face. Guy is a renowned Microsoft gadfly (though he holds few punches for anyone including his old employer Apple). Who better to invite to Microsoft’s premier web developer event – Mix – for the premier session, an interview with CEO Steve Ballmer?

Guy’s very first line of the day was, “Who would have thought that I would ever be at a Microsoft event??” He goes on to add, “First of all I can’t tell you, I got this email out of the blue saying would you like to be the interviewer for Steve Ballmer at Mix 2008. I really thought that it was some kind of spoof. Surely someone doesn’t care about his career at Microsoft. Do you realise how career limiting that could be? But lo and behold here I am. I’m really happy to be here. Steve never invites me – Steve Jobs – to do this at MacWorld!”

Technorati Tags: Guy Kawasaki, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft, Mix

Don't Worry, Be Crappy

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:42:22 GMT

Following up this week’s earlier post ‘Throwing Away Ideas,’ Toby Moores also referred to Guy Kawasaki’s assertion that the conventional notion of ‘Release, Test, Build’ should be turned on its head and become ‘Release, Test, Build’ in the world online world of community feedback and input. Guy goes through this notion in one of his keynotes in the section ‘Ship Then Test’ or what he colourfully refers to as ‘Don’t Worry, Be Crappy’. In clip above, Guy relate this concept to the Macintosh, but for the context of the whole presentation, it is best to go to his ‘The Art of Innovation’ presentation (24:14 in the index on the right hand column) where he says the following…

“It is my experience that entrepreneurs that succeed…Don’t worry, be crappy. By this I mean, when you have a revolution, when it is literally the next curve, it is 10 times better, it is okay to have elements of crappiness. The first laser printer was too slow. It only printed one side. It only printed on 8 ½ by 11. $7000. It was a piece of crap. But it was a revolutionary piece of crap. It was 10 times better than the best daisy wheel printer. If you wait for the perfect world where chips are fast enough and chips are cheap enough…and with the Macintosh if you wait for the perfect world where there are big hard disks, and there bigger monitors, and there’s slots and there’s colours, and there’s wireless and there is all these perfect things, you will never ship. The way it works is ‘ship then test’. ‘Ship then test’. (except life sciences). That’s the way it works. Windows users are going to find out about this with Vista. Ship then test. Don’t worry be crappy. I’m telling you that if you have something truly revolutionary, it’s okay if your first laser printer has elements of crap to it, it’s okay if your first online bookstore has problems with it. But you have to be revolutionary. People will accept a lot of stuff if you are truly changing the world.”

Technorati Tags: Guy Kawasaki, failure, innovation

Throwing Away Ideas

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:15:40 GMT

Today’s blog stemmed from an event I’ve started going when schedule permits where real flesh and blood blogging folk get together face to face for human interaction – the London Social Media Café. Started by veteran UK digerati Lloyd Davis, the LSMC meets on Friday mornings at what is becoming the Guerbois of the London social media scene, the Coach and Horses pub.

A few weeks ago, Toby Moores of Sleepydog led a discussion about the influence that bloggers play which led onto a discussion on various dimensions to the creative process. Toby talked about his business whose focus is generating creative ideas and noted, “We need to have 200 ideas to get one good one.” To which one of the group commented, ‘If you have enough ideas, then you can be prepared to throw away quite a few.’

Willingness to come up with the failed ideas you won’t use gets you to the good ones that change your business and more

Technorati Tags: failure, creativity, social media

Question Time

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 06:50:16 GMT

A nifty feature of LinkedIn is the ability to raise questions to the community. Recently, Vassilis N. Siakos asked the question: “A good Manager does things right, while a good Leader does the ...right things. What does it take to do the right things right?” The question prompted 9 pages of responses.

The lion’s share seem to articulate the model that ‘Leaders initiate direction and Manager follow process to get there’ or more simply the ‘what’ versus the ‘how’, the ‘ends’ versus the ‘means’. An example is Yasushi Suenaga’s ‘Managers cook following recipe created by Leaders.’ This articulation maps somewhat to the upside/downside model of leadership if one interprets the ‘direction’ as the opportunity and upside, and one sees ‘following process’ and insurance to avoid not getting there.

The second most common characterisation was the parallel with ‘Effectiveness and Efficiency’. As Jerome Jewell outlined, “Doing things right = Efficiency. Doing the right things = Effectiveness. The combination of the two = Productivity.” I’m not a fan of this model applied to Leadership and Management. I think effectiveness and efficiency are more applicable to Blanchard ‘Situational Leadership’ which describes different leadership proficiencies required along the lifecycle of a project or undertaking.

Some of my other favourite responses included…

"A good leader asks the right questions, whereas a good manager finds the right answers." – Peter Nguyen

“Leaders produce dramatic significant change, help an organisation to adapt in a changing environment. Managers create and maintain order and predictability, help an organisation to be on time and on budget” – Rod Makin quoting John Kotter

Technorati Tags: Leadership and management, John Kotter, LinkedIn

Reunion Wizardry

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:27:26 GMT

This week I celebrated perhaps the most notable milestone a Harvard graduate can have in marking the successes and failures of their life…the 25th Reunion. The event is a five day affair complete with cocktails, games (the rowing team convened for a ceremonial row down the Charles River), presentations and assorted gatherings. The university produces an 1,134 page “25^th Anniversary Report” where everyone in the class submits an update on their life’s journey usually replete with quite humbling achievements.

And in and amongst this celebration of success and accomplishment rang out J K Rowling’s sterling Commencement Address espousing the embrace of failure (video link above and excerpted highlights below)…

“On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure…

Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools. What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure…

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment. However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all in which case, you fail by default. Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.”

Speaking with classmate Gwen Knapp about how the address was just as apropos to the 25^th reunion class (which is honoured by processing into the ceremony and given their seats actually on the stage with Rowling) noting, “At this point everyone has experienced some sort of loss, and it has made them better people.” It was an inspiring week between Rowling’s wizardly words and reconnecting with so many long time friends in the prime of their lives coloured by both proud accomplishments and enriching failures.

Fellow housemates and crewmates at joining in the 25th celebrations

Technorati Tags: Rowling, failure, Harvard, reunion