On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy addressed the nation from Rice University. “We choose to go to the moon,” he said. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
The speech galvanized the country into one of the most vast collective efforts in history, involving politicians, scientists, engineers and the general public to achieve that goal. Perhaps even more importantly, it imbued the country with a sense of shared purpose that carried over into our business, personal and community life.
Today, that sense of shared purpose is much harder to achieve. Our societies are more diverse and we no longer expect to spend an entire career at a single company, or even a single industry. That’s why the most essential element of a leader’s job today isn’t so much to plan and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief in a common mission.
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So summer is finally here, but not the way we thought it would be. Although most places have opened up, we still need to be careful and keep our distance. Some places, unfortunately, are having second waves and may have to shut down again. Life in the age of Covid is never normal or easy.
Yet we can still enjoy ourselves. Pools and beaches are opening, albeit with restrictions, and even a global pandemic can’t stop the warm weather. That’s what makes summer such a great time to catch up on reading, hours of lying in the sun with nothing better to do than spending time with a good book.
When I’m anxious about something, I usually try to learn more about it. Although the facts aren’t always pleasant, I find that once I understand something, I’m able to follow events in a more constructive way and that, at least, gives me a feeling of calm. That’s why this summer, I’m focusing my reading list on books that will help you understand the Covid crisis better. read more…
Clearly, we live in a time of great flux. First, #MeToo, then Covid-19 and now a new racial consciousness in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. The most important task for leaders over the coming years will be to guide their organizations through change. Make no mistake, it won’t be easy. Important changes always encounter staunch resistance.
In Cascades, I researched dozens of change efforts ranging from historic turnarounds at major corporations like IBM and Alcoa, to political revolutions like the color revolutions in Eastern Europe and social movements like the struggle for civil and LGBT rights in America. Every one had to overcome entrenched opposition to succeed.
Yet probably the most impressive strategy for overcoming opposition I came across was how the Serbian movement called Otpor devised a plan to turn arrests to their advantage. The key to their strategy was to study their opposition, anticipate its actions and leverage them for their own benefit. Business leaders can use similar strategies to drive change forward.
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Humans tend to think in a linear fashion. If something is growing, we expect it to keep growing. If it is decreasing, we expect it to continue to decrease. We are natural trend watchers and instinctively look for patterns. Yet it is often the discontinuities, rather than the continuities, that have the biggest impact.
The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot referred to this cycle of continuity punctuated by discontinuity as “Noah effects and Joseph effects.” Joseph effects, as in the biblical story, support long periods of continuity. Noah effects, on the other hand, are like a big storm creating a massive flood of discontinuity, washing away the previous order.
Throughout history, inflection points have defined the future. Business models, built on top of Joseph effects, are disrupted by Noah effects, creating new opportunities for those who are able to identify and adapt. Today, we’re in the midst of a series of inflection points in what was already a time of enormous flux. We can’t predict the future but we can prepare for it.
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We tend to think of transformational leaders emerging fully actualized. We look for early indications of promise, sure that there must have been nascent signs of greatness from the start. It’s hard to imagine those that attain the highest level of achievement are anything less than destined for greatness.
While talent clearly plays an important role in success, most talented people live their lives without any great distinction. Some attain some moderate level of achievement, but simply go unnoticed. Others even fail miserably. A few hit on the right mix of luck, skill, time and place that catapults them to greatness.
What’s interesting about the stories behind so many of those of remarkable achievement is how they often begin with heartbreaking tales of desperation and failure. Yet, those failures didn’t define their path. In fact, very much the opposite. It is what they learned from their early struggles and failures that helped make them the historic figures we know today.
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In 1993, after being named IBM’s CEO as it was quickly careening toward insolvency, Lou Gerstner said, “There’s been a lot of speculation as to when I’m going to deliver a vision of IBM, and what I’d like to say to all of you is that the last thing IBM needs right now is a vision.” It was a peculiar thing to say, especially for an executive renown for his strategic acumen, and people took note.
What Gerstner meant was that IBM was broken internally. It had lost sight of itself and fallen into infighting. It no longer sought to serve the customer. Instead of collaborating, executives engaged in endless turf battles. Until IBM’s culture and values could be brought back into harmony with the market, it didn’t matter what the vision was.
Today, America has a similar plight. We are undergoing profound shifts in our racial makeup, urban concentration and generational demography in the midst of great geopolitical and technological disruption. We need to build a new social contract based on shared values that align with those shifts and, until we do that, any vision for the future will be irrelevant.
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The moon landing in 1969 was, in many ways, the high point of the American century. Since then, we’ve been beset by scandals like Watergate, Iran-Contra and two presidential impeachments, mired in never-ending wars that we don’t win, while increasingly encumbered by rising debts and income inequality amid falling productivity growth. Incomes have stagnated while education and healthcare costs have soared.
Yet in an essay written back in February, just before the Covid-19 crisis, Ross Douthat wrote that these apparent woes are actually signs of success. In effect, he argued that we lack major technological breakthroughs because we become so technologically advanced and we lack economic progress because we’ve become so prosperous.
Even then, it was a strange and somewhat maddening position to take. Why would Douthat, an intelligent and insightful man, write such things? Because he so wanted to believe them that he went in search for facts to support them. Many of us have been doing the same. Yet the Covid-19 crisis has unmasked us and it’s time to start facing up to the truth.
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Within hours of planes crashing into the World Trade Center on 9-11, stories began circulating that it was not, in fact, the planes that caused the towers to collapse, but explosives planted inside by someone with access. Since then a number of conspiracy theories have circulated that people ranging from government employees to Wall Street Traders were responsible for the attack.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that there are no shortage of alleged schemes about the coronavirus epidemic, from theories that the disease is caused by 5G mobile networks to that Bill Gates cooked it up as part of a global plot to electronically track us through vaccinations. Even the president’s son has a pet theory.
The simple truth is that when a tragic event happens, we lose our sense of control and there will never be a shortage of hucksters willing to take advantage of that, for profit or for other reasons. Often, these are elaborate narratives and can seem very convincing. Yet the schemes tend to have common characteristics which we can use to spot and nullify their effect.
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“Greed…is good,” declared Gordon Gekko, the legendary character from the 80s hit film Wall Street. “Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind”
The line resonated because it answered a question that people cared deeply about at the time, “how can we become more efficient?” In the face of heightened competition from Japan’s doctrine of total quality management, American firms appeared too sclerotic to compete. Corporate raiders preaching shareholder capitalism offered an easy answer.
The results are clear. Since then the stock market has crashed a number of times, the last one resulting in a Great Recession. Productivity growth has been depressed for half a century. The incidence of extreme weather events and pandemics like coronavirus is on the rise. Clearly we’ve been getting the wrong answers. It’s time we started asking different questions.
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Like a lot of people, I’ve been participating in group Zoom calls with people from my past lately. One that’s especially engaging is a group from my high school class that meets once a week. It’s interesting to hear people from very different parts of the country share their experiences in the type of candid way that only old acquaintances can.
Unfortunately, a number of my classmates were infected with the virus. One, an executive at a paramedic services company, was filling in on the front lines when he got it, even though he had on full protective gear. He believes he got it through his eyes. Others spoke of weeks in bed, unable to move.
So I find it bizarre when I see other people I know who deny the severity of the crisis. In most cases, these are otherwise reasonable people, who watch YouTube videos or other alternative sources of media that minimize the crisis or portray it as a hoax. As hard as it is to believe, these people aren’t crazy. Rather, they are falling prey to very common cognitive biases.
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