When people talk about Steve Jobs, they usually focus on his triumphant return to Apple. The company was on the brink of collapse. Jobs came back and lead one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history. Under his leadership, Apple created iconic products and became the most valuable company in the world.
Yet we rarely hear much about his years in the wilderness, especially his failures at NeXT Computer. It was the missteps there, like poor product-market fit and lack of software development, that informed his later successes. You can’t fully understand Jobs’ success unless you follow the entire journey, stumbles and all.
I get the same feeling every time I see a protest march. People often look back at the 1963 March on Washington as a model for change. But there have been roughly 300 marches on Washington, and that’s the only notable success. If we want to drive real change—in business, activism, or anywhere else—we need to study not just the rare wins, but all the failures too.
It’s become increasingly common for people to justify wacky ideas—ranging from Holocaust denial to miracle cures—by claiming that they are doing their own research. Originally coined by conspiracy theorist Bill Cooper in the 1990s, the phrase has become a rallying call for those who seek alternatives to mainstream expertise.
Yet doing your own research is much harder than it would first appear. As Leonard Read pointed out in his classic essay, I, Pencil, even an object as simple as a pencil requires expertise in everything from mining, chemistry, logistics and myriad other things to produce it. It is far too complex for any single person to do it by themselves.
Pencils are far less complicated than most things we have to make decisions about. Anybody can, of course, access papers in scientific journals and see what they have to say, but unless you’re an expert you will be unable to evaluate the validity of the materials and methods used to carry out the research. To benefit from expertise, you need to learn how to listen critically.
In 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States, Teresa Shook, an Indiana lawyer who had retired to Hawaii, posted a simple message on Facebook: “We have to march.” Within hours, her post went viral and what began as a single voice quickly snowballed into a nationwide call to action.
An experienced activist, Vanessa Wruble, began organizing a formal effort that included fashion designer Bob Bland and recruited three prominent activists of color, Carmen Perez, Linda Sarsour, and Tamika Mallory, to serve as co-chairs. They wanted to address the “whiteness problem” and build a more diverse, representative coalition.
Tensions soon flared. The women of color were wary of being tokenized, while some of the white organizers didn’t appreciate being lectured about their “blind spots.” For a time, they managed to paper over these divisions, but it was only a matter of time before the movement unraveled and, despite a well attended march, the women failed to further their cause.
Leaders begin their role with the best of intentions. No one starts out by thinking, “I want to make everyone’s lives miserable and undermine their performance.” Yet, we know many do just that. Most are thrust into the role, with very little training or development, because they were good at something else or there was simply a hole to be filled.
In Good Boss, Bad Boss, organizational psychologist Bob Sutton writes, “Devoting relentless attention to doing one good thing after another—however small—is the only path I know to becoming and remaining a great boss” and that’s good advice. But before you can become a great boss, you first need to stop being a bad one.
The first step? Letting go of the beliefs that undermine your leadership effectiveness. While nobody sets out to adopt counterproductive ideas, certain myths creep in over time and shape decision-making. These misconceptions lead to poor actions that harm both leaders and their teams. Here are three of the most common stupid things to watch out for:
On February 12th, 2004, at the direction of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and in defiance of California Law, city officials began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in what would come to be known as the Winter of Love. Coming just in time for Valentines Day, it captured the imagination of the LGBTQ community.
Yet the backlash was swift. Within weeks, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment declaring that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. Conservative groups swung into action and in 2008 were successful in placing Proposition 8, a law so harsh that many believe that it paved the way for marriage rights.
Saul Alinsky warned that every revolution inspires a counterrevolution. Out instinct is to try to silence dissent, but that will always backfire. There is a better way. Rather than try to overpower those that oppose your idea, you can create a dilemma that forces them to discredit themselves. By inciting a crackdown, that’s exactly what Newsom’s ploy did.
When I was living in Moscow in 2003, I couldn’t help thinking, “This must be what Weimar Germany felt like. These people don’t know that they lost the Cold War. They think their leaders betrayed them and surrendered. They will try to dominate again.” At the time, I wondered if I was being a bit alarmist. Today, it’s clear that I was not.
I had come to Moscow with the perspective of having spent more than 6 years in the region, most of it in Poland, where the country was rapidly modernizing and westernizing. The fall of the Soviet Union was seen as unambiguously positive there. In Moscow though, you could deeply feel its sense of loss of imperial identity and its visceral desire to restore its national pride.
It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, like the end of history. The conflict between communism and capitalism had come to an abrupt end. Just one model remained. But, as Fukuyama also noted—and as I saw firsthand in Moscow—the human urge to assert identity remained. What we were witnessing wasn’t an end, but the beginning of a major realignment.
My friend Jessica Kriegel often warns leaders about the action trap, the mistaken belief that if we just do something we’ll get results. We’re conditioned to have a bias for action, to do something rather than nothing. Yet actions without a sound strategy are doomed to fail. We need to avoid the trap of doing stuff just to make ourselves feel better. Action is no substitute for discipline.
The truth is that good ideas fail all of the time for all kinds of reasons. The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. There are also cultural norms and rituals that are rarely obvious. And beneath the surface, there are always unseen obstacles that can derail even the best-intended efforts.
Until you identify, analyze and understand exactly what your actions are targeted at, you’re just wasting time and resources. Even worse, as you lurch from one failed action to another, you create stress, erode trust and fuel change fatigue, making future actions even less likely to succeed. Smart leaders learn to avoid this cycle. Here’s how they do that effectively.
People who are passionate about change usually start with answers. They have a solution to a problem they are enthusiastic about and are excited to implement it. Questions usually revolve around communication. They want to make people aware of their idea and give them the knowledge and understanding to make good use of it.
That’s why change management consultants tell us to to start by building awareness, desire and knowledge before moving on to training to provide people with the ability to implement change. They assume that if people just understand the idea, they will embrace it. That’s almost never true and it usually doesn’t end well.
The truth is that a big awareness campaign is likely to trigger those who hate the idea to immediately start working to undermine what you’re trying to achieve in order to kill it before it even starts. To bring genuine transformation about you need to see the world as it really is and ask yourself hard questions. Here are three that you’ll want to start with:
It’s hard to believe that ChatGPT launched in November 2022, just two and a half years ago. In that short span, AI has become deeply embedded in our personal and professional lives, often serving as a constant companion: answering questions, offering feedback, and sometimes even pointing us in new directions.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that many are asking what it all means for the future. Are we heading toward a utopia of super-productive machines and widespread abundance? Or are we hurtling inevitably toward a Matrix-like dystopian nightmare in which we are subjugated by machines and the oligarchs who control them?
History is long and varied, so there are plenty of examples to support both the utopian and dystopian view. The future is unknowable. Yet by this point, we know a lot about innovation so we have some good models to make judgements. When it comes to technology, jobs and the economy, we need to look at three effects: displacement, productivity and reinstatement.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have two modes of thinking. The first is emotive, intuitive and fast. The second is rational, deliberative and slow. As humans we evolved to make split-second decisions in life-or-death situations. Our slow-moving rational minds don’t automatically engage unless we deliberately focus.
Cal Newport, in his new book Slow Productivity, makes a similar point about work. In our hectic modern lives, we need to optimize tasks, such as returning emails, dropping off kids and managing schedules, to keep things moving. We need to do this quickly, because there are other people depending on us to get things done.
Yet there is also a different mode of working. Often, this type of activity is not pursued with a specific goal in mind, but rather as an exploration. There are stops and starts, dead ends and blind alleys, as well as long fallow periods that can span months or even years. This, however, is the kind of work that makes significant impacts on the world. Not all who wander are lost.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
