Labyrinth- the Art of Decision-Making

by Pawel Motyl

  Advance Praise for Labyrinth

  “Astute, thought-provoking, and bold. Pawel Motyl has brought important case studies to life brilliantly, revealing deeper lessons for anyone in a decision-making role. This unique book is an essential contribution in truly understanding executive leadership.”

  Marshall Goldsmith Thinkers50 #1 in Leadership and World’s #1 Executive Coach

  “This book is a must-read for any leader wanting to improve how decisions are made. Pawel Motyl demystifies the challenge of decision-making in a dramatically changing world. Using extensive case studies, he points out common decision mistakes and offers specific recommendations. His work is extremely well grounded, researched, and presented.”

  Dave Ulrich Rensis Likert professor, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan

  “Both enlightening and entertaining, Pawel Motyl has created a dream guide to the art of sound decision-making. Sixteen rules are well articulated and amply illustrated with fascinating examples. They provide the road map for decision-makers to challenge the natural human reliance on precedent in a world where options are increasingly unprecedented, and to wean us from slavish devotion to authority and the status quo so that we can make the innovative, process-driven decisions necessary to be trailblazers rather than bridge-burners.”

  Whitney Johnson bestselling author of Disrupt Yourself and Build an A-Team, and Thinkers50 Leading Management Thinker

  “Leadership and life are about making great choices based on sound decision-making. If there’s one decision you need to make about must-read books for this year, make this one your first choice!”

  Mark Thompson New York Times–bestselling author and AMA’s #1 Growth Leadership Coach

  “With a backdrop of history, Pawel shares ‘watch outs’ and ‘ways’ to make better decisions that are practical and executable.”

  Garry Ridge president and CEO, WD-40 Company

  “Fantastic, gripping read! Brilliantly helping to understand how decisions are made, both one’s own and those of others. Highly recommended!”

  Dorota Czarnota managing partner, Poland and CEE, Russell Reynolds Associates

  “Decision-making is often complex and somewhat overwhelming at inflection points, and thereby in ambiguous times. Pawel Motyl offers refreshing and practical insights on the journey of leadership for decision-making. This is a fascinating read!”

  Aicha Evans chief strategy officer, Intel Corporation

  “What an amazing book! Pawel Motyl takes his readers on a fascinating journey through perfectly researched case studies. Each page in the book is both inspirational and practical. This reading is essential.”

  Darek Lenart senior vice president human resources, North America and strategic growth, Mastercard

  “Perfecting the skill of decision-making is essential in a complex, attention-restricted economy. Pawel Motyl gives you the tools you need to move your agenda forward.”

  Bonita Thompson New York Times–bestselling author and career strategist

  “Some decisions are easy to make. You’ve already got those covered. But others, leadership decisions, are much trickier. Motyl’s substantial book draws on data, storytelling, and leadership principles to share the rules that will help you learn how to make smarter decisions. And smarter decisions mean more successful outcomes.”

  Michael Bungay Stanier author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller The Coaching Habit

  “In an age of unprecedented complexity, uncertainty, and change, the big, important decisions become extremely difficult. Few leaders are equipped with the level of courage and insight that is necessary to make these tough decisions with velocity. Pawel’s book provides rules, principles, and vivid examples that actually help leaders make sense of what they are facing so they can make better decisions to drive better outcomes.”

  David B. Peterson PhD, director, leadership and coaching, Google, Inc.

  “Pawel Motyl took a massive undertaking in analyzing the most complex cases in history where effective decision-making was critical to creating or destroying value for the endeavor at hand. In this groundbreaking book, he offers practical frameworks that will help you prepare for the uncertain future and make better calls at any high-stakes juncture.”

  Sergey Sirotenko executive coach, INSEAD and Ward Howell

  “There is real wisdom in this book. You will remember its lessons and its stories long after you are finished reading it. The world would be safer and happier if our leaders made better decisions—and Pawel Motyl shows us how.”

  Asheesh Advani CEO, Junior Achievement (JA) Worldwide

  “In today’s uncertain and complex world, we face new assumptions and unprecedented challenges. Through insights backed by numerous case studies, Pawel Motyl presents us with new rules for effective decision-making and launching into leadership success. A thought-provoking read!”

  Sanyin Siang CEO coach and author of The Launch Book

  “The speed and quality of decision-making is vital in any organization—and Pawel Motyl deeply gets it. In this enlightening book, Pawel has taken real case studies and offered precise and actionable insights to help leaders make more effective decisions. I highly recommend any executive to read and apply the lessons from this powerful book.”

  Prakash Raman CEO, Raman Consulting

  “If you’ve ever wondered how catastrophic mistakes, with lives and fortunes lost irretrievably, could have been avoided, you need to read Labyrinth. Writing about business and leadership with the pace of a thriller, Pawel Motyl will change your assumptions about decision-making, drawing on lessons learned from high-altitude mountaineering to organized crime syndicates.”

  Ayse Birsel Author of Design the Life You Love and one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People

  Copyright © 2019 by Pawel Motyl

  Originally published by ICAN Institute, Poland, as Labirynt. Sztuka podejmowania decyzji by Paweł Motyl, copyright © 2015

  Translation by Praski Publishing & Graham Crawford

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Cataloguing in publication information is available from Library and Archives Canada.

  ISBN 978-1-98902-531-4 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-98902-532-1 (ebook)

  Page Two Books

  www.pagetwobooks.com

  Cover design by Taysia Louie

  Interior design by Setareh Ashrafolofghalai

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens

  Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

  Distributed in the US and internationally by Publishers Group West

  Every reasonable effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for work reproduced in this book.

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  www.pawelmotyl.com

  Ebook by Bright Wing Books

  “Life is the sum of all choices.”

  Albert Camus

  To everyone who taught me to choose better in life.

  Labyrinth

  Contents

  Contents

  Introduction

  1: Koyaanisqatsi

  2: Turkey Trouble

  3: In This Chapter, There Is No Good News...

  4: Process

  5: 改 善

  6: Somethin
g in the Air

  7: In Search of Authentic Leaders

  8: My Favorite Enemy

  9: Peering Through the Looking Glass

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Bibliography and Further Reading

  Index

  About the Author

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  Introduction

  Vịnh bắc bộ, better known in English as the Gulf of Tonkin, lies on the coast of northern Vietnam and southern China in the northwestern South China Sea. In the early 1960s, it was the focal point of the US Department of Defense’s DESOTO operation, as part of OPLAN 34- Alpha: regular patrols were conducted by US Navy destroyers in order to gather information about the North Vietnamese army’s plans and movements. On July 2, 1964, a serious incident occurred. Captain John J. Herrick, commanding the destroyer USS Maddox, reported coming under fire from North Vietnamese patrol boats. Two days later, another incident sparked the war in Vietnam: the destroyers USS Turner Joy and USS Maddox reported coming under torpedo attack. The information about the event was very precise—the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, stated that as many as nine torpedoes were fired, none of which hit any American ships. As a result of this purported attack, President Lyndon B. Johnson forced a bill through Congress—the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution—that resulted in air strikes being launched against North Vietnam, followed by ground troops being sent in. Thus began a nearly decade-long conflict which, according to various estimates, took the lives of between 2 million and 3.5 million people.

  The mid-1980s marked the beginning of the commercialization of Mount Everest. In 1985, a wealthy Texas businessman named Richard Bass spent a small fortune on buying himself a place on the climbing team of the renowned US climber David Breashears. Bass was successful in his mission, conquering the highest peak on Earth, and the event resonated widely; not only among Texan oilmen seeking an adrenaline rush, but also among mountaineers, who smelled a new kind of pay dirt. The following years saw a whole new industry emerge, as a series of commercial expeditions were launched up Everest and the other eight-thousanders. The market leader was Adventure Consultants, founded in 1991 by New Zealander Rob Hall, who could boast of having led thirty-nine amateur climbers to the top of the world. On May 10, 1996, Hall set off with another eight cheerful paying customers. He was supported by two experienced mountaineers—Mike Groom and Andy Harris—and a group of Sherpas led by sirdar Ang Dorje. Several other expeditions were operating on the mountain at the same time: an IMAX television team with David Breashears, a Taiwanese group led by Makalu Gau, a South African team led by Ian Woodall, and a commercial team under the leadership of American Scott Fischer, who had founded a rival company to Adventure Consultants, called Mountain Madness. Despite a few minor problems, the likes of which affect any expedition, there were no portents of the tragedy that would claim the lives of eight people, including Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, and result in numerous others suffering from hypothermia and frostbite. For nineteen years, May 10, 1996, would hold the record as the most lethal day in the mountain’s history. 1

  When Gabriel García Márquez placed the action of his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in the fictional town of Macondo, he could never have imagined that the name would dramatically resurface more than forty years later for reasons entirely unconnected with the world of literature. But that’s exactly what happened: at 9:47 pm on April 20, 2010, on the oil platform Deepwater Horizon, owned by Transocean and leased by British Petroleum, a catastrophic explosion killed eleven people. But that was only the beginning of the damage. In the weeks that followed, close to 5 million barrels of oil gushed from the damaged well into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, causing massive ecological carnage and sparking discussions not only about the safety of exploiting mineral deposits in the undersea Mississippi Canyon, but also about the multitude of risk-management mistakes that led to the explosion. The name of the well in Block 252 where the tragedy occurred was Macondo.

  At the beginning of the 1990s, Porsche was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Few believed it could be saved, and opportunistic predators circled the ailing brand, waiting to snap it up. One of the few who believed there was a chance of saving the firm without selling it was a thirty-eight-year-old named Wendelin Wiedeking. He took on what others saw as a mission impossible, and in 1993, he was made President and CEO of the failing automotive legend. Over the following decade or so, he showed that Tom Cruise and Hollywood directors are not the only ones capable of achieving mission impossible: he rescued Porsche through a series of bold moves, including strategic cost cutting and process optimization—known as the Porsche Improvement Process (PIP)—outsourcing a part of the production process to Valmet Automotive, a Finnish company, and radically revamping the product portfolio by ditching the loss-making 928 and introducing the Boxster and Cayenne models. Wiedeking’s moves took the firm back into the black, making him an industry bigwig in the process. His success reached its zenith in the 2007/08 financial year, when Porsche posted record net profits of €6.392 billion. The company was valued at over €13 billion, and it spoke confidently about buying the Volkswagen group. Fast-forward one year: Porsche was back in the red, primarily because of gigantic losses, which exceeded €3.5 billion. As a result of this startling reversal of fortune, Wendelin Wiedeking was obliged to hurriedly clear his desk and leave the building, although the pain of his dismissal was undoubtedly soothed somewhat by a €50 million golden handshake.

  While Wendelin Wiedeking was indisputably among the elite of European management, in terms of economics he was outclassed by Robert C. Merton, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he shared with Myron S. Scholes, in 1997. Merton is famed for his groundbreaking research in finance, including share option pricing (which gave rise to the Black–Scholes–Merton formula), derivatives, and managing investment risk. It would therefore be reasonable to assume that someone who had spent his whole professional life developing ever more effective and precise forecasting instruments would be brilliant at building an investment portfolio. Robert Merton certainly thought so when, in 1993, he co-founded and became a member of the board of directors in a hedge fund management firm called Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Hordes of clients shared his belief in his abilities, investing over $1 billion in the fund. After impressive initial successes (annual returns as high as 40 percent!), came a massive meltdown, caused by the Asian financial crisis that ignited in Thailand in 1997 and hit Russia a year later, and in 1997/98 the share price crashed. LTCM’s capital fell to under $400 billion, and the total losses suffered by investors was estimated at $4.5 billion. A similar fate befell the Trinsum Group, another company set up in 2007 by the Nobel winner: just a year and a half after its founding (admittedly, in a very difficult period), it had to file for bankruptcy.

  What Robert Merton was to economics, Harvey Weinstein was to film: co-founder of the legendary Miramax production company, which we have to thank for such films as Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, Kill Bill, The English Patient, Clerks, and The Crying Game. His influence in the industry, built up over decades, was affirmed by the often-quoted statistic that he got more thank-yous than God from Oscar winners. His remarkable career came to an abrupt halt in October 2017, when the New York Times and the New Yorker published a series of articles alleging that he had sexually assaulted numerous actresses over many years. His denials of the charges changed little. In the weeks that followed, a typhoon swept through the media, leading Harvey Weinstein to discontinue many of his business activities and resign from The Weinstein Brothers. In addition, he was thrown out of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Georgina Chapman, whom he had married in 2007, moved out of the family home.

  Early in the morning of January 28, 1986, Dr. James P. Bagian, an astronaut with NASA’s space program, took
a desperate step: he called on STS-51-L Mission Control to cancel the liftoff planned for that day. He was worried by the unusual weather conditions in Florida, as on the night of January 27, the temperature at Cape Canaveral had fallen to 23°F. The solid rocket boosters used to send the shuttles into orbit had never been used in such low temperatures, and Bagian was concerned that after such a cold night the O-rings separating the rockets from the fuel source might fail. Mission Control ignored his concerns and approved the liftoff of the Challenger space shuttle.

  Sixteen years passed, during which time NASA conducted eighty-nine successful shuttle missions. In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia was scheduled to be the first launch of the year. The oldest of NASA’s fleet of five shuttle craft, its maiden flight on April 12, 1981, had initiated the entire space shuttle program. Liftoff for the STS-107 mission, led by Rick Husband, was planned for January 16; the aim of the flight was to conduct research in microgravity. The crew of seven consisted of five Americans, one Indian woman, and an Israeli man named Ilan Ramon who was to become the first person from his nation in space. The liftoff was fairly routine. The only anomaly looked at in detail by NASA engineers was a small part of insulating foam that broke off and struck a thermal protection panel on the shuttle’s left wing. Although the Debris Assessment Team (DAT) had serious concerns about the condition of the wing, the engineers could not assess the safety risk from the available data. Flight Director Linda Ham decided to continue the mission as planned and to not take any actions in response to the engineers’ concerns. Tragically, for over two weeks, NASA managers did not act on the chance to try and save the astronauts onboard Columbia. On February 1, 2003, at 8:10 am, the space shuttle initiated its landing procedure. Just before 9:00 am, it burned up on re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

  A similar double tragedy occurred in Europe. On the evening of January 23, 2008, not far from Mirosławiec Airport in Poland, a military CASA C-295M airplane belonging to the Polish air force crashed. The scale of the catastrophe was shocking. Twenty officers were killed in the disaster, among them almost the entire leadership of the 1st Tactical Air Force Squadron. Some analysts and commentators asked the obvious question: How, at a time when any sensible corporation prohibits all the members of the board from traveling together, could key air force personnel be allowed on board the same plane? Not only was the question never answered but, sadly, no lessons were learned from the catastrophe. On April 10, 2010, one of the most appalling tragedies in the history of aviation unfolded. All ninety-six members of a Polish delegation en route to the village of Katyn, in Russia, onboard a Tupolev TU-154M died when the aircraft crashed on its approach to the Smolensk-North military airbase. Among the victims were MPs, diplomats, and senior military personnel, as well as President Lech Kaczyński and his wife, Maria.