Experimentation
Look at your work, your project, as an experiment. Allocate a reasonable amount of time each week to try new things. At Google, software engineers spend 20 per cent of their time on projects of their own interest. Although the founders credit this idea to their experiences at Stanford, where PhD students are encouraged to spend one day a week on something besides their officially sanctioned thesis topics, companies like 3M with their 15 per cent rule have been doing the same for decades.
These ideas generally do not need to be approved by management. They are usually the ideas of the scientists themselves. From these little experiments came the Post-it notes at 3M, and Google News, Google Earth, and Froogle, among others, at Google. And at Cirque du Soleil there is an entire division in Montreal dedicated to 'new ventures'.
Could your business implement something like 20 per cent time? What about one day a month dedicated to new idea generation?
Guerilla tactics
I have met my share of potential flipstars who are caught inside very traditional and unexciting companies. They don't leave because they love the product they help make or sell.My advice to them (and you) is to start little hidden experiments. Your company may not give you 20 per cent time, but take some of it anyway. Use the company's resources to get a working prototype of the service or product you are envisioning up and ready for demonstration. You may get your butt kicked, but who cares. Firstly you probably don't even like your manager, and secondly it is easier to apologise than to ask for permission.
These little behind-the-scenes activities are like guerilla tactics.Here are some extra ideas for all of you hidden flipstars:
1. Recruit a champion. Find someone high in the organisation that you think is a closet flipstar as well. Recruit them for your project. Stop them in the foyer, stalk them at lunch if you have to. Tell them what you are up to, tell them that it is under cover. Ask first that they make some suggestions on how to further the idea, and second that they help you to get your new idea a hearing at the level of the organisation where things can actually change.
2. Recruit some helpers. If you are bored, I can guarantee some of your co-workers are too. They probably don't have the rebellious energy required to start a guerilla project themselves, but I am willing to bet they would happily work with you on yours.
3. Make sure it works. Don't be all self-righteous just because you are doing something. Although I think you have a right to feel great about your risk taking and orientation to action – I have been writing about it nonstop this chapter – it won't get you anywhere in your organisation by itself. No one can argue with results. Get your prototype up and running, make sure it can work, crunch some numbers and then show people.Not the other way around.
4. Move on.Your little experiments will often fail. Get over it. Start another one.
As Richard D'Aveni of Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business puts it, 'This is not the age of castles, moats and armor. It is rather an age of cunning, speed and surprise.'Your career is no different. You can contemplate your navel all you wish, searching for your soul's purpose, the perfect job, the foolproof strategy, the most innovative product or the grand unified theory of everything, but you won't find it there. You will find it by taking action, by trying something, damn near anything I say. And the combination of wins and losses, successes and failures and everything in between will deliver back to you the clarity you need to finetune those actions and strategies to make you more effective, and to generate the results you desire.
What guerilla project could you personally kick off? Even if you are a very senior exec, get something cool started. Today!
DECIDE ON A TRAJECTORY
You really do need to have some idea of where you are going. We live in times of too much opportunity, rather than a time of not enough opportunity. The greatest challenge a flipstar will face will be to decide what to focus on. But decide you must.
The beauty of the trajectory model is it leaves plenty of room for serendipity. It is more about where you are heading, not necessarily exactly what you will be doing to get there. Being the leading bank will likely mean something vastly different in fifteen years from what it means today, but it is still a worthy goal. The best real estate company in twenty years might be one dominated by property management, rather than by sales.
Cirque du Soleil has a trajectory that does not limit it to the production of circus events. Their trajectory is to 'evoke, provoke and invoke imagination'. It sounds a little trite I know, but they certainly have done this with their stage shows to date. But this is not all they are doing. They are looking deeply into establishing Cirque du Soleil resorts, as well as staging stadium-sized productions. I myself think there is huge potential for them in corporate training. This is on top of Cirque du Monde, which is a not-for-profit venture that travels into third-world countries and teaches juggling and other such imagination-building skills.
Cirque du Soleil's strategy would actually include all of the above items, but as you can see they are quite varied, yet still fit into their broader vision.
While on the topic of imagination, I would like to encourage you to use some. It is the companies who in recent times had far-reaching imaginations that we celebrate today, companies that were able to see outside of their narrow sphere and imagine a bigger and brighter future. Think big! Dream even. Only this will inspire intelligent people to join you on your quest to create something that is bigger and better and faster than whatever is currently available.
Confusion management requires that we balance activity and big picture thinking. Replace your detailed strategy for the long term with a basic trajectory, a direction you want to head in, within which you will have the flexibility and agility to change quickly as you respond to changes in the external and internal environment that will alter the landscape you will be competing in. And allow the ambiguity that comes with it to excite you, rather than scare you.
Focus your strategy and planning on the shorter term, which I will outline in a moment.
I am using business-focused language here, but your career is exactly the same. I meet very few people who are extremely successful in their careers who knew from a very early age that this (whatever this turned out to be) is what they wanted to do. Sure there are the Andrew Gaze and Eminem style examples, but in reality they are few and far between. People may have known they wanted – for example – to be an entrepreneur, but did they know it would be in the specific industry they are in today? Probably not.
But the chances are they would not have even been certain that they wanted to be an entrepreneur. In fact they may not have even known what the word meant when they got their first job. I certainly did not. I did not even know that there were jobs even remotely like what I now do. (I might add that some people still don't think there are jobs like mine.)
The trajectory is a powerful thing when the market changes in your direction. Google began at Stanford with Sergey Brin and his PhD supervisor Rajeev Motwani as a data mining project. There is no way in the mid 1990s when they were getting very interested in this topic and how it applied to the newborn internet that any of the MIDAS (Mining Data at Stanford) crew, which included among others Sergey Brin and Google co-founder Larry Page, could have ever imagined how valuable internet search tools would become. As the project evolved and Brin and Page got more and more committed to it, they decided that, no matter what, they would focus on better search functions. This remains at the core of the Google trajectory and all of their very powerful and valuable tools, and their skyrocketing revenues come from all things related to search.
Google could easily rest on the success of their AdWords business and choose to consolidate rather than aggressively pursue new applications for search technology. The millions of AdWords clicks, most only worth a couple of dollars each, is where Google gets almost all of its revenue – a quarterly total of US$3.66 billion at the time of writing.
But instead of sitting back
and counting the cash, Google keeps growing and aggressively pursuing new opportunities and new services built around search capability.
They are also expanding into other areas: for example, taking Microsoft on in the business software market, looking to replicate the success of Microsoft Office with a suite of online alternatives such as Google Spreadsheets, under the banner of Google Apps.
CONNECT WITH THE FUNDAMENTALS
Some things never change. Seriously! In fact what we do actually changes very little over time. It is how we do it that changes far more often. Never lose sight of what you are trying to do. For example, the customer should be at the centre of everything that you do. The new strategy for the Commonwealth Bank is built around this fundamental idea. Here is a 30,000-plus people organisation that dominated the banking sector for many years. Under the leadership of David Murray they embarked on a deep and widespread cost-cutting rampage. Most industry pundits agree that this was essential for the bank to generate better profitability and increased efficiency, but it seems to me they have done so at the expense of quality customer service.
I don't think the banking sector is all that complicated. Sure the products, multitude of choices and other such things can make it seem very complicated, but in reality all banks are offering the same sorts of products and services. The competitive advantage then will be very simple. Those who offer these products and services in the fastest, easiest and dare I say it the most helpful and the friendliest way will win. Good customer service, amongst other things, is a fundamental in this industry. Stay connected to it, no matter what else changes. Sure, the way you deliver that customer service can change using things like the internet for example, and customer expectations of quality will continue to rise, but customer service will still remain a fundamental in the provision of banking products and services.
What are the fundamentals in your business? How are you performing in these areas? Are you staying abreast of new developments and rising expectations in these areas? If not, why not? What could you do now to get started?
If you are running a large organi-sation, you will obviously be delegating the accountability of the fundamentals to key people. Do so, but monitor them like a hawk.
Getting back to the Commonwealth Bank for a moment, their new CEO, Ralph Norris, who has successfully turned around the Commonwealth Bank's sister bank in New Zealand, ASB, and also Air New Zealand, has said publicly that business is much simpler than we make it out to be. There are some basics that are not negotiable and you must execute these flawlessly. I am backing Norris to do this successfully at the Commonwealth Bank.
LOOK, LISTEN AND UNLEARN
It is essential that we keep our eyes and ears open. The reason people and the businesses they run fall behind is because we as individuals are not paying attention to the changes taking place.We are not looking for them, we are not reading about them, and sometimes we notice them but refuse to listen to the lessons they give. Sure, you can trundle out any one of hundreds of excuses about being too busy, under-resourced or restricted by upper management (or the board and shareholders if you are upper management), but in reality these are all just excuses.
To be a flipstar you need to have high sensory acuity. That is, you must notice the nuances of change that occur around you daily and notice what is happening.You must begin to act on the fact that more of your customers mention they visited your website before calling you, or that increasingly people get confused when you tell them what you do.The point is you won't be able to change and adapt if you do not know what is going on.
If you take repeated action that is not pushing in the right direction and you are not using this feedback to inform how you may need to change, then this is not intelligent behaviour. It has colloquially been referred to as the definition of insanity; that is, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.Not all feedback is good in the first instance. The faster you move through denial, that all is rosy when it is actually not, and make some change, the better. First, you have to notice that all is not rosy.
And it is not just noticing things about your individual business and industry. It is said that the disposable aluminium drum invented by Canon that revolutionised the copier market was inspired by a can of beer. I know, I know. That particular engineer really needs to get a life. Thinking about photocopiers while having a beer. But in reality, this is how many such things actually happen.
Step one – keep moving. This will create plenty of feedback for you to observe. Go beyond this and look to what your competitors have done that has and has not worked.
Look to other industries for what they have done. How could you do something similar? I was with a large health care provider recently. The biggest challenge they have is finding nursing staff for their many hospitals nationwide. Skills shortages are rampant, and rostering is a nightmare. One of the members of the board had been a consultant for an airline and responsible for implementing systems that would allow them to get the maximum out of their staff while cutting their numbers (and costs).
She was able to explain the rostering system the airline used – which mostly consisted of a staff bidding system, with the hardto- fill shifts paying more money and the traditionally desirable ones less – and that it could meet the health company's needs. The board and senior managers adopted the same approach across multiple sites and are saving tens of thousands of dollars every month in a tight labour market. This is an example of listening to someone with the right expertise.
I would like to reiterate here that no matter how much information you gather, you will still be confused. In fact, it is quite possible that the more you discover, the more confused you will be. Again, celebrate the confusion. Rather than dig deeper and deeper and run the risk of being more paralysed, revel in the ignorance and see it as an opportunity to try something new.
A groundbreaking piece of work by David Gray at BCG Strategy Group, published in the Harvard Business Review, argues that embracing nescience (the opposite of knowledge) is actually enormously beneficial. Too much knowledge can constrain thinking and limit you to acting within the confines of what you 'know' to be true.
The beauty of being a flipstar is you can always do the opposite of what the world suggests. People say knowledge is power. Perhaps knowledge is not power. Maybe ignorance is. David Gray even mourns the loss of ignorance:
Unlike knowledge, which is infinitely reusable, ignorance is a one-shot deal: Once it has been displaced by knowledge, it can be hard to get back. And after it's gone, we are more apt to follow well worn paths to find answers than to exert our sense of what we don't know in order to probe new options. Knowledge can stand in the way of innovation. Solved problems tend to stay solved – sometimes disastrously so. 3
Two thousand years ago, people 'knew' the universe was created in a week. A thousand years ago, humans 'knew' the sun moved around the earth. Five hundred years ago, people 'knew' the earth was flat. Imagine what you will 'know' tomorrow.
What knowledge or practices do you hold onto that are no longer empowering? What behaviour that once drove your success do you and your team need to unlearn?
MAKE UP YOUR OWN MIND
The most powerful way to figure out the right answer is to ask yourself what you think. I know this sounds ridiculously simple, but I can assure you it is very powerful. Ask yourself: what do I think? You will come up with new answers – answers that make sense and that are based on all the experience that has brought you to where you are today.
Great leaders and managers must be prepared to make decisions about their business, and for that matter their lives. Often these decisions will be based as much on intuition and educated guesswork as on predictable data and knowledge. The flipstar makes the decision anyway.Why?
Decisions lead to action. When you finally make up your mind about something, it usually leads to action. There is no need at this point to say why this is a good thing.
Decisions create mome
ntum. The action that follows your decision will give you the clarity that was preventing you from making the decision in the first place, and now you are off on a positive upward spiral. Action, clarity, confidence, decision, action, and so on.
Decisions create confidence. The decision does not just give you a sense of confidence but also those around you. If you are to get your team, or if you are a CEO your whole bloody company, moving in the direction of your stated trajectory, you had better instil some confidence. Decisions create that confidence.
In reality you have no choice but to make up your mind. If you ponder too long you will become irrelevant faster and faster. Sure a decision usually requires some change and some risk, but the risk of not deciding and not taking action is of course much higher.
To be a flipstar you will need some degree of delusional self-confidence, a willingness to believe in your opinions and ideas even if the whole world says they are crazy. John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, says, 'You have to have the courage of your conviction.'
Let's get real about it. We spend so much of our lives pretending we know what we are talking about, trying to appear in control in front of those we are supposed to lead. But the reality is we are all throwing mud at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. Business texts and conventional wisdom suggest this is reckless and unintelligent behaviour. I say it is just the reality of a global business world.
Now, don't stop pretending. This is an essential part of what you as a leader need to do. You must instil a sense of optimism among those you attempt to lead.Your team and colleagues will be attracted to confidence. An air of certainty must surround the leader.You can be honest about the confusion in the market, but you must remain certain that the business can pull through it and that you are the one to lead it through.
I would suggest that without this blind faith it would become impossible to lead. There is no doubt that we must deal with intense levels of change. I suggest that the human species has always had to do so. The blind faith is like a very powerful drug. I am not sure this is the analogy you would have expected in a book such as this, and I am definitely not suggesting that you use actual drugs to solve your problems, but I do know that 'belief ' helps relieve the pressure of a world that continues to change in scary ways. The belief that tomorrow can be better than today makes the pain of the hard work bearable. The belief that your product is going to be a hit makes the late nights and inevitable setbacks tolerable as the promise of something great tomorrow keeps you going.
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