Thirteeners
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For about twenty-eight years now I’ve been fascinated by how human thinking systems operate, both the thinking that went into them in the first place and what is driving them currently. I’m especially interested in how I might be able to impact a company’s performance through a different perspective of business. This hasn’t been a pastime or hobby. What drives me is a desire to see what people can accomplish when there is a shift in their consciousness, when they transform the way of thinking they have always relied on.
Here in Section 1, I discuss a concept that everyone engages in: conversations. That’s a simple word to distinguish what turns out to make the biggest difference in people’s performance, whether we’re talking about a major company with thousands of employees or a micro-entrepreneur who works alone.
We tend to treat our conversations very casually and often take them for granted. Yet conversations are the fundamental technology of the complex evolving human system—business—that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. To think there might be another way of looking at the idea of conversations might seem strange at first. Especially when we continue to use the word “conversations.” But I haven’t found another word that better describes this concept of language and its effect on business performance.
I’m inviting you to think differently about your conversations and the impact they have on you and others around you. Conversations are an interesting tool in your business arsenal, and when you have better mastery of the language as I use it, you will see that the world you live and work in won’t be the same after you have begun to examine your own relationship to the conversations in your business.
In the next three chapters, I want to introduce you to a new world—a world of possibility that is invented through speaking. This is not what might happen if you’re lucky enough; instead, this is what happens when you declare something to be possible even when you can’t yet see that it really is and your past would prove you right. I have found nothing as powerful as using your voice to say how it’s going to be and then have it be that way. Aristotle said that, and you can make it true.
Declare What’s Possible
Maybe it was my overactive imagination as a kid in the 1960s, but when I was in the sixth grade, there seemed to be a huge amount of fear about the Cold War. As I recall, adults didn’t actually talk about the Cold War, they talked about America getting nuked by the Russians, and they taught us to deal with this frightening notion of annihilation by practicing “duck and cover” exercises in our classrooms. Looking back, it seems like an absurd experience—laughable even. Did adults really think that if we were attacked with an atomic bomb, hiding under our little desks would provide a lick of protection? Or were they just protecting us from the knowledge that if attacked, we would all simultaneously evaporate into thin air?
On May 1, 1960, the news came that the Russians had shot down an American spy plane. The pilot, Gary Powers, plummeted from 70,000 feet, bailing out at 30,000 feet right into the hands of the enemy. His U-2 plane was the most advanced reconnaissance jet we had in our arsenal at the time, but by the time Powers was going through his ordeal, Lockheed Corporation’s advanced development group, Skunk Works, was already working on a new even more advanced U-2 aircraft. The U.S. government wanted an airplane that would fly higher, faster, and more stealthily than anything else in existence—an impossible airplane that nobody had ever imagined because they couldn’t imagine it—and the country needed it right away.
The job of creating it had fallen to a group of Lockheed’s aircraft designers led by Clarence Leonard “Kelly” Johnson, who had a reputation for producing impossible technology. But this new plane needed to go beyond the impossible. Lockheed quotes Johnson as reporting later, “Everything had to be invented, everything,” He took up the gauntlet and declared that he and his team would design and build an aircraft capable of exceeding a speed of 2,000 miles per hour—and do it all in twenty months!
Kelly Johnson stood up and declared the future of aviation. Everyone else said it couldn’t be done, but he stated exactly what his team would accomplish and exactly how their aircraft would perform as if it were already a reality.
The plane that Johnson and his team developed—the Blackbird SR-71—was so advanced that the paradigms of flight and aircraft navigation had to be rewritten to accommodate it. Visual references used in conventional flying were worthless to its pilots. At 83,000 feet, you couldn’t see a highway, bridge, or river, so you needed to use oceans, mountains, and large lakes as reference points. The Blackbird could fly from coast to coast in under seventy minutes, and it served for more than three decades, until 1998, when it was retired due to excessive operating costs. The technology that emerged from its development has made its way into other systems that are still being used to safeguard the United States. The Blackbird now hangs in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Though the aerospace industry was proud of its accomplishments, the people working in that industry knew that the technologies of the past were useless in building anything close to what was now needed. Given what we know about Johnson and his team, it’s a safe bet that the seeming impossibility of constructing this aircraft fueled their urgent desire to create it. The Blackbird was built entirely from scratch, so it was a game changer in every sense. That’s why its story is so important to your business.
Have a Conversation for Building the Possible
The Blackbird SR-71 began with a conversation for—not about—the possibility of something impossible, and it was fulfilled through a conversation for taking bold action. Amazing things happen when you are willing to declare the impossible to be possible—without any idea how you’re going to make it so.
Everything is a function of the types of conversations you engage in. And the conversations that create every dimension of your life are the conversations that cause your business to succeed or fail. You may not think much about this day to day—after all, conversations are just words. Yet, they form your entire world. So imagine if all it took to build an unstoppable company was changing the conversations in your own life and your business. And, guess what—that’s really all it takes!
Become Aware of and Transform the Network of Conversations That Are Your Business
Before your business came into existence, there was a founding conversation, and today you continue to manage your business with conversations. And while conversations appear to happen one at a time, in fact, they rarely exist as singular entities. Our day-to-day interactions are made up of interconnecting conversations.
I’ll say it again: Business is a network of interrelated conversations; that’s all business is. Everything you do in your business is the result of a conversation. Each business idea you come up with starts with a conversation, and each action you take as a result is another conversation.
There are conversations you are aware of and others you are unaware of and, as a result, pay little or no attention to. Yet those unacknowledged conversations undermine and sabotage your business; they act like a virus that infects your vision, your mission, and the strategy you’re trying to execute right now. I’ll discuss these in greater detail later in this book.
I first learned about these conversations more than forty years ago from a wonderful teacher—my father. I spent my early years learning about business from him. But while I knew these conversations existed, I remained unaware of their content, and just knowing about them did little or nothing for me, because I didn’t have the tools to understand them.
It doesn’t have to be that way for you.
Over the years, I’ve seen how some conversations can destroy a person’s career and the quality of their lives. I’ve studied the conversations in poorly run, toxic, mismanaged organizations, and I’ve also uncovered the conversations that help build Best Place to Work companies.
I’ve worked with other entrepreneurs to help them see the damage they were triggering in their own organizations through their unconscious
ly destructive conversations—destroying trust and causing the best employees to leave.
I’ve seen the transformations that happen when people uncover the damaging conversations and finally begin to build what they’ve always wanted: a connection-driven business that achieves their most impossible dreams.
Conversations have within them the ultimate power to make things be the way you say they’re going to be. Creating an awareness of conversations is one of the biggest challenges in your life and your business. At the end of the day, everything comes down to a conversation.
“First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.”
— Napoleon Hill
Summit Daily News
Kim Marquis
Keystone, Colorado, USA. The Keystone ski resort opened for the winter season at 8 a.m. Friday with 36 continuous hours of skiing & riding billed as the “KSMT 36-Hour Team Challenge.” Two Summit County snowboarders rode away with $3,600 in cash as the grand-prize team winners of the “Challenge.” Prophetically, 26-year-old Nick Gearhart and 25-year-old Bill Pomeroy had named their team, “The Team That Just Won $3,600.” –November 14, 20044
Inventing a Conversation on the Slopes of Keystone
You may not find it easy to believe, but every word of this story is true. I first saw it in a homeowner’s newsletter and found it so fascinating that I kept it as an example for my clients to help them understand how the power of words—the conversation—determines the outcome. You, too, can build your own “Team That Just Won $3,600.”
Nick and Bill had an outrageous plan to compete for the chance to split $3,600; and they actually had the courage to declare the outcome of the event weeks before it would take place. How overconfident is that?
In effect, what Nick and Bill did that day was to put a stake in the ground and declare a future outcome—a conversation they put into their team name. They decided to forget about playing it safe by looking good in front of their buddies and instead took an extraordinary risk to have something they were committed to. They were determined to say how it was going to be.
They knew they had work ahead of them, but the die was cast, and the only thing left was to follow through on what they had given their word to do—close the gap between their words and reality.
These two snowboarders had invented the most powerful conversation—a conversation to shape the future. The key to their success was their declaration of the final outcome.
Can You Do That? Or Are You Satisfied with Just Hoping for the Best Outcomes?
What about you and your business? Are you willing to put your neck on the line, to declare something that isn’t, and take a stand for what you want to accomplish?
Bill and Nick, by virtue of their declaration, were already there. There was no outcome to hope for, no place to “get to.” They knew what it was to cross the finish line, and they had already been there in their minds and in their hearts. It was their clarity in speaking that put them there.
If you’re anything like I was decades ago, you want what you want and you have been told by everyone—parents, teachers, the media—that if you want to realize your dreams, you have to work your ass off for them. In effect, a “God helps those who help themselves” way of thinking drove me and drove my businesses: If I did really good work consistently, I believed, I could achieve what I was seeking.
Well, it’s certainly possible to get through life with the hope of a big win someday. But it doesn’t really work.
Then one day I realized …
Hope Is Not the Same as Possibility.
I know this will offend some people, because I have good friends who have actually written books about hope, although I wonder whether it was hope they were writing about or this thing called possibility.
It’s easy to confuse the two. But hope is not possibility. I didn’t get this message early on in my career, and it wasn’t until I had been struggling in my own businesses that I realized I’d relied on a concept that undermined me. There was no creativity or innovation tied to it. Hope was not a tool I could effectively use to cause anything; it’s a concept I was grabbing on to for salvation.
The best thing I could do to lead my business was to never demonstrate hope to my employees and to stop my own hoping! Hope had become an unconscious and limiting part of the culture I was creating for my companies. It had disconnected me and my employees from the possibility of taking bold action.
Today it pains me to no end when I hear anyone—politicians, clients, or TV pundits—talking about hope, and I consider it one of the most negative words in the English dictionary. In my opinion, people who hope cause nothing. They wait with the expectation that what they want will be delivered by someone else.
We’ve all done this without even thinking: What does it mean when you utter a seemingly innocuous statement like, “We hope to get this new client”? For me, it meant there was really nothing else to do, no action to take. It’s as if I simply hoped people would read this book. With that kind of thinking my publication plans would flounder. No, I intend for you to read it and think about it—no hope involved. And I will take action to that end, because I am committed to the possibility of you loving what you do, and having what you want in your business.
Where Is the Integrity in Hope?
The simple answer is, there is no integrity in hope. I swore off hope because it didn’t match what I’m committed to. This book is about using the power of your language—your speaking—to make extraordinarily bold declarations for who you say you are in the matter of your life and your business. It’s about taking courageous action and producing the breakthroughs you’ve been looking for. That isn’t possible through hoping.
Outcomes only become possible when you are willing to declare it to be possible—with absolutely no evidence that it is—and then to take the actions that are missing and that are consistent with your commitment. Your words only gain power the moment you are willing to say how it is going to be and then take the actions to have it be that way.
When I changed my language, the words I chose literally changed my perspective. When I changed my perspective I changed what was possible in my future.
Bill and Nick Didn’t Hope—They Declared
Bill and Nick took the least traveled route, and they staked out their future with a bold declaration, creating a new stand for what might have seemed impossible to achieve at the time. Most people would have said it wasn’t possible, but Bill and Nick said it was, and that’s the difference between Bill and Nick and so many people I’ve encountered in business. Instead of looking at the $3,600 prize as a goal to get to, they adopted a breakthrough perspective in which they had already achieved it.
Their perspective—or their view of the future—said they didn’t have to get anywhere because they were already standing there. Their stand said how it was going to be, and then they rode their butts off to close that gap between what they said and where they were the moment they said it. That’s an amazing demonstration of ultimate power: to declare a thing to be possible as if it were already achieved and then to take the exact right actions to close that gap. That’s a very powerful conversation I had to learn for my businesses and for you to learn for yours.
We All Need to Be Willing to Step Up and Say How
Bill and Nick declared their win and then took the action that made it possible. That is the kind of conversation you and your employees need now. In fact, I believe if your business could speak for itself, it would tell you, “I’m desperate for this conversation!”
When I lead performance transformation programs inside companies, I have my clients declare their outcome for the year even before they take the first step toward fulfilling it. They don’t know if they can do it—they don’t know how to do it—but none of that matters. They just know they are committed to it being that way, and they aren’t in hope abou
t it. They invent a conversation that says, “This is how it is right now—as if they were already there—and this is who we are in the matter of our business.”
They actually stand up and say, “This is how it is right now and from now on!” For them, it’s true the moment they declare it—and it can be for you, too, if you are willing to take a stand, create a bold possibility for it, believe it, and then ruthlessly and persistently stand for it and take action.
What do you hope will happen with your business?
How do you hope customers see your business?
What conversations do you hope your employees are having?
What is all this hoping accomplishing for you?
Why Should You Look at Your Business This Way?
Unfortunately, I’ve learned that the conversations in nearly 90 percent of companies are limiting, and as I’ve said, they undermine and sabotage your company’s performance. Remember they’re hidden, so you can’t see or hear them, and especially because you’re not familiar with how they work against you, they pass undetected through your filter.
If you can’t put your desired outcome into words as if it already exists—and if you don’t believe that outcome is possible—then you’ll continue to struggle. To see the impossible happen in your company, you have to be willing to let go of all the notions that you have about “how it is” or “how it might not work if you take the risk.” It’s only that way because you say it is. You’re that powerful.
Begin to say how: Right now, state your desired outcomes for your business, your customers, and your employees as if those outcomes already exist.