Inventing a Model of Yourself for Public Consumption
We all invent a model of ourselves for public consumption. It’s a formula for appearing to be winning when we fear we are not, and it’s our way of maintaining some level of equilibrium in a world of chaos. But in the end, that equilibrium undermines our best intentions.
Your rigid model of yourself is a way of being that makes up for your own personal limiting perspective. It’s the ideal us—what we want everyone else to see—so we display it to keep the rest of the world from finding out that most of us believe we don’t know what the hell we are doing.
Whenever I’ve attended a networking event and asked another CEO how he or she was doing, I’ve almost always heard the often-rehearsed answer that things are great, or great except for some minor road bumps due to the economy. But I’ve never been told what’s really going on in that CEO’s head because appearances are so important to us. While we appear to have it all together, the conversation and self-talk going on inside us expresses doubt about who we are.
Over the past ten years, I’ve led workshops with everyone from CEOs of large organizations to solo-entrepreneurs, and it’s the same on every level: As far as everyone else is concerned, they are doing fine. On the inside, it’s another story.
To compensate for that other story, these leaders cook up the personae they want everyone else to perceive. But each such persona is the embodiment of the pretense of leadership (as we explored in Chapter 9), and it’s what ends up running your business.
This is a problem of epidemic proportions. Your organization, regardless of its past performance, operates on a negative and limiting hidden context (a meme) that is covered up by the visible pretense of winning.
This conversation is helping to keep your company from executing its strategy, and it’s holding you back from your own growth potential.
Active Inertia
I enjoy driving near my home in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, but I have found you need to be very careful at night or you might learn the hard way about the deer, elk, and moose that cross the roads in the dark. You spot the reflection of your headlights in the animals’ eyes, but they don’t move, because they are literally paralyzed by the light.
I’ve met business leaders who remind me of deer caught in the headlights. They’re suffering from a condition called “active inertia,” which was revealed by Donald Sull, associate professor at London Business School, in his book Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them. Active inertia, Sull says, is “management’s tendency to respond to the most disruptive changes by accelerating activities that succeeded in the past.”18
Active inertia is really a very simple concept: Entrepreneurs start companies because of a great product or service they are confident will make money. They proclaim to the market that their product or service is the “best thing since sliced bread,” and the sales start rolling in. Satisfied that they now possess the formula for sustaining their competitive edge, they believe all they need to do is just keep doing what they know how to do. It’s now their winning paradigm or strategy. So, that’s all they do; that’s active inertia in action.
When companies fall into active inertia, they get bogged down in repeating what they know and have always done. Even in the face of clear and compelling evidence that the marketplace might have already changed, they still believe and act as if they had the right answer.
Sull gives an example of this in a story about Firestone Tire Company and its reaction to Michelin Tires’ new radial tire technology. Instead of recognizing the direction the market would be headed, Firestone kept its workforce focused on the old technology. As Sull says, “It just dug itself an even deeper hole.”
This is a substantial problem in business. Instead of digging themselves out of the rut they’re in through new practices, perspectives, and possibilities, companies end up digging themselves in deeper. To paraphrase an old saying, the smarter they are, the harder they fall. Armed with their winning strategy, companies end up victims of their own success.
When change occurs in the marketplace, these companies don’t see how their thinking has undermined them until it’s too late. Suddenly, they realize the competition has caught up or customers have switched to something the company wasn’t even aware was needed. The company can only respond with the tried and true, thus making matters worse. The answers seem to be to do more and work harder and faster, because that’s what entrepreneurs have always done.
Entrepreneurs are inventors, and inventors love what they create. They think that all they need to do is what they did to be successful in the past. And woe betide them if they were so “fortunate” as to be praised in the local press. That can make the locomotive really go off the rails.
The Telltale Characteristics of Active Inertia
Basing actions on fixed or rigid thinking from the past keeps results in the future looking like the results of the past. Haven’t we all fallen into the trap of sticking with “what we know” even if it’s failing to give us the result we want?
What has worked very well for you in the past?
How do you foresee that a past success might turn into a future failure?
It would be just too damn simple or ridiculous if we thought we could avoid this phenomenon altogether. It’s going to happen, so the best most can hope for is to do what Joel Arthur Barker said was necessary to break out of this paradigm paralysis: “Look outside your current way of thinking and at least consider how you might be in a rut. In any authentic change effort, that’s the first step.”19 When leaders begin to understand their own limiting paradigms—how what you know can prove to be the enemy—they are less likely to join the ranks of their unsuccessful comrades. Leaders should be the first to examine their own limiting perspectives.
Active inertia comes with a powerful paradox for failure. A paradox can be two conflicting ideas—for example, “I need to make a change to succeed, but I might fail.” But what if failure is a good thing, and the objective is to fail so you can succeed? That’s another sort of paradox. I have often reluctantly and unenthusiastically embraced new concepts in order to move forward, and the first thing that happened was that I failed. Does that mean I shouldn’t try again? I have failed more times than I have succeeded, but each time I’ve failed, I’ve learned something that I needed to succeed. I needed to fail so that I could succeed.
Confronting the limiting memes in my head that produce active inertia is not always easy. If you’re like me, you probably have these challenges on a weekly if not a daily basis. But taking the risk sure beats sticking with an old approach that leaves me with nothing as everyone else passes me by on their way to my future.
You need to pay particularly close attention to these telltale characteristics of active inertia.
Paradigmatic blind spots
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Paradigms shape how people view the world and their business. They are the models as well as the boundaries that define our personal world. They can create a powerful context that helps leaders take their organization to the next level, but limiting and rigid paradigms can also create blind spots and restrict the ability to act on new opportunities.
Talking as a substitute for action
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I point to this often in this book because leaders who “talk about it” as a substitute for action are endemic in organizations today. Too many leaders fall into the trap of allowing themselves and their employees to engage in institutionalized thinking that gives rise to faulty assumptions and unsuccessful workplace systems.
When stakeholders in the organization confuse talking about doing something with real action and nothing happens, planning and execution bog down. It’s time you paid attention to this behavior. It is the chief cause of the failure to execute your strategy.
Relatedness that restricts growth
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Make no mistake about it: Relatedness is the source of many of your results, and all companies should focus
on it as a principle, a value, and a practice—as long as you understand how it is used in your organization. As we discussed in Chapter 10, relatedness can also evolve from a strength into an entitlement and create an excuse to justify not changing. “I want to make significant changes that would make a difference in our bottom-line results—but, I don’t want to upset anyone,” is a paradoxical form of entitlement-driven behavior. It generates a culture of irresponsibility in which nothing can get done because no one will take ownership.
When relatedness backfires, it’s because we have treated people in a way that says they’re incapable of being accountable. We treat employees like children, thinking they will love us more if we don’t make it too hard on them. Give me a break! These conditions—which you are responsible for—not only restrict the organization, but they also push it into paralysis. Ultimately they result in resentment that can kill the organization.
Rules passed off as values
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Dominance takes many forms. Your propensity to create rules is just a more subtle form of your own commitment to patriarchy. More often than not, the sole purpose of rules is simply to control behavior. Over time, “That’s how we do it around here,” creates self-defeating rules that become the focal point of the enterprise—and fodder for new memes that sabotage performance.
Rigid thinking
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Rigid thinking results in false assumptions, negative assessments, and ultimately employee disengagement. Rigid thinking thwarts future intentions since it’s generally tied to avoiding a repeat of a past experience. And trying to change the past results will never take you or your organization to the next level. If you want to leverage change in your favor, you need to know how the past is impacting the current thinking of everyone. It’s the current thinking along with the conclusions about the past that dictate what is possible for your future.
There Are Solutions
The solutions to active inertia lie in two basic approaches:
1. Broader participation in the process of leadership and solution design. By creating effective teams that can create upward change, we can tap into our employees’ inherent creativity, so that what we do in our workplace shows up in the marketplace with a bigger impact on the bottom line, both ours and our clients’.
Guiding a company through change of any kind can be a difficult balancing act. You have to know what critical thinking to keep and what nonsense to discard. Should you go it alone or use an outside manager who has no preconceived ideas about your enterprise? Though some argue that an outsider might be inclined to throw everything out and start over, I believe an outside perspective combined with good insider insight is what’s needed. Change is best done in partnership with someone who understands how to get to the underlying conditions—the conversations—at the heart of the organization without ignoring the past and forcing the company to start from square one.
2. Nurturing a nebulous vision of the future that has you always working to investigate possibilities on the distant horizon. The watchword here is “distant.” This should be a sort of ongoing inquiry that you verbalize but don’t act on immediately.
If my client who thought he should invest $20 million into an online solution that nobody wanted had just waited a bit longer before acting, he’d be $20 million richer today. He would have discovered the solution he was actually looking for, instead of the one he built. It’s important to emphasize again that context is the heart muscle of every organization. Unless you consider all the underlying assumptions and invisible premises on which your decisions and actions for the organization are based, you are S-T-U-C-K with the past.
Before you can begin to create something anew, look at the conversations in which your organization is engaged and the limiting paradigms within which people view the world and interact.
The paradigms reside in all the perspectives, thinking, and beliefs that everyone in the organization relies on and that govern the company. Remember that these are based on the experiences and feelings of the past and what those mean to people, because regardless of what management intends to communicate, everything that happens is personal to the stakeholders in the organization.
If you want to leverage change in your favor, you need to know how the past impacts the current thinking of everyone in the company. The current thinking along with the conclusions about the past dictate what is possible for your future.
To leap out of the pit of paralysis, go to work on the organization’s alignment with your thinking, the quality and quantity of quality conversations, your actions, and your results. To alter the results of your organization, look at your actions. To alter your actions, look at your paradigms. At the core of it all are the conversations you are engaged in.
Defining Business Culture
Let’s talk about what culture is, how it impacts performance, and especially, what theories we need to be aware of so that we can turn the lessons into practice. Principles without action are merely beliefs without application.
Often, when meeting with prospective CEO clients, I find that they are eager to tell me about their organization’s culture. It’s something they seem very aware of, yet when they try to describe it, they struggle. Cultures are as difficult to describe as are the characteristics of Best Place to Work companies. Most leaders and their employees just know when they’re in a company that works and when they’re not.
I’ve come to the conclusion that most leaders perceive the need for a good culture but often fail to realize that cultures, too, are functions of the conversations people engage in, in the workplace. Negative conversations (and powerful negative memes) breed negative cultures, just as positive conversations (and positive memes) result in positive ones.
Of course, a leader would want to foster a positive culture, in order to have a positive effect on executing strategy, limiting turnover, and promoting results. But how do you create a positive culture, one that gives people the empowering feeling of belonging to something meaningful?
Let’s start off by defining culture. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary calls it: “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization … a corporate culture focused on the bottom line.”
Since attitudes, values, goals, and practices are conversations, your organization’s culture is established by the same conversations that impact the performance of your organization.
If I want people to be connected to the strategy of my organization, to each other, or to my client’s needs, I need to invent the kind of conversations that will help people do that. I call these types of conversations ConnectionPoints, which I described in Section 1, and I’ll discuss them more fully in Section 4. For now, the idea to keep in mind is that conversations create the culture of your business and that, therefore, you can transform your business by transforming your business’s conversations. (You are already familiar with this idea from our discussions in Section 2 about replacing the negative viral memes in your company with positive ones.)
But before we can begin building a powerful workplace that reinforces our values and connectedness, we must have a foundation upon which to build. That foundation is composed of ideas that lead to lessons or skills that can be practiced, embodied, or realized. The end goal is action. And the function of foundational ideas is to take the company’s vision, mission, and concepts and get them ready for action.
Three Foundational Ideas
There are three foundational ideas you urgently need in your business to transform your company into one that is not at the mercy of outside circumstances.
Transformation is not change. Change takes what you already have and know and makes modifications so it’s the same thing, only possibly improved upon. Transformation, on the other hand, is the process by which you completely reinvent your thinking, your actions, and who you are. It’s like the process of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. A butterfly is not a better or more improved caterpil
lar; it’s an entirely different animal that has undergone a transformation. I don’t work with clients to help them be a bit better. I’m interested in looking at who they want to be (and are not yet) and then designing that.
The fastest way through the transformation process in your business is to adopt the three foundational concepts of the Breakthrough Solutions Framework (BSF) for altering the way you relate to your business future. Think of them as the legs of a stool you can calmly sit on in the middle of chaos so that you can see what you need to do to start transforming your organization.
BSF Concept #1:
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Perspective Is Everything. To Transform Your Company, Transform Your Perspective of It And Your View Of Its Place In The World.
Your perspective is the view you have as you’re standing in your business. To change your perspective, all you need to do is change your view by changing where you’re standing—what you’re standing for. If you’re going to take your company to a new level of performance, it’s important to first change your perspective of your business. In the rest of this book, I promise to help you do that.
I’ve coached many teams and individuals on this concept, but clearly I’m not a psychologist. I’m only giving you a businessman’s version of how perspective works in our minds. You can interchange the words “perspective” and “view” if that helps you understand this better. How you view your employees, clients, suppliers, and competitors, is critical to performance. Even your perspective of your own role has a direct impact on you and your employees’ performance.
Here’s something to think about: All perspectives are made up. Your opinion and everything you think you know are made up, too. In fact, you made them up. Your opinion or view of everything (especially of yourself) determines how you’re going to deal with it. But if your actions come from a non-reality-based perspective of the world, it stands to reason that your organization’s performance might not be the best.
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