Leadership transition is fraught with folks who leave a mess behind. C-level transition, especially, can have an aspect of political pragmatism that leaves a stinky mess.
“What’s the first thing we do to help clients find money?” That was the question Wendi and I set out to answer when we had a forehead-thumping déjà vu. Although we didn’t phrase it quite that way, we did answer that question here about two years ago. The answer still seems pretty timely, so we’re running it again, minus a couple of typos:
We stand corrected. That was after having carelessly made the assertion that no foreign power had successfully occupied Afghanistan since Alexander the Great. Now, “standing corrected” is the problem of being a dilettante in front of a smart guy like Prof. Peter Dutton at the U.S. Naval War College. “Nope,” he said. “Genghis Kahn did it, too.”
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Henry Ford said that failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.
But many of us begin again with no increase in intelligence. Or, we don’t get smarter because we won’t risk failure in the first place.
Yikes! It’s the end of the year, and we’re all supposed to have a bunch of stuff done by now – like writing our strategic plans. But the deadly temptation with strategic plans is just to “git-er-done” so we can “git-er-out-the-door!” You see, simply getting it done and out the door doesn’t mean much if the plans never actually materialize.
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Successful innovation requires successful experimentation, and successful experimentation requires eagerness to learn from failure. This has become a cliché because it holds true, time and time again.
The great experimenter Thomas Edison is famous for comments such as, “I have not failed.
“Innovation sandbox” is a term coined by the late C.K. Prahalad. The gist: For a truly quantum innovation in either goods or services, (1) set a really high bar for what “good” looks like, (2) identify a small handful of aggressive constraints, and then, within that “sandbox” (3) begin a radical re-examination of your assumptions and self-imposed limits as you develop your breakthrough design. That combination forces you to, as Apple says, “think different.”
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Deep wisdom directed at today’s leaders isn’t what you’d expect from a guy who’s been dead since 1792. But Captain John Paul Jones, having been successfully channeled by Rear Admiral Rob Wray, has stern advice for today’s officers of the American Navy.
“Goals are dangerous!” That’s what a current spate of management literature would have you believe, stating that goals cause narrow and short-term focus, inept performance, and harmful side effects such as unethical behavior. Say it isn’t so!
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"It’s an accountability problem." This is one of those diagnoses that sound definitive and inspire lots of nods around the conference table – right up there with “it’s a leadership issue,” and “it’s a communication problem.
