Flip

PeterSheahan
is an energetic entrepreneur with a reputation for transforming organisations by turning traditional paradigms on their head. Not yet thirty years old, he is a consultant to powerful multinational brands including Google, L'Oréal, News America Incorporated, Ernst & Young, BMW and Coca-Cola.

A recognised authority on global workforce trends, Peter was the first to uncover the Generation Y revolution in the workplace in his groundbreaking
Generation Y: Thriving (and Surviving) with Generation Y at Work
. In
Flip
, Peter shares insights gained from his work inside the boardrooms of some of the world's most significant companies.

Peter is the author of five books, and has given more than 2000 presentations to a combined audience of over 300,000 people in six different countries. Peter was the 2003 MBN Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and in 2006 was voted the leading keynote speaker in Australia by his peers at the National Speakers Association. He lives in Sydney, Australia, with his wife Sharon and two children Maddy and Thomas.

How counter-intuitive thinking is changing everything – from branding and strategy to technology and talent

PeterSheahan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia

Flip

ePub ISBN 9781864714524

Original Print Edition

Random House Australia Pty Ltd
Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney, NSW 2060
www.randomhouse.com.au

First published by Random House Australia 2007

Copyright © Peter Sheahan 2007

This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Sheahan, Peter.
Flip

ISBN: 9781741667202

1. Success in business – Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Creative ability in business – Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Title.
650.1

Cover illustration by Getty Images
Cover and internal design by Melanie Feddersen, i2i design
Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

TO ALL YOU FLIPSTARS OUT THERE TRYING SOMETHING NEW, TAKING A RISK AND PUTTING IT ALL ON THE LINE. HOLD THE NERVE!

• About the Author
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Picture 1
  
• Introduction
  
• Chapter 1 THE FOUR FORCES OF CHANGE
  
• Chapter 2 FAST, GOOD, CHEAP – PICK 3
  
• Chapter 3 SUPERFICIAL IS ANYTHING BUT
  
• Chapter 4 BUSINESS IS PERSONAL
  
• Chapter 5 THERE IS NO WISDOM IN CROWDS
  
• Chapter 6 TO GET CONTROL, GIVE IT UP
  
• Chapter 7 ACTION PRECEDES CLARITY
  
• Acknowledgements
  
• Notes
  
• Index
  
• PeterSheahan
  
• Engage Peter to Speak or Consult
  

Getting flipped:
Experiencing a shift in mindset to a more counterintuitive approach that reflects the hard reality of the business landscape as it is today, and not as it used to be

Business today requires new perspectives on strategy, operations, customers and staff. Most of all it requires a level of mindset flexibility that has previously been considered a weakness in some organisations. To navigate in an increasingly complex environment and zig when the competition are all zagging, you must flip repeatedly between different perspectives and paradigms. And you must do so in real time and on demand.

Flip
provides a foundation and guidelines for developing and employing that flexible mindset. It stimulates a way of thinking – an approach to business and life – that will remain relevant regardless of the changes that will occur at an increasingly rapid pace in coming years. It does not replace one rigid set of rules with another that will soon be outmoded in turn. To
flip
is to turn conventional wisdom on its head, whether it be the wisdom of 1987, 2007 or 2027.

This book will, I hope, be a tonic for many readers. Daily I meet people who are struggling to keep their heads above water, crippled by their desire to always be 'right' and to have an answer about what will happen in the future. But you can't know this, nor do you need to.You just need to have the ability to notice what is and isn't working, and then be willing to
flip
.

The complexity of the current business climate means there is no single right way forward. There are many ways, and the most successful companies and leaders will try them all at one time or another. They will keep flipping. This is what Toyota is doing with the Scion and with hybrid technology throughout the Toyota and Lexus ranges. It is what Apple is doing with the iPod. It is what Richard Branson does in virtually every industry he touches. And it is what Skype is doing in telecommunications. Flipping, you are about to discover, is what the world's most effective organisations and individuals do to distinguish themselves from the competition.

It's a beautiful, warm Arizona winter day outside, and the sky is as blue as Sydney's was when I left just thirty-six hours earlier. But the three hundred executives eating lunch inside a windowless ballroom at the Biltmore Resort in Phoenix can't see it. The CEO, COO, regional executive vice-presidents, and other senior managers of one of the world's leading engineering design firms, a company with 28,000 employees worldwide and 2006 revenues of US$3.4 billion, have been sitting inside all day for three days. No golf, no free time, just business session after business session, with compulsory attendance at dinner followed by a final session, six hours sleep, and a 7 am start the next day. Three fifteen-minute breaks per day, 'BlackBerry moments', are as close as this group has gotten to fresh air and a look at the 36-hole golf course.

Jetlag has kicked in for most, and the tension in the room has become palpable after listening to more than four hours of presentations from Human Resources and Learning & Development staff about fostering employee engagement, building a 'great place to work' and employer branding. Three hundred hard-nosed engineers have responded to these buzzwords the same way I imagine their teams would to a group hug at a Monday morning project meeting.

The executives, 90 per cent of them white male baby boomers, run market-leading companies across the US, Canada, the UK, China, the Middle East and Australia. They are well-seasoned, successful men and women who have in many cases built their companies from the ground up. More than half of this fast-growing, multi-billion dollar organisation's operating companies and their representative executives have come into the fold through mergers and acquisitions, often quite recently. This meeting is part of an ongoing effort to give them a shared sense of purpose and build a unified corporate culture.

In the line for the Mexican buffet I overhear one executive whisper to another, 'I am sick of all of this "soft" crap. Why should we have to change what we do to meet the needs of our staff? They work for us and should be grateful to have a job.' His buddy mutters in agreement with him.

Then another executive says quite loudly in an unmistakable New York accent that he'd rather be on the golf course, given that recent snow back east had kept him off his favourite Long Island course.

I am the next speaker on the program, and I have heard these sorts of comments before. In fact I hear them almost daily from senior executives at the market-leading companies that I have the pleasure of working with.

My brief that day: 'Change the way our senior executives think about their people and how essential they are to the growth of the business.'

I go to the stage, take a deep breath, and begin . . .

I start with a quick story about how someone half their age got to be in front of them. They laugh a little, but are still sceptical. Then I poke some fun at the CEO, who had introduced me. They are shocked at this, but are even more surprised when they see him laughing at my remarks.

As I work through a model or two about why talentcentric organisations are more successful in the market, I seem to be losing them fast. I imagine them saying in their minds, 'Here we go again.' I need to rescue the session before they tune me out completely.

On my laptop, ready in case a moment like this arises, I have a series of jaw-dropping slides charting the present and continuing changes in the size of the world's labour markets – substantial contraction in developed economies and explosive growth in most undeveloped and some developing ones. I rarely have to use these slides, but the 'harder' and more leftbrained my audience, the more likely it is that I will need them. I present US workforce trends first, because half of the audience are based in the US. Then the UK, followed by China and India. Their faces light up. Well-designed graphs with credible data are a powerful currency for these left-brained engineers. Now I have them on my side.

Given a series of examples anchored to their experiences with twenty-something children being demanding, impatient and refusing to leave home, and to their own collaborative and collegial parenting styles compared with their parents' more commanding and controlling styles, and they have a whole new philosophy for dealing with their staff. It is amazing how easy it is to win over a group of high-powered people from any industry when you connect with their personal lives. For so many audiences this has been my most powerful tool.

Now they have the data, they have the mindset, and it's time to inspire them to do it. I rant and rave about how they are pushing the envelope in their industries. I recite some of the data from day one and day two about the state of the world's resources and appeal to their sense of civic duty: 'The world is looking to you to solve these problems. It is companies like this one that will create the breakthroughs in more efficient energy use, water conservation and other crucial infrastructure. You have an obligation to build the most powerful technical professional services firm in the world. The planet requires that you do.'

I tell a final, true story about how a senior executive in a similar organisation refused to change, going as far as locking himself in the boardroom to protest a new workplace design that placed him in amongst his team instead of in a corner office. The absurdity of the executive's behaviour is an indirect way of suggesting that anyone who wanted to resist the change initiatives being highlighted at this conference would look equally absurd to his or her peers. This story gets a much better laugh than my first, and I close the session.

The members of the audience have been
flipped.
They entered the session with a mindset that it was employee responsibility to meet the needs of the employer. They leave knowing it is their responsibility to create businesses that the best and the brightest talent in the world will eagerly compete to work for.

At the 'BlackBerry' break that follows, fewer phone calls are being made. People are buzzing. One exec says to another, 'I am going to make our operating company a talent magnet?' and I laugh out loud, because there is no way he would have said something like that before my presentation.

Welcome to my world. This is what I do. I help senior executives shift their mindsets out of the world as it used to exist and into the world as it exists today. These people are actively seeking to create new paradigms for the way we do business.
Flip
is about these new paradigms. It proposes a series of changes in perspective – for companies and organisations and for people at every stage of their careers – that literally flip on their head some of the traditional ways in which we approach our businesses, policies and even our individual lives.

The flip I highlighted in Arizona – to put talent at the centre of a strategic business agenda – may not seem like a big shift to some people, but I can assure you to this company and this group of executives it was a
huge
deal. Since that winter meeting in Arizona, I have been asked by the same company to participate in a global project to redesign their employment brand and talent initiatives, working directly with the head office in Los Angeles and engaging managers and executives in their seventeen different operating companies around the world. They are clearly not just giving lip service to the idea of becoming an employer of choice; they are serious about it and are putting their money where their mouth is.

In carrying messages like this to organisations of all kinds, I have become known to some of my clients as 'the Mohawk in the boardroom'. 'Mohawk' refers to my youth and my penchant for being bluntly provocative, as I share my insights into the changing expectations of today's staff and customers and how to adapt to them successfully. 'Boardroom' refers to the level at which I interact with many of my clients.

That I do this work, given my background and lack of formal credentials, is a flip in itself. Conventional wisdom would say that to advise leaders at the CEO and top executive level about issues that are critical to the future of their organisations, I should have decades of experience, a PhD and probably a stint at the helm of a multinational company. I have none of these, but it is precisely my unjaded, unfettered, youth-driven approach that makes what I do so valuable to my clients. I give them access to a way of thinking they can barely comprehend and insight into a market they desperately need to penetrate.As more than one client has said to me, with a healthy dose of irony, 'You
are
flip, aren't you?'

I would be lying, however, if I said I always succeeded in shifting senior leaders' mindsets. After a session on generational change, the CFO of a multinational company told me, 'You Gen Y'ers are a zero sum game. You cost more money than you're worth. All I am going to do is give all my friends a job, because by the time your lot are in control, I'll be dead.'

He had apparently tuned out one of the key points I had been stressing. Generation Y doesn't just act differently from older generations. It also alters the behaviour of older generations in a more immediate and dynamic way than any previous youth cohort has done, even going back to the fabled youth culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The demands and expectations of Generation Y as customers and staff in fact reflect the demands and expectations of talented people and influential consumers across the age spectrum. The problem this CFO has is that 'all of his mates' are going to be wanting the same nurturing, creative and inspiring workplaces that the Gen Y'ers he dislikes so much are asking for now. The flip is that a Gen Y–friendly workplace will be a talent-friendly workplace. Full stop.

But this book is not about Generation Y. I wrote and published that book already
(Generation Y: Thriving and Surviving with Generation Y at Work)
. It is about business and leadership more broadly. However, my work in the area of generational change has greatly enhanced my understanding of where the business world is heading, because Generation Y is a virtual bell-wether for the behaviours, needs and wants of clients and customers in all age and demographic groups.

There has never been a more exciting time to be in business. Things are changing faster and faster, new opportunities and new markets are opening up every day. In order to profit from these new opportunities and markets you first need to understand exactly what is changing, and what impact this is having on your existing business. Then you need to flip. Flip from the perspective that has governed your business and competitive strategy into new perspectives and strategic directions tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Mindset flexibility, not proprietary expertise or resources, will define the successful businesses and leaders of the future.

This book will show you how seemingly counter-intuitive thinking is changing the way we do everything, from branding and strategy to technology and talent. That thinking begins with understanding that we have seen the end of an
either/or
world. Conventional business models are built on choices between mutually exclusive options. That's a nonstarter in a world where few, if any, options are truly mutually exclusive. For the foreseeable future, you must
Think AND, Not OR.

Consider the following statements:

• The world is getting smaller every day.
  
• The world is getting bigger every day.
  

Both statements are true. The world is getting smaller all the time because people, things and ideas move from one place to another in greater and greater numbers at greater and greater speed. And the world is getting bigger all the time for the same reason; all those people, things and ideas in motion create an ever-increasing number of possibilities and options. Concentrate on one of these statements at the expense of the other and you will miss crucial possibilities and options and cripple your decision-making ability.

The need to 'Think AND, Not OR' will pop up throughout the book. It is the overarching context for six major flips of mindset that I will explore: