Flip (31 page)

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.
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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 momentum.
  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.

You
must make a decision, and
move
.

GO NUTS!

By this point you should have a fairly good idea what is working and what is not. If you have been continually taking action, observing the results and taking new action based on that feedback, you are ready to make a decision and bet the bank on it. Seriously. There comes a time when your little experiments need to become full-scale attacks.

Whether you choose to do this through rapid evolutions or full-scale revolution is up to you. Either way, this rapid, fullblown effort is the only way change happens.

Bain & Co conducted a study of twenty-one recent 'corporate transformations' (large-scale management consulting projects involving massive company overhaul, mostly the CEO firing all of upper management). In every case where the transformations led to positive benefits for the company, the changes happened in two years or less. For the companies that changed fast and enjoyed quick and tangible results, their stock prices rose on average 250 per cent a year as they revived.
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This kind of commitment creates energy. And energy is what we need. Apathetic staff are worse than angry staff. Angry staff can have their energy redirected when an organisation is ready to move in a positive new direction. Apathy is far harder to budge. Consider from the same study quoted above that 90 per cent of people with heart problems that required invasive heart surgery never change their behaviour post surgery, even though it is likely to kill them. The same lazy habits that got them into this mess are likely to keep them in this mess.

IBM have not treated their reinvention as a global services company lightly. They actually sold an important part of their hardware business – their entire PC division, including the ThinkPad laptops – to Lenovo in China. Although IBM continues to manufacture mainframe computers (the latest is the Enterprise z9), jettisoning the part of the brand that had become most familiar to ordinary consumers was not a half measure. Of US$91.4 billion in 2006 revenues, IBM got US$20 billion from its Systems and Technology division, which manufactures mainframe computers and designs server processors and computer chips, and US$47 billion from Services. Who knows, maybe one day Apple will execute a similar flip and become a full-scale music business.

Business is no different from a kindergarten playground. In order to progress along the monkey bars you need to let go.

RAPIDLY DEVISE SHORT-TERM PLANS

Strategy on the go requires that you do have a strategy – it just requires that it be shorter term not longer term, and that you allow yourself the requisite degree of flexibility within your longer term plans.

This is a vital point. Long-term planning is built on your capacity to accurately predict not only the environment of the future but also the outcomes of each of your steps along the way. The problem we face is that the four compounding forces of the changing world make long-term prediction nigh on impossible. Prediction, as an activity, is getting harder and harder.

Consider this point, made by Daniel Gilbert in
Stumbling on Happiness
:

All brains – human brains, chimpanzee brains, even ordinary food-burying squirrel brains – make predictions about the
immediate, local, personal future
. They do this by using information about current events ('I smell something') and past events ('Last time I smelled this smell, something big tried to eat me') to anticipate what will happen next ('A big thing is about to – ').

But the more complex a system becomes, the less likely results in the past are going to be accurate predictors of results in the future. Think about this in terms of something we try to predict all the time: you can predict with a great degree of certainty what the weather in your immediate vicinity will be like in the next ten minutes, but it becomes much harder to make an accurate prediction if you expand the time span over which you are projecting and you increase the complexity of the system within which the predictions take place.

As both time span and complexity increase so does the margin for error when predicting the future. The preceding steps are an attempt to minimise the complexity you face, so add to that a reduction in the time span for which you are attempting to plan and you will reduce your margin of error.

This kind of short-term planning approach requires genuine speed. You must be able to devise and communicate your plan rapidly, and repeatedly, as you go.

CHANGE AND ADAPT

At a conference recently I heard Tim Macartney-Snape speak. He is one of the only people in history to climb Mount Everest without the assistance of oxygen. He was talking about how the hardest thing about climbing Everest, apart from the oxygen and the cold, is that the mountain 'makes its own weather'. Apparently, even the best climbing technology can't predict the weather patterns at that altitude. It reminded me of the marketplace. It makes its own weather: you either adapt and flip to stay on the mountain or you resist and get blown off it.

At the end of the day, you just need to be flexible. You must be able to change and adapt your actions and strategy in order to more effectively propel your business, your career and your life in the direction you desire, not just in little ways but in big ways. Sure you may have a whole lot of personal or business capital invested in doing business a certain way, but if the world changes so must you. This is true regardless of the infrastructure you have in place, the degrees you have or the business models that have made you profitable.

I remember when I first started my business almost a decade ago. I wanted to work with students in schools. I wanted to teach them how to make a smooth transition from school to work and to give them the inside scoop about résumés, interview skills, employment expectations and – most of all – about the changing career landscape. I thought a one-week course would be perfect. How wrong I was.

The mistake was not in the idea. There was a lot of support for the content I was intending to teach. It was the format of a one-week course that was wrong. But even this was not the mistake. There is nothing wrong with 'guessing' what will work. In many ways this is what we do when we strategise (we hate to admit it, but it is all just educated guessing). The mistake was spending a year perfecting my guess before I opened myself up to the feedback of the market.

Month after month I worked on what I would say, on what day in the one-week program I would say it, and what activities I would get them to engage in to drive their learning. Then, in less than a week, the market made it very clear that this was not what the schools could use. They could not afford to release students from class for that long. Even though it was agreed that it would provide a good learning opportunity, it was simply not practical. They wanted short (like one hour short), sharp sessions with simple take-home tip sheets for their students. Had I started earlier, had I committed before I was ready, had I acted in spite of my early confusion, I would have gained more clarity faster. I would have saved a year!

Action must happen now – risks must be taken: calculated, intelligent and high-payoff risks, but risks nonetheless. You can change and adapt. You must believe it is possible.

FINAL WORDS FOR THE NEW FLIPSTAR

Getting inspired while reading a book is the easy part. Talking to yourself and getting yourself psyched about a new idea for your career and company takes little courage. Sure you should be commended for picking the book up in the first place, and you should be celebrated for making it to the back. However, this is the catalyst, not the action. You have to get stuff done.

When you put this book down and head back to work you will be met by people who have not yet been
flipped
. They won't see the world through the same lens as you now do. They will be entrenched in out-of-date and inefficient practices, which have made them successful to date.

You should not reject, ridicule or try to 'fix' these people. At least, not straight away.And nor should you develop a sense of superiority because you now 'get it'. You will need these people in order to flip your organisation.

What you need now is to exercise some finesse, generate some real and impressive results and develop an inspiring view of their future.

Finesse
because people will want to reject you and your ideas.New can often scare people.Your job is to 'play the game' and win these people over. Going head to head is usually not the best approach. Although, if you get no love – go hard! You might as well go down fighting. Then go and start your own company and kick their butt in the marketplace.

Results
because at the end of the day in business this is what matters. No point having cool ideas, as flipped as they may be, if they don't get results. Being different for different's sake is no different to change for change's sake. If all it does is keep you interested and add some variety to your life, get a hobby. Play some, take some risks too. Just remember business is about getting results.

And finally,
an inspiring view of their future
, because people can and will change if they believe it is for the better. They want to know you have their best interests at heart, and deep down I think they just want to be inspired by the possibility of a better future.

My hope is that
Flip
has given you an inspiring view of the future. I wanted to provide some clarity about the changes we are dealing with daily, and most of all I wanted to give you an empowering mindset for meeting those changes head on.