Tag Archive for: Leadership

Do ‘C’ students run the world?

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Leadership begins where excuses end.

Kobe Joseph

Have you heard the saying, “The ‘C’ students run the world.”? The quote has been attributed to Harry Truman, though Chat GPT informs me that the truth of the quote’s origin is only, “plausible but unverified.”

Regardless of who said it, behind many popular quotes lies some degree of wisdom, so let’s start by checking the validity of it. Do the early educational achievers – valedictorians, ivy leaguers, and so on – come to dominate the business world, or do we see plenty of the so-called ‘C’ students on top?

When documenting the educational backgrounds of Fortune 500 CEOs in 1999, David Kang, a Dartmouth Tuck professor, found that the most common bachelor’s degree held among them was not from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, West Point, or any other elite university – it was having no degree at all. While there certainly are academic elites at the top, there are just as many great leaders who found their stride later and rose to the top.

So… how does this work? What can bring supposed ‘A’ students down to normalcy and ‘C’ students into success?

A critical factor to look at is a simple mindset difference. The ‘A’ student often considers himself or herself to be gifted – innately smart, talented, and born with outstanding ability – whereas the ‘C’ student might not hold the same internal assumptions.

These internal assumptions can affect something called your locus of control. If you have an external locus of control, you tend to believe circumstances dictate your life. With an internal locus of control, you more so believe that you dictate your life. People who get labelled as “intelligent” or “talented” can often attribute their success to traits they possess but cannot change, contributing to the formation of an external locus of control. The unseen benefit to those with a less exceptional start is that they can more often identify themselves with controllable qualities, such as being “hard-working” or “reliable” and develop an internal locus of control.

This matters because it completely changes how you recover from adversity.

Imagine you’re faced with this scenario, which I found myself in a few weeks ago: you’re presenting an analysis to an executive and, suddenly, they tell you your dataset is wrong (and it is). Whose fault is it? There’s two ways to respond:

  1. Well, someone gave me the wrong data. It was their fault.
  2. I should have been more diligent, tested my assumptions, and found the problem. It was my fault.

If you choose option 1, while it may be true, you’ll find no way to improve upon the error. You didn’t cause it, so why should you fix it? But, if you respond with option 2, you can find ways to learn and become better – all because you took ownership of an issue that might not have been your mistake.

In your organization, even when you make a mistake (as we all do inevitably), don’t follow it up with a much more serious error: the fundamental attribution error, where you think success is a result of your character, but failure is blamed on your circumstances. When you believe external factors cause your problems, you won’t sharpen your internal toolset to prevent them from reoccurring.

In truth, your GPA, SAT, or technical expertise alone won’t get you all the way to the finish line – so own the problems and find ways to improve from them, or else you’ll get passed by someone who does.

When an initiative doesn’t hit its targets, a product must be recalled, or a workplace accident occurs, who usually gets the blame? The person in charge, whether it’s the product manager or the CEO.

So, if you want to be a great leader, then start owning things now. Own the issue even when, “It’s not my fault,” because you won’t be responsible for something tomorrow if you don’t take responsibility for it today.

What do you think? Where have you seen talented people fall behind in the workplace?

AI and getting trapped inside the box

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New tools raise the bar on the need for creative thinking.

Geoff Wilson

A recent essay from AI Snake Oil (here) made a surprising claim: that artificial intelligence might slow down science. Not because it’s inaccurate, but because it’s too good at being accurate–within the wrong frame.

The author points to the centuries-long dominance of the geocentric model of the universe. At one point, predictions of planetary motion based on Earth being the center of the universe were astonishingly precise. But they were also deeply wrong. The math worked. The understanding didn’t.

The essay poses an unsettling idea: if AI had existed then–and been trained on those models–we might have clung to the wrong theory even longer. The system would optimize the pattern, not question the premise.

That idea should raise eyebrows in business, too.

Because if AI has the potential to reinforce flawed scientific models under the guise of precision, what could it do to our strategic and operational models in the business world? Could the efficiency of the tool blind us to the fragility of the box it lives in?

Let’s rewind to the 1990s.

Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was an elite hedge fund run by some of the most decorated minds in finance — including two Nobel Prize winners. Their trading strategy was based on elegant models, airtight math, and decades of data. They had accounted for everything — except what had never happened.

When the Asian financial crisis hit, and then the Russian debt default followed, the market behavior fell outside the box. LTCM’s models didn’t break–they simply didn’t apply. Within months, the fund teetered on the edge of collapse, threatening to drag the global financial system down with it.

That story wasn’t about incompetence. It was about conviction–conviction in a model that worked, until it didn’t. A belief in historical precision, at the cost of hypothetical imagination.

Which brings us back to AI.

Artificial intelligence excels at pattern recognition. It’s built to identify structure, predict based on precedent, and optimize for success–all within the observed dataset. But what happens when the next critical insight lives outside the dataset? Or when the market moves in a way it never has before? Or when a first-principles challenge is needed, not a predictive output?

What happens to outside-the-box thinking when the most powerful tools we use only look inside the box?

That’s not a knock on the technology. AI can enhance insight, increase productivity, and surface connections humans might miss. But it’s also a mirror–reflecting what’s been done, not necessarily what should be done next.

In that way, AI can become like the geocentric model: precise in the wrong direction.

Or like LTCM: confidently accelerating toward the edge of a cliff because the GPS has never seen a cliff before.

Strategic leaders–the real kind, the ones who hold the long arc of value creation and risk–can’t afford to outsource the act of questioning. AI can suggest. It can support. But it cannot wonder. It cannot imagine the inverse, the anomaly, the edge case that no one has seen but everyone should fear.

The job of leadership–now more than ever–is to ask: what if the model is wrong?

What if the future doesn’t look like the past?

What if we are right about everything, except the thing that matters most?

Outside-the-box thinking is not a luxury. It is, increasingly, the only kind of thinking that will matter. Because as the boxes get smarter, the need for human insight–uncomfortable, abstract, imperfect insight–only grows.

We should use AI. But we should also stay skeptical. Every model has a boundary. Every dataset has a blind spot. And every organization that overfits to efficiency risks underfitting to reality.

So yes, use the tool.

But keep one eye on the horizon–and one foot out of the box.

What do you think?  How do we keep a foot outside the box?

Michael Collins? Who’s That?

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The spotlight doesn’t reach everyone — but success does.

Geoff Wilson

I was swinging golf clubs with a younger professional recently — a sharp, curious guy early in his career. Somewhere around the 11th hole of virtual golf we faced a Par 5 and discussion of an “eagle” came up.  Since I had just chunked my umteenth shot of the game, I made an offhand comment: “I’m so far away from an eagle, you might as well call me Michael Collins.”

He laughed, politely. But then he asked, “Who’s Michael Collins?”

The question stopped me. Because while it was a reasonable question…it was telling.

Michael Collins, as you may or may not recall, was the third astronaut on Apollo 11. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history in the Eagle lander on the lunar surface, Collins stayed in orbit, piloting the command module (Columbia, for the record) solo for over 21 hours. He never touched the moon. Never took a famous step. Never delivered a line that would echo through time.

But without him, no one would have come home (coincidentally, the return trip from the moon started on July 21, 1969…exactly 56 years ago).

Collins–orbiting the moon as the loneliest human in the universe–was the one who kept the mission alive while the rest of the world watched the main event. He was critical, and yet largely forgotten.

The moment made me think about how often this happens in business, in leadership, in life.

We celebrate the keynote speaker, not the team that built the deck. We remember the CEO who closed the deal, not the analyst who first spotted the opportunity. We quote the founder, not the engineer who debugged the product the night before launch.

We tend to build monuments to moonwalkers. And we forget about the people who kept the orbit steady.

But if you’ve ever led anything big–a transformation, a turnaround, a product launch, a merger–you know that success is rarely the result of marquee moves alone. It’s the result of many people doing their job well, quietly, persistently, without fanfare. Often, without being asked.

Every great outcome has a few people whose names will never make it into the press release. But take one of them away, and the whole thing wobbles.

I’ve seen executive teams spend months on strategy–and then watched a mid-level operations lead execute the plan better than the leadership ever imagined. I’ve seen project managers, schedulers, executive assistants, even interns, step into chaos and bring order. And I’ve seen those same people go home at the end of the day, not looking for credit–just knowing they helped get it done.

These are the Michael Collinses of our organizations.

They don’t need a statue. But they do deserve recognition.

Leaders look for talent that shines. They also look for talent that supports. They understand that success is not only driven by visionaries, but by role players who turn vision into reality. They know that someone has to keep the engine running while others plant the flag.

And they make sure those people know they’re seen.

So here’s a simple challenge: look around your team. Ask yourself: Who is tending the command module? Who is holding the line while others step onto the stage? And what are you doing to celebrate them?

Because the truth is: Not everyone needs to walk on the moon.

Some people bring you home.

What do you think?  How do unsung heroes factor into your organization’s success?  How do you recognize them?

Recent disasters show the importance of keeping your head on a swivel

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Recent flooding disasters provide grim insight into the importance of remaining risk aware in life and work.

Geoff Wilson

First, an author’s note:  My heart aches for the lives lost and families forever changed by the recent flooding in Kerr County and across Central Texas. These reflections are not a critique of those who paid the ultimate price. They are offered with humility — a reminder that even as we grieve, we can reflect on the role of self-leadership when facing risk, uncertainty, and the unexpected.

Earlier this month, flash floods swept through Kerr County and neighboring parts of Texas. Rivers surged, bridges disappeared, and lives were lost — more than anyone even still yet knows, as recovery crews continue their efforts.

In the aftermath, the questions are surfacing. Could this have been prevented? Was there a breakdown in emergency response? Were there gaps in communication, in leadership, in planning?

Probably yes — to all of the above.

But even as we examine the failures in systems and structures, there’s a quieter, harder truth emerging: some of the deaths came down to risk decisions made at the individual level. Sleeping or camping near a river known for flash flooding. Ignoring the rumble of rain upstream. Trusting the past to be a guide for what the next night would bring. Or, importantly, thinking that somebody else would warn of major life-threatening risks.

It’s easy to point fingers when institutions fail. Harder to wrestle with the reality that self-leadership is the last line of defense. That no matter how well a system is designed — or how poorly — you are ultimately responsible for the risks you take with your own life, or with the lives of young people in your charge.

That’s not victim-blaming. It’s a recognition of agency. And it’s a principle that applies far beyond emergency response.

In organizational life, we often fool ourselves into thinking that risk is someone else’s job. We assume that someone — a finance lead, a risk officer, a committee, a consultant — is modeling the downside. Running the scenarios. Watching the flood gauges.

And then the waters rise.

When strategy falters, when markets shift, when the “one in a thousand” hits — the question isn’t who owned the spreadsheet. It’s who owned the decision. More often than not, the person who feels the full force of a risk realized is the same one who delegated the risk management in the first place.

There’s a lesson here. A call to self-leadership, even in the most structured organizations.

Keep your head on a swivel.

Look beyond the dashboard someone else built. Ask where the floodplain is. Know the signs upstream. And remember that just because a risk is being managed, doesn’t mean it’s being avoided.

This isn’t about paranoia. It’s about presence. Strategic leaders don’t live in a state of fear, but they do live in a state of alertness — especially in domains where the downside lands squarely on their shoulders.

If you’re going to sleep by a river — in Texas or in business — make it a conscious choice. Know the history. Understand the margins. Have a plan.

Because no matter how good the systems are around you, there’s no substitute for awareness.

And when the water starts to rise, you’ll want to be the one who saw it coming — not the one waiting for someone else to sound the alarm.

As of this writing, relief is still needed in the flood-ravaged areas.  WGP has made a donation to the Kerr County Flood Relief Fund, and I hope you will consider doing the same.  Here is a link.

What do you think?  Are there ways to keep your head on a swivel when it comes to business and career risk that deserve discussion?

Pain / Management

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The organizational flinch!

Geoff Wilson

This one comes from reflections over the past year I spent recovering from a total knee replacement.  The procedure and the recovery has been a revelation in not only the true miracles of modern orthopedic technology, but also the slow loss of function that we don’t even notice as we age.

Just two weeks ago, my wife and I hiked 65 miles along the Coast Path in Cornwall, England.  That would simply not have been possible for me a year ago.

For more than 20 years, I’ve dealt with the progressive degradation of a knee that I injured badly in 1996.  I’ve written about that injury and the learning that came with it in a prior blog post here.  The long degradation proceeded to a point last May where a simple 10-step stroll was a puzzle of pain and motion…and to a point where I experienced a prison of pain where sitting or lying still hurt as badly as moving. So, I have experience to share in my recovery from that: once the pain was gone, I had to re-learn how to move in ways my body had “blocked” over the past three decades.

I think there’s leadership learning in that process…

To wit: walk behind an older person in a grocery store and you might notice the pattern: the careful steps, the limited turns, the subtle guarding of motion. It’s not just age at play. It’s memory — the memory of pain. A stiff back, a knee that needs replacement like mine, a hip that talks back after a long day. Over time, the body learns to move around the pain. To manage it. And in managing it, it also limits itself.

What begins as protection becomes pattern. Eventually, the body isn’t moving to avoid pain — it’s simply not moving.

Organizations behave the same way.

Pain, in a business context, rarely arrives as a torn ligament. It comes as a failed initiative. A reorganization that went sideways. A strategy that fell flat. A leader who pushed too hard. An innovation that drained resources without results.

And like the aging body, the organization remembers.

People stop suggesting bold moves. Teams become careful. Risk assessments grow longer. Reviews grow heavier. The organization doesn’t say, “We can’t do this.” It says, “Let’s revisit that in Q4,” or “This feels like a distraction,” or the classic: “We tried something like this a few years ago…”

The organizational flinch is rarely loud. It’s quiet. Respectable. Even rational. But over time, it becomes rigid.

In physical therapy, clinicians often help patients relearn movements they’ve been avoiding — not because the body can’t do them, but because it’s been trained not to. The process is slow, deliberate, and occasionally uncomfortable. It requires the patient to trust the process — and the therapist to know when a movement is worth reintroducing.

Organizations need a similar kind of therapy.

Avoidance can’t be the long-term answer. Avoiding difficult conversations, complex initiatives, or once-burned strategic paths may feel prudent. But prudence can harden into paralysis. And agility — the ability to move, pivot, try, and adapt — fades.

This isn’t to say that pain should be ignored. Quite the opposite. Pain is a signal. It points to stress, imbalance, or real risk. But pain also presents a choice: recover and reengage, or protect and retreat. The latter feels safer in the short term. The former builds resilience over time.

Leaders must become attuned to their organization’s flinches. Not just the big ones — the failed product line or the ghost of a bad acquisition — but the smaller ones, too: ideas that never make it to the meeting, suggestions dismissed with a glance, initiatives that quietly die on the vine.

Ask: Where are we guarding movement? What pain are we protecting ourselves from? And is that protection still necessary?

Because over time, what we avoid becomes what we can no longer do.

And if we want to stay agile — as leaders, as teams, as organizations — we have to be willing to move through the pain. Thoughtfully. Carefully. But decisively.

What do you think?

Are you hitting the weights?

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Thoughts on building stronger professionals

Paul Currey

“Hey Boobie, you didn’t lift.”

“C’mon man. This is god given. The only thing I gotta do is show up.”

If you’ve seen Friday Night Lights (spoiler alert for those who haven’t), you know that Boobie Miles – Permian High’s star running back – suffers a career ending injury a few scenes later. Boobie was the Panther’s most talented, dynamic, and exciting player…and it all came naturally. But what happens when natural talent isn’t enough? What happens when you’re up against equivalent talent with a substantially stronger work ethic, grit, and determination to win. You lose.

Athletics provide an easy and tangible arena for the “hard work pays off” adage. If you’ve ever trained for a marathon, you know that more miles yield more base fitness, more base fitness yields more speed, and more speed yields a faster race result. All sports have an equivalent payoff; with success coming to those who put in the work. Conversely, we’ve all been on a team with talented superstars who lack drive and work ethic. These superstars are objectively good (at times infuriatingly so); but everyone around them knows they’re leaving potential on the table.

I think you know where this is going (after all, this is a business blog, not Sports Illustrated). Reflect with me on your career and professional life, ask yourself the question “are you hitting the weights”? For what it’s worth, I find this question convicting and need to explicitly clarify that I fall short here often. Most of us would love to emphatically answer, “absolutely, I’m essentially a corporate powerlifter.” But, if we’re really honest with ourselves, it’s easy to slide towards the Boobie Miles camp of, “the only thing I gotta do is show up” to my job. Hitting the weights in your career is difficult. For starters, your season is 40+ years long with no recurring offseason (unless you’re French, I think they take an annual off-season). Additionally, the game evolves incessantly (several folks reading this didn’t start their career with a computer in-hand, now you can use Excel in your Meta Quest VR headset). Your career is a long game that requires a lot of stamina and endurance…so how do you build it?

That answer is long, varies by profession, and in the proverbial words of a consultant “it depends” on a lot of factors. That said, here’s a few practical ways I think we can all “hit the weights” together. You might ask, why does it matter if we’re “hitting the weights”? My assertion is that the world doesn’t need more corporate “Boobie Miles superstars” – it needs folks who work hard, care about their contributions to the greater good, and serve their teams well. That’s a much more enjoyable huddle to be in on a daily basis. That said, here’s some “workouts” to consider:

  • Read, a lot: Some of the most impressive professionals I’ve encountered have an avaricious appetite for reading. Novels and news are a free gym membership for the brain…turn off The Office re-runs and pick up a book (I started rewatching Succession last night, I’m a hypocrite).
  • Keep up with your industry: It’s imperative to stay apprised of key updates and the long-term direction of the industries we work in. This dovetails nicely into the reading piece…stay current on industry trends and implications for your company through trusted sources. It’s not enough to be a “finance, supply chain, or [insert functional expertise] area person,” you need to know the landscape of the industry you’re playing in.
  • Learn and develop hard skills: Do you remember trying a clean and jerk for the first time? I do, I was an overweight rising Freshman with less muscle mass than a wet rag and aspirations of playing in the NFL – it went really well. Like trying a new lift, there’s a ton of hard skills we can go learn, grow in, and develop into real professional assets (e.g., data analytics, accounting, project management, etc.). Learning hard skills is a great way to evolve professionally and be a “5 tool player” on any team.

The three points above are far from exhaustive (and thousands of books, lectures, and TikToks exist on similar themes), but I hope it spurs some thought and action towards ways we can get stronger in our day-to-day professional lives. If nothing else, I hope we’re all reflecting on the work ethic we bring to the office every day; and, I hope we’re all hitting the weights.

What are other practical ways you “hit the weights” in your professional life?

Wish you were here

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Humans are wired to be at the same campfire.

Geoff Wilson

We are seeing a lot of consternation in companies these days around the topic of remote work and so-called “back to the office” movements.  Remote work among knowledge workers has been a viable topic for decades, but really came into its own when “everybody” in a knowledge-work role suddenly had to be remote during the COVID pandemic.

Such a mass adjustment to norms came with a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings about how effective people can be while working remotely with today’s tools.  Indeed, for the first months of the pandemic, the effectiveness of remote work was one of the few areas of general consensus in an otherwise uncertain environment.

But what has followed has been mixed, at best.  It slowly began to surface that “cheating” was happening if not common. Some people took advantage of remote work to work multiple “full-time” jobs.

On the other side, many business functions actually became more productive in a remote environment.  When we consider certain business functions as essentially piecework, we can see a great advantage to sending piecework back into the cottages. A worker charged with auditing accounts isn’t likely to be any more or less effective at such an individual activity while doing it with the same tools remotely. And, they don’t have to commute.

But this post isn’t about cheating, or managing, or outright fraud (which you are if you aren’t telling your multiple employers that you are overcommitted…but I digress).

This post is about culture.

Humans are strange animals.  We are tribal by nature.  We operate in a cognitive fog of trust, and love, and social proof, and mutual support.  We work for the common good in small groups. We become self-involved and selfish in large groups. We care less as social distance increases.

Such is the reality of the human condition.

And, we depend on actual…interpersonal assessments of these social aspects to form culture.  So-called “social cues” are tremendously important to establishing social consistency.

No matter how much we adjust to the amazing tools and technologies intermediating our remote lives–and I for one am fond of telling people I am remotely kicking them under the table, for instance–we can’t replace the whole-bodied experience of being there IRL (that’s “in real life” for you Gen X’ers like me).

Remote culture-building removes almost all of this. It’s reductive to a face on a screen or–worse–a disembodied voice.  It’s fully intermediated by technology.  And, it largely eliminates serendipity.  All of these things, disembodiment (“is he actually listening?”), intermediation (“you’re on mute” and “sorry you’re breaking up”), and lack of serendipity (“this meeting ends in 5 minutes”) can combine to completely distort culture.

All of this is to say two things:  No matter how much you try to engineer culture in a remote environment, you will fail if you are trying to engineer the same culture you would have had in an in-person environment. And, human cultures are fundamentally in-person.

Yes, that’s right, you’d better change your expectations if you are going to “stay remote.”

We are wired to be around a campfire.  We are wired to hunt and gather and dine together and engage in small talk while working in the fields or while stalking dinner.  We are wired to hear and feel and see and…smell each other as humans without some “greater power” interceding or masking our own often already-masked and insecure presences.

Your culture CAN survive being remote. But, the deeper human aspects will erode with a sort of half-life.  I have no idea how truly fast-paced cultures like the large consulting firm I was a member of for years could even survive for a few months in a virtual work environment.  So much of that type of culture is conveyed “in the team room” and the workforce turns over so quickly that culture can be shattered in a matter of months if extreme care isn’t taken.

If your company is slower moving and has less turnover, people will still remember. But remembrances fade.

As somebody who struggles mightily to ensure enough alone time in a life that rarely affords it, I can tell you that being “in-person” is not an all-the-time thing.  But it is a critical aspect of building warm, supportive, team-based cultures. And, warm, supportive, team-based cultures will be very important in a future where most any truly remote-piecework style jobs are likely to be automated.

Human factors–culture–will be the deciding factors for the future of competition. This is true whether managing a workforce or selling the next big deal.

So, what’s a leader to do?

Well, if you are leading a remote workforce, be sure to create more campfires and gatherings to build culture.  These so-called wastes of time can be foundational to building mutual support and acceleration.

If you are leading a hybrid workforce, the mandate is similar:  Be sure your pieceworkers who are off in their cottages get called back to the mothership frequently.

And, if you are leading a team that’s together, be sure you reinforce the benefits and expectations that together should bring.

What do you think? How do you see culture impacted by presence?

Legacy lessons from NASCAR’s worst wreck ever

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We all leave a legacy of some sort. Ryan Newman’s survival of NASCAR’s worst wreck ever highlights the contrasts of passive and active legacies.

Geoff Wilson

Do you know the legacy you are leaving with your business, team, or organization?

It’s surprising how little this topic actually gets highlighted when managers and executive teams focus on their strategic aims.  Sure there are legacies that are left via who you are–for example the ethical legacies like that of Marvin Bower at McKinsey or innovation legacies like that of Gordon Moore of Intel and Moore’s Law fame.  Those were probably not forged in a boardroom strategy session but rather through strength of personality.

But, there are also legacies left in a couple of other ways.  There are passive legacies that result accidentally, and there are active legacies that result from thoughtful focus and intervention.  This weekend offered a stark contrast of the two.

Monday’s Daytona 500 ended with a vicious wreck where driver Ryan Newman–leading the race at the time–was bumped from behind and spun violently into the wall of the final turn in the race.  His car, pictured above, went airborne, was struck broadside by another car at 190 miles per hour, landed on its roof, and then slid for a quarter mile or more in a conflagration of sparks and flames.  Here’s a post with that wreck:

Most are saying the wreck is the worst in NASCAR history.  Rescue crews took a long time to extract Newman from the car, shielded by black screens that usually signify tragic carnage on race scenes.  Speculation was rife that Newman was killed in the wreck, and prayers and concerns swept social media.

But, Tuesday morning brought news that Newman had survived.  As of this writing, details remain sketchy, but reports are that Newman is not only alive, but also is awake and conversing with doctors and family.  Doctors have said his injuries are “non-life threatening.” And, while such announcements can no doubt hide life-changing and awful injuries, they offer hope.  Furthermore, Newman’s survival illustrates an amazing pair of legacies.

The first, is the unfortunate legacy of the last race driver fatality in NASCAR’s elite division.  That would be the 2001 death of Dale Earnhardt, Sr.  Earnhardt Sr.’s death–on the same track at almost the same spot as the Newman wreck–happened one day shy of 19 years before Newman’s wreck.  For those who are not NASCAR-literate, that wreck killed the biggest legend in a sport that is rife with legends.  It was, put simply, the equivalent of Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Tom Brady, or Lionel Messi dying on the court or field.

And, it changed the sport.  NASCAR changed mandates for safety equipment and changed car and track characteristics significantly.   Many fans are acknowledging this:

At the same time, Ryan Newman is being acknowledged as having a safety legacy of his own. Newman has been an outspoken safety advocate who is responsible for the addition of the “Newman Bar” to the roll cage of the current NASCAR car design.  That addition may have saved his own life on Monday.

Which brings me to the punchline of this post.

The sad reality is that a lot of passive legacies are written in blood.  The Earnhardt legacy can certainly be characterized as such.  Without going too far in trouncing a legend, I’ll put it this way:  Earnhardt came from a tradition of selective usage and even modification of readily available safety equipment that was allowed within NASCAR at the time. But, that selective usage arguably cost him his life in a wreck that “looked” far less violent than the Newman wreck.  I quote “looked” because I know firsthand that television cannot convey the real physics of collision like this.

Active legacies, like Newman’s with the “Newman Bar,” are quite different.  They are active modifications in hopes of protecting the future. They are also often implemented without fanfare or–thankfully–tragedy.

Not seeing the connection to your legacy yet?  Consider such passive legacies as innovation funding or safety investment cuts to meet current quarter profit targets.  What do they leave for the future?  Consider such active legacies as protection of training and development programs for your team. What do they leave?

The list could be long on both sides of the ledger.  I only pose the question:  What kind of legacy are you leaving, and are you trying to leave it?

What do you think?

When one more is too many, what do you do?

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Focus need not be only about doing less.

Geoff Wilson

Focus is a frequent theme in our work.  Often, action-oriented teams do what they do, which is to take on more and more “things” until the collection of things is basically overwhelming. When organizations place one management layer of achievers on top of another management layer of achievers, the result can often be a cacophony of initiatives…each with a purpose and all generating tension against one another.

In the most mature organizations, the tendency of achievers to stretch toward more and more things is bounded first by a few good leaders who decide what not to do and second by processes that force choices early and often.

In less mature organizations…cacophony.

So what is that organization to do?  As with almost anything, the first step is to admit it.  If you can list a dozen initiatives that you are working on, you likely have a problem. I often tell executive teams that 3 – 5 active initiatives are plenty (a lot, even) for any management team.  That’s in the context of teams that can list a dozen or more active initiatives.  And, of course, all the initiatives are important.  All of them need to progress.  We must make progress on cost structure and product development and accounting systems and talent sourcing. So, admit it when you have a problem.

The second step is to actually define what focus is.  Is it truly doing fewer things, or is it about ensuring that the things that are done in the organization are done in the right place in the organization? All the example initiatives I listed in the paragraph above are likely important at the same time.  Of course they are…all of those elements are about running the business.  The problem is, many of them should belong to a person or team, not to the entire organization.  There may be a natural owner of the work that is not the executive team.

You don’t often really need to have the entire management team engaged in the accounting system rebuild, but often they are. And, thus, I see it frequently:  Senior managers scurry from one steering committee meeting to another, without having real context on any one initiative to be a clear contributor.  They have their hands in many pots, but have no idea what is for dinner.  Why not try to leave some things to the organization? Too many people get worried about focus because they think it leads to accomplishing less.  Once you factor in your ability to delegate, it’s just not true.

After you have the first and second steps completed, it’s time to actually focus.  This involves at least four decisions.  First is what to delegate.  Second is what to do now.  Third is what to do next. And fourth is what not to do at all (explicitly).   If anything is still standing alone after those four filters, then the answer is likely to get help. Why? Because it usually means you have other root issues–like not being able to delegate because you don’t trust your people or because they haven’t earned your trust.

If your management team or organization lacks focus, try to organize a bit to get through these few steps and decisions.  Your company will thank you for it.

What do you think?  

You are what you eat, whether you like it or not.

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Your sources of revenue (and income) say plenty…mind them closely.

Geoff Wilson

 The New York Times released an article this week on McKinsey’s work with authoritarian and otherwise dangerous regimes across the world.  The article raises some questions on McKinsey’s choices on whom to serve and how such choices align with McKinsey’s Firm values.  There have been further revelations even today that McKinsey has a partner under arrest in the Saudi kingdom (a partner who was “acquired” by the firm through a company transaction, and so not one who was “vetted” up through the ranks, but a partner nonetheless).

While the Times article is less than flattering to McKinsey–a firm that has faced an unusual number of embarrassing press items recently– it deals in very gray areas around client service.  How does a global firm make choices on which governments to serve (or serve under) and not serve?  How does a firm decide on engagement or disengagement as a statement of its values?

In short, the article raises the most basic of questions: How do our values relate to our income?

This question goes far beyond McKinsey (a firm that I admittedly still have a very strong positive feeling for)…it goes right to the very soul of all of our work.  In the business world, your professional profile is highly correlated with how you earn your income.

You are what you eat.

Do you earn your income by creating new ways for authoritarian governments to impose their will on their populations?  That makes you an accessory to oppression.

Do you earn your income by depending on a steady stream of working poor people to borrow/buy/rent from you?  That makes you dependent on the existence of the working poor.

Do you earn your income by creating technological addiction in order to sell more ad space?  That makes you dependent on addicts.

Do you earn your income by serving tyrannical or amoral leaders who use people as objects?  That makes you his or her enabler in their career.

These aren’t hard concepts to chew on as we get ready to dive into the new year:  Do the things you get paid to do–in the main–produce more good in the world, or not? Do your sources of revenue contribute to a better society or not?

McKinsey’s case is not cut and dried–few are in the business world–and the New York Times was sensational bordering on unprofessional in its insinuations.  Still, it isn’t a large leap to assume that serving authoritarians is enabling them. It is also not okay to blame such client service choices on “growth” or “influence.” This is especially true when you consider that McKinsey is a firm whose iconic leader examined this very vein of thinking many years ago.  As I have written before, Marvin Bower wrote to the McKinsey partnership on how income and growth could lead to poor client choices.  He said:

“If an individual consultant has
to make a professional decision
on the spot and he has too many
obligations, I worry that he is
likely to make a decision to attract
a client who shouldn’t be
attracted.”

So…What is a client who shouldn’t be attracted to you?  What is a source of income that isn’t worth the hit to your integrity?

To me, and in my firm, it’s basic: Does the client or source of income depend on or produce states of the world that I would not sleep well at night knowing that I have proliferated? Admittedly, it’s a personal test…but I have given hints as to my own limits above.

As we ponder the new year, let’s ponder the fruits of our labors, and know that we are what we eat.

Now it’s your turn, share a bit about how you match purpose, values, and income.  What do you think?