NAU: Ahead of its time?
Posted by Polly - May 2nd, 2008I’ve written about Portland, OR-based outdoor clothing retailer Nau and its compelling brand of “business activism” here before. Today, I’m sad to report that Nau is closing shop. I spoke with Ian Yolles of Nau today and he confirmed that they were unable to close their latest round of funding, and after exploring every option, are left with this crushing decision—it turns out there’s not much room in today’s retrenching capital markets for the soaring ambitions of a company like Nau.
A word about those ambitions before we start picking apart the business model and intoning knowledgeably about why it failed.
From the start I found Nau’s plan almost breathtakingly ambitious—but unimpeachably right-minded. The founding idea at the heart of the company was that business has a responsibility (and a great opportunity) to contribute to positive and lasting change in society and the environment. Nau’s founders were so serious about this, they took the unprecedented move of writing a triple bottom line into the corporate charter. From the start, Nau wasn’t simply interested in producing killer product (although they accomplished that by pushing the boundaries on sustainability, performance, and style further than anyone has before in the outdoor industry—when do Vogue and Rock & Ice ever rave about the same product?), they were also intent on disrupting the economics of their industry, changing the way people shop (in futuristic “webfronts” that I believe contain powerful signals of what’s next in retail), and inspiring a wider movement among businesspeople and consumers.
As CEO Chris Van Dyke put it to me in his laid-back and guileless way, “Why would anyone start a company for any other reason?”
I think that’s even more true today than when Nau’s band of founders were first hashing out those ideas over coffee at the Urban Grind in Portland a few short years ago. We’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: great companies don’t just offer great products or great services, they stand for important ideas. Ideas with the power to fundamentally reshape the sense of what’s possible among customers, employees, and the wider world. Having a meaningful idea agenda doesn’t guarantee you’ll win (as the events of today demonstrate), but not having one is a sure path to failure.
As Alex Steffan points out in his elegant elegy on Worldchanging (channeling Aristotle), there are many ways to fail, and Nau has failed in the best possible way. How? Because they’ve left a legacy of important ideas—ideas that represent a gathering force in the world and continue to animate a wider community (the “collective” Nau saw as its audience rather than any consumer demographic). And because they’ve modeled a different way to be a company: one in which the first order of business is for every person to be remarkably thoughtful about what it means to be good and to do good at work and in the world—and to be equally meticulous about matching their every behavior to those beliefs.
I could go on (and I have, as anyone who’s caught me in a Nau item and asked, “Where’d you get that?” knows all too well). But I’ll let the folks at Nau have the last word. Here they are thinking big and thinking right even in the toughest moment:
Nau set out to show the world that business can be a force for positive social and environmental change. Although our current financial obstacles have proven to be insurmountable, it does not mean the ideas associated with Nau are unattainable. Nau was merely one attempt to express a larger idea that was around before us and will survive long after. It remains as urgent as ever for businesses to take the lead in creating a sustainable future for humans and the planet. We, as individuals and as members of a grander collective of the change-minded, look forward to continuing that journey.
P.S. Check out the site ASAP for incredible bargains on the remaining inventory.
Talent Trumps Resume, Persistence Trumps Talent
Posted by Polly - April 30th, 2008In putting together an ongoing series on the “New Rules of Success” for my CNN gig (”new” being a loose term to describe what happens when a new generation stumbles upon eternal truths—or when the times catch up to those timeless truths), I’ve encountered two seemingly contradictory pieces of wisdom about talent that add up to a powerful lesson about sustainable success.
The first comes from Jeffrey Kalmikoff, chief creative officer of Threadless—a remarkable platform not just for selling t-shirts on the Web, but for providing individuals from all over the world an outlet, rewards, and recognition for their talent. Bill’s written about their powerful approach to customer community and their powerhouse business model here. Here’s how it works: the site receives some 800 usable t-shirt designs from a worldwide pool of customers, amateurs, and designers around the world every week. Those get scored by some portion of the site’s 725,000 registered users and then about a dozen get chosen for sale every week. The winning designers get $2000 in cash and $500 in gift certificates.
In its few years in existence, Threadless has minted many mini-celebrities and design darlings (one of whom, Glenn Jones, just left his day job to set up his own t-shirt emporium). But the point isn’t to celebrate stars so much as to keep the playing field level, says Kalmikoff. He reports receiving submissions from “a world famous design superstar” and “a 15-year-old kid from Japan” in the same week. The design diva’s submission didn’t even make it to the scoring phase, while the kid’s design rose to the top. In other words, Threadless’ founders have designed a t-shirt talent-ocracy, where “it doesn’t matter what’s on your resume—it’s how relevant your art is to the moment you submit it,” says Kalmikoff. Talent trumps resume. (What’s more, the focus on talent-above-all isn’t just a management mantra. The top Threadless designers routinely shake off their celebrity to post under new aliases, just to make sure they’re still getting by on their merits and not their reputation.)
But wait a minute, isn’t this notion that “talent is the ultimate currency” responsible for spawning a generation of twenty-somethings who show up at work thinking they can do anything (and deserve everything) on Day One? This is the crowd (along with their doting and anxious parents) my friend Dan Pink addresses in his lively new book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need (and the first career guide to serve up profound wisdom in cartoon thought bubbles, or Japanese manga form).
Among the six spot-on lessons about the nature of success and career Dan highlights via the adventures of a hot-chick genie type and a Keanu Reeves-esque young office drone (and yes, there are pictures!), is one that seems to contradict the primacy of talent. Instead, says Dan: Persistence trumps talent. It’s an old-fashioned lesson whose time has come (again). “There are massive returns to doggedness,” Dan writes. “The people who achieve the most are often the ones who stick with it when others don’t. . . They show up. They practice and practice and practice some more. . .” (Or, as the Post-It attached to my computer monitor lo these many years has been reminding me, in the inimitable words of Dorothy Parker, “Writing is the art of applying ass to seat.”) “The world is littered with talented people who didn’t persist, who didn’t put in the hours, who gave up too early, who thought they could ride on talent alone.”
So which is true? Talent trumps resume or persistence trumps talent? Luckily, we won’t have to host an aphorism smack-down, because it turns out, both are true. In fact, it all ties up rather nicely. There’s a certain paradoxical psychology behind the pursuit of success: if you’re pursuing success for its own sake (for the reward, the promotion, the fame), you’re less likely to succeed than if you’re pursuing something deeper, following a genuine passion, doing something you like (or even love). As Dan puts it, “the more intrinsic motivation you have, the more likely you are to persist. The more you persist, the more likely you are to succeed.” You can see this principle in operation at Threadless. The best designers on the site aren’t looking for fame or acclaim so much as a chance to exercise their talents and mix it up with like-minded peers—and the community is set up to give them endless opportunity to do so. The level playing field allows for talent to come from the most unlikely places—the winners are most likely to come from a place of persistently and enthusiastically practicing their craft.
Of Sprints, Marathons, and the Power of Changing the Game
Posted by Bill - April 28th, 2008These are tough times for investors, what with four airline bankruptcies in the last week alone, and an embarrassing miss on Wall Street by GE and its much-admired CEO Jeff Immelt. But these are great times for sports fans in Boston, what with the Red Sox defending their second World Series title in four years and the Celtics dribbling towards a 17th championship banner. And don’t forget last week’s running of the Boston Marathon, which featured the closest women’s finish in the 112-year history of the race.
Now, I’m not big on using sports metaphors to think about business, but indulge me for just a moment as I use a metaphor that I think is apt for the times in which we work and compete. I just finished a great book by a writer named John Bryant. It is about the quest to break the four-minute mile. We all know that Roger Bannister became the first person ever to run a four-minute mile. It was in a race in Oxford on May 6, 1954. His ran it in three minutes, fifty-nine and four-tenths of a second.
Bannister was, at the time, a 25-year-old, full-time medical student who devised his own approach to training. He was something of a maverick—both in terms of what made him tick and in his approach to competition.
The quest to break four minutes had been in full force at least since 1886—almost 70 years before Bannister did it—and it involved the most brilliant coaches and the most gifted athletes in North America, Europe, and Australia. It was truly the Holy Grail of athletic achievement. It’s amazing to learn about the pressure, the crowds, the media attention in various races as runners tried to break the mark.
And for 70 years it didn’t happen—and when it did happen, it defied all the experts. The experts believed they knew the precise circumstances under which the record would be broken. It would have to be in perfect weather—68 degrees and no wind. On a particular kind of track—hard, dry clay. And in front of a huge crowd urging the runner on.
But Roger Bannister did it on a cold day, on a wet track, at a meet in Oxford before a crowd of just 3,000 people. He broke the mark, and even his most ardent rivals breathed a sigh of relief. Somebody did it! And once they saw it was possible, they did it too. Just 46 days later, John Landy, an Australian runner, not only broke the barrier but crushed Bannister’s time. Then, a year after Bannister’s impossible achievement, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race! Over the last 50 years, more than one thousand runners have broken a barrier that for the previous 70 years had been considered impossible to break.
Here’s the message: What goes for runners goes for leaders running organizations. Progress in business doesn’t move in a straight line. It’s not incremental. Whether it’s an entrepreneur, a scientist, or an athlete, someone does something that was thought to be impossible—somebody changes the game—and what was unreachable becomes merely a benchmark, something for others to shoot for and surpass.
Wharton Professor Jerry Wind has written about the symbolism for business of the four-minute mile. In his book, The Power of Impossible Thinking, he offered this assessment of Bannister’s feat: “The runners of the past had been held back by a mindset that said they could not surpass the four-minute mile. When that limit was broken, the others saw that they could do something they had previously thought impossible.”
Southwest has run the four-minute mile in the disastrous airline business. Lexus has run the four-minute mile in the brutal automobile business. What does it mean to run the four-minute mile in your business—and how are you going to do it?
Democracy: Not Just Good Politics
Posted by Polly - April 24th, 2008Our friend Traci Fenton has just announced this year’s WorldBlu list of the “Most Democratic Workplaces.” Her democratic organizations share a lot of qualities with the mavericks Bill and I have been lucky enough to meet. Most important, a genuine grasp of the idea that freedom is a more powerful organizing principle than, well, power. Here’s an excerpt from her Top Ten Reasons to become a Democratic Organization:
THE TOP 10 REASONS TO BECOME A DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATION:
1: DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS ARE MORE ADAPTABLE, RESPONSIVE, AND SUSTAINABLE.Unlike command-and-control structures, organizational democracy, by definition, is a living system designed to handle and adapt to perpetual growth and change.
2: DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS ARE MORE ALIGNED WITH THE GLOBAL TRENDS TOWARD POLITICAL, SOCIAL, AND ECONOMIC FREEDOMS.This allows them to better integrate and engage with the macro-level systems around them.
3: DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS INSPIRE MORE LOYALTY, DEDICATION, CREATIVITY, AND ENGAGEMENT FROM THEIR EMPLOYEES.By aligning employee talents with meaningful work, democratic organizations give people a place to express their individuality, inspiring workers to do their best.
4: DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS MINIMIZE WASTE.Because democratic organizations operate on trust, adult-to-adult relationships, and access to information, there is less of a need for layers of bureaucracy, inefficient interactions, and useless chatter, all of which are forms of waste.
5: DEMOCRATIC ORGANIZATIONS ARE FASTER WHERE IT MATTERS - IN THE EXECUTION AND IMPLEMENTATION STAGE.Because democratic organizations generate a sense of ownership from employeess, who are actively involved in key decision-making processes, the implementation stage is often much more successful.
Check out the rest here.
For more on mavericks and workplace democracy, check out the WorldBlu Live event in NYC in October. Bill is one of the speakers.
My Official Earth Day Post
Posted by Polly - April 22nd, 2008We’re about halfway into Earth Day and I’ve already purchased a green (in ink only) MetroCard, picked up my official Earth Day shopping bag at Whole Foods, and downed about a liter of filtered NYC tap water out of my Sigg bottle. Yet the day won’t be complete until I add my two cents to the groaning pile of green messaging and eco-commentary that has made every day Earth Day these days (or is it Christmas?). I’ll try to keep my contribution to the intellectual landfill brief.
In researching a piece for CNN on the “strange bedfellows” the evolving environmental movement has made (the Sierra Club’s recent endorsement of Clorox’s new Green Works line of cleaning products seems a long way from Julia Butterfly Hill’s year in a redwood), I spoke to a bunch of leaders and thinkers on sustainability, including Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, NRDC Senior Scientist Allen Hershkowitz, and Act Now’s Adam Werbach. Although each of these guys comes at the challenge of sustainability from a dramatically distinct point of view, I came away from each conversation struck by 1) the vastness of the challenge (no big revelation, I know) and 2) the fact that none of the players can afford to be enemies anymore—which means we’ll see (and should welcome) more and more experiments, initiatives, and partnerships that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
As the leader of one of the more minutely deconstructed such partnerships, Adam Werbach caught holy hell for signing up to counsel Wal-Mart a couple years ago. Werbach is the youngest-ever director of the Sierra Club, a lifelong environmental activist, and a leading thinker and provocateur around the issue of sustainability. For a flame-thrower, he has a decidedly gentle and generous presence. When I visited him in the Act Now offices (an invitingly calm space bathed in muted earth tones in a converted pie factory in San Francisco’s Mission district on Friday) we talked about his mission to expand the green movement from its focus on the health of the planet to connecting the dots between the health of the planet, people, communities, and the economy. He calls this the “Blue” movement—and the core initiative of his new partnership with ad giant Saatchi & Saatchi. You can learn more here.
Adam offered up a lot of powerful and provocative thinking, but I want to share just one thought as my message to marketers and business leaders on Earth Day. We were talking about the inescapable flood of green messages and green products (a recent study of some 1,000 consumer products discovered nearly 2,000 green claims and found all but one guilty of some form of greenwashing) and Adam proposed a simple but powerful mindshift for marketers. Too many people are operating in the realm of changing and promoting the features of their products, rather than getting at the real lynch pin: changing the behavior of people. Take car makers as an example. There’s a lot of focus on developing green, hybrid, fuel-efficient luxury vehicles (and singing from the rooftops about those qualities)—making cars better, but not truly good. Instead, Adam suggested, “it should be the responsibility of the car company not just to change the car, but to change the person in the car.” That might sound like a threat to car companies, but I think it actually presents a massive opportunity for those that crack it, in any industry.
You Had Me At Goodbye
Posted by Polly - April 15th, 2008It’s easy to get fixated on loss these days as the stock market continues to take a beating, wealth melts away from our portfolios and homes, and job cuts are on the rise. And yet, even as I fork over my dues to Uncle Sam and rather helplessly rejigger my IRA investments, I can’t help but think of so many of the maverick leaders I’ve met over the last few years who, even when they lose, seem to win. Time and time again, as they told stories of setbacks and failures, they described them as opportunities to double-down and deliver on their distinct sense of purpose.
I was reminded of this principle last week while interviewing two very different (but equally impressive) CEOs for a CNN segment on the power of “nice guys” (and gals). The language may be made for TV, but the point, I think, is important: there’s a growing body of evidence that the old adage “nice guys finish last” is on its last legs. A recent Harvard study upended the old game theory principle that selfish action and aggression are the hallmarks of winners. And research out of Berkeley, Stanford, and Northwestern demonstrates that the path to power isn’t paved with Machiavellian manipulation and ruthlessness, but humility, humanity, and generosity (what happens once you achieve power is another story —and another post).
The two leaders I spoke with—Paul Purcell, the chairman and CEO of wealth management firm R.W. Baird and Lars Dalgaard, the founder and CEO of the on-demand software operation SuccessFactors—make their own case for sane success. The personalities of these two leaders and their organizations couldn’t be more different (a 90-year-old wealth management and private equity firm headquartered in Milwaukee and a fast-growing Silicon Valley software startup), but both are universally recognized as great places to work—and both leaders made it their first priority to institute a “no asshole rule” in their companies. Those policies pre-date the book by the same name, “The No Asshole Rule,” by my friend Bob Sutton, but they’re very much in the spirit of the movement Bob has ignited and continues to document tirelessly on his excellent blog to rid the working world of “assholes” and cultivate more civilized workplaces.
Despite their differences, Lars and Paul were strikingly in sync when it came to explaining the logic behind their “no asshole rule” and how it changes the way they lead and their organizations operate.
First, both objected to the word “nice” when I proposed my angle into the story. Lars refers to himself as a “reformed asshole” and both exhibited a tough-mindedness around the business case for the “no asshole rule.” Paul told me, “it’s a business principle. It’s simply more efficient to have an asshole-free culture because you’re not protecting your backside or playing politics. And, people end up both happier and more productive.” Lars decried the “wasted cycles” involved in dealing with the fallout of politics, gossip, ridicule, email flames, hidden agendas, and all the corrosive, cancerous behavior that plagues too many organizations. The business benefits range from a recruiting edge (Baird’s “no asshole rule” has won it a place near the top of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list for five years running) to enhanced performance and customer satisfaction (SuccessFactors is growing at an incredible rate, with 3 million users in thousands of companies around the world).
Second, both argued that “enforcing” the no asshole policy is a matter of peer pressure and modeling good behavior. Hire the right great people (both Lars and Paul describe extensive interviewing processes in which candidates meet people from all over the organization and an explicit conversation about the “no asshole rule” upfront) and, as Lars puts it, “set scorching examples” as often as you can. Lars talks about catching himself in an “asshole moment”—whether losing his cool with a subordinate in front of the board or sending out an insensitive email to the entire company—and how he immediately cops to the behavior, apologizes, and sets about rectifying any damage done. What’s more, every single employee of SuccessFactors signs what Lars calls “an emotional contract” laying out the no-asshole” rules of engagement in vivid detail—from “I will not be a jerk” to “I will not BCC anyone and never talk negatively and destructively behind someone’s back” to “I recognize that I am personally a steward of this ‘Olympic flame,’ and I know that if I lose my edge, it will trigger a wildfire, and we together have both the power to keep this open honest culture, or break it. DON’T DO IT. BE GOOD.”
Finally, and this brings me back to how the best leaders lose well, both Lars and Paul were as emphatic about how they fire people as how they hire them. It’s the inevitable and dreaded task of all leaders to have to “let people go” from time to time. And leaders like Lars and Paul, who are hyper-vigilant about holding the line on the quality and behavior of each individual in the company, have a no-tolerance policy for jerks. Still, that doesn’t mean they fire like jerks. Both of them made a point of saying how vital it is to fire people with all of the care, humanity, and dignity with which you hired them in the first place—to make the experience as productive, helpful, and mutually satisfying as an experience that brutal can be. The benefits aren’t limited to karmic retribution, says Paul, but include the impact on everyone else in the organization: “Oh, this is how we treat people here, even those who’ve disappointed us in some way.”
It’s easy to be “nice” when you’re winning, but what principles and practices have you put in place to keep your inner-jerk (and we all have one) from rearing up when you’re losing?
What’s that on Your Shirt? A Sign of the Future…
Posted by Bill - April 5th, 2008It’s a rainy Saturday morning in Boston, and I’m sitting around the house in my ratty blue jeans and a new T-shirt, which fits great and looks, if I say so myself, pretty darn cool. I bought it from Threadless, a small company whose rapid growth offers big lessons for the future of product development, marketing, and connecting with customers.
Threadless is in a pretty old-fashioned business—selling T-shirts. But the company, which has become an Internet sensation, does it in a completely new-fangled way. The designs in its huge online catalog all come from its customers, who submit their original artwork to the site. Threadless has 600,000 registered members and adds more than 20,000 members per month. It receives an average of 150 new designs per day—that’s a thousand designs a week. Members rate the submissions on a one-to-five scale, and the highest vote-getters win. (Well, that’s oversimplifying a bit, but it’s basically right.) The company selects seven new designs each week and sells the shirts for $15-$17 each.
What an awesome business it’s become! Threadless sells 90,000 shirts per month—that’s more than a million shirts this year alone. Total revenues will be nearly $20 million—with just 35 full-time employees. And the brand is hot as can be—young people around the world know and embrace Threadless as a company, a sensibility, and an online community.
So what are the lessons of this fashion phenomenon? First, you don’t need a huge staff to do big things—particularly if you create a community of deeply engaged fans who are willing and eager to do a lot of the work for you. What traditional design department could possibly match the creativity and energy of thousands, even tens of thousands, of talented young designers competing against one another.
And these designers love to strut their stuff. Winners of the competition receive $2,500 in cash and merchandise. A few of the designers are so good, and have won so many times, that they’be become mini-celebrities. Glenn Jones, a young designer in Auckland, New Zealand, is the all-time Threadless champion. He’s won 20 times, he’s been the subject of profiles in all sorts of newspapers, and he recently started his own shirt-design company by virtue of his talent and visibility.
Second, Threadless makes sure that this collective brainpower gets applied to more than just design. Members don’t just get rewarded for their art. Their votes determine what shirts get made. And they earn points — good for store credit — for referring new buyers and for submitting photos of themselves wearing Threadless shirts—a sign of viral marketing.
Finally, grassroots participation isn’t just about the Internet. Last September, Threadless opened its first-ever physical store in downtown Chicago. It stocks just 20 different T-shirt designs at a time, and no shirt stays on sale for more than two weeks—excellent ways to create a sense of scarcity and excitement.
But the real value of the store is not as a 21st-century version of the Gap. It’s as a hangout, a community center. The company and its members host art exhibits, run Photoshop seminars, and, in general, socialize with and teach each other. They interact in the real world in the same spirit that they interact online.
Who ever imagined that the lowly T-shirt could become such a source of creative energy and business innovation? But don’t take my word for it. Go to threadless.com and see how it works. You may even come away with a cool shirt—or the urge to design one yourself!
Hidden Genius—Is There a “Million-Dollar Idea” In You?
Posted by Bill - March 28th, 2008Maybe it’s the ongoing popularity of American Idol. Or perhaps it’s the tale of Paul Potts, who went from mobile-phone salesman to global celebrity with his victory on Britain’s Got Talent. Whatever the reason, more and more people believe that they too possess some “hidden genius”: a flair for design, a knack for writing, a gift for invention. If only there were a stage on which they could strut their stuff and win applause, acclaim and even financial rewards.
Actually, there are plenty of such stages. In all sorts of fields. With all kinds of rewards. That’s the message of Michael Collins, an entrepreneur and “idea scout” who has become a kind of Simon Cowell for the creative economy (minus the bad attitude). Collins has a company, called the Big Idea Group (BIG), that organizes “roadshows” in which aspiring inventors display new gadgets, cool products, or hot technologies. If Collins and his panel of judges discover a killer idea, they help the inventor find a company to manufacture or license it.
More importantly, though, Collins enrolls the most impressive roadshow participants, whether they have a winning idea or not, into a giant database, which now numbers some 13,000 inventors. Companies eager to solve a technical problem or design a new product then hire BIG, which unleashes its collective brainpower in an “Idea Hunt” to make the innovation process faster, cheaper, and more creative. The firm has conducted Idea Hunts for giants such as Staples and Kraft Foods. And WPP, the London-based marketing giant, has bought a stake in BIG.
The most powerful ideas often come from the most unexpected places. That’s why, Collins explains, companies “are now offering everyone the chance to be part of an open innovation process, to submit product ideas, share their creativity, influence the types of products and services offered.”
Now Collins has a new target for his message: you and me. He has written a book, just published today, called The Million-Dollar Idea in Everyone. It is both a manifesto for why you should embrace the phenomenon of open innovation, and a manual for how to do it. So many of us, he argues, have skills, interests, passions, and insights that we can’t maximize (or even exercise) in our work lives. What’s different about today’s environment is that there are opportunities for “everyday experts” to show what they know—and, in the process, to enhance their reputation and maybe even change the course of their career.
“This is an old idea for a new time,” says Collins. “Young people in particular understand how important it is to build their personal brand. With the rise of open innovation, the opportunity to express your talents and interests is an order of magnitude greater than it’s ever been.”
There are all sorts of models to consider. Collins likes the down-to-earth story of Laura Cunitz, who walked away from an 18-year marketing career with IBM to pursue her true passion—knitting. Cunitz was a telecommuter during part of her career at IBM, and sought out human contact through a part-time job at a knitting store. She discovered that she had a gift for teaching and coaching knitters, especially those with complicated projects. So she quit IBM and started her own online company, Bella Knitting, to turn her passion into a career.
Or consider this below-the-earth story that we wrote about in Mavericks. A Canadian gold-mining company organized an open-source challenge—inviting geologists from around the world to submit their best ideas for where this company should drill for gold. The contest caught the eye of an Australian engineer by the name of Nick Archibald, who had developed much-admired technology for oil-and-gas exploration. Archibald believed that his technology could also work for minerals such as gold, so he entered (and won) the contest, earned a huge prize, and became an instant celebrity—the Paul Potts of mining. His notoriety helped him to start his own company and issue shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
You don’t always get to apply your real talents and passions at work. But there are plenty of chances to share them with the world—and, in the process, to enhance your work and maybe even change your career. What’s the “million-dollar idea” inside you?
Mavericks on Change Nation
Posted by Polly - March 18th, 2008My friend Ariane de Bonvoisin recently launched a terrific website called First 30 Days, which offers up and advances the collected wisdom on the one topic we’re all obsessed with—namely, change. The site provides clear and compelling pathways for navigating every sort of life change—from the most mundane (”the first 30 days of getting organized”) to the more cosmic (”the first 30 days to a happier life”). The “first 30 days” concept is powerful (it turns out you really can make a remarkable difference in your life if you can commit to small steps, little tweaks, new habits of mind for just 4 weeks) and the site is a great tool. You can sign up here.
Ariane recently interviewed me about the “first 30 days of becoming a maverick” for her weekly Change Nation podcast. While I don’t have a step-by-step playbook for becoming a maverick (mavericks, by definition, don’t fit one mold), it was a fun conversation and an interesting exercise in thinking about building your maverick chops from the ground up. Check out the podcast here—but don’t go there just to listen to me. The real draw is Ariane’s exclusive interview with Dick Parsons—his first after stepping down as CEO of Time Warner.
When Smart Leaders Do Dumb Things: On Bear Stearns, the Democratic Primary, and Other Avoidable Disasters
Posted by Bill - March 17th, 2008“The wise men were all fools…What to do?” So sings Bruce Springsteen in his searing rocker, “Last to Die,” a lament about the endless miscalculations that led to our endless war in Iraq. That line was ringing in my ears as I read this morning’s headlines about the fiascoes gripping almost every element of our society, and wondering how intelligent people can do such stupid things:
The Masters of the Universe at Bear Stearns turn one of the great franchises on Wall Street into a $2 stock.
The political geniuses in the Democratic Party can’t figure out how to conduct acceptable primaries in two of our most important states.
The likeable leaders of Yahoo continue to struggle with how to respond to Microsoft’s unwelcome acquisition bid—the direct result of years of strategic missteps on the part of Jerry Yang and his colleagues.
The first instinct is to excuse these blunders on the theory that life is full of surprises. Who could have foreseen the meltdown gripping world financial markets? Who could have predicted that prideful jockeying for position by Florida and Michigan would throw the Democratic nomination into disarray?
In fact, the real explanation is much simpler—and starker. Even the most intelligent leaders have a way of doing idiotic things. Time and again. Despite all the evidence staring them in the face.
Last week, I gave a talk to a gathering of executives and directors organized by a Boston law firm. Prior to my talk, I sat through a fascinating workshop conducted by Sydney Finkelstein, the Steven Roth Professor of Management at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and the author of the must-read book, Why Smart Executives Fail.
The normal story we tell when things go wrong, Professor Finkelstein said, is that unpredictable forces messed things up—executives get blindsided by financial shocks, business models get “disrupted” by new technologies. In fact, he reported, of the 51 case studies he examined in-depth, it was almost never true that an outside shock caused the failure. Instead, failure was the result of leaders “choosing not to cope” with obvious signs of change.
He then enumerated what he called “the seven habits of spectacularly unsuccessful executives”—character traits that are at the root of so many screw-ups and flame-outs. I don’t have space to review them in this blog, but you can read them here. And please keep in mind Professor Finkelstein’s most basic conclusion: “Extreme success is a warning sign of failure.”
How might you and your company avoiding becoming a case study in failure? My one piece of advice is to keep reminding yourself how easy it is to screw up—especially when you’re in a position of great success.
Consider, for example, the leadership wisdom of Silicon Valley hero Marc Andreessen. A few years ago, when we interviewed him for Mavericks at Work, he told us about a document he kept in his desk drawer as he was building his latest company—one he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $800 million. Called “Ten Reasons We’re Going to Go Out of Business,” it was a frequently updated list of the most serious threats to his venture—a way to concentrate the mind when things were going well.
Or consider Bessemer Venture Partners, the well-known (and quite successful) venture-capital firm. Like other VCs, Bessemer maintains a list of its most brilliant investments—portfolio companies that went public or got acquired. But it also publishes what it calls its “anti-portfolio”—great companies in which it could have invested but turned down. Among the missed opportunities: Apple, eBay, FedEx, PayPal.
Here’s how Bessemer explains its anti-portfolio:
“Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation’s oldest venture capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.
“Over the course of our history, we did invest in a wig company, a french-fry company, and the Lahaina, Ka’anapali & Pacific Railroad. However, we chose to decline these investments, each of which we had the opportunity to invest in, and each of which later blossomed into a tremendously successful company.
“Our reasons for passing on these investments varied…[But] whatever the reason, we would like to honor these companies — our ‘anti-portfolio’ — whose phenomenal success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of these companies, we might not still be working.”
Bessemer’s humor is in the service of a serious point: If you want to sidestep disaster, don’t pretend that it’s not possible (or even likely), or that you haven’t barely sidestepped it already. The best way to avoid failure is to prepare for it—at the time of peak success.
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