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and inability to focus when and where it matters.
While one strategy for grabbing eyeballs tweaks our bottom-up systems with surprising, attention-compelling tech effects, there’s been a renaissance in an older method: telling a good story.
Look up
Just as in his Zen practice, where recognizing you’ve become distracted helps you concentrate, he saw that “[deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”7
new groups of customers, ways to buy, evolving needs, technologies, distribution channels, or information systems. Every advance opens doors to a host of potential winning strategies.
Winning tactics are available to everyone, yet are overlooked by all but a
few.
The name of Grove’s book—Only the Paranoid Survive—tacitly nods to the necessity of vigilance, scanning for the telling detail on the horizon. This holds true in particular for the tech sector, where super-short product cycles (compared with, say, refrigerators) make the pace of innovation brutal.
As Clay Shirky observes of the failure to disengage focus from comfort zones, “First the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then it’s a niche, then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.”12
Others find their road to success through exploration, by experimenting with innovative alternatives to what they do now.
Exploration means we disengage from a current focus to search for new possibilities, and allows flexibility, discovery, and innovation.
Those who exploit can find a safer path to profits, while those who explore can potentially find a far greater success in the next new thing—though the risks of failure are greater, and the horizon of payback is further away. Exploitation is the tortoise, exploration the hare.
They can lead switch-hitting organizations, which are, for instance, good at seeking growth by simultaneously innovating and containing costs—two very different operations.
But prospering is no guarantee of ambidexterity, either. That switch can be hardest for those caught in what Intel’s Grove calls the “success trap.” He observes that every company will face a point when it will have to change dramatically to survive, let alone raise its performance. “Miss the moment,” he warns, “and you start to decline.”
Intel was having trouble unsticking from exploitation to exploration.
Exploitation was accompanied by activity in the brain’s circuitry for anticipation and for reward—it feels good to coast along in a profitable, familiar routine. But exploration mobilized activity in the brain’s executive centers and those for controlling attention; searching for alternatives to a current strategy, it seems, demands intentional focus.
A scholarly review of gut intuitions concludes that using feelings as information is a “generally sensible judgmental strategy,” rather than a perennial source of error, as the
hyperrational might argue.
The sweet spot for smart decisions, then, comes not just from being a domain expert, but also from having high self-awareness. If you know yourself as well as your business, then you can be shrewder in interpreting the facts (while, hopefully, safeguarding against the inner distortions that can blur your lens).
When we say a leader has “focus” we typically are referring to one-pointedness on business results, or on a particular strategy. But is such single-pointedness enough? What about the rest of the repertoire of attention?
Leaders who inspire can articulate shared values that resonate with and motivate the group. These are the leaders people love to work with, who surface the vision that moves everyone. But to speak from the heart, to the heart, a leader must first know her values. That takes self-awareness.
But amid the din and distraction of work life, poor listening has become epidemic.
When we’re fixated on a goal, whatever is relevant to that point of focus gets priority. Focus is not just selecting the right thing, but also saying no to the wrong ones. But focus goes too far when it says no to the right things, too. Single-pointed fixation on a goal morphs into overachievement when the category of “distractions” expands to include other people’s valid concerns, their smart ideas, and their crucial information. Not to mention their morale, loyalty, and motivation.
McClelland argued that once you were in a given job, specific competencies like self-discipline, empathy, and persuasion were far stronger forces in success than a person’s ranking in academics. He proposed the methodology that has become competence modeling—now common in world-class organizations—for identifying the key abilities that made someone a star performer in a specific organization.
Now ask them, “Who is the most influential person in your group?” The answer to that identifies the informal leader, and tells you how that group actually operates.
These informal leaders are more self-aware than their teammates: they tend to have the smallest gap between their own ratings of their abilities and those by others.7 University of New Hampshire psychologist Vanessa Druskat, who did this study, says, “Informal leaders often emerge in a temporary way, and switch in and out.
• Coaching, based on listening to what people want from their life, career, and current job. Paying attention to people’s feelings and needs, and showing concern.
• Celebrating wins, laughing, knowing that having a good time together is not a waste of time but a way to build emotional capital.
That pattern seems to fit what the University of Oxford’s Simon Baron-Cohen has identified as an extreme brain style, one that excels at systems analysis but flunks empathy and the sensitivity to social context that comes along with it.
Only by taking risks do we get to the most valuable new ideas.”
“Politicians are in charge of our welfare,” says Weber. “They need to know people will thank them later for a hard decision now. It’s like raising teenagers—sometimes thankless in the short term, but rewarding in the long.”
“We don’t hire people to bake brownies. We bake brownies to hire people.”
