ILLUSTRATION BY RUTH MACAPAGAL
(Second of two parts)
Last week, I wrote about the first five steps to reach your most ambitious goals. Today, I will complete this guide and add the last two remaining steps.
To recap, the first five simple steps are:
Step 1: Be one with your energy.
Step 2: Be one with yourself – and embrace you who are.
Step 3: Be one with your dreams.
Step 4: Be one with your creative flow.
Step 5: Be one with others.
Let us look at some of the practical applications for businesses that come from step 4.
As we discussed last week, the No. 1 mistake that most organizations make when it comes to creating breakthrough out-of-the-box solutions and innovative thinking is that they are too rigid. They do not understand the creative process behind innovation.
Step 4, being one with your creative flow, demands that organizations have the necessary flexibility to innovate. Here, the control freak has to leave the room because you cannot force innovation. You can simply provide the best environment for it to happen.
The foundation for innovation
A good example of the misunderstanding most businesses have when it comes to innovation and control is our work with an American multinational corporation that develops, among others, consumer packaged goods. It is high on the Fortune 500 and is one of the world’s most valuable companies.
They approached us to help them optimize their innovation and change the way their teams collaborate to produce optimum, out-of-the-box creative product and service ideas.
During one of our first briefings, the older leadership complained about their millennial workforce: We don’t understand them; we cannot work with them; and we don’t know how to motivate them.
When we asked what their current processes for innovation were, the top management told me, “Well, we give our millennials an assignment, put them in a room for six hours, close the door and expect them to produce breakthrough results.”
“Six hours?” I asked. “Most millennials I know cannot focus for more than 45 minutes before they need a creative break,” I added. No wonder this Fortune 500 multinational firm had a hard time creating breakthrough innovation. It’s because the senior management thought everyone else would function the way they do, and they also assumed they could force innovation by locking everyone in a room.
Google and innovation in action
Google is a great example of innovation done right. The Google campus in Silicon Valley is a perfect playground to produce top-level innovation. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin understood the secrets behind the creative flow, namely that we are most creative when we take our mind off a problem and get into a “free flow.”
What sounds esoteric to most companies around the world is highly practical and precisely one of the top reasons why Silicon Valley has consistently been outperforming the rest of the world when it comes to billion- or trillion-dollar high-tech startups that change our world.
This is the reason why Google offers so many activities for its employees to engage in while they are at work, so that anyone can find the one or two activities that get them into their creative flow: pool table, massages, swimming pools, gyms, yoga classes, ping pong tables, arcade games, you name it! They can come back to their complex challenges refreshed and with new creative solutions.
Step 6: Be whole—Surround yourself with people who are very different from you.
All of us are missing most of the world’s reality because our view is, by nature, very one-sided. Even the most successful business leaders only see a tiny portion of reality.
The high achievers of this world understand that they have to surround themselves with people who can complement them in the areas where they are weak. This is the foundation for their unique talents, their core genius, to shine so that they can solely focus on what they do best.
Of course, most educational systems around the world fail us completely in this aspect. They tell us to get better in our weakest areas. They create this false notion of the ideal human being who should be good at everything. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Every single high achiever I have ever worked with—from Nobel Laureates to best-selling authors, from heads of state to world-champion athletes, famous artists, Fortune 500 CEOs and self-made billionaire entrepreneurs—is a walking collection of weaknesses. But each one of them has one, two or three key strengths or talents they focus on to become extraordinary and accomplish the impossible.
How to create effective teams
Surrounding yourself with people who are very different from you has fundamental implications for any business leader, any team and any organization. Teams need to be set up with people who complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, so that the team can be most effective. This requires a deep assessment of everyone’s personality type, strengths and weaknesses. Yet most companies shy away from openly addressing weaknesses, especially in Asia. So how can you build effective teams to produce high output results?
Step 7: Be one with persistence.
This is one of the many essential success factors usually not taught in school or university: unwavering, relentless, against-all-odds persistence.
Winston Churchill said never, never, never, never, ever ever give up. By definition, if you never give up, you can only succeed.
But there is an additional element that kicks in that you can observe with famous business leaders: it is that their greatest successes and breakthroughs often came after their greatest failures. It is that inner drive not to give up, not to bow before challenges, not to falter no matter what life or circumstances may throw at you.
Take Jack Ma, for example, the Chinese self-made billionaire and cofounder of Alibaba Group. Jack failed primary school twice and middle school three times. He applied for a job 30 times and got rejected by all of them.
How you do anything is how you do everything
The attention spans of most people today are too short. This is especially true for building businesses. You need incredible levels of tenacity to start a business and make it successful, to take a business to the next level or the next generation. Social media does not help because it forces our brains to get used to short-term dopamine hikes that go against building long-term persistence.
How you do anything is how you do everything. This means: constantly work on extending your attention span no matter what you do, so that over time you can become a master of persistence.
Here are all seven steps to reach your most ambitious goals:Step 1: Be one with your energy.
Step 2: Be one with yourself —and embrace you who are.
Step 3: Be one with your dreams.
Step 4: Be one with your creative flow.
Step 5: Be one with others.
Step 6: Be whole; surround yourself with people who are very different from you.
Step 7: Be one with persistence. INQ
Tom Oliver, a “global management guru” (Bloomberg), is the chair of The Tom Oliver Group, the trusted advisor and counselor to many of the world’s most influential family businesses, medium-sized enterprises, market leaders and global conglomerates. For more information and inquiries: www.TomOliverGroup.com or email Tom.Oliver@inquirer.com.ph.