Author Archives: Ken Goldstein

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Getting Your Shot

This month Kamala Harris got a step closer to one of the most coveted jobs in the world. It was anything but a predictable path. The preceding weeks were filled with anxiety and uncertainty. Through it all she remained fiercely loyal to her boss and the inside circle that provided her with the opportunity to someday be considered for the gig in the spotlight. Without much trumpeting, the door then opened and she proudly walked through it. She was ready.

That is not to jump the gun and offer any conclusions about whether she will be president. This isn’t even meant to be a piece about Kamala Harris. It’s about readiness. It’s about preparation. It’s about truly knowing what you want and putting yourself in a position where you might get there.

That kind of readiness is harder than most people think. Way harder. Exponentially harder.

If you’ve ever been in second position in any leadership capacity, you understand the difference between advising the person making a call and making the call yourself. They are both tough jobs requiring objectivity, empathy, careful analysis, diligent consideration, and consensus building. A bench coach in Major League Baseball is a vital and respected member of the coaching staff, but he’s not the team manager who will take the fall for a failed season. The provost of a university has a vast impact on the institution’s administrative and financial condition, but if the university fails to meet the goals of the governing board, it’s the president most likely to be under fire.

Often these second-in-commands long to succeed their bosses, and often they do. When the time comes, the key questions those in a selection capacity will ask encompass whether the candidate understands the gravitas that shifts in this role change, and whether that candidate is fully prepared for the unknown roadmap in their future.

I have written often that mentoring might be the best part of being a leader, but also one of the most difficult. We do our best to share perspectives, but each of us has a unique approach to things that may or may not be useful to someone else. Of all the gratification I have enjoyed in my career, none has been greater than watching younger careers flourish. Sometimes I have been able to offer guidance to a rising star looking to shore up his or her toolbox. Sometimes I have been able to explain the nuances of navigating a particularly counterintuitive negotiation.

I have seen ambition tempered by learning, and ambition undermined by hubris. I have listened to people lobby for a big promotion, asked them to consider fully if they understand the change in expectations once they get it, and watched the results go both ways. We do our best as leaders to ready the next generation for the ladder ahead, but ultimately that readiness is in their own hands.

Opportunity knocks when it wants, not necessarily when someone wants it. That can come in the form of a crisis, an unexpected competitive swing in the market, a change in surrounding personnel, an expansion effort willing to take a chance on new talent and untested ideas — all kinds of events and circumstances can unlock a mythical gate. Sometimes patience is on your side. Sometimes impatience serves you just as well. The question you must have already asked yourself is not whether you want what you think you want, but whether you are ready to tackle the unknown that you accept when you are asked.

In a memorable moment in the musical Hamilton, the young Alexander Hamilton sings the powerful refrain, “I am not throwing away my shot.” It’s a dramatic proclamation of self and an emotional manifesto easily relatable to a mirrored audience. “I’m a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal,” he continues. He knows the coming revolution will call upon the best of all those who choose the life risk of demanding national independence. It is that combination of desire, conviction, and opportunity that puts him on the path to becoming a historical figure.

Does nineteen-year-old Hamilton really know what is ahead of him, the sacrifices he will make, or the ultimate result of his ambition? How could he? What he knows is what matters: he believes he is ready. He commits. That puts him on a remarkable path with personal evolution and history. His choices are intentional. The opaque path ahead is purely beyond his control, and still, he makes his mark.

Alexander Hamilton didn’t throw away his shot.

Kamala Harris isn’t throwing away her shot.

There were no shortcuts for either of them. No guarantees. No promises. No sour grapes.

If you think you know what you want, recommit to readiness. Hone your skills. If you have a mentor, don’t squander the opportunity to be in the room anytime you can. You’ll see good decisions and bad decisions in real-time. You learn from both.

Test yourself repeatedly. Question your preparation even more often. Learn not just how important it is to be right under pressure, but how to improve your odds of being right by building trust with those around you to vet a broad spectrum of possibilities. Learn the balance of risk-taking, the integrity of owning failure, and the cycle of learning that comes from measured mistakes.

Embrace clear and frequent communication even when you want to be alone. Build a substantial contact list and advice circle that is diverse, renowned, honest, accessible, and global. Network ceaselessly for what you can do for others with such modest expectations of reciprocity that help is always abundant long before you ask for it.

Know that the next step is not a cosmetic change in title with better perks. If you want the gig, find the regimen to train for it. Don’t be timid, but don’t catapult yourself into contention before you’re convinced you can launch.

Don’t throw away your shot.

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Image: BroadwayMerchandiseShop.com

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Easing Up on Advice

When I started writing this blog more than thirteen years ago, I never intended for it to be an advice column. The tagline has always been “Ideas, Business, Stories.” Sometimes it’s not about business, sometimes I fail to shape a decent story, but I always try to center the content around ideas, which comes first for a reason. Nothing in these words other than keeping me in practice between books is more important to me than causing people to think harder and test those thoughts in ardent dialogue and discussion.

I’ll admit, too often I’ve delved into the realm of advice. I won’t apologize for that per se, because I’ve heard from many of you over the years struggling with similar challenges that extracted bits of this advice have led to course corrections, strategic realignment, saving a customer, or even circumventing the unneeded pain of a failed initiative without key learning. If the reading material was helpful, great. If not, perhaps at least I got you to reconsider the ordinary.

What is better than advice and where I’ve hoped to steer a lot of these words? That would come back to ideas, and that would be anchored in inspiration.

With advice, we often suggest what to do and when to do it.

With inspiration, we better suggest why something is worth rethinking and how perhaps to approach a framework for effective resolution.

Never was this clearer to me than in a candid panel discussion at my latest college reunion ostensibly about third acts in our lives. Understand this is a collection of oldsters whom I would be so bold as to characterize as not yet ancient. This group now has four decades of life and career under its belt post-college, with all the setbacks and curveballs we are certain everyone else is likely to encounter. In simply introducing this panel, the moderator found several of the participants rejecting the very premise of the panel in asking: Why does any life have to be structured in three acts? While that framework might (or might not) work at times for commercial storytelling, what relevance does it have to most human arcs, which are infinitely more nuanced?

Yes, it was that kind of discussion. The ideas that emerged were worth the nitpicking.

Key among those ideas for me, and quite a surprise at that, was the somewhat common theme that all the diverse participants shared in acknowledging most of the advice they received throughout their lives as well-meaning but demoralizing.

Wait, huh? If you know people genuinely care about you, or at least give them the benefit of that doubt, why would the advice offered too often hurt more than help?

Again, the commonality in response was striking: Advice considers the general case rather than the personalization of the specific case. Indeed, if the recommended advice worked for you in your set of decisions and you were happy with the outcome, that’s terrific. It’s more than terrific if you navigated a complex maze to get safely and successfully to where you wanted to be. What relevance is it likely to have for me? Much less than you think.

In these cases, the advice individuals received from people close to them centered on career, family, self-realization, medical and health problems, losing loved ones, even planning for retirement. The standard expressions of get an education, get a starter job, climb the ladder, pursue a family, invest wisely, and confront demons as they emerge all seemed too pat in hindsight. Get an education to you might not be the same as get an education to me. Find fulfilling employment, even gainful employment, again proved a landmine of difficult-to-connect dots.

The biggest problem seemed to be that rejecting advice could insult the advice-offerer, but more troubling, cause the advice-offerer to segue from advice to criticism. To the extent this set of unique, highly motivated fellow travelers at difficult junctures in their lives wished to hear criticism… well, you can imagine how that kind of rejection lands. Feedback opens the door to curiosity, which fuels the exploration of a theme and extends two-way dialogue. Even the tiniest implication of judgment can shut it down.

Instead of advice, the panel craved peer interaction, within and across disciplines, within and across life stages, to light a torch that could lead them through opaque corridors and dark tunnels. To some extent, this means active listening combined carefully with real-time conversation, avoiding the trap of prescriptive solution crafting. It is precisely the inspiration of those exchanges that people found most useful in designing and committing to better outcomes. It’s the difference between canned narrative touting relatively obvious answers and imaginative moments of shared realization. Advice was predisposed to be narrow. Inspiration was ceaselessly unlimited.

Still think we’re nitpicking? I don’t think so. I’ve written many times that in my own worldview, the course of our lives often comes down to four to six invisible forks in the road. As Yogi Berra liked to say, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The problem with these invisible forks is just that — you don’t know you’re there when you are. We understand our relationships and careers in hindsight way better than we plan them forward. We can point to those stunningly revealed forks looking back. We can’t necessarily know that a decision we make today will affect our lives for decades to come.

If you are potentially at one of those invisible forks, and you start to explain it to someone, the advice they offer you (“Why, yes, you have to take that job”) is as likely to be wrong as right. Throwing darts would probably get you better results because at least the dartboard is unbiased. On the other hand, if the dialogue we enjoy at those potential forks causes us to think differently and make a decision we are comfortable living with right or wrong, the interaction is likely to be memorable and long-term laudable. It’s the difference between practical direction, which is somewhat hierarchical, and empathy, which is bonding.

All of this is to say if any of my advice in these passages has been useful, I am happy I didn’t blow it. If it has been thin and irrelevant, or worse, demotivating, I do apologize. On the other hand, if any of the ideas here have lifted your spirits to encourage better decision-making, I am humbled. My goal is not to articulate what I think you ought to do. My goal is for you to feel great about your choices and decisions. If I have stretched your notion of possibility along the way, then the words did the job I intended.

To my aging classmates, thank you again for the inspiration. You got me to rethink my own sense of purpose in a manner only you could achieve. I’ll try to repay the favor going forward with the precious time ahead we can still share.

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Image: Pixabay

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Staying Forever Young

May you build a ladder to the stars

And climb on every rung

May you stay forever young

Those lyrics were written by Bob Dylan around 1973. I was in the sixth grade when it was released, so hey, I fit the bill. If I could quote the entire song here without violating copyright, I wouldn’t have to write the rest of this blog post. There you go, blame the copyright laws for making me try to find the words to reflect on the inspiration of a Nobel laureate.

I’m experiencing a moment of sentimentality, but allow me to position that as a positive. Last weekend my wife and I saw the musical Girl from the North Country, which is a collection of more than twenty Dylan songs wrapped around a rather grim story of a boarding house full of exhausted souls during the Great Depression. It’s a a curious pastiche, but from what I can tell Dylan endorsed it. The penultimate number is Forever Young. You don’t need to know more than that — just that this song landed a powerful blow on me at an opportune moment, which is what an impossibly eternal song never ceases to do.

Dylan wrote the song for his children. It has popped up in every context imaginable over the ensuing decades. Google it, the impact is vast and varied. This month it is speaking to me.

A few weeks ago my niece got married on a beach in the rain. She and her fiance looked every bit the part of a couple starting on the next phase of their journey. You can’t help but see the light in the eyes of young love and remember when you stood where they stood. Your youth is your superpower. It is filled with hope, promise, aspiration, and authenticity. The older generations invited to share in the celebration see themselves in the eyes of the betrothed. We are aware of our age, but that isn’t what runs through our minds when vows are exchanged. We try to connect the now to then. In that moment, we remain forever young.

I happen to be on my way to a college reunion. It is a milestone that can be divided evenly by too many integers. The decades behind can’t help but denote age, it’s the underlying purpose of the occasion, to bring together in the present people who learned from each other in the past. Recently my classmates started posting photos of themselves from that time long ago, before mobile phones, digital cameras, and electronic image archives in the cloud. Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away! That’s borrowed from Paul Simon for anyone not of a certain age. Yep, those photos have been sitting in envelopes from mail-in film processing, pasted up in laminated albums stashed under beds, now succumbing to scanning technology and <gasp> social media. I look into the bright eyes of students I knew when Reagan was president and I am convinced they remain forever young.

I look at the conflict in our nation and as hard as I try I barely recognize the place I thought it would become. I talk to my dad about living through World War II as a child and his dreams as a third-generation American for the broadening perspective he believed was ahead for all of us. I’m not sure he realized how idealistic he was as a young man, not fully comprehending the scope of the Civil Rights movement as it emerged all around him, but certainly not expecting to hear so many of the angry expressions currently creeping back into the vernacular. When we sit together now at baseball games, I remember being a young boy also sitting with him at baseball games wondering if the world could be any more perfect than watching Al Kaline catch a deep fly ball to right field on the warning track to end an inning. Today at the games we share, I wonder if my dad in his mind sees himself the way I see myself, not our current age, but with the idea that the life then ahead of us would always be driven by imagination over conflict. In those shared moments of retained dreams, we remain forever young.

Age is real. None of us escapes it. Some of us navigate its trials better than others. It can be genetics. It can be lifestyle. I’d like to say it can also be attitude but like so many my age I’ve seen too much to crawl under that blanket. What I do know is that inside each of us is that very wish Dylan asked us to preserve. It’s there for as long as we remember it, revitalize it, rekindle it. Our bodies will slow, maybe even our minds will slow, but our vision of what we can be is ours to infuse with resonance, To see ourselves in those earlier years can carry us into a more profound, more hopeful, more caring, and more empathetic present for as long as it lasts.

That is the song I am hearing right now and it’s blasting on all channels in stereo.

May your heart always be joyful

May your song always be sung

May you stay forever young.

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Image: Pixabay

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Sniff for Myth

The mantra of modern business decision-making is often tied to the basic concept of data-driven reasoning. If you hold a leadership position within an organization, you know that understanding data is a mandate. Data is the foundation for supporting a thesis, building consensus around a point of view, or building an argument for change. Data won’t tell us everything we need to know, and data can easily be misinterpreted, but if we aren’t looking at objectively collected data in forming an analysis, we might be better off buying lottery tickets than investing our company’s money in a resource-heavy plan.

If we know that data is essential to our success, and we know that critical decisions are better informed with data than without it, how is it that so many myths creep into the workplace? By myth, I mean a widely shared belief in a set of rules that a company has adopted without a sufficient test or challenge. In the worst of all circumstances, that myth may have no foundation at all.

As companies grow and practices become routine, repeated behaviors can be handed down from one generation of managers to another. I’ve often written about the notion of “but we’ve always” to point out the routines we come to follow without question, long after the reasoning for those practices has become obsolete. Most companies are guilty of this in one form or another. The good ones find a way to eliminate obsolete practices before they do real damage. Failed companies often find themselves immersed in a death spiral because they stopped questioning what made them successful and found it more expedient to repeat the same actions long after their relevancy left the playing field.

Each year in our cycles of strategic planning, we ask ourselves what is working and what isn’t. Data is often a great indicator in both directions. When we see metrics trailing downward and don’t ask ourselves why, we allow passive behavior to perpetuate itself. Often when we dig into that data, we find there are reasons something that was working no longer is creating the value that was expected. Several things could be going on: a once solid practice has become obviated, a proven practice that was working is no longer ardently being followed, or a practice has emerged from grassroots innovation to replace an existing practice because the people who created the variation come to believe it works — without proper data to support it.

Any of these cases for decline are possible, as are a host of others. All of them allow myth to replace math. When myth in a company takes over workflow, nothing good is likely to happen. It is always our job to sniff for myths — to question existing practices when data reveals a negative trend that must be corrected. Bringing deliberate change is what effective leaders do. Allowing myth to perpetuate is how once-great companies join the dead brand graveyard.

We are always fighting myths. We discover practices we put into place a decade ago were never updated for new technology. We discover a practice we reinvented to drive better results is quietly being rejected by staff members who either don’t like it or don’t understand it, but are sure they are helping matters by covertly sticking to the old practice.

Perhaps we observe a decline in KPIs and temporarily conclude something must be wrong with raw materials because we know the processing methodology we put in place is sound, only to discover that methodology has been misunderstood by the team members utilizing it. We may discover that a team’s interpretation of methodology widely differs from the guidelines developed, not because the guidelines are unsound, but because they have been explained poorly.

In each instance, a myth of what we are doing and why we are doing it overtakes what should be standard operating procedure. It could be an honest set of mistakes. It could be a misunderstanding. It could be a lack of rigor in reevaluating once-proven practices. Regardless of cause, data tells us if we are winning or losing in the form of metrics and dollars. If those signals are getting worse and we fail to delve into the practices behind the decline, we let the myth of proper functioning triumph over the innovation required to unseat the myth.

Company culture is highly efficient at enforcing rules. Veterans in companies are eager to tell rookies “how things are done here.” Sometimes rookies learn existing processes, immediately convince themselves there is a better way, and think they are doing us a favor by doing things that better way without a proper framework for evaluating results. Sometimes company culture is our ally and creates peer reinforcement of best practices. Sometimes company culture invents its own set of operating principles assuring the peer group everything is going as planned when that is not true.

Organizations function from an agreed set of rules, but often the origination of those rules is long-forgotten while the perpetuation of those rules lives on. Myth-busting makes old rules go away, ad hoc rules become exposed, and misunderstood rules become clarified. If we’re looking at data that tells us something is wrong, our intuition in identifying wrongness is only a first step toward correcting it.

Ask yourself if there might be a myth undermining your success. Then go look for it, and without embarrassing anyone, quickly build a consensus to reveal the misapplied rule. Do this often enough and the myths you sniff will be systemically corrected. No company can eradicate all its myths, but companies in constant learning mode can shorten the longevity of misconceptions and revitalize broken practices by reconciling conjecture with data.

That’s how teams get past myth and win together with shared understanding.

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Image: Pixabay