Avoid your 'Kodak Moment' through a culture of growth!

My daily wishlist has "Start your day by watching a TED Talk for 20 minutes" but alas I haven't been able to execute that successfully just yet, but last week further reinforced why I should pursue that goal! I had the privilege of attending two thought-provoking and inspiration keynotes at the Singapore Human Capital Summit 2017 - one backed by 40 years of corporate experience and the other by academic research in the domain of behavioral economics.

Harish Manwani, Advisor at Blackstone & Non-Executive Chairman at Hindustan Unilever kicked off the conference in an articulate fashion on Day 1 with clarity of thought and sharpness of opinion, a combo that is rare to find; Daniel Pink challenged our paradigms from Silicon Valley on Day 2 through a video conference that went smoother than expected and was a live testimony to the fact that great ideas can transcend boundaries and influence us no matter which time zone we operate in.

Here is a string of pearls of wisdom from both speakers that ornamented and inspired us to drive change in our personal and professional lives:

• To avoid a "Kodak Moment" and from your business becoming just a memory of the past, organizations need to create a "Growth Culture" as opposed to a "Cost Culture"; traditional cost-culture driven organizations function on the philosophy of "Poets and Farmers", where the former are responsible for strategy & innovation whilst the latter are doers who are responsible for execution and for many the farmers are perceived to be less important than the poets.
• Mr. Manwani clarified that both roles and mindsets are critical for growth and in growth-cultures, every member of the organization needs to play the dual role of a "poet and farmer" emphasizing that innovation and execution need to be a core part of everyone's armoury and employees need to be inspired to deliver both "logic and magic" ~ an approach that amalgamates both IQ and EQ driven processes.
• Agility & Speed need to be at the heart of growth-culture driven companies and Mr. Manwani eloquently alerted us that "Don't let organizations come in between growth". He asserted that hierarchical structures are pointless if they slow down growth.

One of the points that resonated the most with me was that in any organization there are only two kinds of people that matter: "Those who make a product/deliver an outcome-related service and those who sell; everyone else is an overhead." Whilst addressing a room full of senior HR professionals, he was crystal clear about the fact that anyone whose core role is to coordinate and manage an interface will be made redundant by technology eventually.

• He highlighted that strategy is all about 'good execution everyday' and making choices about what not to do and how to make fewer errors; he clarified later during the Q&A session that this is not to be confused with not nurturing a risk-taking environment - in fact, he urges organizations to encourage intrapreneurship as part of the 'growth culture' but it is critical to have a mindset to reduce unforced errors.
• Organizations need to be able to convert 'Plans into P&L' with velocity and to do so business leaders need to be able to attract, retain and develop talent that is future-ready.
• Talking about the core role of leaders, Mr. Manwani highlighted that according to him, leaders have 2 key roles in any organization: to manage the reputation of the business and more importantly to unleash energy amongst his troops. He cited that when you enter a meeting room, you either find leaders who suck the energy out of everyone or leaders who fuel and catalyze everyone around them.
• In terms of developing future-ready talent, he shared an anecdote from "The Corporate Athlete" which talks about how professional athletes train for 85% of their time and perform for the remaining 15%; unfortunately, in the corporate arena, we perform for 95% of the time and train only for 5%. Organizations need a mechanism for continuous learning and feedback in place for its talent to bloom and drive the 'growth culture'.
• He concluded his keynote sharing that corporates need to upgrade their growth strategies from the 3G to the 4G era and it must revolve around the "4 towers of consistency, competitiveness, profitability, and responsibility." We got a deeper perspective into responsible growth on Day 2 in Prof. Williamson's session which highlighted that businesses will only go as far as it's community allows and hence businesses must consider "Social Impact as a firm's strategy".
• If Mr. Manwani focused on growth cultures and talent development, on Day 2, celebrated author Daniel Pink dived deep into a core skillset that he suggests must be part of everyone's job description but usually isn't - that of 'non-sales selling' or 'moving people'. His session was an entertaining overview of his 2013 best-seller "To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others". During his hour-long session, Dan focused on 2 megatrends, 3 core ideas and 4 practical takeaways for business leaders
• The 1st megatrend that Mr. Pink harped on was that upon surveying more than 7,000 professionals, he discovered that people spend more than 40% of their official time persuading, convincing, cajoling people or what he collectively classified as "moving people".
• He elaborated that whilst most of us have a negative perception of the sales function as we relate it to someone who is pushy and greedy, most of us are "selling" our expertise/time/opinion day in and day out, in both our professional and personal lives without consciously realizing that we are actually selling! Hence "To Sell Is Human"! He urged everyone that in today's era everyone needs to consciously master the act of "non-sales selling" to get better at "moving people".
• The 2nd megatrend was about the different landscape we operate in, in the context of selling/persuading. In the era of Joe Girard & Normal Hill, sales were all about the seller leveraging the information asymmetry that existed between her and the buyer. The more the salesperson knew about the subject matter, the easier the sale and higher the premium that she could command. Thanks to the Internet, we live in an era of near information symmetry/parity and this advantage for the seller has ceased to exist. The modern-day salesperson or professional needs a framework or mindset to "move people" in an information symmetric environment.
• Dan Pink went on to share this new framework, which has the same memorable acronym of A-B-C that most sales folks are familiar with. His framework has transformed the famous "Always Be Closing" to "Attunement. Buoyancy. Clarity". I must admit that those words are quite a mindful but he illustrated them well with some relevant examples and case studies.
• Attunement is all about being emphatic and seeing things from the other person's perspective with the goal of building trust and rapport, as that is what increases the probability of selling or convincing someone. To build on this point, he borrowed lessons from Adam Grant's study which questions whether extroverts or introverts make a better salesperson? His research shows that as per popular belief, extroverts do sell more than introverts but only by a small margin - the best salespeople are a new breed called "ambiverts" who lie somewhere in between the extremes. You can take this quick 18 question MCQ test to find out where do you lie.
• Most salespeople (even the best ones) face tons of rejections every day and hence Dan Pink talks about buoyancy as a mechanism to stay afloat and not drown in the ocean of rejections. He provided various "framing" techniques before, during and after the sales process to manage our mindset amidst all the rejection that we may face.
• In the world of information parity, it is safe to assume that buyers know as much as sellers, if not more and hence access to information alone is not an advantage per say. Professionals need something more to persuade and convince people. The next logical step is to be able to harness information to solve problems and provide solutions. Whilst that's a good start, it is not a sustainable skill set as in the era of artificial intelligence and machine learning, robots and machines are way more likely to solve problems in an efficient and cost-effective manner than us mortals.
• So what should we humans focus on to keep our jobs and thrive in the economy? Pink suggests that we are better off focusing on problem finding, defining and framing than solving it. If we can define the problem in the right way and anticipate it, machines can then focus on solving them. He believes this problem defining skillset is what will help the best professionals differentiate themselves and stay relevant.
• Following the 2 megatrends and the 3 core ideas, Dan Pink ended the session with 4 practical takeaways for everyone. Firstly, he re-emphasized that ambiverts have the biggest advantage when it comes to persuading and selling and that ambiversion is fairly accessible, no matter what culture we are in, so it is possible to nurture and nudge oneself to get there consciously.
• Next up, he suggested that we leverage the principle of 'social proof' (the concept that was established by Robert Cialdini) to convince people to act in a particular manner. As per this notion, our pre-historic part of the brain still looks to other people in our social circle to see if someone else has chosen a certain path and if it's safe to emulate them.

One can experience this in everyday life in a food court wherein most people would prefer to queue up at the stall which already has the longest queue than visit a stall that has fewer people!

• The third advice was to give people an 'off-ramp' to essentially make it easy for them to make a decision by not only telling them what and why to do something but also giving them a step-by-step how-to guide to make it easier for them to follow through.
• Lastly, he urged leaders to focus more on the "why" than on the what or the how - essentially to establish the purpose behind doing something as that in itself is far more persuasive than telling people what and how should they do something.
• As a takeaway, he suggested that in the coming weeks, we have 2 fewer conversations about the "how" and convert that to a "why conversation". This is very similar to what Simon Sinek preaches in his latest book - "Find Your Why: A Practical Guide For Discovering Purpose For You and Your Team"

I would personally like to thank Su-Yen Wong, Missy Devlin, Sara Moulton, Guillaume Jeanpierre, Rachel Tan and the team at HCLI for putting together such an inspiring and thought-provoking event and for rekindling my desire to start every morning with a TED talk. That's exactly what I need as we enter into final quarter of 2017.

May all of us succeed in our pursuit of building a growth culture in our respective organizations and avoid the proverbial 'Kodak Moment'!