Destiny Creator

Over the years as I've evaluated candidates and given feedback to my team members, one leadership principle that I find most predictive of success is Destiny Creator. In a previous post I mentioned that at Pattern? , our product org has product leadership principles to which we aspire. Destiny Creator is a magic combination of optimism, competence, innovative thinking, and drive. Here is our description:

Destiny Creator - Good product managers are optimistic and actively take the reins of their job and their success. Bad product managers want to be told what to do. Good product managers always have time for the most important priorities. Bad product managers get bogged down in the minutiae. Good product managers come with solutions. Bad product managers come with problems.

Years ago during a one on one with my manager at Amazon, I proposed that we pursue a sizable but daunting operational improvement opportunity. I noted that another team had mentioned to me they were already planning to work on it, then wondered aloud if I should leave it to them. His response has stuck with me: “Do it. People talk about doing things, people have talked about doing this particular thing for years. Trust me, they won’t get around to it, just do it.”??

Doing it does not necessarily mean by yourself. In fact, it rarely does. When I went back to the aforementioned team, they were all in on partnering. We expanded the cross-functional team with experts from other orgs that also had skin in the game. Together, over the next year, we delivered a number of impactful innovations that resulted in a measurably improved customer experience and millions of dollars in operational cost savings. I also learned that, if you have people from different orgs all feeling ownership and taking credit for delivering game changing solutions, you are doing it right.?

This quote from Steve Jobs encapsulates the spirit of Destiny Creator:?

“My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the 'thinker-doer' in one person… It's very easy to say, 'oh I thought of this three years ago.' But usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.”

Destiny Creator is a leadership principle that spreads optimism throughout an organization. You are trailblazing, and attracting likeminded creators to the cause. As you all work through the inevitable challenges together, the results can be truly extraordinary.