How to Execute More Effectively and Efficiently to Get a GOOD (not bad or ugly) Outcome

“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”

—   Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

The Standing Babas, outlined in Shantaram—arguably one of the best novels of all time—are “a legendary cloister of mad, inspired monks” who have “renounced all material possessions” and taken “vows of penance to get closer to God.” Perhaps most notably, they’ve chosen to stand for the rest of their lives. That’s right—they’ve vowed to never sit or lie down again. That means eating standing up, riding a bike standing up, and sleeping standing up.

This self-inflicted dogmatic commitment is intended to help them achieve spiritual enlightenment by “putting their bodies through extreme hardship” so they can “burn off all their bad karma” and “head directly to salvation.” According to Gregory David Roberts, the “unending and terrible pain” and “spears of agony [that] stabbed up through their feet with every downward pressure” filled the monks with a powerful light. “I’ve never known a human source more brilliant than their tortured smiles.”

This level of discipline sets a very high bar. Management thinker Jim Collins offers a more attainable method: “Think of the transformation as a process of buildup followed by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action.” Put another way, to create a substantial, sustainable step-change in performance, large helpings of discipline are required. And while this might sound simple, as Atul Gawande said: “Discipline is hard—harder that trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even selflessness. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We can’t even keep from snacking between meals. We are not built for discipline. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at.”

Most efforts of this nature fail to achieve the desired aspiration. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that only four percent of patients who recently suffered a heart attack or stroke stopped smoking, started to eat healthier or engaged in more physical exercise. Another study highlighted that only two in three patients suffering a life-threatening condition picked up the script after a consultation from a doctor, and only half of them followed the script as prescribed.

If you look at organizations, John Kotter in Leading Change revealed that only 30 percent of change programs succeed for a range of reasons, including underestimating the power of vision, under-communicating the vision by a factor of 10 (or 100 or even 1,000), or declaring victory too soon. Another study of 1,546 business executives from around the world showed that only 30 percent agreed that their change programs were “completely / mostly successful.” Those aren’t great odds!

I want to show you that to achieve a substantial, sustainable step-change in performance—the rocket scenario—an organization needs to have both a high level of ambition as well as a high level of execution discipline. A quote from Alice in Wonderland brings this to life:

“‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.

‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice.

'Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.”

Hiding from the competitive realities of our modern interconnected world is no longer an option. Lord Salisbury, the UK Prime Minister, said at the turn of the century: “All change is for the worse, so it’s in our interests that as little should happen as possible.” This approach will result in extinction. Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, said more appropriately: “Companies today basically have two choices: adapt or die.”

The average age of a Fortune 500 company has fallen “from almost 60 years old in the 1950s to less than 20 years currently.” Nine out of ten Fortune 500 companies in 1955 are no longer even in the index. Remember Enron, or Research in Motion (makers of Blackberry)? Their reign is over.

Want to create and maintain something great? Through these four key steps, you can ensure a GOOD as opposed to a bad or ugly outcome.

1.    Set an ambitious goal

2.    Detail a plan to achieve this as well as a way to know if you’re on track or not

3.    Create stable routines to turn the plan into reality

4.    Generate determination to push forward when the going inevitably gets tough

When Ben Horowitz first met Andy Grove, he blurted out the he loved his book High Output Management. When Andy asked him why, he replied: “Every other management book that I’ve read explains the trivial, but yours gets to the real issues.” Upon hearing that, the master teacher softened and replied with a priceless story: “It’s funny that you say that about management books. I recently ran out of space on my bookshelf at home, so I was faced with a choice. I either had to throw away some books or buy a bigger house. Well, that was an easy decision, but which books to throw out? Then I thought, the management books! But I had a problem. Nearly every management book that I’d received was sent to me by the author and was autographed with a kind inscription. I felt badly about throwing away all those nice notes. So, I went through each book and tore out the inscription page then threw away the book. So now I have a large stack of pages of nice notes to me and plenty of space for good books.” With that in mind, my hope is that you will find the below practical, relevant and insightful!

Step One: Set an Ambitious Goal

 “I’ve seen a great many people who are magnificent at getting the unimportant things done. They have an impressive record of achievement on trivial matters.”

—   Peter Drucker

Goal – What ambitious, energizing vision are you going after?

Theory – In 1958 the fledgling NASA organization had eight important goals. However, they were unfocused and hard to measure, understand and remember. Two examples included: “The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles” and “The expansion of human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.” Huh?

Most organizations have strategy goals that go in one ear and out the other, and while senior leaders in these organizations would argue that they’ve shared these with the wider team, as Nobel Prize-winning writer and critic George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” And Ben Horowitz states in The Hard Thing About Hard Things that “The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal”—indeed, the hard thing is setting a goal you’re likely to achieve; that is, one that’s clear and focused. A survey showed that only one in seven employees can name even one of their organization’s most important goals. The further from the top of the ladder an employee, the lower the clarity about the company’s goals. Moreover, only one in five employees felt they were held accountable for making regular progress on the organization’s strategic goals.

By 1961, NASA had just one goal: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” The from-to here is stunningly clear. This goal is focused, measurable and easy to both understand and remember. This narrowed focus increased both accountability and engagement. When JFK visited the NASA headquarters in Cape Canaveral and asked a janitor who was mopping the floor what he did at NASA, his response was: “Mr. President. I’m helping put a man on the moon!” Everyone involved felt like their contribution mattered. We all know how this story ends, with a team of over 400,000 engineers, technicians and scientists coming together to achieve something that once seemed impossible.

Application – While your goals don’t have to be quite as inspiring as putting a man on the moon, they should be focused, measurable and easy to understand.

In The Boy and the Filberts, Aesop tells the fable of a young boy who puts his hand into a pot full of figs and hazelnuts. While he grasps as many as he can possibly hold, his hand gets stuck. Unwilling to let go, yet unable to withdraw his hand, he bursts into tears. While it can be hard, being selective and not trying to have everything is often the best path forward. For example, Tim Cook, now CEO of Apple, once said: “We are the most focused company that I know of or have read of or have any knowledge of. We say no to good ideas every day. We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we choose. The table each of you is sitting at today, you could probably put every product on it that Apple makes, yet Apple’s revenue last year was 40 billion dollars.”

Jack Ma, having once earned just 12 dollars a month as an English teacher at his local university, is now the founder of Alibaba and one of the richest men alive. He said, “If there are nine rabbits on the ground, if you want to catch one, just focus on one.” Michael Porter built off this when he said: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

Boxer, the horse in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, responds to almost everything with, “I will work harder.” But despite his ever-increasing effort, the problems on the farm continue to get worse. Rather than simply working “harder,” focusing on the 80:20—the few tasks that can have disproportioned benefit—can increase the scale and type of impact you’re having. It’s important to avoid the peanut butter approach of spreading a thin layer of resources, with the occasional variance due to the rough nuts, across the organization.

In Blue Ocean Strategy the example of Cirque du Soleil is used. “Guy Laliberté is now CEO of Cirque du Soleil, one of Canada’s largest cultural exports. Cirque’s productions to date have been seen by some 150 million people in over 300 cities around the world. In less than 20 years since its creation, Cirque du Soleil achieved a level of revenues that took Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey—the once global champion of the circus industry—more than 100 years to attain.

“What makes this growth all the more remarkable is that it wasn’t achieved in an attractive industry but rather a declining industry in which traditional strategic analysis pointed to limited potential for growth … Children cried out for video games rather than a visit to the traveling circus. As a result, the industry was suffering from steadily decreasing audiences and, in turn, declining revenue and profits. There was also increasing sentiment against the use of animals in circuses by animal rights groups. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey has long set the standard, and competing smaller circuses essentially followed with scaled-down versions. From the perspective of competition-based strategy, then, the circus industry appeared unattractive.

“Another compelling aspect of Cirque du Soleil’s success is that it didn’t win by taking customers from the already shrinking circus industry, which historically catered to children. Cirque du Soleil did not compete with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey. Instead, it created uncontested new market space that made the competition irrelevant … Significantly, one of the first Cirque productions was titled ‘We Reinvent the Circus.’”

When it comes to measuring goals, great management thinker Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” In his book Better, Atul Gawande shares the story of Virginia Apgar, whose development of the Apgar score, a quick and simple measurement of newborn health, had a tremendous impact on infant mortality rates. In the 1930s, one in 30 children died at birth, showing very little improvement from the same statistics an entire century earlier. The creation of the Apgar score allowed doctors and nurses to quickly and effectively evaluate the health of newborns from the moment of their birth, and it’s a measure that continues today.

Babies receive a score for their coloring, pulse, reflexes, muscle tone and breathing at one minute and again at five minutes after birth. The simple existence of this measure allows doctors to systematically collect data that was previously not used. The score turned an intangible and impressionistic clinical concept—the condition of new babies—into numbers people could collect and compare. Using it required more careful observation and documentation of the true condition of every baby. The Apgar score has saved millions of lives since its creation in 1953.

When it comes to goals being easy to understand, Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, once said, “Goals cannot sound noble but vague. Targets cannot be so blurry they can’t be hit. Your direction has to be so vivid that if you randomly woke one of your employees in the middle of the night and asked him, ‘Where are we going?’ he could still answer in a half-asleep stupor.”

John Kotter builds on this: “A useful rule of thumb: if you can’t communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are not yet done with this phase of the transformation process.” And Sam Adams, creator of Dilbert, says, “[Effective communication is about] getting to the point and leaving out all of the noise. You think you already do that … but you probably don’t.”

In The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki outlines how the mission statements of a number of well-known organizations could be written in a pithier, sharper way. Wendy’s could go from “The mission of Wendy’s is to deliver superior quality products and services for our customers and communities through leadership innovation and partnerships,” to “Healthy fast food.” Southwest Airlines could go from “The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit,” to “Better than driving.”

Finally, challenge your goal to avoid a false sense of certainty. In Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick the example of Kodak is used to highlight the need to check hubris: “Film, chemicals, and paper had been around for so long that management could simply not imagine a world in which people didn’t light up at the prospect of collecting their prints in little yellow boxes … The assumption that the transitional film business would always be around simply never got sufficiently challenged in the strategy room, even though ample evidence to the contrary was available.”

A good technique is what Warren Buffet is said to use: “To operate with red and blue teams, even at times hiring two investment banking teams to evaluate a possible acquisition. One argues in favor, the other against. Both are offered success fees, payable only if Buffett decides that their argument wins. Private equity firms have found that more than 30 percent of decisions are different when opposed possibilities are pitted against each other.”

Step Two: Detail a Plan to Achieve Your Goal as Well as a Way to Know If You’re on Track

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

—   Mike Tyson, professional boxer

Theory – Alchemists believed they could “discover the deepest secrets of nature, gain the power to create something out of nothing, and turn dust into gold.” They searched for the philosopher’s stone—a substance that would change the chemistry of anything to gold. Of course, this isn’t possible. In a similar vein, having an effective goal isn’t enough. It’s not the philosopher’s stone. You need to turn the idea into gold—the goal into reality—yourself.

The ugliest chart out there—the “hairy back”—is an example of how common it is to set an aspiration you’ll never achieve. “When you look at the annual reports of the global 2000, on average, the leaders of those companies are projecting to outgrow their markets by two times on a revenue basis and on a profit basis to outgrow their market by four times. And so it’s a reasonable question to ask: on any sustained basis over a ten-year period how many companies actually outgrow their markets by two times? And the answer is roughly one in ten. That means 90 percent of companies are going to fail to achieve their basic growth ambitions.” Thus, it’s clear that having an ambitious goal requires an outline of how this goal will be achieved.

Robert Greene, in his book Mastery, talks about the indigenous people of Oceania:

“Among the many feats of human navigation of the sea perhaps none are more remarkable and mysterious than the voyages of the indigenous peoples in the area known as Oceania—comprising the islands of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. In an area that is 99.8 percent water, the inhabitants of this region were able for many centuries to deftly navigate the vast spaces between the islands.

“… The Islanders would travel in outrigger canoes fitted with a sail with three or four men aboard, one serving as the chief navigator. They had no charts or instruments of any kind, and for the Westerners who accompanied them this could be a disconcerting experience. Taking off at night or day (it didn’t matter to them), there would be apparently nothing to guide them along the way. The islands were so far apart that one could travel for days without spotting land. To go off course only slightly (and storms or weather changes could certainly cause that) would mean never spotting their destination, and probably death … And yet they would embark on their sea voyages with a remarkably relaxed spirit.

“The chief navigator would occasionally glance at the night sky or the position of the sun, but mostly he talked with the others or stared straight ahead. Sometimes one of the men would lie belly down in the middle of the outrigger canoe and report some information he had gleaned. In general they gave the impression of being passengers on a train, serenely taking in the passing scenery. They seemed even calmer at night. When they were supposedly getting closer to their destination, they would become slightly more alert. They would follow the paths of birds in the sky; they would look deeply into the water, which they would sometimes cup in their hands and smell. When they arrived at their destination, it was all with the air of pulling into the train station on time.

The travelers’ trained ability to navigate their seas was key to reaching their destination. Create a smoothly running system like this to keep on track during your own journey. 

Application – Developing a scoreboard and the key data you’ll track, as well as the milestones of the plan, is crucial. In Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the author talks about how great teams measure performance by eliminating ambiguity and interpretation.

“On a football field, a scoreboard focuses everyone’s efforts on one thing: winning. It doesn’t display defensive statistics or offensive statistics or individual player statistics. It provides unambiguous information about how the team is doing, and how much time the members have left if they want to improve the final outcome. That leaves little room for individual interpretation. Imagine the quarterback of a team that is losing by 14 points with three minutes to go in the game saying to the coach, ‘Well, I feel pretty good about things. I mean, my performance was not bad, and my stats look good.’ The coach would be furious. He wants that quarterback, and everyone else on the team, to be focused on one thing: winning. And the only thing a team has to do to know whether it’s winning is to look at the scoreboard. Teams within organizations need to do the same thing. They have to eliminate ambiguity and interpretation when it comes to success. It’s ironic that so many teams don’t do this, because they have an advantage over sports teams: they often get to create their own scoreboard! They decide what it is they want to achieve, and how they want to measure their success.”

Having a scoreboard that allows everyone to know the score at all times is a powerful driver. Within a few seconds everyone can look at the board and determine, “Are we winning, and are we making progress?” Your scoreboard shouldn’t have a huge amount of data; rather it should be a “players’ scoreboard”—a few simple metrics.

This data must be updated on a weekly basis. As the authors of Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick say, “Trying to improve your strategic decision making is like trying to improve your golf game by practicing blindfolded, and not finding out if your ball went into the hole for three years.” Furthermore, the metrics need to be both moveable (you’re able to do things that can change them) and predictive (they’ll give you a good read on where you’re heading). W. Edwards Deming used to say looking at lagging financial data is the equivalent of “driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.”

The Punjab Education Reform Roadmap to improve 60,000 government schools, “The biggest education reform challenge on the planet,” uses simple “players’ scoreboards” each month to track key indicators such as enrollment, student attendance, and teacher attendance. Andreas Schleicher, Director of the PISA program, said, “In the darkness, all students, schools and education systems look the same. And when we know little about the strengths and weaknesses of schools and education systems, it is difficult to help them.” That’s why tracking and measuring is so important.

When it comes to planning, I always go back to Benjamin Franklin, who has reportedly said that, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” A concept I’ve found helpful is called Commander’s Intent, used by military planners to ensure a plan remains relevant and applicable when contact occurs:

“During World War II, the sea and airborne invasion of France on June 6, 1944 (D-Day) had been planned for years. British, Canadian, and American airborne forces planned and rehearsed for months a precise series of glider and parachute landings that were designed to secure bridges, road junctions, and other key terrain that would enable the ground invasion forces to advance rapidly inland. The airborne invasion forces took off from England and months of planning appeared to vanish instantly. Parachute forces dropped into unmarked landing zones, gliders landed in the wrong areas, and thousands of soldiers from different units were mixed together in the night. It appeared that a military disaster had occurred. Yet, only hours later, the original military objectives were being accomplished by ad-hoc units that faced much fiercer German resistance. Commander’s Intent had saved the day. Leaders and soldiers at all levels understood that no matter where they landed, they had to form into units and seize the bridges and key terrain. The plan was a failure, but good Commander’s Intent and superior training allowed improvisation and initiative to save the mission.”

While “No plan survives first contact with the enemy” (Helmuth van Moltke), the benefits of a plan can be in the exercise itself rather than the precision of the actual plan. Know your goal. Study your goal. Build a sturdy plan around your goal. And then go after it.

Step Three: Create Routines to Turn the Plan into Reality

“We don’t have to be smarter than the rest, we need to be more disciplined than the rest.”

—   Warren Buffet

Theory – According to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, “In 2010, Dave Brailsford faced a tough job. No British cyclist had ever won the Tour de France, but as the new General Manager and Performance Director for Team Sky (Great Britain’s professional cycling team), Brailsford was asked to change that. His approach was simple. Brailsford believed in a concept that he referred to as the ‘aggregation of marginal gains.’ He explained it as ‘the one percent margin for improvement in everything you do.’ His belief was that if you improved every area related to cycling by just one percent, then those small gains would add up to remarkable improvement.

“They started by optimizing the things you might expect: the nutrition of riders, their weekly training program, the ergonomics of the bike seat, and the weight of the tires. But Brailsford and his team didn’t stop there. They searched for one percent improvements in tiny areas that were overlooked by almost everyone else: discovering the pillow that offered the best sleep and taking it with them to hotels, testing for the most effective type of massage gel, and teaching riders the best way to wash their hands to avoid infection. They searched for one percent improvements everywhere.

“Brailsford believed that if they could successfully execute this strategy, then Team Sky would be in a position to win the Tour de France in five years’ time. He was wrong. They won it in three years. In 2012, Team Sky rider Sir Bradley Wiggins became the first British cyclist to win the Tour de France. That same year, Brailsford coached the British cycling team at the 2012 Olympic Games and dominated the competition by winning 70 percent of the gold medals available. In 2013, Team Sky repeated their feat by winning the Tour de France again, this time with rider Chris Froome. Many have referred to the British cycling feats in the Olympics and the Tour de France over the past 10 years as the most successful run in modern cycling history.”

While British cycling has faced some recent controversy, there are lessons to be learned from this disciplined approach to driving improvement.

Application – Thomas Edison is believed to have said, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” To prevent against another “hairy back,” I want to call out two key focus areas: a weekly meeting singularly focused on the goal(s) and how to clear obstacles in the way, and empowering others to lead the change.

First, the meeting should happen at the same time every week like clockwork—rain, hail, or shine—and follow the same fast-paced agenda. In no more than 30 minutes, you should review the scoreboard (how are we doing?), understand if last week’s actions occurred, and then take closed-loop (Exactly What? Exactly When? Exactly Who?) actions to remove obstacles and make commitments to move the key indicators forward for the week ahead.

The specific actions should focus on “the one or two most important things I can do this week to impact the team’s performance on the scoreboard.” No one should be saying things like: “I will attend the meeting with the marketing team,” or “I will review some of the paperwork this week.” It should be much more specific: “I will attend the 10 a.m. meeting with the marketing team and get a commitment from Bob to provide his go / no-go by Friday August 9th.”

As Sir Michael Barber, head of Tony Blair’s Delivery Unit said, “The key, when they turned out to be wrong, was to learn the lessons. Which assumptions turned out to be flawed? What changed that we hadn’t anticipated? I used to quote the great conductor Benjamin Zander, who taught his musicians not to swear when they made a ghastly error, but to say to themselves, ‘How fascinating!’”

A large part of the power of this meeting cadence is the routine—one of the most powerful tools for removing obstacles. Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do.” A robust, repeatable routine can increase your chances of achieving peak performance, which is why the world’s best performers use them. For example, Michael Phelps, winner of the most Olympic medals ever—28 in total, 23 of which are gold—“followed the same routine at every race.” This is outlined in Essentialism:

“He arrived two hours early. He stretched and loosened up, according to a precise pattern: eight hundred mixer, fifty freestyle, six hundred kicking with kickboard, four hundred pulling a buoy, and more. After the warm-up he would dry off, put in his earphones, and sit—never lie down—on the massage table. From that moment, he and his coach, Bob Bowman, wouldn’t speak a word to each other until after the race was over.

“At 45 minutes before the race he would put on his race suit. At 30 minutes he would get into the warm-up pool and do six hundred to eight hundred meters. With ten minutes to go he would walk to the ready room. He would find a seat alone, never next to anyone. He liked to keep the seats on both sides of him clear for his things: goggles on one side and his towel on the other. When his race was called he would walk to the blocks. There he would do what he always did: two stretches, first a straight-leg stretch and then with a bent knee. Left leg every time. Then the right earbud would come out. When his name was called he would take out the left earbud. He would step on to the block—always from the left side. He would dry the block—every time. Then he would stand and flap his arms in such a wav that his hands hit his back.

“Phelps explains: ‘It’s just a routine. My routine. It’s the routine I’ve gone through my whole life. I’m not going to change it.’ And that is that. His coach, Bob Bowman, designed this physical routine with Phelps. But that’s not all. He also gave Phelps a routine for what to think about as he went to sleep and first thing when he awoke. He called it ‘Watching the Videotape.’

There was no actual tape, of course. The ‘tape’ was a visualization of the perfect race. In exquisite detail and slow-motion Phelps would visualize every moment from his starting position on top of the blocks, through each stroke, until he emerged from the pool victorious, with water dripping off his face.

“Phelps didn’t do this mental routine occasionally. He did it every day before he went to bed and every day when he woke up—for years … When asked about the routine, Bowman said: ‘If you were to ask Michael what’s going on in his head before competition, he would say he’s not really thinking about anything. He’s just following the program. But that’s not right. It’s more like his habits have taken over. When the race arrives, he’s more than halfway through his plan and he’s been victorious at every step. All the stretches went like he planned. The warm-up laps were just like he visualized. His headphones are playing exactly what he expected. The actual race is just another step in a pattern that started earlier that day and has been nothing but victories. Winning is a natural extension.”

In addition to the power of the routine, engaging everyone in the process drives accountability. By asking everyone each week what they’ll do to move the scoreboard forward, whether they completed what they said they would do last week, and if there were any learnings, you’re getting them to “write their own lottery ticket.” This is explored in the book Beyond Performance:

“To understand why collaboration is so powerful, consider a famous experiment where researchers ran a lottery with a twist. Half the participants were randomly assigned a numbered lottery ticket. The remaining half were given a blank ticket and a pen, and asked to choose their own lottery number. Just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offered to buy back all the tickets. They wanted to find out how much they would have to pay people who write their own number compared with people who are handed a number at random.

“The rational expectation would be that there should be no difference, since a lottery is pure chance. Every number, whether chosen or assigned, should have the same value. A more savvy answer would be that you should pay people less if they write their own number, because of the possibility that numbers will be duplicated.

“Neither of these turned out to be the right answer. Regardless of nationality or demographic group, people who wrote their own number always demanded at least five times more for their ticket.

“This reveals an important truth about human nature. When we’re personally involved in ‘authoring’ an outcome, we are far more committed to it because we feel we own it. The underlying psychology relates to our need for control, which is a deep-rooted survival instinct.

Consider another experiment that examined the importance of a sense of control among elderly people in a nursing home. Some of the residents were given the opportunity to decide how their rooms should be set out, and asked to choose a plant to look after. The others had no say in the layout of their rooms, and had a plant chosen and tended for them. After 18 months, the survival rate among residents who had control was 85 percent, but among those who had no control it was just 70 percent. It appears that our desire for control is strong enough to keep us alive.”

Step Four: Generate Determination to Push Through Obstacles and Keep at It

“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too.”

—   If, Rudyard Kipling

Theory – Marcus Aurelius, emperor of the Roman Empire and one of the great Stoics, once said, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” The idea that the obstacles we face in life are opportunities to improve ourselves is a provocative one. It was also a sentiment referred to in JFK’s famous “we choose to go to the moon” speech, in which he said we do these things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

The story outlined in Ryan Holiday’s book The Obstacle is the Way brings this concept to life: “There is an old Zen story about a king whose people had grown soft and entitled. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he hoped to teach them a lesson. His plan was simple: He would place a large boulder in the middle of the main road, completely blocking entry into the city. He would then hide nearby and observe their reactions. How would they respond? Would they band together to remove it? Or would they get discouraged, quit, and return home? With growing disappointment, the king watched as subject after subject came to this impediment and turned away. Or, at best, tried halfheartedly before giving up. Many openly complained or cursed the king or fortune or bemoaned the inconvenience, but none managed to do anything about it. After several days, a lone peasant came along on his way into town. He did not turn away. Instead he strained and strained, trying to push it out of the way. Then an idea came to him: He scrambled into the nearby woods to find something he could use for leverage. Finally, he returned with a large branch he had crafted into a lever and deployed it to dislodge the massive rock from the road. Beneath the rock was a purse of gold coins and a note from the king, which said: “The obstacle in the path becomes the path. Never forget, within every obstacle is an opportunity to improve our condition.”

Sir Ernest Shackleton, British polar explorer, put out a newspaper ad saying: “[People] wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success.” This is a great example of tenacity and determination. As Sir Raymond Priestly, the Antarctic explorer, summed up: “For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes, and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” 

In 1914, Shackleton and 27 men set sail for the South Pole on the ship named Endurance. Their goal was to be the first men to traverse the Antarctic continent. Endurance, however, became stuck in ice which set off a series of events that caused a “two-year nightmare of hardship, catastrophe and ultimately heroism of the highest order.”

“The Endurance was immobilized, held hostage to the drifting ice floes. Shackleton realized that his men would have to wait out the coming winter in the ship’s cramped quarters until summer’s thaw. Shackleton feared the potential effects of idleness, ennui and dissidence among his men more than he did the ice and cold. He required that each man maintain his ordinary duties as closely as possible. Sailors swabbed decks; scientists collected specimens from the ice; others were assigned to hunt for seals and penguins when fresh meat, a protection against scurvy, ran low. He also kept a strict routine for meals and insisted that the men socialize after dinner … Through the routines, order and interaction, Shackleton managed the collective fear that threatened to take hold when the trip didn’t go as planned. He knew that in this environment, without traditional benchmarks and supports, his greatest enemies were high levels of anxiety and disengagement, as well as a slow-burning pessimism. 

“Days became weeks, and weeks became months, and still the ice held the ship. By June 1915—the thick of winter in the Southern Hemisphere—the ship’s timbers were weakening under the pressure created by the ice, and in October water started pouring into the Endurance. Shackleton ordered the crew to abandon the sinking ship and make camp on a nearby ice floe. The next morning, he announced a new goal: ‘Ship and stores have gone—so now we’ll go home.’ A day later, in the privacy of his diary, he was more candid about the gauntlet in front of him. ‘A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground,’ he wrote. ‘I pray God, I can manage to get the whole party to civilization.’ After the Endurance sank, leaving the men stranded on the ice with three small lifeboats, several tents and supplies, Shackleton realized that he himself had to embody the new survival mission—not only in what he said and did, but also in his physical bearing and the energy he exuded. He knew that each day, his presence had huge impact on the men’s mind-sets.

“… The ship was gone; previous plans were irrelevant. Now his goal was to bring the team home safely, and he improvised, adapted and used every resource at hand to achieve it … By April 1916, the ice began breaking up, and Shackleton ordered the men to the lifeboats, hoping to reach land along the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. After a week of stormy seas, they arrived at the deserted Elephant Island. They were exhausted, seasick and dehydrated … Almost immediately, Shackleton began planning his next move. Along with five other men, he managed to guide a 22-foot lifeboat to South George Island; from there, a smaller party reached a whaling station and helped … Then he began looking for a vessel capable of rescuing the rest of his crew. During the next several months, he set sail in three different ships, but none could cut through the pack ice surrounding Elephant Island. Finally, on Aug. 30, 1916, aboard the Yelcho, a Chilean steamer, Shackleton sailed within sight of the island and rescued the 22 remaining men. ‘I have done it,’ he wrote his wife, Emily. ‘Not a life lost, and we have been through hell.’”

Maya Angelou puts it well: “Leaving behind nights of terror and fear / I rise / Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear / I rise .. / I rise / I rise / I rise.” The story of The Endurance and Shackleton’s energetic and enterprising exploits highlight the determination to keep at it, even when the odds are against you. The rewards are unimaginable.

Application – Remain steady and “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.” In the HBR article The Power of Small Wins, the authors state: “The power of progress is fundamental to human nature, but few managers understand it or know how to leverage progress to boost motivation.” At every small opportunity, recognize the individuals involved. When employees achieve their goals—I’ve seen one individual do a backflip to celebrate—they walk and talk differently. Like they’re part of a winning team. This is a powerful force that can ripple through an organization.

Conclusion

Jocko Willink, former Navy SEAL and author, provides some sage counsel in his poem GOOD: “How do I deal with setbacks, failures, delays, defeats, or other disasters? I actually have a fairly simple way of dealing with these situations, summed up in one word: ‘Good.’ That’s it. When things are going bad: Don’t get all bummed out, don’t get startled, don’t get frustrated. No. Just look at the issue and say: ‘Good.’ Finally: if you can say the word ‘good,’ then guess what? It means you’re still alive. It means you’re still breathing. And if you’re still breathing, that means you’ve still got some fight left in you. So get up, dust off, reload, recalibrate, re-engage—and go out on the attack.”

Set an ambitious goal and execute it with discipline. As Zen Master Hakun said, “It’s like chopping down a huge tree of immense girth. You won’t accomplish it with one swing of your axe. If you keep chopping away at it, though, and do not let up, eventually, whether it wants to or not, it will suddenly topple down. When that time comes, you could round up everyone you could find and pay them to hold the tree up, but they wouldn’t be able to do it. It would still come crashing to the ground … But if the woodcutter stopped after one or two strokes of his axe to ask the third son of Mr. Chang, ‘Why doesn’t this tree fall?’ And after three or four more strokes stopped again to ask the fourth son of Mr. Li, ‘Why doesn’t this tree fall?’ he would never succeed in felling the tree.”

Questions to Noodle On

·      What are the best books / articles on achieving a substantial, sustainable step-change in performance?

·      What are some examples of organizations that have been able to sustain high performance and how have they done this?

(All views are mine and not those of McKinsey and Company)