By Molly Hayman and Theresa Witham
Uncertainty, often viewed as a bad thing, can be a pivotal advantage in business, says Leapfrogging author Soren Kaplan, who will close CEO/Executive Team Network, Nov. 3-6 in San Diego. In this excerpt from his book, he explains how:
Leapfrogging is about changing the game—creating something new or doing something radically different that produces a significant leap forward. What you create or change can vary, but one thing remains constant: Individuals, groups, and organizations that leapfrog old ways of doing things often become the new leaders of the future.
Whether we’re in a large corporation or a start-up, just about everything we’re told about the right way to lead our organizations involves increasing predictability and maximizing control—from planning, forecasting, and managing human resources, to training and even managing innovation. Certainty is good. Uncertainty, ambiguity, and surprises are bad.
When it comes to the implication of all this for business, I think Gary Hamel said it best: "New problems demand new principles. Put bluntly, there’s simply no way to build tomorrow’s essential organizational capabilities—resilience, innovation and employee engagement—atop the scaffolding of twentieth century management principles." In the same book he says, "In an age of wrenching change and hyper-competition, the most valuable human capabilities are precisely those that are least manageable."
These two brief quotations propose something revolutionary: that we must embrace counterintuitive ideas that go against the grain of management and leadership as we know it if we are going to succeed in today’s whirlwind world.
If you want to incorporate a leapfrogging mindset in your executive team, consider the following traits when hiring someone new (also see Kaplan’s Monster.com article):
Look for people who want to change the game, who want to make a real big difference, says Kaplan. “It’s a mindset first of all. If you are comfortable with status quo, you aren’t going to be as comfortable” stirring the pot.
“Look for complementary knowledge or content expertise that pushes adjacent to what you are currently doing,” he suggests. “Don’t hire the world’s leading expert in some area of business that you’ve been doing for 20 years.” If emerging online payment technology is important to your business, consider hiring somebody out of PayPal or Square over somebody who processes checks, he says.
For example, when Coca Cola wanted to create an interactive vending machine, it hired someone who had worked for Xbox.
Also look for people who have strategic relationships inside and outside the industry who could really help you leverage his or her capabilities to get you into new product, services or business models.
Look for people who tolerate ambiguity and who are optimistically persistent (who do not let little failures get them down).
Molly Hayman, a former CUES editorial intern, is studying abroad in Ireland. Theresa Witham is a CUES editor.
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