Who Moved My Tent
by Peter McLaughlin
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson go on a camping trip, set up their tent, and fall asleep. Some hours later, Holmes wakes his faithful friend: “Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”
Watson replies, “I see millions of stars.”
“What does that tell you?”
Watson ponders for a minute. “Astrologically, it tells me that Saturn is in Leo. Meteorologically, it seems we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?”
Holmes is silent for a moment, then speaks. “Watson, you idiot, someone has stolen our tent.”
Mark Twain pointed out that all humor betrays an underlying grievance. The grievance for us is that changes occur so quickly that we, like Watson, fail to come to grips with the new landscape; our tent is gone and no one notices. Sherlock Holmes is one of the few whose trained eye perceives the obvious. We are explorers in a new environment without our tent, and we are not prepared for it.
Getting Ready for Anything
The CEO who wants to be successful and lead a relatively sane, healthy and happy life needs a new kind of training – strategies and tools that business schools didn’t provide. To take an analogy from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, most of today’s CEOs (not you, of course), like institute-trained mechanics, are ready for everything but a new situation.
If one is to be ready for anything, the training must be geared more toward the who, not the what. The challenge for CEOs is to become more optimistic and resilient, more creative and energetic. In order to more fully incorporate these qualities, there must be an awareness of new research on human performance – e.g., the benefits of positive psychology on the emotions needed for teamwork and managing/coaching; the understanding of what it takes for the business environment to be more accepting and, indeed, demanding of creative innovation.
Elizabeth Curtis, CEO of Sharp Community Medical Group in San Diego, runs or works out most mornings and rides her horses most weekends. She does it because her job demands it: Keeping track of 1,100 – plus physicians is not easy. “I don’t know how anyone, much less a CEO, can find the energy to keep up and to make crucial decisions without the benefits of exercise and healthy eating. …Nothing relieves my stress like an hour at the fitness center or a 20-minute run.”
As I wrote in my book Catchfire, you need a combination of aerobic work, strength training, and some variety of stretching (e.g., yoga, Pilates) to maintain the great energy and positive emotions necessary to navigate a new landscape.
How do you fit exercise into an already busy schedule? There’s the rub. Some executives try to work out early in the morning, before the day begins. And, because exercise stimulates the right side of the brain, these executives get their most creative ideas during that time.
If you like sports, watch your favorite teams from an aerobic machine. You get an extra advantage; you’re pumping endorphins (the “feel-good” chemicals), so if your team is losing the loss doesn’t hurt as much. Benefits: longer life, better health, and more energy and optimism.
Tell Yourself A Good Story
Twenty years ago, over a game of pool at the Tarrytown Conference Center in New York, renowned author Peter Drucker told me, “A leader is a person who controls his own energy and orchestrates the positive energy of the people around him.”
As a CEO, you have to remember that everywhere you go you leave an “emotional wake.” If it’s negative, your company produces less quantity and certainly less quality. You can be angry or you can solve problems, but it’s hard to do both. Martin Seligman, Ph.D., author of Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness, has corralled the best psychologists in America to study positive emotions. His research proves what a lot of us suspected: Positive emotions help you become more productive at work, healthier, longer-lived, and happier.
The results of Seligman’s research gives you the answer as to what and how to change in order to be more consistently positive and optimistic. Having worked with him and his findings for two years, I offer several ideas from proven research.
· An optimist tells herself a good story, especially after a defeat. In Seligman’s words, to be more positive, use an “optimistic explanatory style.” For example, say, “The deal was almost done when the stock market hit the skids – not our fault; we’ll get them next time,” versus “I never win the big ones” or “It’s hopeless dealing with big committees.”
Perform a weekly act of gratitude – not just an arbitrary e-mail, but a handwritten note, a special phone call, a surprise cubicle visit. Your staff and employees will love it, but the real change happens to you.
Changing The Company Environment
Look at the average company (not yours, of course). Most, if not all, meetings are set up in the left-brained, logical, linear, sequential-thinking mode. Titles are left-brained as well: CEO, CFO, COO, CIO. There are budget meetings, operational meetings, and technology meetings. Where is the committee for creativity and innovation? Who got rewarded for the most innovative customer save or creative sale?
From a feng shui point of view, most of our offices are “hindquarters,” designed around where we put our rear ends; what we need are “headquarters,” places that encourage ideas and visionary solutions. While it is true that day-to-day business operations depend on logical decisions and structure, I think we’ve gone overboard. We need to encourage the creative thinking that anticipates the new environment.
Training CEOs
CEOs who pitch their tents in uncharted territory – a bit scared but enthusiastically optimistic about the future in the new world of technology, globalization and ever-aging employees – are the ultimate explorers. And these CEOs need to train as such. Here are four rules for CEOs, similar to the rules that would govern a world explorer.
· Be as physically fit as you can possibly be so that your energy will be equal to the new business environment.
· Be as positive as you can be (realism with optimism) to leave a positive emotional wake.
· Construct an environment that requires creative innovation from all of your employees and staff as well as yourself.
Laugh more. “It’s not getting the point of the joke, it’s getting the point of joking that really matters.”
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