Today’s TED Talk by Sarah Lewis contains an interesting discussion on Success versus Mastery. I’ll let the video speak for itself but wanted to extend something I was writing about a few days ago on perfection.
If success is doing something right one time and mastery is about being able to do it time and time again, Sarah has stated that it is important to celebrate the near wins as small failures are necessary to achieve mastery.
This means though that a perfectionist will never achieve mastery due to an obsession with small successes. Instead of being able to let go when perfect success is not achieved and trying again, the perfectionist will devote entirely too much time to each success and thus never achieve mastery.
The perfectionist will never produce the volume of work necessary to learn to become a master so in itself, perfectionism is the ultimate failure.
Anyone, enough of my sometimes incoherent ramblings. Watch Sarah.
Within minutes of posting yesterday’s blog on Founder’s Syndrome, I got a call from Guy Burry who regaled me with tales of the founders he has worked with. He also told me about a syndrome that I had never heard of before. It’s called Dentist’s Syndrome.
This is something that CEOs get and it’s pernicious. Think about every trip you have made to the dentist in your life. You sat there in the chair with the dentist sticking things in your mouth all the while she is asking questions and chatting with you.
Chatting may be too nice a way of putting it because dentists do all the talking. All you can say with your mouth full of fingers and instruments is something that sounds like “Mhwp flub falbin.” How a dentist can understand what you are saying is beyond me. After a while you stop trying to say anything intelligible and just grunt yes or no.
After ten years of this, a dentist is pretty much relegated to one-way conversations. She doesn’t expect to get any answers and basically just has to fill in the answers for herself.
And this is exactly what happens to CEOs who are in place for too long.
They start out asking questions and trying to understand the answers. After a while though, the answers sound pretty much all the same and eventually end up sounding like a bunch of grunts and whistles.
As a result the CEO ends up having a conversation only with himself, not listening to those people around him and voila, he has Dentist’s Syndrome: a case of asking questions but not hearing the answers and pretty much filling in the answers that he wants.
I had an interesting conversation in Waterloo the other day with Trish Crompton, Communitech‘s Digital Journalist about Founder’s Syndrome. I’ve thought much about the syndrome since and realized that it doesn’t apply just to founders of companies but to everyone who works. It is in fact the foundation of the Peter Principle.
First, let’s look at Founder’s Syndrome. According to Wikipedia “The passion and charisma of the founder or founders, which was such an important reason for the successful establishment of the organization, becomes a limiting and destructive force, rather than the creative and productive one it was in the early stages.” This usually means that it is time to turf the founder and get a more experienced CEO.
And the Peter Principle says that people are promoted one level above their level of competence because companies promote people who are great at their jobs, not ones who will be great at the next level. (Which pretty much means that all managers are incompetent.)
So what is it that causes the founder’s syndrome or the Peter Principle? In thinking it through, I’ve realized that what stops people being effective is their inability to learn and to adapt to new situations.
When you stop learning and adapting, you’ll stop being effective and will stop being able to handle the next new challenge. As I’ve said before, you have to wake up every morning thinking that absolutely everything you know could be wrong if you want to continue to learn.
So learning is the key to continued success. As long as you can learn at the same pace as your situation changes, you’ll not fall behind and be subject to Founder’s Syndrome or the Peter Principle.
I’ve had a debate recently about the true meaning of perfection and I thought that derivation week would be a good time to explore this on the web. The surprising thing is that people have a different understanding of what it means than the meaning that was originally intended.
Perfection comes from the Latin ‘Perfectus’ which itself comes from ‘Perficio’ which means to finish or bring to an end. (I’ve borrowed from Wikipedia for much of this analysis by the way.) Aristotle described three shades of meaning to the term. Something is perfect:
which is complete — which contains all the requisite parts;
which is so good that nothing of the kind could be better; or
which has attained its purpose.
Unfortunately, perfectionists nowadays ascribe the second meaning to the term and never bring something to an end because it can always be made better. This is particularly problematic in the knowledge economy.
Take this blog for instance. When is it perfect?
How do I know when it contains all the requisite parts?
I could write on this topic forever as I’ll never achieve something that could not be made better.
But I could call it perfect when I think I’ve conveyed my point.
I read recently that the federal Department of Transportation took over three weeks, many people and countless hours just to write one tweet. This is perfection run amok and the problem with the second definition of perfection. In the knowledge economy, nothing ever achieves perfection in a way that it could not be made better.
In the manufacturing economy you can almost achieve the second meaning of perfection but in the knowledge economy, you have to stop at being satisfied when something has attained its purpose.
That’s why when I do something I always ask myself how little I can do to meet my objective. That for me is attaining perfection. And that’s why there are ofetn speling, grammarical, and compositionel errors in this blog.
While we’re having Fun with Words Week here at Material Minds headquarters, I think we should look at the term ‘Executive.’ Much attention is paid to what the difference is between management and leadership. And in company ranks we have managers and leaders.
Fortunately, there is no confusion as to what we should call the people who manage as they are called management. But the leadership of an organization isn’t called that, they’re called Executives.
Frequently you hear an executive saying that their job is to lead and not manage as management is the purview of managers. But then if an executives job is leadership, what is leadership exactly?
That’s where I come down to the meaning of the word Executive. Look at it carefully and it comes from the word Execute. Yes, a CEO’s role is as the Chief Execute-ive Officer. It can’t be any clearer than that. An executive’s prime responsibility is to execute.
That’s why leadership is about setting strategy, inspiring people and executing. An executive who thinks the job ends at setting strategy and who leaves execution to management is not doing his job because the foundation of this job is to execute.
Have you noticed that there are a lot of words with similar endings? Suicide, homicide, genocide, pesticide etc. They all end with the suffix ‘cide’ but perhaps you didn’t notice that there meanings are all similar. They all refer to death, destruction and killing.
That’s because their ending is from the Latin ‘caedere’ which means to kill. (Now you can impress people in conversation with your obvious erudition.)
Funny thing is that the word ‘decide’ has the same ending and the same meaning. When you decide something it means that you have to kill something else. And this is why it is so hard for people to decide: they have to kill something.
And they get stuck in the Six Stages of Change and can’t break loose. If you want to help people decide, you must help them through those six stages of change until they reach acceptance and are able to kill whatever they can’t stand to lose.
Or when that doesn’t work, you have to decide, which is all right for many people as they would rather someone else do the killing.
