How - Dov Seidman [159]
• 3M: innovation, tolerance.
• American Express: heroic customer service.
• Citicorp: expansionism, being out in front, aggressiveness, self-confidence.
• Philip Morris: winning.
• Procter & Gamble (P&G): continuous self-improvement.
• Merck: excellence.
These are all amazing companies, each with a long history of success and achievement. But I ask: Can you do innovation? Expansionism? Winning? Can you do excellence? Can winning or heroic customer service inspire you? Can you be guided in your everyday efforts by aggressiveness and self-confidence? As groundbreaking as was Collins and Porras’s book in its time (and I built LRN on many of its precepts), the world has evolved substantially since then. While Built to Last remains a visionary work and its approach fundamentally sound, we can now see more deeply into what lives at the true core of successful enterprises. The new lens of HOW shows us that what Collins and Porras saw as “core ideologies” are not core enough for the road ahead. I don’t think you can do, be guided by, or most importantly, be inspired by any of these things. They are results, things you get when you innovate in HOW.
You can’t do self-improvement, but if in every e-mail, conversation, meeting, and task you are thinking like a leader, you will improve. You can’t do tolerance, but if in every interaction you strive to fill the spaces between you and others with trust, you will get tolerance, and a whole lot more. You can’t do excellence or winning, but, if you believe in a set of core values and you pursue the expression of those values in everything you do, you will deliver more excellence to others and, in a world of HOW, win. We’ve seen this in other areas of business. Human resources long ago learned that you can’t do employee retention; employees stay or leave in relation to their inspiration, reward, and fulfillment with their work. The quality movement showed that you couldn’t do quality; you get quality from a commitment to eliminating inefficiencies in the process of creation. The lens of HOW lets us see more deeply into the true core of what brings perpetual and perennial success, past the doing to the values and beliefs that truly form the common bonds and inspiration of group endeavor.
So let us return to the first question: Can you do experience? Obviously, no. Great experiences result from great interactions, and great interactions come from getting your HOWs right, from building strong synapses with all those around you, and from inspiring those around you to do the same. Look at some of the big shifts in business today:
• From brand awareness to brand promise.
• From customer service to customer experience.
• From managing reputation to earning reputational value.
All these big shifts result when you get your HOWs right, when you connect to something deeper than ideas, something that unleashes the power to make Waves in everything you do: values. And all these shifts are happening and newly critical to success because the sea change in connectivity and transparency since the beginning of the twenty-first century has brought them to the fore.
Philosopher Henry Sidgwick spoke about the Paradox of Hedonism, the idea that if you pursue happiness directly it tends to elude you, but if you pursue some higher, more meaningful purpose, you can achieve it.3 The problem with Collins and Porras’ core ideologies is that they are about going at the benefit directly, aiming at just the “IP” (innovation and progress) in TRIP and neglecting what it takes to get there. Like happiness, if one seeks such ends as innovation, progress, and winning, one can best achieve them by pursuing the values that can get you there: trust, honesty, integrity, consistency, and transparency. Values inspire, and are deeper and more powerful than ideologies.
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