How - Dov Seidman [90]
Progress
What happens if you innovate? You create progress. “P” stands for progress—not just progress in goods, services, and profit, but also personal progress. We toil each day for the satisfaction when we achieve great things, when we help the team, and when we make others’ lives better. Progress is, in this way, intimately related to the pursuit of significance. We go on TRIPs because we want to accomplish big things. We go on TRIPs because we want to solve real problems and because we want to create lasting value. We also progress when we take risks and succeed. When we struggle through the Valley of C and climb the Hill of A, we know that we have grown as a person, that we are stronger and more capable, and, most important, that we have the strength to set out on the next journey, to an even higher hill, and beyond. And isn’t that what the journey is about?
TRIPPING
Trust enables risk, which leads to innovation, which creates progress. TRIP. This is the basic formula for thriving in the hyperconnected, hypertransparent world of twenty-first-century business.
There’s more to this TRIP, as well. The “T” also stands for transparency, which creates trust. Interpersonal transparency is a necessary power to thrive in a connected world, and not coincidentally, it creates trust. I was discussing trust with Roger Fine, former vice president and general counsel of Johnson & Johnson (J&J). I had the privilege of working closely with Roger during his time at J&J, and learned a great deal from him. When we spoke, he zeroed right in on this. “The main way people create trust,” he said, “is by being transparent and being honest. Transparency lets people know when you are telling them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and they know that in a minute. That’s why we believe in the jury system. Jurors can sniff that out. All it takes is a lot of common sense and some basic human instinct; you know when somebody is putting you on and when somebody is really being transparent with you. We all feel that.”9 When you are employing the power of active transparency, people feel that you’ve told them everything—the bad with the good, the negative with the positive—and that you are the kind of person who wouldn’t lie to them and hide something that was against your own interest. So trust and transparency go hand in hand.
“R” also stands for reputation. Reputation both derives from trust and engenders it. We’ll discuss its importance more in Chapter 9.
Trust also frees instinct, another “I.” As humans, we have animal instincts, but unfortunately for our decision-making apparatus, most of our true biological animal instincts have either disappeared or become vestigial. What most people consider instincts are simply a complicated interweaving of experience, judgment, and sense perception that takes place in the synapses of the brain when faced with making a decision. When you are in a trust-filled situation, these synapses are strong. The various centers of your brain communicate seamlessly and rapidly, and you can then make split-second decisions that often pay off.
Athletes know this well. In golf, hitting your ball along a more aggressive line might get you to the hole in fewer strokes but also might lead you closer to hazards that can penalize you. When your swing is working well and you trust it, you feel more confident about taking such risks, so you swing away; you go for it. When you have less trust in your stroke, you take a safer line or shoot for the center of the green rather than for a flagstick tucked behind a bunker. The same principle applies to more reactive games like tennis or basketball, where the action happens so quickly that you often do not have time for considered thought before making a play. If you trust your stroke in tennis you are more likely to attempt a dangerous drop shot or a