The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [48]
The audience was nervous and the oxygen left the room. Then they exploded with applause. They understood the message. Over the years that incident has become part of IBM lore.
Subsequently, IBM brought in the first outside CEO in their history, Lou Gerstner, and began to rethink just about everything. Instead of guarding their proprietary secrets, they licensed them to others. In addition, they provided information technology services to others. And under the leadership of Sam Palmisano the result is that more than half of the company’s $90 billion in revenue in 2006 came from businesses that did not exist in 1990. The mixed messages were gone.
Commandment Ten
Be Afraid of the Future
“Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed.”
—Michael Pritchard
MOST PEOPLE find it sensible to be prudently cautious regarding the future. It is not a crime to be cautious, but when caution becomes the overriding modus operandi in a business it can, as I’ve noted in Commandment One, precipitate failure. You see it all the time in football. Near the end of the game, the team with the lead begins playing it safe, cautiously protecting their lead. They quit taking the same kind of risks that gave them the lead in the first place. And all too often they lose in the final minutes of the game.
To quit taking risks is a serious risk!
But there is an even more debilitating malady lurking out there.
Fear!
There is a great difference between prudent caution regarding the future and unbridled fear of that future. When FDR said that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” my father and mother knew exactly what he was talking about. They moved boldly ahead in the 1930s, when, truth be told, their circumstances were anything but good. But they were not going to let themselves be afraid. They had that same kind of unquenchable optimism that built this nation.
It’s inspiring to me that the term the “American Dream” was coined by the historian James Truslow Adams in a book with the grand title Epic of America, published in 1931, when millions were out of work. He described the American Dream as “the dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” The American Dream is a resounding endorsement of the future.
Today, when that dream is more realistically attainable for more people than ever, so many look at the future and are simply afraid of it. They’re not merely afraid of taking a risk. They’re afraid of almost everything. They’re afraid of life! And that is a sure recipe for failure.
We are well beyond the age when ships’ captains feared disappearing into terra incognito. In the modern scientific age, in the industrialized Western world, perpetual fear of the future is irrational. But if you want to fail, it’s a good posture to take.
In ancient Greek cosmology, the greatest gift the gods possessed was the ability to know how events were going to unfold, to know the future. Mere mortal men could not do that. Not in the time of the ancient Greeks and not now.
No one knows what will happen in the days ahead. No one. Not all the soothsayers in the world or all the computer models at MIT can tell you for certain that the sun will come up tomorrow. It’s possible it won’t. The reality is that it probably will. But no one can know for certain.
People have always had cause to fear the unknown, but since we’ve become more knowledgeable, more scientifically oriented regarding the way things work, we’ve found there is less and less to fear in general. We feel rather certain that natural laws, such as gravity, will continue to operate with consistency. We feel fairly secure that we can sail and fly to far-off places with relative safety. We have some assurance that we can cope with quite a number of