leadership lessons from Michael Schumacher

Taking a sporting theme for the second week in a row I’m going to refer to the aftermath of Michael Schumacher’s early exit from the Chinese Grand Prix after one of his wheels was not properly attached during the first round of pit stops; “I don’t have any hard feelings. I feel a bit sorry for one of my boys that I guess he feels responsible, but it’s part of the game”.

And this after he lost the chance of his best result since making his comeback and, possibly, a win on the circuit that he won his last race on. No tantrums, no ranting a raving, just a straightforward comment.

One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going – Goethe

This one is a bit of a double edged sword maybe. You can work with it from a couple of angles as least.

Taking a first look you can see the issue of people who don’t know what they are doing using far too much resource to achieve, if at all, the desired end. I learned about wasted effort way back in the days when I worked on the farm in the school holidays. I doubt that any of the guys had any formal training in O&M (Organisation and Methods as we used to call it) other than what they might have picked up in the forces, but you learned these things through peer group working, common sense and experience. Waste was the enemy because it cost money one way or another and, in an area where there was a lot of manual labour, it took its toll on the individual. As a skinny 13/14 year old I couldn’t heft a hay bale, but I could drive the tractor and trailer as well as anyone and that freed up an able bodied man to do the hefting.

These days we make great play, quite rightly, of making sure that our teams are trained, equipped and well drilled so that we don’t waste time and effort. We dress things up with fancy names, but they are all just refinements of the common sense that we’ve learned down the ages and that have evolved with the leads we have seen in technology. Operational efficiency is the name of the game as we all try to get the most we can our of our assets, and techniques such as six sigma and lean have entered our consciousness and vocabulary, and these have migrated from the manufacturing sector and been adapted for use in other industries.

So knowing where you are going does enable one to get there by the most direct route, but is that what Goethe was talking about in the quotation I have used?

The other possibility is in terms of making progress, and the possibilities that open up when you are experimenting are enormous. We’re all familiar with the old chestnut about thinking outside of the box, and that’s a starting point maybe: If you don’t constrain yourself with conventional thinking and just strike out into the unknown, who knows where you will be able to get to?

The adventurous spirit that has seen us poke our way into various parts of this planet and into space still has a place in the business world. Those who are prepared to try something new or a different way of doing things are pushing the boundaries and taking us all forward. This is how we make real progress in life and in business.

I make no effort to second guess which way Goethe was thinking, but suspect that he was on the latter tack. Is that the right option? I think that we need both. The first approach make things work well, keeps costs down and customers satisfied. It drives quality and consistency in what is offered and these are all fine things. It is good, but it makes small, incremental improvements and there is a danger of stagnation.

But we also need the pioneering approach to make the big differences, push the boundaries and take us down new routes because this keeps the waters moving and avoids that stagnation risk.

My contention is that we need both approaches and a balance between the two, so sometimes it is good to try that leap into the unknown and to accept the risk.

 

 

 

 

You can’t take yourself too seriously. If you do you are buying your own con – Ferrol Sams

It’s a quote I found in a book entitled Last Bus to Albequerque and it struck a chord with me when I first read it back in 1994. I used the first half of it as one of my over the desk mottos; the whole thing was too long and, in any case, if anyone thought that I was a con artist I didn’t want anything over my desk that appeared to confirm that view!

But the sentiment is a strong one, and it took a while for me to realise that I had fallen into the trap of taking myself very seriously indeed;  the blinding flash that showed me what a complete idiot I was making of myself was an unpleasant realisation. As I write these words now I am transported back to about 1984 when I had that moment on the road to Damascus so to speak.

Having been able to see the problem and deal with it made a big difference to me in many ways, both professional and personal. I began to enjoy myself and I got even better at what I did as a result. When I adopted the strapline of “25 years of having fun whilst making things happen” last year, that is exactly what I meant.

Getting a laugh out of every day isn’t always easy, and there have been times when black humour has won through. I won’t repeat some of the jokes here because I recognise that they were offensive to some, but in the context of our team and the moment they were just what we needed to lift the mood. The best ones were, of course, the ones that punctured my dignity and I’ll share a couple here.

My team and I managed a diverse property estate and most of the team would have to travel to get to a common location, so hotels provided a neutral venue, but at the previous couple of meetings I had felt it necessary to mention standards of dress; we were on show and the welcome board in reception told everyone which company we represented. After the second warning one of the team challenged me quietly and suggested that suits and ties were maybe too formal, so could we not have a smart casual regime, maybe golf clubhouse standards? I took the point and smart casual was the order of the day for the next meeting. I turned up in golf shirt and chinos to find the rest all in their best business suits – game set and match to the team.

Another time I had been banging the environmental drum and we had begun to have our site vehicles and equipment painted green in an effort to raise awareness amongst our tenants and generally push the Green boat out. Then came a meeting to discuss the issue of the latest set of site manuals for our tenants. “I suppose you want green binders?” I was asked, and the answer was, of course, “Yes”. On leaving that meeting I was reminded that I should wear overalls when on that site as it was both protocol and would be part of the new Health & Safety plan in respect of wearing personal protective equipment (lead from the front John). I mentioned, sheepishly, that my girth had outgrown my overalls and that a new set were needed. No problem, they’d be waiting for me on my next visit. And they were, in lurid green! Team 10, Bowen 0.

You can’t take yourself too seriously.you do, no-one else is going to take your side.

Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.

This is often bandied around as a motivational quote, but like many such quotes, it has its detractors. I don’t pretend to know what William Jennings Bryan had on his mind when he said this, but I have my own thoughts.

On the one hand I often argue here that the choices we make influence what we end up as, and that I’m unlikely to change my mind on. My own experience, both of what has happened to me and what I’ve seen happen to others, is that your choices have a big impact. Of course there are circumstances not of your making that will affect how your life turns out. I wrote last week about the fickle finger of fate and how none of us know how long we have here.

So no, we don’t choose everything that comes our way. The trick for me is in how we react to the slings and arrows through our lives. As with the quotation that started this off, there are loads of old adages, all of which have a modicum of truth in them. One that suits my line of thought here is “When the going gets tough, the tough get going”. You can roll over and moan when things go wrong, or you can try to turn something positive from the experience.

On that basis I have no time for the arguments of those who would reject the premise as not being a law of life. Of course we have no choice in many aspects of our existence; we don’t chose to be brought into life and many choices are made for us by others during our formative years, but we do have the choice of whether or not we learn at school for example, and we have choices about how we approach whatever job we manage to find ourselves.

Not everyone is going to make big sums of money, but that isn’t the only measure of success in life. You can either sit around and wait for something to happen or you can make an effort. You won’t win them all, but you have to be in it to win it, so if you don’t try you don’t have a chance. Even a lottery winner made the effort to pick some numbers and buy a ticket.

Having dreams is fine, but they need a little work to make them come true. It’s fine to look up in wonder at the heights and want to be there looking down, but those who go for a ladder have the right idea.

It doesn’t matter how hard things look there is always an opportunity to try something. One of my schoolboy heroes in the late 50s and early 60s was the great Swedish rally driver Eric Carlson. A bear of a man he could make those little 2 stroke Saabs dance over the ice and through the forests, and at a time when such cars were just modified production vehicles with little of the safety aids of today. There was also no route reconnaissance or pace notes, but when he was asked about what went through his mind heading over a blind crest at night in the forest at 100 mph, he shrugged and said, “Well, the road must go somewhere”.

For all of us we have these blind crests on the road of life; destiny may not always be in our hands, and whatever WJB had in mind when he uttered his words I don’t know, but for me they do make a connection. I’d rather go down trying than crying.