Change. A Birds Eye View. Compounding Improvement.And Jazz...
The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past Edition 3
Welcome to Edition 3 of this free newsletter. After just two weeks and two editions the subscriber count has grown to 1281 as many readers are suggesting that their colleagues and friends sign up. Please continue to do so. ( The newsletter is free, and will remain free of any subscription or paid levels, it is ad and affiliate marketing free, no names are sold and there is no data harvesting outside of basic traffic and subscriber count. It aims to be a “gift” that gains your attention and possible goodwill for myself while helping me learn about Substack.)
Change.
Change is difficult especially for established individuals and businesses since transforming our thinking and doing into new shapes requires one to go through a regimen of pain, mistakes and unknowable twists and turns.
Why suffer sure pain for unknown gain if there is a way to avoid it ?
Therefore it is not surprising that many of us as individuals and companies take the easy way out by pontificating about “change agendas”, hiring “change agents”, announcing “re-organizations for a changed era” and issuing a flurry of press releases and re-decorating one’s digital presence with words like “platform”, “disruption”, “personalization”, “data”, “cloud” “seamless” and other buzz word bingo and mumbo jumbo.
Never works this eruption of vigorous cosmetic application and vocal vociferousness.
The only way a company transforms is if the people in the company transform.
Upgrade the people or upgrade their mindsets.
To gauge if you or your company are really aligning with change ask three simple questions
Incentive plans: Are people being incentivized to change or are the people who get paid the most the ones who run the established businesses, have the biggest existing revenue books, have the deepest current client relationships ? Are some of the best people being allocated to where the company will spend the rest of its life which is the future or is it folks the company does not know what to do with or those between assignments?
Show me a company’s incentive structure and I can guess how they behave and if they will really change.
The future does not fit in the incentive and power systems of today and yesterday.
Fear: Change is scary but the reason many people don’t change is something is they fear their management and culture even more than they fear change.
Management that provides no room for error, or for speaking up or calling out the “turd on the table” will have a difficult time to get people to people to change. Without freedom to challenge and fail, there is unlikely to be any innovation but just a crowd of synchronized head-nodding, bobble-headed people who serve as mirrors to their leaders by reflecting what they believe their leaders need to hear or what will make them look good in their Managements eyes.
Investment in Training : The third key to change in addition to incentive systems and an absence of fear is a significant effort in training. If a company is to change and to upgrade its people it can do so in two ways. First it can bring in and hire talent with the skills they need and second it can upgrade the skills of the people it has.
Most companies will need to do both and will require to train existing employees with new skills while training new employees to the company expertise resources and culture.
So next time you or your company speak of change ask if you have got the incentive systems, culture and training to get you to the other side of this difficult transition.
It’s not easy but even though change sucks, irrelevance is even worse.
A Birds Eye View ( photo by Rishad Tobaccowala)
Compounding Improvement
The single most powerful concept in Finance is that of compounding.
Compounding interest and compounding returns can over time create wealth or lead one to bankruptcy depending on whether you owe or own capital.
If you start with 12,000 dollars and add 1,000 dollars a month every month for 30 years and it grows at 10 percent you have just under 2.5 million dollars. The key is you set aside a small sum every month for a long time
To see how powerful it can be try this calculator
In a world of change we all may want to consider another way compounding can help us grow in changing times and drive mental, emotional and even financial wealth which is compounding improvement.
If a company can only change and transform if its people change and transform we should each invest in upgrading our own mental and emotional operating systems.
There is so much we cannot control in a world driven by global, demographic, social and technological change but instead of being buffeted about helplessly in a sea of chaos maybe we can try to control and build our ourselves to be better.
Three ways on how you might starting this very minute begin to embrace Compounding Improvement
a) Discipline equals Freedom: This is the title of a book by Jocko Willink, a Navy Seal. Basically if you want to get a grip on the world get a grip on yourself.
b) Invest an hour every day in learning: The world is changing so fast that many of your skills and expertise and mindsets need continuous upgrading. While many us set aside time to exercise to maintain our physical operating system we need to also feed and exercise our minds. The power of this habit is that at the end of a year you will have spent 365 hours learning new things by just doing one hour a day. You will gain compound returns to thought !
c) Deliberate Practice: Professor Anders Ericcson who died last month wrote a book called “Peak” which is the best study of deliberate practice which entails immediate feedback, clear goals and focus on technique. According to his research, the lack of deliberate practice explained why so many people reach only basic proficiency at something, whether it be a sport, pastime or profession, without ever attaining elite status. A great resource for Deliberate Practice is here.
Jazz.
We are living in a jazz age and not a classical one.
In classical music —particularly orchestral music—there is a conductor that musicians follow, sheet music one sticks too and a hushed auditorium one sits in.
Jazz on the other hand is a mix of classical, swing, blues and much more but at its heart its about improvisation. It is about playing off each other. There is no conductor. Rare is there a hushed auditorium but more likely a noisy club or the anguish of a lonely saxophone in a subway station.
Today we are living in a diverse, global and connected world where we have to work together, we have to fuse our different cultures and beliefs and constantly adapt and improvise.
Here is a Spotify List of my favorite jazz you can listen to and if you want subscribe.
Hope it lifts your soul.
Rishad Tobaccowala ( @rishad ) is the author of the bestselling “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data” published by Harper Collins globally in January 2020. It has been described as an “operating manual” for managing people, teams and careers in the age we live in and The Economist Magazine called it perhaps the best recent book on Stakeholder Capitalism.Rishad is a sought after speaker and advisor who helps people think, feel and see differently about how to grow their companies, their teams and themselves. More at https://rishadtobaccowala.com/