“It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.” G. K. Chesterton, 1908.
These are turbulent times, and there are a lot of unknowns causing anxiety on a number of fronts, from sweeping changes in buyer behavior to how government policies will affect the bottom line. Organizations across the board are considering various ideas in hopes of striking that delicate balance that will provide the basis of financial and cultural health. But keeping one’s head in the sea of those ideas has become the order of the day to stay competitive.
“All achievements,” writes American author Napoleon Hill, “all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.” It’s true, as study after study has demonstrated, that it’s the ideas and ideals that drive one company to success and another to ruins. The key has always been in harnessing those ideas in a delicate balance that doesn’t allow one to become more, or less, powerful than the other. That’s because each idea, in isolation from the others, is strong enough to cause damage to a company and place it at risk. Two of those are especially interesting and have become almost cliches of popular culture, but are extremely important to the health and well-being of any company: namely, the ideas of pessimism and optimism.
How many times have you been asked if you’re a person who views the glass as half full or half empty (as if that’s your only choice)? I suppose in popular life such a simple view of things suffices, but if your financial health and security hinges on the correct answer (as it actually does for every company), then perhaps a more nuanced approach is warranted. What I propose is that the popular answer, that you’re simply one or the other, is faulty; and more, that any company wanting to flourish has to think about this more expansively.
One thing we certainly wouldn’t want is a compromise between optimism and pessimism, as we wouldn’t want joy and anger for example to neutralize each other and produce an unpleasant contentment. Being a mixture of two things, it would be a dilution of the two, with neither present in its full strength or contributing its full color. What we should desire, rather, is a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We want the two side by side in all their ferocity and at the top of their energy. The enemy is an amalgam or compromise of the two. So the question for us is, can we be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist?
As Chesterton pointed out long ago, both of these ideas need to be free to roam because both are kept in their place. The optimist can pour out all the praise he likes on the triumphant music of the march, the golden trumpets, and the purple banner going into battle. But he must not call the fight needless. The pessimist might draw the picture as darkly as he chooses concerning the wounds of battle. But he must not call the fight hopeless. The point I’m trying to make is that both are necessary to the health and sanity of an organization. The optimists and the pessimists are not quite right enough individually to run the organization: the former tending to gloss over the brutal facts with the latter tending to call the fight hopeless. Having both coexist in all of their energy keeps black from evolving into white to form a dirty gray, which produces mediocrity and everything the sane person deplores.
And interestingly, this is exactly the proposal we find in Jim Collins’ bestselling business book, Good To Great. Those visionary companies he investigates that vastly outpaced their competitors had just this ability to hold the two ideas side by side. Under the appropriately named section “Facts are Better than Dreams,” Collins says that these companies displayed a distinctive form of disciplined thought as they infused all of their processes with the “brutal facts of reality.” They institutionalized a careful look at the reality they faced vis-a-vis competitors, customers, market trends, etc. In fact, in his latest book Great By Choice, he elaborates further and notes that these companies have what he calls a “productive paranoia.” He’s worth quoting here:
“Fear should guide you, but it should be latent,” [Bill] Gates said in 1994. “I consider failure on a regular basis.” He hung a photograph of Henry Ford in his office, to remind himself that even the greatest entrepreneurial successes can be passed by, as Ford had been passed by GM in the early history of the auto industry. He worried constantly about who might be the next Bill Gates, some freaky high school kid toiling away 22 hours a day in some dingy little office coming up with a lethal torpedo to fire at Microsoft.
In all of the visionary companies Collins examines, pessimism is not only allowed, but encouraged to run wild, as long as it’s kept within limits and held next to an “unwavering faith amid the brutal facts.” In other words, an unbridled optimism was absolutely necessary as well. A faith that no matter what, the company would make it through, and make it through brilliantly.
Insightfully, Collins sums this up by referring to Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest ranking U. S. military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date, and uncertain whether he’d ever see his family again. Collins’ interview with Stockdale is impactful and important:
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he [Stockdale] said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
I didn’t say anything for many minutes, and we continued the slow walk toward the faculty club, Stockdale limping and arc-swinging his stiff leg that had never fully recovered from repeated torture. Finally, after about a hundred meters of silence, I asked, “Who didn’t make it out?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” he said. “The optimists.”
“The optimists? I don’t understand,” I said, now completely confused, given what he’d said a hundred meters earlier.
“The optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
...The good-to-great leaders were able to strip away so much noise and clutter and just focus on the few things that would have the greatest impact. They were able to do so in large part because they operated from both sides of the Stockdale Paradox [understanding the brutal reality and having an unwavering faith that they’ll prevail], never letting one side overshadow the other.
And so must we.
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