Pam & Scott’s Holiday Book Pairings for Accelerating Success in 2016

Chris Curran: Growth Igniters Radio, Episode 40 − Pam and Scott’s Holiday Book Pairings for Accelerating Success in 2016. This episode is brought to you by Business Advancement, Inc., enabling successful leaders and companies to accelerate to their next level of growth, on the web at businessadvance.com. And now, here’s Pam and Scott.

Pam Harper: Thanks, Chris. I’m Pam Harper, founding partner and CEO of Business Advancement, Inc., and with me is my business partner and husband, Scott Harper. Hi, Scott.

Scott Harper: Hi, Pam. As always, it’s great to be here with you again on Growth Igniters Radio. If this is your first time listening, our purpose is to spark new insights, inspirations, and immediately useful ideas for leaders to take themselves and their companies to the next level of success. So Pam, what’s up for today?

Pam Harper: Today, we’re getting ready for the holidays pretty early, but not really too early. We’re going to be doing it through some great books that we believe will take us to accelerated success in 2016 and beyond.

Scott Harper: Okay.

Pam Harper: You recall in our book-pairing episode that we had on Episode 24, we had some great books for the summer, but what better time to start reading books again than over the holidays?

Scott Harper: We really got a lot of positive feedback from our listeners that they really liked the idea that we paired books that were complementary around themes, and so it makes sense to do that again.

Pam Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Let’s take it from the theme that there’s a lot of uncertainty out there. What we’re hearing from CEOs and people in the C-suite is that there’s a great deal of uncertainty about all kinds of things, and a few of them happen to be the changing global business environment…

Scott Harper: Right, what’s going on with Europe, what’s going on with China and all those other things.

Pam Harper: Exactly, exactly. And of course, who could overlook the 2016 presidential race and all the kinds of things that could bring.

Scott Harper: Oh, yeah − regulations, taxes, what’s going to happen with the Fed. Yeah.

Pam Harper: Then, of course, there’s uncertainty about the business environment through new business models, say, Uberization.

Scott Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative) − the sharing economy, and things that we haven’t even dreamed of yet that are going to come up and, hopefully, not surprise us too much, but could.

Pam Harper: Exactly. What we’re going to do is take pairs of books, just like wine and cheese − different types of books …

Scott Harper: That bring out each other’s flavor.

Pam Harper: … and we’re going to talk about these themes through that.

Scott Harper: Okay!

Pam Harper: Let’s get started.

Scott Harper: Okay. The first theme we’re going to talk about is the idea that really comes up a lot when we talk to top leaders about projecting into the future to identify actionable opportunities − things that can really take them to the next level.

Pam Harper: Just our previous episode was Jim Blasingame.

Scott Harper: That’s right.

Pam Harper: And he was talking about CEOs as futurists.

Scott Harper: … Right − how important it is for CEOs to be futurists. The two books I’m going to be talking about today, one of them really talks about how to do more accurate forecasting, taking up where Jim left off − how do we become super forecasters?

Pam Harper: You just said the operative word here…

Scott Harper: Yes?

Pam Harper: … which is “how.”

Scott Harper: How…

Pam Harper: How we do it…

Scott Harper: That’s right.

Pam Harper: … because we get that we need to do it. We get that there are some ways to do it, but this book…

Scott Harper: It’s the “how” that’s really important.

Pam Harper: Yeah, exactly. This book does that?

Scott Harper: This book does that. The second book talks about the perils of not doing it. The first book is Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. It’s by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. It just came out in 2015. It’s interesting because it is based upon research underwritten by the U.S. government intelligence equivalent of DARPA to identify how can people forecast the future better. Obviously, the intelligence community is really concerned with forecasting accurately.

Pam Harper: What’s their big idea?

Scott Harper: First off, they found that many people who make a professional living forecasting − pundits and economists and stock pickers − sometimes do no better than throwing darts, and the more certain that somebody is about how right they are, the less accurate sometimes their predictions are. They did a study where they engaged hundreds of people and put out questions like “is the price of gold going to go up by more than ten percent in the next six months?” or “What’s going to happen with the election in the U.K.?”

They looked at how people addressed the questions, and they found that the most capable predictors − superforecasters, they called them − had a number of ways how they approached questions. They were very open to asking the big questions, and breaking them down into small questions, and you get into manageable things that you can start to accumulate data on.

Pam Harper: The type of question you ask, of course, informs the kind of results that you’re going to get as an answer.

Scott Harper: Absolutely. The question you ask is going to determine the answer you get, and if you ask the wrong question, you’ll spend a lot of effort getting crappy answers.

Pam Harper: Garbage in, garbage out.

Scott Harper: Garbage in, garbage out − absolutely. The second big thing was that these people were open-minded. They were willing to entertain information from all over. They were willing to change their forecasts when they got new information, and the people who would not make big changes, but rather incremental changes − so essentially refining the forecast − were frequently more accurate. That’s just two of the ways. The point is that how you think [makes a huge difference,] and also getting multiple perspectives − the more opinions you get that are manageable, the better prediction you’re likely to have.

Pam Harper: That reconciles with what Jim was saying.

Scott Harper: That’s right.

Pam Harper: He was talking about getting more perspectives.

Scott Harper: Absolutely…

Pam Harper: They’re talking about more perspectives; but what I hear the most is that you have to ask the right questions.

Scott Harper: You have to ask the right questions, and be willing to go to multiple sources to get it and be open to what the answer could be. The more certain you are this is the answer, the more likely you are to be wrong.

That takes us to the next book, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry. It’s by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, and it was also published in 2015.

Pam Harper: Now this is actually a research-based book, too, right?

Scott Harper: This is done by reporters who did a great deal of research, and also interviewed a lot of people in Research in Motion, which is the company that made the BlackBerry.

Pam Harper: They didn’t make all this up…

Scott Harper: They didn’t make all this up. The big idea is that they really track very vividly the story of Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. Balsillie was the business guru behind BlackBerry. Lazaridis was the technical guru. It’s a reallyhh interesting cautionary tale, because at first, these guys, especially Lazaridis, were very good at looking into the future. In fact, the authors make a point of saying that one of Mike Lazaridis’ teachers in high school made the prediction that people who marry mobile communications and computing will have a huge impact. Lazaridis had the real insight to know what’s really the unmet need is mobile e-mail. That’s looking into the future, looking into an unmet need.

Pam Harper: They birthed the company…

Scott Harper: They birthed the company.

Pam Harper: Why is the book called “Losing the Signal”?

Scott Harper: It’s “Losing the Signal” because, as we all know, BlackBerry went from rising up and becoming the dominant mobile device to being upended by technology that they initially dismissed.

Pam Harper: Sure. Everybody had a BlackBerry and then suddenly everybody had a smart phone and an Apple.

Scott Harper: That’s right. I mirror this, because my first electronic device was a Palm Pilot, and Palm was unseated by BlackBerry. Then BlackBerry was unseated by iPhone, and I’m carrying around an iPhone these days. The big thing is − remember I said superforecasters are flexible and they aren’t certain about what’s right − one of the things that comes out in Losing the Signal is that Balsillie is painted as a person who was very certain that his approach was the right approach − take no prisoners.

Pam Harper: No spoiler alerts…

Scott Harper: No spoiler. Everybody knows this, because anybody who reads Newsweek or Business Week or Fortune has heard this story. They just delve a lot deeper into it. They also show how RIM dismissed Apple as, “Oh, it’s technically inelegant.” They were wedded to their device and their beliefs and weren’t paying attention necessarily to the customers.

Pam Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative). If we all know the story, what would make somebody want to read Losing the Signal?

Scott Harper: Because it brings in great detail the case study. You hold this up next to Superforecasting, and you go, “Oh, well, there’s where they made a wrong turn, there’s where they made a right turn, and there’s where they made another wrong turn.” That’s why I paired these. It’s really a wonderful way of using the very story-like Losing the Signal to get through the very dense but important Superforecasting.

Pam Harper: It’s a great example and it makes it come to life…

Scott Harper: It’s a great example and makes it come to life. That’s our first pairing.

Pam Harper: Okay. That takes us to our first break. When we come back, we will be talking about our second pair of books, which has to do with finding new opportunities. Stay with us…

Scott Harper: You’re listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper, brought to you by Business Advancement, Inc., on the web at www.businessadvance.com. We enable successful companies to accelerate to their next level of innovation and growth, and if you like what you’re hearing, spread the good word. Go to www.growthignitersradio.com, select Episode 40, and use the links for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter at the top right of the page to tell your social media communities all about us. Use hashtag Growth Igniters. This will help us extend our reach to all of the people who can benefit from this series.

Pam Harper: Welcome back to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper − that’s me − and Scott Harper. Today is our second book-pairing episode, and Scott and I are talking with each other and all of you out there about some great books that can address some of the issues of looking into that crystal ball in 2016 and helping all of us to accelerate to our next level of success. Of course, you can see resources for this episode by going to www.growthignitersradio.com, Episode 40. Let’s get back to our book-pairing. Scott, I think you have the next one.

Scott Harper: I do have the next one, then we’ll pass it off. We’re talking about uncertainty, right?

Pam Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott Harper: There are few things that are more uncertain than about when to stay the course and when to shift, when to transform personally or transform in the business −, when to wait, when to take action.

Pam Harper: And how did Uber actually figure out that it was time to become Uber?

Scott Harper: Precisely.

Pam Harper: Exactly.

Scott Harper: The most successful leaders that we’ve worked with have all shown a real facility for not just projecting linearly into the future − this is where we are, this is where we were, and that’s where we are going to be − a straight line. They’re really good at looking around at the environment, reaching into that fuzziness of the future and saying, “Ah, here’s a leap we can make.” It’s not necessarily a continuous linear change − it’s discontinuous very often, but it can take them to real success. I want to talk about one of the granddaddies behind that idea of that discontinuous leap, and that is The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard. The book originally came out in 1995, I believe, so it’s been around − what − twenty years.

Pam Harper: They’ve updated it…

Scott Harper: Oh, they have updated.

Pam Harper: There is a new edition 2013, I believe. You can see the updated edition.

Scott Harper: The updated edition; it’s still a goodie and, in fact, it’s a book that I have referred to many times over the years. Virtually everyone who’s out there in business has heard of disruptive innovation.

Pam Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative). We’re all talking about disrupting…

Scott Harper: Disrupting this and disrupting that, and Uber disrupted the cab industry, and Apple disrupted Research in Motion, and so on. Christensen really was the one who came up and popularized the concept of disruptive innovation, first in an article … I think it was in Harvard Business Review … and then in The Innovator’s Dilemma − not the easiest read in the world, but well worthwhile. Unfortunately, sometimes as we talk to people and they talk about disruption, it’s not always represented the way Christensen wrote it.

Pam Harper: Let’s just get the big idea.

Scott Harper: The big idea behind Clayton Christensen’ [description of disruptive innovation] is that companies can be upended when they become married to what they’re doing. A disruptor can come in with something that initially is not as good in many ways, but frequently is less expensive. Christensen uses the example of the watch industry; you had Swiss watches and then the Japanese watch companies came in with electronic watches, and the Swiss watchmakers looked at it and said, “Oh, this is a piece of junk. No one is going to want to wear this.”

Pam Harper: It was a market need that wasn’t yet firmly entrenched.

Scott Harper: Not firmly entrenched; right.

Pam Harper: Right.

Scott Harper: What happened was people started wearing electronic watches − watches with electronic movements. A cheap watch could become much more accurate than cheap watches used to be, and eventually it went all the way up, and the Swiss watch market really sort of was upended for a while. They came back, rebounded back by focusing on a new niche, which is the luxury watch.

Pam Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott Harper: The whole point being that disruption starts with something that meets an unmet need, usually for an underserved audience, and then they start this idea of incremental innovation, do that…

Pam Harper: That’s the learning curve.

Scott Harper: That’s the learning curve.

Pam Harper: The scaling curve.

Scott Harper: Right. Eventually, the innovator − the new company − can get to the point where the old company gets bumped.

Now here’s the problem. Companies know they need to innovate. Sometimes they know they need to do something big, but the reward is, “I’m serving my current market, I’m serving my current customer base. Don’t mess with my resources to serve my current customer base.”

Pam Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Scott Harper: People in the leading company who are saying, “Well, we should be working on this new thing,” often get shot down, because [the response is], “No, that’s not what we do. That’s not our market. It’s not our customer base.”

Pam Harper: We fall in love with our…

Scott Harper: We fall in love with our technology or our business model. Christensen proposed the idea of something he called a skunkworks, which is take an innovation team outside of the company and away from competing for funding − and sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t if it’s not done right.

Pam Harper: Yes, that’s true. So just kind of to sum it up, if you were to look at this, the big idea here is we have to be able to recognize when there is an emerging opportunity, when we can take advantage of it. We have to be willing to stay with it to grow the company or grow the idea, and also then to recognize when it’s time to start, as they called it, an S-curve. What’s interesting to me is that so many people have heard of this book-

Scott Harper: Yes.

Pam Harper: … and have read it in business school and whatever. It’s a classic, and yet to do it is its own challenge…

Scott Harper: Ah − not easy.

Pam Harper: Having that review of a book like this − for those of you who have already read this, read it again and read it again with the experience that you have behind you, because it takes on a new meaning-

Scott Harper: It does.

Pam Harper: … the more that you try to do this…

Scott Harper: Yeah.

Pam Harper: It’s also led to some interesting offshoots-

Scott Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Pam Harper: … which is where I want to pick up.

Scott Harper: Okay.

Pam Harper: The offshoot that’s most interesting here is in a book called Disrupt Yourself by Whitney Johnson. This is a brand new book, so you have a granddaddy and a brand new book. What’s really great about what Whitney has done is she actually knew Clayton Christensen-

Scott Harper: Right.

Pam Harper: … who wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma. She was a cofounder of Rose Park Advisors’ disruptive innovation fund. They used this theory of disruptive innovation to invest and publicly trade in stocks and private early-stage companies. Whitney was fabulous at doing this, and she applied it to her own career growth.

Scott Harper: The idea of disruption…

Pam Harper: Yes, disruption.

Scott Harper: Okay.

Pam Harper: Disrupt Yourself is about career disruption, and the idea that in order for us to be able to continue to get not just money or whatever it is functionally from a job, we also have to be able to get the psychic payoffs. We have to be able to have both. That means growth. Even when you’re successful, or maybe especially when you’re successful − if you think about this whole curve of growth − you need to be willing to start looking and saying, “What else is out there that needs to be done, that builds on my strengths? Even if there are things that I need to do to develop myself, to really be a player, what can I do? Whitney takes us through such a very interesting series of ideas to do it. I don’t want to get too deeply into it because she’s going to be our guest [next time on Growth Igniters Radio].

Scott Harper: That’s right.

Pam Harper: What’s interesting about this whole concept of the S-curve − seeing the idea, understanding that there is an initial lag, −think of the letter S and when you’re going around the curves, you’re developing and you’re going into a learning curve.

Scott Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Pam Harper: Ideally, before you get to the top of that letter S, you have found something new to grow into and you start that S again; so not just business growth but self growth.

Scott Harper: Right.

Pam Harper: Whitney is going to tell us so much more about that, how are we going to come up with new models for growth and be in that continuous point of looking at emerging opportunities.

Scott Harper: That’s right, and having our eyes open so that we can look for the unexpected, and that comes from really having a very strong, big idea about what you want to have happen. That serves as a filter, right?

Pam Harper: Uh-huh (affirmative). There’s more, because in order to be able to do that, you need to be able to interact with people in some very new ways and look at people in some very new ways. That’s going to take us to our third pairing, which we will discuss after the break, so stay with us.

Scott Harper: So Pam, since we’re discussing books related to dealing with uncertainty and increasing success, how does your own book, Preventing Strategic Gridlock, fit into this theme?

Pam Harper: Actually it could be paired with any of the books we’re discussing in this episode. “Strategic Gridlock” is the name I gave to the mysterious stalls that often happen when successful organizations are under intense pressure to transform and grow.

Leaders have told me that Preventing Strategic Gridlock helped them think more strategically about how to head off the stalls and unlock more of their organization’s potential, raise performance, and make big things happen – regardless of the uncertainty they faced.

Scott Harper: So go to Growth Igniters Radio.com, select Episode 40, and scroll down to “Resources” to find out about a special offer you can receive for buying your copy of PSG today.

Pam Harper: Welcome back to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. Today, Scott and I are talking about pairs of books that will accelerate your transformation and growth and success in 2016 and beyond. You can find out more about these resources by going to the Growth Igniters Radio page Episode 40.

The third area that we want to talk about has to do with learning about how to deal with people in some new ways. The pair of books that I’m going to be talking about, the first one is called “Friend and Foe,” and it’s by Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer, who are researchers. This is a brand new book also. Their study is very interesting because so often we talk about, well, collaboration is the best way toward success, right?

Scott Harper: Yeah.

Pam Harper: That’s a standard wisdom.

Scott Harper: Never trust your neighbor.

Pam Harper: There are people who are friends, there are people who are foes.

Scott Harper: Right.

Pam Harper: What these two researchers are telling us is that we have to learn how to balance the fact that the same person can really be both friend and foe at the same time and that there’s a tension between cooperation and competition. Think about this. In personal life, we talk about sibling rivalry and then we talk about brotherly love or sisterly love. That’s a great personal example, but we see it in the business world all the time.

Scott Harper: Oh, sure.

Pam Harper: You think about, for example, colleagues who are all competing for scarce resources or scarce job promotions, and yet, at the same time, we all know that we have to collaborate. Now we’re seeing it extended, of course, into more co-opetition, which is competitors cooperating, and working with alliances many more times or outsource providers. Our organization is constantly dealing with others, individuals as well as organizations, where in one moment we are collaborating, but in some cases we have to come up with how are we going to advocate for our own objectives.

Scott Harper: Okay, so they’re making the case that it’s very dangerous to go all the way one way, all the way the other.

Pam Harper: Extremes don’t work.

Scott Harper: Okay.

Pam Harper: On the other hand, what I really like about this book is that they’re very pragmatic about it. They also talk about the fact that inevitably there are going to be times when trust may be broken. How do you repair it? When do you put your guard up? They talk about that, too, like what are some warning flags? At the same time, another thing that is really great about this book is that virtually every paragraph is an example.

Scott Harper: Wow.

Pam Harper: There’s a story almost in every paragraph. It actually was a good read for me. I enjoyed it. An example, how names can bond and bully. It’s good to be queen, but it’s easier being the king. You can see that that’s the kind of thinking, and they do it with good spirit. We have to know, as they put it on the cover, when to cooperate, when to compete, and how to succeed at both.

That brings me to the other book that I wanted to pair this with, which is an older book, comes from 2012, called “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,” by Charles Duhigg.

Scott Harper: One of my favorites.

Pam Harper: The reason for pairing these two books is that I think we get habitually oriented towards dealing with somebody as either a friend or a foe or somebody that we don’t even pay attention to. For instance, I might overlook somebody that I should be paying more attention to. I’m thinking about an example in a client of mine where this company had patterns, and we all fall into these behavioral patterns. One part of the organization never spoke with the other part of the organization. In fact, they were actively disincented by the way they were set up for promotions for the two parts of the company not to talk to each other at all.

Scott Harper: Very adversarial.

Pam Harper: It was. Yet, we’re all in this together and we have to work together to make new things happen.

Scott Harper: Team, team, team.

Pam Harper: Exactly, but they did not realize.

Scott Harper: Yeah, okay.

Pam Harper: They did not realize what they were doing until, in this case, I had a chance to look at it, and I said, “Do you realize what’s happening?” They said, “Huh,” like shaking their head and going, “Oh.” What we’d been doing is we had been actually not working together in a way that would be best for us under the circumstances as they exist today. The fact was there had been reasons earlier on in the company’s history as to why these two areas of the company would not have interacted.

Scott Harper: Okay.

Pam Harper: It was simple-

Scott Harper: Was functional at the time.

Pam Harper: Functional at the time, now it wasn’t. Isn’t that the case for a lot of things? We do whatever we do. We develop these powers of habit, so there’s a key, there’s a stimulus. We see the other group. We get into a routine where we don’t interact and then we get some kind of reward. It no longer applies. Again, the reason that I’m pairing these books is to say we have to be sensitive, as Duhigg says, to when it’s time to change our habits.

We have to recognize what the cues are, what sets us off into behaving a certain way and what does that trigger? What are the sets of actions and interactions that that brings out? Then, is that reward really applicable today, and if not, what would be a new reward? Maybe you have to work backwards sometimes to say, “This is what I want.” It goes into why we’re having these pairings today is to say if you want something different, you have to do something different.

Scott Harper: That’s right.

Pam Harper: That brings us all the way to the whole reason why we’re having this book pairing today, which is we want to find ways to have the most successful 2016.

Scott Harper: And beyond.

Pam Harper: And beyond. We need to first embrace the uncertainty, expect the unexpected. Second, look for those new opportunities that might seem a little out there, but that if you go back and do your research and talk to people-

Scott Harper: You bear your purpose in mind.

Pam Harper: That’s right.

Scott Harper: Really think about what is it we’re here to do, why do we exist as a company, or what’s my big purpose in life? That acts as that filter to go, “Hey, you know what, I hadn’t thought about that thing, but that thing could really be the thing that makes a big difference.”

Pam Harper: Of course, the thing that puts it all to life is learning how to balance that tension between cooperating, competing, and succeeding at both so that you can actually work with people in new ways to bring about what you’re looking to make happen.

That is it for this episode of Growth Igniters Radio. We want to thank you for listening and we want to hear from you. Is this something that you want to hear more about? Tell us about some other pairings of books, and we’ll be back with a future book-pairing and we’ll put them together.

Scott Harper: Thank you for listening to Growth Igniters Radio with Pam Harper and Scott Harper. To check out resources related to today’s conversation including links to the books we talked about, share on social media, find out about upcoming episodes, or open a conversation with us, go to growthignitersradio.com, select Episode 40.

Pam Harper: Until next time, this is Pam Harper …

Scott Harper: … and Scott Harper …

Pam Harper: … wishing you continued success and leaving you with this thought.

Scott Harper: What are you reading? What’s on your bookshelf? How will it power you to the future?