FT.com
August 26, 2013 5:29 pm
By Tom Peters
Wow or bust! Market yourself or perish! Sign up for the
action faction! Don’t get sidetracked by analysis paralysis!
Those phrases urging business people to stop thinking and
take action! Now! – always with an exclamation mark! – are associated with my
work on what makes a successful management team. I’m not about to to recant.
But I will acknowledge that two books have set me back on my heels: Quiet by
Susan Cain , and Wait by Frank Partnoy.
I despise terms such as “transformational”, but the ideas in
these two books may actually merit them. As I put it, when speaking (loudly)
about Quiet to one avowedly aggressive senior management team recently: “I’ll
bet a pretty penny that you have been ignoring the half of the population who
might have saved you from, or at least ameliorated, the horrendous mess of the
past six or seven years.”
The subtitle of Quiet is “the power of introverts in a world
that can’t stop talking” and one of her arguments is that the more measured and
thoughtful introverts might have helped to avoid the early 2000s feeding
frenzy. But we failed to ask them aboard. Why? She unearthed voluminous
research that says we find talkative people “smarter, better looking, more
interesting, and more desirable as peers”. And we like fast talkers too.
There is a lot to say for action- takers and risk-seekers: I
have been celebrating them for 30 years. But Cain’s book gave me pause
concerning the imbalance I’ve been party to, and cheerleader for.
She has loads of practical advice for managers, boiling down
to: “Make the most of introverts’ strengths – these are the people who can help
you think deeply, strategise, and solve complex problems.”
Cain also makes a strong case for introverted leaders. They
will probably be better at listening to and engaging employees, which should
arguably top the list of a leader’s tasks. As the late management writer Peter
Drucker noted: “Among the most effective leaders I have encountered and worked
with . . . the one and only personality trait the effective ones did have in
common was something they did not have: They had little or no ‘charisma’, and
little use for the term.”
Quiet is persuasive that strong subconscious biases in
favour of noisy people is causing us to ignore those given to listening, deep
thinking and risk assessment. If that does not make you feel like an idiot (as
it did me), let’s turn to Partnoy to deliver the next implicit rebuke.
Years ago, in In Search of Excellence, my co-author Bob
Waterman and I wrote that innovative companies cease the endless debating and
try something, anything, right now. We boiled the idea down to a slogan –
“Ready, fire, aim” – appropriated from computer services pioneer H Ross Perot.
Partnoy argues that it can often be beneficial to hold your fire. “Life might
be a race against time, but is enriched when . . . we stop the clock to process
and understand what we are doing and why.” He even devotes an entire chapter to
the power of procrastination. He quotes technology investor Paul Graham: “The
most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators.”
Both writers did their homework. The cases they discuss and
the research evidence they unearthed make a case that cannot be ignored.
So what do you do tomorrow morning? For one thing, you might
sit quietly through your first meeting and observe: is it dominated by a
cacophony of voices interrupting and leaving no space for thoughtful
reflection? In my experience at many companies, beset by pressure to “do
something”, contemplation will be pushed aside.
Likewise, if your organisation is hiring, sit in on a couple
of candidate interviews: are we so enamoured with the action faction that the
quiet ones who frequently pause to reflect are considered too slow and passive?
If you’ve a keen ear, odds are high you’ll discover that
noise wins out over thoughtfulness or giving things a little more time to
simmer.
The advice these two books serve up is strategic not
tactical, indeed possibly transformational. I became ever more antsy as the
realisation sank in that ignoring the quiet ones and the failure to consider
anything other than hasty action dominated my models for what makes for
success. I have made a vow to myself that I will forthwith attend seriously to
both these issues.
The writer is the author of several management books,
including In Search of Excellence
www.tompeters.com
No comments:
Post a Comment