‘“Be Patient?”

The first time I met Will, I remember thinking, “Now here is a guy who looks like a CEO.” Will was straight from Central Casting. He was a little older than I was at the time, late forties maybe. He was taller than me, maybe six-one and trim and wore an expensive medium gray small herringbone suit, tailored so you noticed that he worked out. Will’s hair was black with just the right amount of silver at the temples. His teeth were toothpaste-ad perfect, bright white and straight, and his jaw muscles looked like he chewed rawhide as a hobby. He had a warm smile, but when his gray -blue eyes locked on yours there seemed to be a chill in the air.

Will was the division head for major project finance at a money center bank where I conducted leadership training. Participants formed change teams during the training and then presented their progress monthly over the next ninety days.

The project finance team missed what they promised at the mid-point. Will exploded.

When I lose my temper I turn into a sputtering fool who cannot put a sentence together; Will was one of those people whose verbal acuity sharpens with anger. He eviscerated the team.

After the team left I suggested he might be more patient. Will did not take my suggestion well.

“BE PATIENT?!  THE WORLD WAS NOT BUILT BY PATIENT PEOPLE!” Will bellowed at me red-faced and stormed out.

I was still a little rattled when Bob arrived to hear the progress report from his team.

“I see you’ve met Vesuvius,”  Bob joked. Evidently Will had a reputation for volcanic eruption. Later I heard his temper derailed him from the CEO track, but I do remember that his team delivered at the next meeting.

Reflecting on Patience

This week I have been reflecting on patience. As part of my self-publishing journey, I have struggled with impatience as I learned digital user interfaces for publishing and advertising platforms. I’ve been pushing my ‘late adopter being’ to its capacity. So I thought about Will’s outburst.

I can think of many examples to support his “great men ain’t patient” case. Andrew Carnegie and his partner Henry Clay Frick built the Pittsburgh steel industry, but weren’t patient men, (just ask the Homestead Works strikers in 1892). Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor company and force behind the adoption of the assembly line, was known for many things, but patience wasn’t among them. Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Elon Musk of Tesla, have each been called many things, but “the soul-of-patience” not-so-much.

There are stories of each of these men losing their tempers. They each set extremely high standards and frequently belittled people who didn’t meet them. Could Will have been right?

Of course, these business tycoons, offered being part of building something extraordinary in exchange for their impatience. There is some relationship between that vision and others’ acceptance of their angry intolerance of delay or underperformance.

Patience and Perseverance or Persistence

Contrary to what many people think Thomas Alva Edison did not invent the light bulb. People had been burned filaments-under-glass since the late 1700s.There were several patents for incandescent lights by 1870. Edison may be given cultural credit because he commercialized the light bulb, actually made a profit selling them. He tried many different filaments.

In 1879 he hit on carbonized bamboo, which burned with an eerie orange light and lasted for a long time. When I visited his home in Fort Meyers, Florida.in the 1970s the docent told me that the chandeliers with twenty twenty-watt bulbs were “installed when the house was built almost a hundred years ago, but Mr. Edison went on to experiment with almost three hundred filaments after that.”

“Why?” I blurted out. Others on the tour laughed.

“There is no money in a lightbulb that lasts for a hundred years,” she smiled. Those same light bulbs still burn today, even if they are only turned on so tour rubes like me can ask “Why?”

Edison was a press hound. He was always giving interviews. Once in the middle of his perfect filament quest he bragged that he had examined “over two hundred different filament materials.”

“Why don’t you give up?” The reporter asked.

“Give up? NO! I now know two hundred ways Not to make a light bulb.”

Edison was persistent. He persevered and ultimately invented an improved vacuum pump so he could use carbon from a burned metal as a filament. The light bulb has become a universal symbol for an idea, which implies a flash of brilliance. Actually the history of the light bulb is one of many flashes of brilliance followed by endless testing and failure before final success.

He was persistent, but was Thomas Edison patient? If you read about his relationship with Nikola Tesla or his battle with George Westinghouse about direct current (DC) versus alternating current (AC), patient might not be the word that comes to mind. Uber-competitive maybe but patient, probably not.

Anyone who starts a business, trains for an athletic event, or engages in invention, innovation, or improvement, knows that gains come from multiple iterations, and patience, persistence, and perseverance are required.

Patient Managers? Patient Leaders?

Managers get the work done and develop people. That would seem to require patience. How could you educate, train, and create growth opportunities without patience.

Leaders work in abnormal circumstances, war, emergencies, and change. They provide direction and attract followers. These circumstances don’t always present opportunities for patience.

 “OK, ladies and gentlemen there is a fifty foot tsunami approaching and we need to get to higher ground. I know that some of you take longer to process risk than others and we want to allow time for you to become comfortable with action in this situation. Some of you run faster than others and that is totally OK. Take your time and move at your own pace, but if you are both a slow processor and a slow runner, you may have a PROBLEM!”

In urgent timeline situations leaders might be forgiven for a lack of patience.

In most organizations these days the manager who manager the day to day and the leader who leads change are the same person. Perhaps using patience to develop people can build the commitment to follow a leader and make change. Change requires persistence and perseverance and not a small amount of patience.

What a manager-leader shouldn’t be patient about

A while after Will’s explosion, but before the next team presentation he and I had a conversation.

Will said, “There is just absolutely no way I would ever make a group presentation to my boss where I was telling him for the first that I wasn’t meeting a commitment. They should have given me a ‘heads-up.’ I mean, Andy, [Will’s boss] wasn’t in the room, but he could have been. It is the ultimate sign of disrespect.”

Once again Will had a point. It didn’t excuse his anger, his explosion, nor his over-the-top dressing down of the team, and I told him so, but he wasn’t wrong about what the team should have done. Some of his impatience was justified.

I often talk about three critical elements of trust in business:

1. Share accurate information in a timely way to those who need it. Protect confidentiality,
2. Be as transparent as possible about decision making so people can understand your judgement.
3. Do what you say you are going to do, (and if you can’t see number 1).

So don’t be “patient” with violations of trust. Constructively confront them as soon as they are known.

What a manager-leader should be patient about

People are different. People are different from each other. People are different from the boss. They process information differently, learn at different rates, commit to action differently. So as far as possible without hindering business commitments or placing undue hardship on customers, or other team members, be patient with those differences. Help when you are asked to help and can help, patiently.

Be patient with yourself.

Here is what I am meditating on this week. This is the opposite of Will’s issue. Will was too patient with his own flaws. He knew his anger was a problem, but never apologized, and apparently didn’t work on it until he was fired a few years after we worked together. He was more patient with himself than he was with others.

Many people, not just me, I swear, are much more patient with others than they are with themselves. They cut others a break for being slow learners or failing to change behavior, but constantly beat themselves up for doing those things.

So . . . these are words of advice to myself . . . if they work for you too, so much the better:

Persist . . . Persevere . . . Don’t give up . . . But be aware there is little virtue in beating your head against a brick wall you could easily walk around, between struggling to learn something when you could easily hire someone who already knows how to do it.

But if you’ve committed to learn something, to do something, to solve some problem, Be Patient. Stop comparing yourself to others, instead compare yourself to your own milestones that you met this week, last week, or last decade. If you’re frustrated, step away for a while. Remember Murphy’s Law:

“Nothing is as easy as it looks. Everything takes longer than it should. And in every field of endeavor, everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, at the worst possible moment.”

And, by the way, just knowing about Murphy’s Law does NOT mean that it won’t apply.

Be Patient.

And please be patient with me as I persistently hawk my book. 

“Murder at the End of the World”

We are watching this TV program. Don’t panic. No spoiler alerts because we aren’t that far into it yet. It’s a murder mystery and a near timeline science fiction show. It was produced by FX but we are streaming it on Hulu so we have no commercials and we could binge the entire series at once, but we can’t watch that much TV at one time. Think back five or ten years and contemplate what has changed to make this paragraph possible even for a late adopter like me.

The story takes place at a hotel built by a tech mogul, Andy (Clive Owen), in Iceland. There is a “conference with a group of tech people and alternative thinkers, artists, hackers and the like there to reconceptualize life in the new climate reality.. Oh, and people begin getting killed, a sort of “Ten Little Indians” updated, (look it up).

All the attendees have been invited by Andy’s assistant Ray, who is an AI mating of scheduling and security aps such that you can actually see him. “We prefer alternative intelligence actually.”

The plot doesn’t really stretch the science fiction imagination much. There are tech giants building bunkers and cities from the ground up on California farmland today. Andy may be a little megalomaniacal, but not really compared to some of the tech moguls alive at the moment, and Ray is, a little dorky but nice. “I’m a good listener.”

But the show is stretching my brain a bit more than the usual whodunnit, I think because of some non-fiction reading I’ve done lately:

• The AI Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology, by Juliette Powell and Art Kleiner
• Unthink: All You Have to Do is Nothing, by Dr. Erik Zabiegalski
• Fluke: Chaos and Why Everything Matters, by Brian Klaas
• Becoming Unbelievably Successful, By John Knotts

These books are seemingly unrelated. I didn’t pick them because of a single line of research, but I think that together with the picture of the near future in “Murders at the End of the World” they connect with ideas for leaders to cope with the chaos of the twenty-first century.

The AI Dilemma     

This book is really about how we, leaders in business and government,  and just regular folk, need to get a handle on artificial intelligence before it gets a self-organizing learning-machine control mechanism on humanity, our institutions, and the world. It may not be the SkyNet of the Terminator movie series, but AI might mess up our life if we leave it alone to be “developed because we can” without enough thought and oversight.

The seven principles that Powell and Kleiner propose would seem to be a solution, if anyone is listening:

1. Be Intentional about risk to humans – Loss of privacy, defamation, medical procedures, or nuclear missile responses run without human oversight.
2. Open the closed box – algorithms that people don’t understand before they start learning might be unpredictable
3. Reclaim Data Rights to People – control over what information we share and to what purpose (opt in or out) may not be enough to stop the AI juggernaut but it’s a start.
4. Confront and Question Bias -There are almost 200 known human cognitive biases. Are we just programming AI so that we can make Belief Bias, Confirmation Bias, Reactive Devaluation Bias, Gambler’s Fallacy Bias decisions (etc.) infinitely faster.
5. Hold stakeholders accountable – there may need to be different defamation law, or negligence law, but it starts with confronting tech developers, politicians, and just poor users of technology before damage is done.
6. Favor loosely coupled systems – I did a lot of work in my career encouraging leaders to build “aligned organizations,” where systems, procedures, culture and leadership practice aligned with and supported strategy. This is critical to get things done, but doesn’t allow opportunity to challenge, rethink and pivot. When we’re talking about systems without human oversight, too much alignment is problematic, thus loose coupling.”
7. Embrace creative friction – bringing together multiple points of view, (Like Andy has done in my TV show) means that conflict will ensue. There is a lot of evidence that managing this kind of conflict leads to better decisions

Sound principles all, for managing the progress of artificial intelligence, but also for leadership in chaotic times.

 Unthink

 Zabiegalski outlines two different thinking processes, “exploitation: doing the same thing over and over again, improving the process by eliminating waste and distraction, and “exploration,” gathering new data, researching seemingly unrelated topics, asking “what if?” or “in what ways might we?”

 He recommends that as individuals we stop periodically and ask what kind of thinking is required. He suggests that leaders build ambidextrous organizations capable of both kinds of thinking. This process of “unthinking” is what Powell and Kleiner suggest for managing development of AI.

 Zabiegalski was very influenced by the work of David Bohm about how things are interconnected at a subatomic level. Quantum entanglement, the demonstrated connection that Bohm demonstrated by changing spin between two particles at a distance, show that our actions have consequences that we may not ever imagine.

 Fluke

 First let me confess that I’ve only bought this book; I haven’t read it yet. I read an article that Brian Klaas wrote in the Atlantic. In the article Klaas gave several examples of how world event were shaped by completely random events.

• Hiroshima was bombed, not Kiyoto because a general and his wife had had a great vacation in Kiyoto twenty years earlier.
• The Arab Spring started because a Tunisian vegetable vendor set himself on fire.
• An oscillation in the Ohrt Cloud in distant space threw a big rock our way and wiped out the dinosaurs and somehow micro-organisms were left in the sea, which grew into fish to amphibians with legs and through an incredible accident to live birth in mammals or people might have laid eggs.
• Covid came from a bat or some other source and one person carried it to the United States prompting a two year lockdown and changing the way people viewed work for the immediate future.

Chaos theory studies the impact of randomness in complex systems and show that small changes in initial conditions can have immense effects. This has been called the “butterfly effect,” a butterfly flapping it’s wings in Hong Kong can cause a tornado in Oklahoma. This is presumably illustrative, not factual, but you never know.

Becoming Unbelievably Successful

John Knotts wrote what is a book about self-leadership. He advocates becoming successful by first determining what success means for you and determining your purpose. This book is like many others except for the fifteen Universal Laws that Knotts includes in these self-analyses. The Law of Vibration sounds like the Bohm principles that Zabiegalski quotes. Knotts emphasizes the power of thought that Klaas points to in understanding the potential impact of seemingly random actions and that Zabiegalski alludes to with his prescription for “unthinking your way to a balance of exploration and exploitation..

One of the universal laws Knotts quotes is the Law of Gestation, life, ideas, technologies take a while being born. Like fine wine matures in fermentation, but must age till the time it is ready, some things must bubble and steep longer than others.

Connections

We live in a turbulent time. Look at any aspect of life right now – world geopolitics, technological innovation, weather, business, communications, attitudes towards work post Covid. What you see is Change and not just small improvement tweaks, huge potentially life altering step change. What do these four perspectives teach leaders about coping with and thriving in this level of change?

From Eric Zabiegalski’s  Unthink  I learn that we must stop and examine our thinking. What aspects of our lives require exploration? What parts of the problems we face do we know roughly what to do, but we need to use exploitation, act measure improve and act, measure and improve again?

Brian Klaas’s Fluke, counsels us to prepare for randomness for anticipating unforeseen consequences. When I worked with clients on strategy and when I worked with clients on improving safety, I always recommended building in some redundancy, a buffer, a contingency plan, something to give you time to deal with the unpredictable.

John Knotts writes about planning your career, purposefully, but one could easily apply his principles to starting and building a business. Knotts emphasizes learning, building new capability and connections as a path to success. He includes a chapter on volunteering, giving back to others as a requisite for success.

Powell and Kleiner’s book, The AI Dilemma, is about how we should react to one particular technological change, but their seven principles require very little rewriting to be a prescription for leading in turbulent times.

1. Be Intentional about risk to humans – Shouldn’t this be applied to a peace, process, actions on climate change, healthcare, financial inequity?
2. Open the closed box – Should transparency and the opportunity for input from those affected by any change be foundational?
3. Reclaim [Data] Rights to People – rights to privacy, visible fair process, equal opportunity, basics for survival -access to food, shelter, and safety.
4. Confront and Question Bias -While Powell and Kleiner discuss decision bias, shouldn’t leaders also confront “Otherism,” that demeans any individual or group such that it justifies mistreatment of those viewed as “less than?”
5. Hold stakeholders accountable – Leaders should start by holding themselves accountable, but stand up for these values, “speak truth to power, and refuse to follow leaders who violate a human centered view of change.
6. Favor loosely coupled systems – and plan for randomness and unintended consequences.
7. Embrace creative friction – “none of us is as smart as all of us.” IT is a truism that bringing together people with radically different points of view produces a better solution, but believe me it ain’t easy. Managing creative friction, takes a strong process that ensure that everyone is heard. In my experience that requires leaders and all participants to put a damper on their egos and follow some agreed upon ground rules.

Now that brings me back to “Murder at the End of the World.“  Andy has assembled a group of radically different thinkers, but someone is eliminating the diverse points of view. That isn’t what I mean by “managing creative friction.” I know, it’s a TV show, but all too frequently, “in order to move ahead,” or because we ‘must sing off the same hymn sheet,” leaders belittle the disagreeable,  and stifle dissent.

That won’t work for solving the problems facing us today. For that we’ll need to Unthink, plan to Become Unbelievably Successful,  prepare for Flukes, and follow 7 Principles for Responsible Leadership.