Mike Lehr's Blog

I recently read in the Schumpeter column, “In Search of Serendipity,” of the July 24, 2010 edition of The Economist about the book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things In Motion, by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. Automatically, the vision of bell bottoms returning to vogue arose. The concept is very similar to Carl Jung’s 1920’s introduction of synchronicity.

As stated in Schumpeter, the basic premise of the book is that “success in business increasingly depends on chance encounters.” It’s these chance encounters that seem spontaneous in the present but more purposeful with future’s hindsight. This is synchronicity repackaged.

About ten years ago, a good colleague was asking about the connections I’ve made to see if I could support this conclusion about his connections: the most profitable ones tended to come outside of his traditional, planned sales efforts. They originated from “out of the blue” encounters at non-business events when he didn’t expect them. I could relate.

It’s a basic premise of my blog that technological advancements are allowing us to see better and better the powerful impact our emotional-related processes such as intuition have in our everyday lives. As Schumpeter supports, advances in the internet – with the social media that it delivers – increases our ability to connect. This is giving us a larger sample population in which to observe that chance encounters really might not be that coincidental. It’s easy to discard one or two coincidences, but a dozen? But, make no mistake that is a concept that has been around for thousands of years in many American Indian and Eastern philosophies.

In his landmark book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) ponders why two Arabs can hold off a dozen Turks but a thousand Arabs cannot defeat a thousand Turks. He arrives at the realization that large scale armies need to be organized around the weakest link to tap the advantages that size and technology can offer. In other words, you can’t organize your army around a set of requirements that are impossible for a soldier to perform.

With this in mind, what might happen to a Special Forces combatant who is compelled to fight in the regular army? As the article, Imperial Grunts, conveys in the October 2005 issue of the The Atlantic, many of these combatants might not “fit” well in the regular army. This is what caused the Arabs to not fight well in large groups; they could not bridle their talents. This is very much like a talented athlete who is forced to sit on the bench or compelled to perform within a structure that does not allow him to express his talents.

In the workplace, the same can occur with an employee who feels the employer is not using his talent wisely. Since a large corporation is like a large army, it will tend to organize around the weakest link. Thus, he might not have the freedom to show what he really could do because he is being forced to work like everyone else does. When we combine this with managers and co-workers who feel threatened by his talent, you could easily see his talents suppressed, his influence marginalized or his actions disruptive. All could mean his departure.

Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and holder of 440 patents worldwide, says in the June 12th issue of The Economist, “Technology is easy to develop. Developing a new attitude, moving the culture from one mental model to another, that’s the difficult part . . .” From the rifle, to the machine gun, to the tank, to the aircraft carrier, military history supports Kamen;  people might employ new technology but they still fight using old strategies and tactics.

In the workplace, we often see technology just supporting old processes rather than creating new ones. For instance, people continued to keep extensive paper files long after word processing and desktop storage improved. Thus, while people used the technology, they did so with an old mindset that made computers glorified typewriters just as they made the rifle and machine gun just other guns rather than the transformative agents of new tactics.

Compounding the integration of technology is the old mindset that doesn’t demand highly developed soft skills of IT, Process Management and Organizational Development people. Very few receive experience and training in areas such as selling, active listening and relationship building. It’s not uncommon to hear employees say, “So now, IT is telling me what my job is?” Much of this is because the IT person didn’t do the necessary advance work in relationship building.

If we truly have “internal customers,” shouldn’t we apply the same sales and service protocols that we use with external ones? This is why soft skills and intuitive adeptness are critical to capturing the potential of new technologies in the form of new processes.