Re:Focus

How To Become A Legend

Usain Bolt knows why he needs to win races and shatter records. Though money and fame are nice additions, what drives him is something much, much bigger. It's even bigger than winning each individual race.

The 23-year old, gold-shoe wearing Jamaican track star became a household name after he shattered multiple world records at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. When asked what his secret is, he replies with surprising humility, "my secret's just hard work and dedication." Great advice, for sure, but it takes more than just hard work to become such a dominating force in sports...or in anything, for that matter. It takes a sense of purpose so big, it's  hard to measure. It may even sound like fantasy. And for Usain Bolt, he wakes up everyday to, as he puts it,  "become a legend."

It is this sense of purpose, the sense of WHY Bolt works as hard as he does that makes such a difference. Whereas other competitors train for a race or for an event, Bolt trains for something that he may not fully appreciate in his lifetime, because inherent in legend-status, is that it will outlive him.

Though each race he wins and each record he breaks matter, they are not the end goals. They represent the milestones he needs to pass to achieve his very big dream.

In our careers and in our businesses we often limit our ability to succeed because we set goals with relatively short time lines.  We work hard to achieve these goals, then set new goals the following year. But quarterly or annual goals are just too short. How many people or organizations are planning to achieve something that will be fully realized after they die?

A strategy of setting a goal, reaching it and working to achieve the next goal does not inherently prevent progress or success, but it limits the ability to make massive leaps. It also begs the question, why are those short-term goals important? "To be successful" or "to grow a business" are insufficient as answers. Everyone who races against Bolt is running to win races, but few, if any, are running to become legends.

Quarterly or annual goals should not be the goals, they should serve to mark the measurable progress we make on our way to something much grander.  The Wright brothers didn't set out to simply make a flying machine, they set out to change the world.  Steve Jobs didn't just want to build a successful computer company, he set out to, as he put it, "make a dent in the universe." That ability to see beyond the year, to see beyond the money and the profit, to see how the world will change because of what you achieve, is what makes legends.

Consider this analogy: If your goal is to drive 350 miles in one day, you may achieve your goal, you may even drive a little further. You'll be elated that you reached your goal or surpassed it.  Your victory may even encourage you to attempt to drive 400 miles the next day. But to become a legend, you need a lofty, almost unrealistic and quite bombastic vision of the final destination...not just one of the way points.  It's not about getting 350 miles in a day, it's about seeing yourself laying on the beach on an island in the South Pacific. In one single swoop, you see the 350-mile achievement as small and slow. You are instantly able  to see opportunities that others miss.  Where others see the need to drive faster, you see the need to jump on an airplane.

Usain Bolt doesn't run each race because he wants to win. He wins each race because he wants something so much grander. And it is this ability, to understand why each race matters towards achieving the grand plan, that he will indeed become a legend.

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Do No Work

I sat down with Mike Michalowiz, the entrepreneur's entrepreneur and author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.  He's nuts and brilliant and understands better than most the things to do to build a successful small business (and how to keep it fun).

He was interested in my theory of going to work to do no work. 

Interview With Simon Sinek from Toilet Paper on Vimeo.

There Are No Mergers, There Are Only Collisions

50% of all corporate mergers completely fail. 

An additional 25% never achieve the ROI that was promised.  

That means 75% of mergers weren't worth it.  Can you imagine walking into a CEO's office and saying, "I've got a great deal, it's got a 75% chance of failure."  You'd be laughed out of the room. Yet CEOs initiate mergers and acquisitions all the time. And when their mergers fail, the first line of the article in the Wall Street Journal is always the same, "the two cultures didn't mix."

Months and months and often millions of dollars are spent combing through the books to see if all is in order, yet what CEOs forget is that companies are nothing more than structures...and those structures are filled with people.  What makes two companies fit well together is not their product lines - it's how their people get along. Sadly, this little detail is often completely ignored. 

Just because there is "synergy" (the rationale so often used to justify so many mergers in the first place) between product lines or marketplaces, doesn't guarantee any success.  That one company makes ink and another makes rubber stamps, for example, means little when it comes to two entirely different corporate cultures needing to play nice together. Unless the plan is to fire everyone from one company and completely rehire for all the new job openings with employees who fit one of the cultures, more diligence should should be spent evaluating the cultural fit before the collision...er...merger takes place.

The great irony is that the single biggest factor that contributes to the majority of merger debacles is amazingly simple to evaluate.  It costs neither millions of dollars nor countless of months to evaluate a corporate culture.  It takes about a day per company.  One day.

It begs the question, then, why is something so important and so crucial to the success of a merger so often completely ignored until it's too late?

The answer is uncomfortably simple: you can't see the culture. The product lines, the market opportunities, the balance sheets are all things that can be easily seen, and easily evaluated and tabulated.  The culture is not. A strong culture exists when all the employees within an organization share the same values and beliefs.  We can tell a company has a strong culture, not because we read it on a balance sheet, but because we can feel it when we walk the halls. There is an obvious camaraderie among the employees and a genuine desire to do good by the company.  In contrast, when we walk the halls of companies with a weak culture we feel cold...or worse, we feel nothing at all. People in a bad culture are more motivated by self-gain than by a desire to see their company...and their colleagues...do well. When we feel a strong culture, we sometimes wish we worked there.

The best part is, if you try to have this discussion with so many of the CEOs who initiated the mergers in the first place, they'll tell you that what you're talking about is fluff. But if that fluff is important enough to avoid a 75% chance of a collision, then maybe it's worth buying that model with the anti-lock brakes after all. 

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