Primitive by Marco Greenberg

Author:Marco Greenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Wave a Magic Wand

When I was working at BBDO, the late head of training, Bruce Leibowitz, would often tell us: “Wave a magic wand. Envision something that replaces and reinvents your current situation.” Doing this clarified our core values and provided a strongly needed reality check for how much progress we were truly making.

For Danny Lewin, waving a magic wand meant reinventing the internet. “The World Wide Wait,” as he derisively called it in the pre-broadband days of Web 1.0, infuriated him with its static Web pages and excruciating load times. He insisted that through proper optimization, content could be delivered much faster. He compared his ideal internet with the real one and found a way to bridge that gap.

The magic wand exercise can even help organizations generate entirely new principles that transcend profit. Tayo Oviosu is the CEO of Paga, a mobile payments company he founded in 2009 to help bring access to financial services to all Nigerians. With millions of users, Paga reportedly reaches more people than all of Nigeria’s banks combined. In a country where three in ten people don’t have easy access to fresh drinking water, Paga uses an open, secure payment platform that allows anyone with a mobile phone to make financial transactions, from sending money to family to paying bills to buying groceries. The platform has enabled entrepreneurs to open businesses in a country that previously did not have a reliable way for its citizens to pay for basic services. Tayo routinely asks his employees what they would do if they could wave a magic wand. “I’ve been wondering what role our business could play in the world around us. What kind of company do we want to be?” he wrote. “What principles do we want to stand up for? I felt this question could help start teasing the answers to these questions.…I did not know what to expect, and was very impressed by the responses and passion behind them.” Specifically, Paga employees brought up equality and ending discrimination, ensuring that all people receive a basic education, and solving broader governance issues in Nigeria. One company can’t solve all these issues, but Tayo challenged his employees to integrate these moonshot goals into the broader culture of Paga.

The magic wand exercise is important because it helps put your battles in context. If you could wave a magic wand and make everything you are fighting for become reality, would you be satisfied? If you became CEO of your current company, would you be content? Or is your goal bigger? For Ali Rezai, waving a magic wand means imagining a world where paralysis, Alzheimer’s disease, addiction, and countless other brain conditions can be cured. Waving a magic wand is a simple exercise, but it’s my first step toward making a solution appear tangible instead of theoretical. No matter how difficult a situation seems, I need to know what my ultimate wish is and do a gut check on how far I’ve strayed from that principle.

Sometimes waving a magic wand can simply mean removing yourself from a bad situation.

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