The Power of Pressure by Dane Jensen

Author:Dane Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

The traditional business approach to solving problems is exactly what is needed in peak pressure moments—it lets us immediately hone in on what we can control and take action. Over the long haul, however, with all of its unknowns and inevitable uncertainty, there are many situations in which we need to take the alternate path—the one that opens us up to surprises, encourages exploration, and doesn’t immediately attempt to drive toward answers and action. Bob Lurie, a valued mentor of mine and a true strategic genius who is currently the vice president of corporate strategy at Eastman Chemical, spent a large portion of his career building a marketing consultancy called Market2Consumer (M2C) into a $100 million revenue business. When I talked to him about it, he told me the team started with a list of over 40 potential products, ranked from most to least promising. It took them until number 27 to get the business off the ground. Their top 26 ideas, painstakingly considered and carefully executed, didn’t resonate with the market. But number 27, which was a novel approach to customer segmentation, ended up being a $100 million product. Lurie’s advice to me was straightforward: “You don’t have the answers, and you can’t predict what is going to work.”

I’ve thought about this advice often ever since, and it has been among the most useful reminders for me personally. Each time one of my brilliant ideas turns out to not be so brilliant after all, I imagine Lurie scratching one more product off the list and moving on to the next, having learned something and ultimately recognizing that we can’t tame or predict uncertainty, but we can expect it and get through a period of uncertainty without becoming dispirited or disengaged.

For Quinn’s part, she started working to help people embrace new mindsets that helped them both see the possibility in and value uncertainty and exploration. “Mindsets are like cross-country ski tracks in the snow,” Quinn says. “Over time they get grooved in and we just unconsciously follow along because deviating takes effort.” She started codifying a set of what she called business mindsets and innovation mindsets, and asking people to become aware of which they were holding when tackling problems. She then encouraged them to consciously “groove in” the opposing mindset to see how that would change their behavior.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.