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Many leaders are frozen in place because of the fear of failure. They need to have things be perfect. But this gets in the way of leading disruptive change -- because rarely can change be perfect. Instead of trying to be perfect, focus instead on being excellent. This podcast provides three ways to jumpstart your journey to purse excellence as a disruptive leader of change.
To be competitive, it’s no longer enough to be innovative – you must have a strategy for disruptive growth, a plan to identify and seize an opportunity no one else has the audacity or confidence to reach for. Disruptors don’t just blow things up – they also create and build things that result in huge, positive change. Welcome to The New Rules of Disruption with Charlene Li. For the past two decades, Charlene Li has been helping people see the future and thrive with disruption. She couples the ability to look beyond the horizon with pragmatic advice on what actions work today. She helps executives and boards recognize that companies must be disruptive to compete, not just innovate.
Episode 9
Wed, 12/8 5:05 PM • 21:30
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
excellence, excellent, decision, perfect, leaders, organization, perfection, discipline, disruption, move, people, create, practice, imperfect action, play, minimally viable, pursue, single, podcast, deadline
00:00
I'd like to thank Workplace From Meta for supporting this podcast. To make your place of work, a great place to work, visit workplace.com/human.
00:18
Leaders have never been challenged in their career as much as they are today, with technology empowering the forces of customers, many leaders are realizing that we're now in a perpetual state of always-on transformation. It's time for disruption, a transformation of leadership, and a transformation of ourselves. But what rules do we play by when you want to create this change? This podcast is about how we as leaders, must transform ourselves to make it all work. My name is Charlene Li and these are the New Rules of Disruption.
01:05
As a child, I learned to play the piano when I was three years old, just couldn't help myself because my mother was constantly playing the piano. So she started teaching me getting me lessons, and I turned out to be really good at it. But when I was about 10-11 years old, I hit a wall. I had other interests. I wanted to be a kid. And I felt like why should I be practicing all the time, and I really wanted to quit. My mother insisted that I stick with it, that it would be a lifelong gift that I would give myself. And I still didn't see it as she goes, this is not about practicing to get things perfect. It's about you finding the excellence in the notes, to see how far you could get.
01:48
It reminded me of this saying that practice makes better, not perfect. And that gave me the inspiration to keep going. Because what I found was a joy in just practicing. And it was about playing my scales about trying to learn a piece to try to play it perfectly, always knowing that that was unattainable. And yet it was that search for that excellence, that was always just there, that pursuit of that excellence that really drove me. And this really came to a head my senior year in high school when I was competing in the highest levels at the state for a piano competition, and I had been practicing for this day for what felt like my entire life.
02:33
So I get into the room, the three judges have their sit down, and I woke up that morning with a terrible head cold, just completely stuffed up. And I am like, well, I'm just gonna do the best that I can. I'm just gonna, I'm going to get ready for this. I'm gonna play. I start playing and playing and playing. And then all of a sudden my contact lens pops out. And I stop. And the judges go, what's wrong? What's wrong? Why did you stop? And I go, my contact lens popped out. And they all said don't move. And the three of them leaped up in sort of crawling around my piano bench looking for my contact lense. One of them found it and handed it to me, and completely red-faced, I said, I'll be right back. went to the bathroom, popped it in, and came back. The judges said, Okay, take a deep breath. Would you like to start from the top? And I said yes, please.
03:21
So I sat down with piano bench and I went, I mean, how the heck do I recover from that? How embarrassing, to have the judges crawling around the floor looking for my contact lens. So I figured I have no chance of winning this competition. So I may as well play my heart out, just do the best that I can. And without that pressure hanging over me with a terrible head cold. And all these adversities, I just went, I'm just going to play, I'm going to play the best that I can. Because that's all I can do at this point. I may as well enjoy the moment. And I played with such freedom and abandonment that I could never have done under that seriousness of a competition. That actually I did extremely well, won the competition.
04:06
I could never have imagined that that would be the outcome. And in those moments when I get into this tightness around trying to perfect a phrase for a post that I'm writing. Or trying to think about how to make the perfect presentation. I remember that moment, and I remember it's not about making things perfect. It's about what is the best that I can bring, focusing on the audience I want to influence, the change that I want to create. And how do I pursue that with excellence rather than perfection?
04:41
I tell this story because so much that I hear from leaders today is that they are frozen in place. They believe that everything has to be perfect. They have to hit 100% of their goals. Everything has to be figured out they must know every single answer, they must have analyzed every single possibility, there could be no room for failure, that failure is not an option. And that is debilitating to us. Because if we want to be transformative, if you want to move at the speed of our customers and move into that future, we have to give up this notion of being perfect. Instead, replace it with the notion of being excellent.
05:26
I worked with an organization, a hospital, they had as one of their core values, do no harm. This is what doctors take as their oath. And the hospital had taken that philosophy to the place where they were frozen, they were unable to try new things. Because if they ever made a mistake, if it wasn't perfect, they were then doing harm. And I had to point out to them, you know, I don't think your patients want you to be perfect. They know that medicine is a science, but it's also an art, you don't always have the perfect answer. So I need you to be making decisions, taking risks, and being excellent in that process. Knowing that at some point, it may not always work out. But I know that you have done your best. That's all that we can ask for.
06:19
If you've been listening to this podcast series, it's been focused on what is required of leaders to lead a transformational organization. My friend, Rebecca Macieira-Kaufman is the author of FitCEO, and we had a conversation, about what it means to be excellent, instead of perfect.
06:37
One of the things I'm struck is when people are trying to create change, one of the limiting beliefs people have is, we can't fail. And so I want to point out that distinction between perfection and what you talked about excellence. And it's something that comes across in the book too, as well. It's like, you know, give yourself some ease. I love that, give yourself some space, you know, give yourself room, you're putting something on, take something off, can you talk a little bit about this whole idea of excellence and how that's different from the way that we think about, you know, perfection or doing things to the max?
07:13
Well, actually, operational excellence is the opposite of perfection, because zero error means you're not learning you couldn't possibly, you know, you learn a lot from error. So you don't want a lot of error, but you need some. So what we tried to cover in the book is that for every single topic we covered, what is the immediate and imperfect action. And let's go to immediate, a big part of excellent execution is doing it. A lot of people get stuck because they don't act. So every concept we cover in the book then has an immediate and imperfect action step.
07:49
So for your personal health, if it's start walking, let's walk 10 minutes today. Don't get into the habit of oh my goodness, for me to get physically healthy, I have to do a two hour you know, three, three-mile run or something or six-mile run like the bar so high that you then injure yourself, hurt yourself in some way, you're wiped out, you can't move to the next week, and you don't want to do it again. That's the same in a company that you need to walk before you run. So same thing. Start with if you want to do something operationally excellent for the client. Don't try to do everything and end. Start with what is the moment of truth for that client, pick one at a time. Get it excellent, to the best possible experience you can, not perfect. See, excellent is different than perfect, perfect leaves no room. And actually, I don't think that perfect ever is stable. But excellent, you know, if you had an excellent client experience, right with somebody, they might have even made a mistake and how they recuperate from the mistake was so good, you felt it was excellent.
08:55
We've talked about things like seeing the future, building agency in your organization, dealing with uncertainty, and moving into the digital space as a leader. All of these sayings are stepping stones to the ultimate place where you need to be, which is to pursue excellence. It is not about being perfect because, in this fast-moving transformational world, things will never ever be perfect. And I want to dispel you have this idea of perfection because it has a cascading effect through the rest of the organization.
09:30
If you are seeking perfection, it echoes down into the rest of your employees who will be frozen in place and unable to make any move until they are confident they can be done perfectly. This is debilitating for organizations. Because in a world where your customers are moving further and further away from you, you are being stuck in place and you'll be paying a huge debt to try to catch up to where they are and you won't be able to do it because until you can do a perfectly, you won't move and you will fall further and further behind.
10:11
Charlene here, if you're listening to this and thinking I'm ready for more, then I want to let you know about all the resources available on my website CharleneLi.com. There, you will find my latest books, articles, videos, courses, and more. All built to help leaders in organizations see the future and thrive with disruption. I've worked with top companies ranging from Adobe to Southwest Airlines. I've also spoken at conferences like the World Economic Forum, World Business Forum, and South by Southwest, and on my website, you will find many of the things I have shared with them. So go now to ch, ar, le, ne, li.com, to transform your leadership today.
11:02
So what does excellence look like? On a day-to-day basis? How do you be excellent instead of being perfect? Again, I believe that it comes down to a practice of excellence. It is a practice that we do every day. And the first and most important thing is to define what excellence looks like. Is it around certain actions that you take? Is it around the mindsets that you have? It's all of those. But most importantly, it requires discipline, the most disruptive organizations that I see have tremendous order structure in discipline, about everything that they do, which is why discipline is such a highly prized aspect of leadership.
11:47
What does discipline look like? In some cases, it's about showing up at your meetings on time. It's about having an agenda, having very clear definitions of how decisions are going to be made and who's going to make them, to have a follow-up. It's a discipline of identifying the top of most important things you have to get done and making sure everyone understands that. And when we have that discipline in our lives, then we can focus on the change that has to happen. Because when we need to change when our organization has to change, we can apply the same practice of discipline to the change itself, creating structure so that people know how to move into the change and move through it.
12:30
One of the most important areas to have discipline around is around how you make decisions. The way we make decisions today is, let's figure out what the decision is, and then gather up all the information we need to have, put it all on the table, and we're not going to stop until we have every single possible piece of information available to us to make the best possible perfect decision. And that takes a long time. And in the end, you may not still have every single piece of information you need to make the perfect, completely 100% foolproof decision, I can't think of a single situation where that would be the case, there was always a better option. There's always another possibility. So how would you ever know that you're done? Instead, the second different approach, which is to create what I call the minimally viable decision. If you know, this is where you want to go someplace out in the future, what's the first decision you have to make in order for that to happen, not the final one, but is the one piece of data that you need to have, in order to make that first decision. I call it the MVD, minimally viable data you need to have in order to make a decision. Because when you have identified that you're not looking for the perfect information, you're looking for the one piece of information, and that speeds everything up and allows you to take action and move forward.
13:57
Now the question becomes what if it was the wrong piece of data? What was the wrong thing and we discover that later on? Well, this is the second thing I would encourage you to think about, which is that most decisions are reversible. We treat every single decision as if our lives depended on it. And the reality is very few of them actually do. In fact, most of them, 99% of the decisions we make, we can always unwind and go back. It may not always be easy to go back, but we can always go back if we really need to. So do we need to put that much energy into making perfect decisions when a decent, pretty well-done decision could make do right now and we'll actually figure out that it's actually the right thing or not after we've made the decision? This is the foundation for this process that people call agile. Agile says I don't know what the final answer is and I won't know until I try a lot of different things along the way. And many things may not work but we'll learn along the way, we will fail forward. We will continue to learn, and we may not always be right, but we can come back and take a different path.
15:03
The third way to instill excellence with discipline is to actually set impossible deadlines to meet, the idea of an impossible deadline is, there's no way you can get everything done in time. So you're not going to make the best decision with all the information, you're going to make the fastest decision available to you with the information you have right now. Because reality is to gather 80% of the data that you need in a very short amount of time, and you make the decision, then, even though it's not perfect, the amount of time it would take to gather the last 20% is not going to get you to that much more of a really good answer, it's not going to change the general direction of where you want to be going. So you're better off setting a really impossible deadline, to force the decision to force a discipline to make the best decision you can make at that point, what you're actually encouraging people to do is to practice excellence, you're not asking them to be perfect. You say, given your experience, give me your knowledge, the information that you have at this moment, what's your best guess? And that's going to be excellent.
16:14
I guarantee you, if you're trying to do this, for the first time, it's going to feel awful. You're like, this is crazy. Why am I doing this to myself, I want to give myself an extended deadline, just give me three more days and I can make a better decision and resist the urge to do that. Because I guarantee you, you will not have made a better decision during that time. You'll just feel better about it. So get over that and know that you'll feel better about it once you put that decision in place, and then you can see whether it worked or not. And if it didn't work, maybe go back to that discussion about how do we deal with things not working out the way we want? How do we deal with failure, and instead of feeling shame about it, look at it as a data point. This is what's required to be excellent, you need to have the discipline around things, you need to be able to find the minimum of types of data decisions you need to make and set some impossible deadlines, to be able to force yourself to make these excellent decisions. This is all in pursuit, again, of a fast-moving future.
17:16
We need to develop a bias for action rather than a bias for perfection. Because that bias for action will always move you forward faster and faster and accelerate you into this exponential change. If excellence feels like a very heavy lift, then I encourage you to try doing this. How can you be excellent for the next five minutes? How can you be excellent in the first five minutes of a meeting? How will you be excellent, and the next five minutes of your life? Because if you can begin thinking about being excellent in small increments, and small bits and pieces, you'll be developing the ability to be excellent in many different other areas. So take a minute here, through your mind, say what are the ways that you can be excellent, not all the time, but just for five minutes. And I guarantee you, when you try this out, you will find the impact immediately in the people around you. They will notice that and when you get that visceral feedback from the people around you, what the impact is of being excellent. It will encourage you to take the steps necessary to continue to be excellent.
18:28
One of the reasons I focus on excellence instead of perfection is that perfection holds us back from taking action. And this is what disruptive organizations do so well. They have a bias for action rather than a bias for perfection. And that bias for action understands that the future is moving so quickly away from them, that they don't have time, they don't have the luxury to be able to pause and ponder and try to make needs perfect. And instead, they pursue excellence because that is going to drive the results that is going to drive them faster and faster towards the action they need to take to pursue that future.
19:08
As I reflect on those early days of my life, when I was learning what it meant to be a leader, I wish there had been somebody early in my career, who had pulled me aside and said this is what excellence means, the importance of being excellent, because that would have saved me a huge amount of heartache. Because even though I knew these lessons, I was trying to be that perfect leader. I was trying everything possible to drive myself and my team to be perfect. And if I had set back a moment to understand and define for ourselves what it meant to be excellent. I would have been such a better leader was shown up in such a different way and driven our team and set new objectives and just worked and I think been more successful if I had been more focused on excellence. So I encourage you to think about what excellence means for yourself, for your team, for your organization, then take the time to define it, pursue it with all the vigor and passion that you have for leadership.
20:12
Rule number nine, replace perfection with excellence.
20:25
Hey there, thanks for listening to the New Rules of Disruption. We created this podcast with the hope that you would be inspired to become a disrupter. Disruptors don't just blow things up. They also create and build things that result in huge positive change. This is a change that the world needs now more than ever, and we want to hear for what change you are creating in this world. You can send us your disruptive story by visiting CharleneLi. com/podcasts. That's ch, ar, le, ne, li.com/podcasts. If you are enjoying this podcast, I have one major ask. Please share it with a co-worker, manager, or friend. Let's build communities of disruption together