[00:00:00] Announcer: This is the build a vibrant culture podcast, your source for the strategies, systems, and insights you need to turn your dreams into your destiny. Every week we dive into dynamic conversations as our host, Nicole Greer interviews, leadership, and business experts. They're here to shed light on practical solutions to the challenges of personal and professional development. Now here's your host, a professional speaker, coach, and consultant, Nicole Greer.
[00:00:29] Nicole: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Build a Vibrant Culture Podcast. My name is Nicole Greer. They call me the Vibrant Coach and I have incredibly intelligent, smart people from all over the world. And believe it or not, today I have Willie Peterson. He was raised in South Africa and received a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. So he knows what he's talking about, people. After practicing law, he embarked on an international business career. Over a period of 20 years, he served as the CEO of multi billion dollar businesses, such as is it lever foods? Am I saying that right, William?
[00:01:05] Willie Pietersen: Lever Brothers Foods, division, that's correct.
[00:01:07] Nicole: All right. So he worked for Seagram USA. So is that my club soda, ginger ale people?
[00:01:13] Willie Pietersen: Yeah, but at the time, it was the largest liquor company in the USA.
[00:01:17] Nicole: Oh, solid opportunity
[00:01:18] Willie Pietersen: And then it was sold to a company in France called Vivendi, so it doesn't exist anymore. But at the time, yes, those seltzers and sparkling waters and so were part of the portfolio.
[00:01:30] Nicole: Oh, that's fantastic. And he also worked for Tropicana and Sterling Winthrop's Consumer Health Group. In 1998, Willie was named Professor of the Practice of Management at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He specializes in strategy and the leadership of change and his methods and ideas, especially strategic learning, are widely applied within the Columbia's executive education programs, and also in numerous corporations. He has served as a teacher and advisor to many global companies, including Aviva, Bausch & Lomb, Boeing, Chubb Corporation, Deloitte, DePue, Electrolux, Ericsson, ExxonMobil, Henry Schein, and the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta. And also my favorite, the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. Don't you love a little Girl Scout? That's so good. I was a Girl Scout for many years. Willie is the author of three books and numerous articles, but today, look what I have. Look what Willie sent me in the mail. Leadership- The Inside Story: Time Tested Prescriptions for Those Who Seek to Lead. I'm so grateful you're with me. Welcome!
[00:02:38] Willie Pietersen: Great to be with you. Thank you so much, Nicole.
[00:02:40] Nicole: Yeah, you're welcome. So I love this book and we all know that in order to build a vibrant culture, you've got to have a solid person in the leadership seat. What do you think about that statement right out of the gate?
[00:02:51] Willie Pietersen: Yeah, it starts with an understanding of what leadership is. I think if we want to excel at something, we need to have some kind of a structure and understanding of what it is we're trying to do and how we excel at it. What's the underlying meaning of it all? And, uh, what I like to do is to offer a structure consisting of three elements that represent the building blocks, if you like, of effective leadership. I'll just mention them briefly.
[00:03:16] Leadership consists of three basic domains that work together synergistically in a kind of mutually interdependent way. And the first domain is leadership of self, consisting of deep self knowledge, a clear set of values and principles that guide our actions and inspire others. That's the starting point for effective leadership. It's what I call permission to lead. And that's where we represent our authenticity and our basic integrity as a leader, as a human being. As some Sioux, uh, no I think it was Confucius actually, who said if you want to be a leader, you must first be a human being.
[00:03:58] Nicole: Oh, I love that.
[00:03:59] Willie Pietersen: We must all express our humanity. Second domain of leadership is strategic leadership. It's the ability to set a clear sense of direction for an organization, a winning way and a set of shared priorities for success. Third domain is interpersonal leadership, which is bringing out the best in others. And not only the leader bringing out the best in others, but getting others to bring out the best in their colleagues as well.
[00:04:29] So that's what a vibrant culture looks like when everybody is helping everybody else succeed, just like a sports. Now the reason I find that useful. Is because it makes our leadership development, our self development intentional and deliberate that we can see where we're excelling and maybe falling short and taking remedial steps for ourselves.
[00:04:53] Again, I quote philosophy where Voltaire said, you must cultivate your own God. We have to really look after our own leadership development as a process of lifelong learning, but it also has another advantage. We need to get feedback from others. We need to have truth tellers who will tell us how we're doing as leaders. You know, there used to be a mayor in New York called Ed Koch.
[00:05:19] Nicole: Oh I know Ed.
[00:05:21] Willie Pietersen: Yeah, yeah, quite a character. He used to walk around the streets of New York and stop people and say, how am I doing? That's too big a question to find a useful answer. How am I doing? Well, you're doing fine. Okay. Thanks a lot. Right? He likes praise. Or he did. He's not alive. I find this process or the structure useful in getting feedback because you can now say to a colleague, a truth teller, a coach how am I doing at personal leadership? How am I doing at strategic leadership? How am I doing at interpersonal leadership? And as we have to react to various external challenges that force us to create new strategies and lead change, we put more or less emphasis on one element rather than the other, but we're really always putting them together as an integrated process. I call that leadership. Becoming an integrated leader.
[00:06:17] Nicole: Yeah.
[00:06:18] Willie Pietersen: So that's my starting point for understanding leadership. You know, if we want to excel at something, we must first understand what it is, its underlying factors, its drivers, its components,
[00:06:29] Nicole: Yeah. And on page 18, and I love a Venn diagram. Look at that . You've got it right there. So I, I love that. And so you talk about the three domains, but then you've also got a story in here that how Nelson Mandela achieved the impossible. Can you share a little bit about that?
[00:06:48] Willie Pietersen: Certainly, and I think the main element there that impressed me most strongly was his leadership of self, overcoming anger and resentment, and realizing that if you wanted a country that was torn by racial strife to create a peaceful transition to a multiracial democracy, he would first have to set the example for himself.
[00:07:10] Now, brief background, South Africa is a country of about 60 million people. Only 9 percent of them are whites. The rest are people of color, mostly Africans, different tribes. And, way back when it was a British colony and a Dutch colony, there was a practice of the separation of the races. It's never a good thing, but, you know, in those early days, it was relatively speaking, a benign practice, relatively speaking. And then in 1948 a national government came and they called themselves the Nationalists, and they imposed a very severe form of this racial segregation called apartheid, meaning apartness.
[00:07:50] Nicole: Mm-hmm
[00:07:50] Willie Pietersen: Now, just to mention the elements of that, you were not allowed to live in the same residential areas, different races, you couldn't go to the same schools, you couldn't marry each other, you couldn't go to the same hospitals, and to have sexual relationships across the color bar was a crime punishable by imprisonment. It was very severe, very demeaning, very oppressive and cruel.
[00:08:18] Nicole: Yes.
[00:08:19] Willie Pietersen: Not surprisingly, there was a violent reaction after a period of time. Nelson Mandela was at the forefront of this as a freedom fighter, and he eventually went on trial for an act of sabotage, found guilty, and he was sentenced to a life imprisonment on an island called Robben Island. It turned out that he was released after 27 years, in order to negotiate a peaceful transition, but that's just the background to it. When he went into that prison, he thought he was going to be there for a lifetime.
[00:08:48] Nicole: Right.
[00:08:49] Willie Pietersen: Now, every single day he was there for the 27 years, he was subjected to cruelty and indignity in a totally kind of terrible way.
[00:08:58] Nicole: Mm-hmm
[00:08:59] Willie Pietersen: And of course that creates resentment and anger, that you're being treated like this as a human being. But he developed this vision in his mind. He said, well, one day I hope to be released and then lead a peaceful transition against all the odds because of all the built up anger over the decades of this terrible system. How are you going to get people to cooperate in a way that they combine together in what he called a rainbow nation and to develop a kind of a forgiveness and a reconciliation process. He realized the first thing he would have to do is to change himself. He studied widely, he thought about it, he developed a vision, and he began to practice this daily practice of forgiving and thinking about reconciliation.
[00:09:47] Now, the language of his oppressors was called Afrikaans. It wasn't his first language. His first language was his tribal language and English. But he decided to learn Afrikaans so that he could speak the language of his oppressors. Philosophy there, clearly expressed, was when you speak to a man in a language that he understands, it goes to his head. When you speak to somebody in a language that's his language, it goes to his heart.
[00:10:16] Nicole: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:17] Willie Pietersen: learned Afrikaans. He spoke to his jailers in Afrikaans. He talked to them about their family issues and financial problems, gave them advice, and their respect, etc. He learned the ins and outs of the game of rugby, which was again, the white man's sport dominated by the Afrikaners to the extent that the African population always cheered for the opposing teams and not for the South African or white team.
[00:10:43] Those were the circumstances. Now, the way it played out is that when he was eventually released, he negotiated with the Afrikaners in their language, in Afrikaans, recognizing their history, their aspirations, and their concerns, and led the country to a multiracial democracy with a superb Bill of Rights. And introduced a process called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a very innovative process whereby People who had committed these brutal acts of oppression and cruelty were allowed to give evidence, and if they showed remorse and apologized, they would be forgiven.
[00:11:21] Nicole: Mm
[00:11:22] Willie Pietersen: But if they denied what they did, they would be put on trial in the normal way, and if found guilty, would be punished in the normal way. Now, thinking about this process of... you can't just say to people, 'Okay, here's what we're now going to do. I want you all to forgive yourselves. Forget about the, we really all want to go on this journey of reconciliation and mutual love. Go ahead and do it.' Wouldn't that be easy? I mean, this process of being the role model, showing people day after day, what forgiveness looks like, and then introducing this process whereby the entire nation would go through a process of understanding what happened, creating a process of collective forgiveness and dedicating themselves to this vision of a rainbow nation.
[00:12:10] So I found that was an astonishing example of great leadership, and it started on the inside. That's why I called my book 'the inside story.' It started on personal values. This is something that Marcus Aurelius, the Roman philosopher, called our command center. We must all develop a command center that determines our actions and makes those actions consistent with our values. So that's a great example for me of what really what great leadership looks like. Now, that was the main Strength that he demonstrated. He also demonstrated tremendous interpersonal skills and empathy. On the strategic leadership front he did some good things, but he didn't do quite as well. So there was still gaps after he died, you know, in wealth and housing and medical care, and it just demonstrates that no leader is perfect and with huge change like that, you can't do it like flicking a switch. It's a journey over years, but he created the foundations for that journey and the impetus for getting it done at the other end. So that's, uh, for me, the most striking example of effective leadership and leadership of change.
[00:13:24] Nicole: Mm. That's a fantastic story. Thank you for sharing that. So you go on to say that learning to learn: the unrecognized leadership imperative. And so talk about learning to learn. You have another quote in here from Marcel Proust, it says "truth is discovered, not taught." So will you talk a little bit learning to learn, that our leaders need to be learning?
[00:13:49] Willie Pietersen: Yeah, well, where it all really starts is the understanding that the world is constantly changing. And we need to be able to respond effectively to that external change and lead our organizations as a learning system to send on to change in a very successful way and change won't stop happening. It's a Darwinian concept. Now, sometimes we have freedom of choice. We could decide how we want to conduct ourselves. Other times we're bound by laws. Evolutionary science is a law. It's not just a choice and that law says very clearly that if you really wish to survive over the long term, you must have the capacity to continuously change successfully to the requirements of the external environment.
[00:14:38] Now, there's a very important consideration here, which evolutionary science demonstrates. The external environment will not respond and adjust to us. We have to adjust and respond to the external environment. So the starting point, of course, is to understand those external elements that require us to change. That is the change master out there, the instructor of what we need to do internally, exists outside the boundaries of our organization, not inside. Inside is how we mobilize our energy and resources to respond effectively to the changes in the external environment. This is the adaptation imperative.
[00:15:20] Now, what does that require? In nature, this whole process of adaptation is a completely random unthinking process. And creatures, organisms that generate favorable variations succeed and survive, and those that don't do that eventually die out. Now, in human organizations we can choose to make it a random process, but that cuts our survival odds.
[00:15:47] Nicole: That's right.
[00:15:48] Willie Pietersen: So we adapt as human organisms is that we learn effectively, learn our way to success. Now, learning doesn't just happen by itself. We must have very conscious, deliberate processes to help us learn. And we all learn intuitively all the time. But we don't consciously know how we learn.
[00:16:09] So, the trick is to be very deliberate and conscious about how we learn. And to be able to do that better and better, both as an individual leader to set the example and to create learning systems within the organization.
[00:16:22] So learning to learn and then developing methods and tools and frameworks that are shared by the organization, that create a learning organization, is a survival imperative. You know, the record of survival in organizations is very poor.
[00:16:39] Nicole: That's right.
[00:16:40] Willie Pietersen: So some research done, I think this was a McKinsey study that was done, showed that if you take the S& P 500, the large organization, so it eliminates startups that sometimes last a few weeks and then fizzle out. These are large organizations. In the mid 20th century, the average lifespan of large organizations was about 61 years. Just a little bit short of a human lifespan.
[00:17:03] Nicole: Mm hmm.
[00:17:04] Willie Pietersen: You know what it is today?
[00:17:06] Nicole: Tell me.
[00:17:07] Willie Pietersen: 18 years. Organizations are dying at the age of teenagers.
[00:17:13] Nicole: Mm.
[00:17:13] Willie Pietersen: Large organizations. You know, being acquired or failing or going insolvent or whatever the case might be. It tells us that we're not really creating very effective learning systems and we need to up our game.
[00:17:26] Nicole: Yeah, I love that. And I'm hearkening back to a book I had to read to get my master's degree. And when I first saw the book, I thought, Oh, this is going to be terrible. Big fat book, you know, and then I got it popped open and it was Peter Senge's book, The Fifth Discipline. And I got to tell y'all, buy it. Even though you're gonna judge a book by the cover, I mean, getting your head wrapped around building an organization that learns, I think is so huge.
[00:17:53] And I highlighted on page 41. Listen, we're talking to Willie Peterson everybody. Leadership: The Inside Story. Okay, Time Tested Prescriptions for Those Who Seek to Lead. He talks about curiosity is the avenue. That's the street you got to get on for lifelong learning. And you know, when I got my coaching certificate way in the way back, Willie, 2007, they talk so much about if you want to be a good coach, you want to be a good leader, you got to be curious. And so I just want you to talk about that for a little bit. Cause it's so true.
[00:18:25] Willie Pietersen: Curiosity is the driver. Now there are two kinds of curiosity for me. There's idle curiosity, which is fine, you're just sitting there and wondering why, and never really pursuing the answers. And then there is curiosity, which says I need to find an answer. The answer is useful for me in the way that I navigate my life, in the way I navigate my leadership processes and leadership happens in different settings. You know, we tend to think about leadership and forums like this and discussions like this as leading business organizations, or not for profit organizations. Well, that's only one setting. We've got leadership in the military setting, what generals need to do; at the national political level, we need good leaders; we need to be good parents if we have a family, that's a form of leadership. It's pretty important developing young people And doing community service is a form of leadership, so it's multidimensional. Discipline is leadership, and because it's multidisciplinary, our thinking needs to be multidisciplinary. We need to think in broader gauges than just reading business books. Now there's some business books that are very, very good. To be honest, probably about 25 percent of the books I read are business books. I skim through a lot of them. Ones like The Fifth Discipline, I read intensely and it's still sitting on my shelf.
[00:19:54] Nicole: Yeah.
[00:19:56] Willie Pietersen: I tell you what drives my curiosity is broader gauge learning. And I find that extremely useful in bringing it into play in these various settings of being an effective leader. Now I love to read philosophy. Philosophy helps us answer the three very big questions in life that we need to answer, which is what's true, what's important, and what's right. And I think we're always, as we go through life, making big life planning decisions and leadership decisions that our organization depends upon, we're always pursuing those three questions. What's really true here? And have we really captured the essential truth? Amongst all the things that are true, what's really important? Separating the important from the unimportant. And finally, what's right? Now, the easy decisions are between right and wrong. Black or white. Teenage kids can do that. The hard decisions are between right and right. Now, you go back to saying, well, what's important? And then that's the rule breaker for you in making the decision in terms of what's right. It's what's really important. And that's where your values come back into play. So for me, that's philosophy that helps a great deal. Another part of philosophy that's been very impactful for me is we always think about integrity. We always think about ethical behavior, but it's an elusive thing to define what's ethical behavior.
[00:21:27] People write tracts, so a lot of words, etc. Now, Plato gave us a definition of ethics. I sometimes put this on a PowerPoint and say to a seminar, Can you improve on that definition? And Plato's definition is a simple one. He said ethical behavior is acting in the common interest regardless of who is watching without the expectation of a reward and without the fear of punishment. I don't think I've ever seen a better definition of ethics. So these are two examples of what I've gathered and learned from studying philosophy. Then I come to evolutionary science and we've talked about that. You know, the rule is adapt or die. How do we do that in the individual level? How do we do it organizationally?
[00:22:15] So I've gathered a lot of nourishment in my thinking from evolutionary science. And the third area that I really enjoy is astrophysics. I don't like formulae. I don't, I understand words, but not form. So more recently, a lot of very, very good books have come out that even laypeople like me can understand. And then I'm struck by the vastness of the universe, our own insignificance and the transient nature of our lives. And I feel humbled by this. You know, there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand at all the beaches in the world. And a hallmark of the universe is impermanence. Now, in that setting, our lives are terribly short. And it helps me think about that particular reality. And it helps me conclude that although our lives are very short, we have just enough time to make a difference.
[00:23:13] Nicole: Right. A little impact.
[00:23:14] Willie Pietersen: And for me, yes, that's the impact on my own thinking.
[00:23:18] Now my curiosity has led me to all these readings. There's a quote I give in the book actually. In astro science, Ray Bradbury was a science fiction writer and he made this wonderful statement that captures it all for me in astrophysics, where he said, 'We are born to be a witness to the mysteries of the universe and understand who we are, where we fit in, and what's important.' I love that statement. And I think that's what astrophysics helps us do. It's humbling, and we need humbling. We think we're so important as humans.
[00:23:51] Nicole: Right. Especially if your title is leader, VP, CEO, whatever it is, right? Yeah.
[00:23:58] Willie Pietersen: More important
[00:23:59] Nicole: Yeah. Yeah. I think that is so great that you study philosophy.
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[00:24:29] Nicole: I gotta tell you, I got turned on to philosophy about 15 years ago by this woman and I'm going to tell everybody her book. Her name's Marietta McCarty and she has a book that is called How Philosophy Can Save Your Life. And I was like, Oh, that's an interesting title. And then she has 10 ideas that matter most. But what's so beautiful about her book, Willie, is that she has like a modern day philosopher talk on the subject. And then she has like an ancient philosopher talk on the same subject. And then she has art and music you can look at. I mean, she just pulls all these things together in such a beautiful way. And she was a keynote speaker. I was a speaker at the conference and she was another keynote speaker and I was just in awe of her. So, I think people think, philosophy is not for me. It's for everybody.
[00:25:23] Willie Pietersen: It is. It really helps us think more clearly. That's really what philosophy does. Confronts the big questions in life, and doesn't really prescribe the answers, but leads you to them through a thinking process. That's what I like. And this is the Margaret Wheatley quote that guides my thinking as well, "You cannot change a living thing from the outside. You can only disturb it so that it changes itself." Now, what I've found with philosophy, astrophysics, and evolutionary science, that these are disturbances, if you like, that help me change myself as needed, certainly my thinking.
[00:26:02] Nicole: Yeah. That's so good. I'm going to put that in my pocket and take it to every training room because people think that the training that I'm going to do with that human is going to change that human. But it's like, No, I'm just putting them in the room just like you put students in the classroom. I present the information. They got to go do their homework. And you have a thing and I skipped past it, but you said something about you have to learn it, you have to apply it, all those other three parts have to be in there for people to actually experience internal change, yes?
[00:26:32] Willie Pietersen: Yes. You know, as you think about learning and its challenges,
[00:26:35] Nicole: Yeah.
[00:26:36] Willie Pietersen: There was a psychologist called Hermann Ebbinghaus who studied memory in the last century. And he was stunned from his research when he found that our dominant capability is not remembering, it's forgetting. And I'm speaking here from memory a little bit, don't hold me to the exact numbers, but after 30 minutes, something like 20 percent of what you've read or learned has already vanished.
[00:27:01] Nicole: Right.
[00:27:02] Willie Pietersen: After 30 days, it's 80 percent or 90, I think it is, that's gone... in the absence of antidotes. This is what I really like about him. Here's a problem, here's a solution. So he confronts us with this problem. To say, well, you want to be a learner? I'm telling you that you're going to lose 90 percent of what you learned after 30 days in the absence of applying the antidotes. Well, I'm interested in the antidotes now. And the antidotes, he says, first of all, write down in real time what you're learning. Secondly, review what you've learned regularly. Keep a learning journal, not writing down in scraps of paper that you lose. So retrieve it regularly. Apply them and apply them in practice. And learn from, you know, action learning. Now I add a fourth one in my seminars. I say to people, what you do after this, and you schedule it when you get back to the office, within the next 30 days. Take your team on a retreat and teach them what you've learned. Why do you do that? A, you're not just going there as an island of learning, having learned new things. Your job is to make everybody else perform better. That's a leadership job. Teach them what you've learned. And you'll deepen your own learning when you teach others. It's the most powerful way on earth ever invented. To learn is to teach. So for me, antidotes and I've kept a learning journal since I was 16 years old.
[00:28:28] Nicole: Wow. I want to read it. You should publish that. Yeah.
[00:28:35] Willie Pietersen: I don't know. I'll go back to some of the things I wrote when I was in my first CEO job in my mid thirties, I was at the time. And I sometimes smile at myself at what seems very naive now, but at the time felt
[00:28:49] Nicole: Revolutionary. Yeah.
[00:28:51] Willie Pietersen: Exactly. And so you build on that learning over time. And I think it's a very important thing to keep a learning journal.
[00:28:58] So, these are all things, if we want to be effective learners, we have to have some practical processes that help us do it more effectively, and that we get our organization to do the same.
[00:29:09] Nicole: Yeah. That's so good. Well, you were saying I was a little bit naive when I was 30 and then you said a minute ago, philosophy helps us to learn how to think. And then you've got this chapter in here, Barriers to Truth: discovering and overcoming our hidden biases. So we have what my daddy would call, Willie, stinking thinking sometimes. Like, we don't know how bad it is, you know? And you've got a quote in here. "We don't see the world as it is. We see it as we are." Anaïs Nin. Yeah. So will you talk a little bit about confirmation bias and how biases can mess up a leader in a culture.
[00:29:45] Willie Pietersen: Yeah, well, the world is complex.
[00:29:47] Nicole: Yup.
[00:29:48] Willie Pietersen: And we have to make very big decisions in the face of complexity and uncertainty. And critical thinking becomes crucial in our endeavors to do that. So, these processes that we develop to create a strategy have a kind of a hidden assumption that's false. And that hidden assumption is that we're all capable of totally objective thinking. No human being on Earth is capable of total objectivity. None.
[00:30:15] Nicole: Right. Notice the emphasis people.
[00:30:17] Willie Pietersen: Yeah. We're not wired that way. We're wired with impulses and urges and emotions. Now, if you're walking along a pathway, and you hear a rustle in the bushes, you're gonna jump out of the way. And then you look over your shoulder, and you see it was a rabbit, and you feel a bit embarrassed for yourself. I hope nobody else has watched you do this. But next time, you do the same thing, and you hear a rustle you'll jump again, in case it's a tiger or something. So, there's just you know these impulses. Now, so I think again, what matters most here is to be aware of our biases. If we're not aware of them, we can't counteract them. The biggest bias of all, I think, is the bias that we, we harbor very often that we think everybody else is biased, except us. I mean, that's the way that political parties work. They're biased. We're objective. Nonsense. We're both biased. Okay? All right. Only thing we can do, again, it comes back to humility, Is become aware of our own biases and these tendencies we all share. Now, I highlight four and just briefly I'll tell you what they are.
[00:31:27] Nicole: Yeah, do that.
[00:31:29] Willie Pietersen: Confirmation bias. It's the tendency we all share to come to an issue with a preconceived idea of what's true and then selectively look for evidence to confirm what we already believe, which is very satisfying, and reject any evidence that contradicts our existing beliefs. We argue backwards from what we believe, and then we rationalize our way back forwards again. And this is a very common bias. Some people think that, for example, flying is dangerous. Now, if you look at the statistics, American carriers in the last 15 years have carried 8 billion passengers without a single fatality.
[00:32:08] Nicole: Yeah, isn't that great
[00:32:08] Willie Pietersen: The And in the same period of time, 500,000 people have been killed in car accidents, but people will still say, there's a crash in the jungle somewhere in a remote area and a kind of a private plane "you see, flying is dangerous!"
[00:32:24] So, we're always looking for that confirmation. We weren't born yesterday, as the saying goes. We've developed a world view by the time we're adults. And we try to kind of justify our world view. So that's the confirmation bias.
[00:32:39] The second bias that's very strong is the status quo bias. That's extremely powerful because we seek comfort. And we get control from the step from the current status. And change is filled with uncertainty and we're anxious about loss of control and I tell the story in my book of Kodak. It was an icon in the photographic market, cameras and film, 85 percent of the camera market, 90 percent of the film market, fifth most valuable brand in the world, but it went broke against, you know, if somebody had told me that in the year 2000, I would have said, you're nuts. Kodak's not going to go broke. It's a complete icon, a great cash machine. Well, it went broke because it was overtaken by digital photography. Now, the alarming part of this story is that Kodak invented digital photography itself. Kodak did as a pioneer of digital photography, an engineer called Mike Sasson, and he invented it, and he was very excited. He presented it at the leadership team, and they didn't like the idea because it would cannibalize their existing business. So they began to reason their way out of it, and he said, I think this is the future, and they said, no, but not if you don't tell anybody, And he gave an interview to the New York Times, so I can quote what what they told him, they said, "Mike, that's a cute idea, but don't tell anybody." He didn't tell anybody, and they went broke, now that's a true story. It's not as if Kodak was filled with stupid people who were complete bigots every day, went home and kicked the dog. They were just normal people. They tried to hire the most intelligent and competent people they could find.
[00:34:27] Nicole: Right.
[00:34:28] Willie Pietersen: It just demonstrates how we're all subject to this status quo bias.
[00:34:32] Then there's denial. When we really don't like something, our tendency is to wish it away.
[00:34:40] Nicole: Right, that doesn't really exist.
[00:34:45] Willie Pietersen: I don't even like going to the dentist. So if I got a toothache, I say, it'll go away by itself. Well, of course it doesn't, right? And it gets worse over time. Now, an example of this is climate change. It's a highly charged issue, I know, politically. Uh, but there's the scientific finding that yes, there are some uncertainties, but one thing we do know is that it's very, very probable, a high level of probability of a risk that we'll reach a point of no return and a catastrophic set of results unless we take countervailing actions.
[00:35:20] Now, the politicians don't like the short term prescriptions to deal with it because they're costly, they turn our lives upside down, and so they're inconvenient. So, what they often do, in the face of all the science, is they don't like the cure, so they deny the disease. And, you know, in the face of this probability and risk, I simply say, oh, it's a hoax. Now, when you've got a major risk, it's not a binary issue of, yes, it'll happen, no, it won't happen. For example, we all have fire insurance for our homes. Now, it's stupid to say, well, a fire will never happen. It's also stupid to say, yes, it will happen for sure. We don't know. So it's risk mitigation
[00:36:04] Nicole: Right.
[00:36:04] Willie Pietersen: It's the answer to something like that.
[00:36:06] And, that seems to be an obvious response in decision making. That's what we do in a business where we're confronted with a major risk. Even if the risk is small, the occurrence of the risk would be devastating. We'll always take remedial action. There's risk mitigation. But this seems to be just flat out, "well, no, let's just deny it." I find it astonishing.
[00:36:28] Nicole: Me too.
[00:36:30] Willie Pietersen: So hard to understand, but there it is. Human psychology.
[00:36:34] And the final one that shows up regularly is siloed thinking. Organizations are divided into functions for a very important reason. We need a set of deep skills in various areas in order for us to succeed, provided they act in combination. If they act like separate tribes within an organization, that's not a recipe for success. But they become tribal and hard walled, and if we're not careful, before long, just like a sports team with the players playing for themselves, rather than to a common game plan, the organization begins to fail. And it always shows up externally, customers are looking for an integrated solution of something. And when you hear the story of a service provider saying, "I can't help you. That's not my job." Well, there you are. That's what silos do.
[00:37:24] Nicole: Yeah. And I think that that is something that you need to take a look at. I've got a list, everybody. I think, Willie, I've got this list of biases. I think it's 52 biases long. There's so many, but if you just got those four under your hat and you got your head wrapped around those four. But when I first started putting together those biases and why did I do that was because I coached so many people. And so I would sit there and I'd listen to somebody. I'm like, what is that? Why is that? What is that person? How is he putting that together in his head? Because I can see a different way, but he cannot, or she cannot, and so you go out and you research it, so I think that's fantastic. All right.
[00:38:04] Willie Pietersen: Well, by the way, talking about business books, I don't want to talk, I'm not sure we can call this a business book, but Daniel Kahneman's wonderful book, Thinking Fast and Slow?
[00:38:14] Nicole: Oh my
[00:38:15] Willie Pietersen: That's a great survey of all of these various biases with great examples, et cetera, for us to understand them. I now start every seminar, strategy seminar. By developing a discussion about these biases to make them conscious so that people are aware of their biases, and I try and make it fun as well. Then you give, monitor your own thinking when you're aware of them. If you're not aware of them, you cannot really monitor your own thinking, and you can call out the team when it goes off the track, so to speak, in terms of rational thinking.
[00:38:49] Nicole: Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. And there's another book that I love and see if I can pull it up in my head. I put the ones I love right here. Roger Schwarz' book. He is a professor at UNC Chapel Hill. And he talks about mutual learning and unilateral thinking as being opposites. And so he's got this whole thing about assumptions, you know, at the heart of a bias is an assumption, right? Roger Schwarz, Smarter Thinking, Smarter Teams. That's the name of it. I finally got it. So not having the biases. And guess what? See all the books behind Willie, everybody in his background? My whole office is just lined with books. And so here's what Willie will agree with me on. We didn't even talk before the show. Leaders read, they have to read!
[00:39:37] Willie Pietersen: Yes, you can't just sit down and say, "I'm really curious."
[00:39:41] Nicole: Right?
[00:39:41] Willie Pietersen: They need to explore and say, well, now I've satisfied my curiosity. And there's always this feeling that we know a small fragment of what there is to be known.
[00:39:51] Nicole: Right.
[00:39:52] Willie Pietersen: So we keep pushing at the boundaries, but I think the understanding here, Nicole, is that leadership in all of its settings, parenting, organizational leadership, or whatever it may be, is a multidisciplinary activity. And so we need to think more broadly if you want to be a good parent, fine, read some books about parenting, but just go broader than that. I mean, when we come home from the office, we come into our families and then we have to be leaders. We might be frazzled and exhausted and impatient, et cetera. But, be conscious of the fact that you're acting as a leader in that setting when you've got young people who are watching you and you're guiding them.
[00:40:32] Nicole: Yeah, that's so good. That's so good. All right. Oh my goodness. It is almost at the end of our hour. I'm just so sad, but I want to ask you about one more thing. It's chapter five. It's page 59. You have, Asking the Right Questions: The Leader's Secret Weapon. So I got to tell you, Willie, when I got my coaching certificate back in 2007, they taught me about this idea of asking a powerful question, and it blew my mind. I thought, I have been asking yes or no, terrible, long winded, double layered questions my whole life. Uh, it's just terrible. And then you have this quote in here from Albert Einstein, "If I had 60 minutes to solve a problem, I would spend the first 55 minutes defining the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution." That is the opening quote when I teach Powerful Questions to leaders. I adore this chapter. So let's finish with that. Talk a little bit about asking the right questions. Why this is so terribly important because I couldn't agree more.
[00:41:32] Willie Pietersen: Asking the right questions is hard, because framing is everything that leads to a good solution. It's kind of like an input output model of decision making. And if the input is poor, the output is poor, right? So, everything we know in science or in general knowledge comes from a question somebody asked. It doesn't just pop out of the blue sky. I've got a list. Of the questions Charles Darwin asked himself at the outset of his voyage on the Beagle that led to his wonderful book, Origin of the Species, in 1859. It was the answer to a set of specific questions. It wasn't just, "I think I'll write a book. I think those birds' beaks are rather interesting. Let me write a book." He posed the questions, and his book answered the questions. That was very striking to me. I think as leaders, again, with very tough decisions to make, in conditions of a lot of uncertainty and radical change and disruption, good decisions come from framing great questions.
[00:42:35] Now, I mean, there are a number of examples of this. How do we ask good questions? They need to be invitations. Not weapons, where we try to trap people exposing their ignorance and so on. Well, did you think of measuring our return on assets when you produced this proposal? So, well, well, well, now it's a weapon. Now all people are doing is ducking for cover, right?
[00:42:57] Nicole: Right.
[00:42:57] Willie Pietersen: We questions are much better to say, what more can we think of here that would enlighten us to make a great decision? Should we perhaps explore or turn on assets and say, Oh, that's a good idea. And maybe also this one and you build on it. So there's an art to asking the right questions that are invitations and not weapons.
[00:43:16] People are not threatened by them. They're invitations to learn, as what James Joyce called our portals of discovery. I've got this example that I found, one of the most dramatic examples that I've come across of asking the right questions that changed history. And this is the American Revolution of 1776. At the time there were 13 separate British colonies in the U.S., and now, of course, 50 states in a republic. And they decided to band together in a war of independence against their British masters. George Washington was asked to be the commander, pulling together these disparate forces. They had their own militias, they never even had the same uniforms, they'd never trained together before. And now they were fighting against the most formidable fighting force in the world at the time, the British military. And not surprisingly, in the early stages of the war they were in retreat and they were losing rather badly. They were in a very negative momentum and they realized that need to be a turnaround.
[00:44:19] So George Washington, according to the journals that were kept at the time, a guy, a historian called David McCullough, who's no longer alive, but told the story very vividly. Or what happened on that fateful night where he sat his senior officers around in a circle and said, okay, we need to take stock. We're losing rather badly. If this continues, this war is going to be over in short order and, uh, we need to turn things around. So the question I want to ask you is how can we defeat the British? And the discussion went to and fro, a lot of proposals came up, suggestions, some of them very creative.
[00:44:56] They were examined critically and each one of them was found to be totally impractical. The formidable resources of the British Army.
[00:45:05] Nicole: Mm.
[00:45:07] Willie Pietersen: It looked very depressing. But after all of this intellectual sparring and examination, an officer said, I think we're asking the wrong question. There's no good answer to the question of how can we defeat the British. We can't. The right question is how can we avoid losing? Now that question won the war literally because it led to an innovative new strategy of commando raids, taking the British columns by surprise, quickly withdrawing without taking losses, doing it repeatedly over time with the theory that the British would get exhausted by it and would go home and it worked with the help of the French in the final push. Literally true. That was the question that won a war and it's for me a very vivid illustration. They could have just collapsed this whole thing and said, well, there's no good answer. We might as well capitulate.
[00:46:05] Nicole: Right.
[00:46:05] Willie Pietersen: That would have had a very different outcome, but the right question moved the needle.
[00:46:10] Nicole: Yeah. Oh, that's so good. That's so good. And I'll just tell you on page 74 he's got seven important questions we seldom ask before making a decision. So I think that those are money right there on page 74. And Willie, our time is up and we've only gotten to chapter five. Maybe you'll come back and hang out with me another time? Do you want to come hang out with me this summer sometime? We'll do phase two, what do you think?
[00:46:35] Willie Pietersen: Absolutely. It'd be a pleasure.
[00:46:36] Nicole: Okay. All right. Well, everybody, we just spent an hour with Willie Peterson, Leadership, The Inside Story: Time Tested Prescriptions for Those Who Seek to Lead. I think you are just great to listen to. So I know everybody's going to love this episode.
[00:46:53] We've got all of his social media down here in the show notes. So please go down there, click, like him, find him on LinkedIn, all the good things. And then of course, buy the book. It will really be good for your shelf and take a look at, if you go on the YouTube, look at Willie's book shelf. That's what your bookshelf should look like. Fill it up with good things.
[00:47:14] You know, people are probably thinking, give me one more nugget, one more Willie Nugget. What nugget would you leave us with? One final thing. What, what would be our willy nugget for the day?
[00:47:24] Willie Pietersen: There's an ultimate nugget. I just tell you this. I'm no longer a young person, right? And I'm still working full time as a professor at Columbia.
[00:47:34] Nicole: Nice.
[00:47:35] Willie Pietersen: And I've developed a credo of sorts. I don't know if it's helpful to others.
[00:47:40] Nicole: We want it.
[00:47:41] Willie Pietersen: So it's got three elements to it. One, never retire. Two, never stop learning. And three, lead life at a reasonable pace. That's how I try to govern my life at this fourth quarter of life, and that's what drives me forward.
[00:48:01] Nicole: I absolutely love it. All right, everybody write that down in your learning journal that you're going to start today with this podcast. Okay. You might not be 16, you might be 66, you might be 26, you might be 46. What you need to do is get your learning journal going. Okay, here do Willie and I a favor, go down to the bottom, click the like and leave a little love note for me and Willie that you enjoyed this podcast. Willie Peterson, it has been such a pleasure to have you. And I am serious. I'm calling you. We'll set up something for the summer. We'll do the last half of the book. Good?
[00:48:32] Willie Pietersen: Terrific. Thank you so much, Nicole, you really are stimulating in the questions that you ask.
[00:48:38] Nicole: Oh, it's the book. I just try to give everybody the cliff notes on the book. That's what I'm trying to do because I want to give the listeners great content and you delivered today. Thank you so much.
[00:48:49] Willie Pietersen: My pleasure. Be well
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