فصل 18

PART VI

THE WELL-FOCUSED LEADER

18

HOW LEADERS DIRECT ATTENTION

Death by PowerPoint” refers to those endless, meandering presentations that this software tool seems to encourage. Those presentations can be painful when they reflect a lack of focused thinking, and a poor sense of what matters. One sign of the ability to pinpoint what’s salient is how someone answers the simple question, What’s your main point? When a meeting is coming up, I hear, Steve Balmer, CEO at Microsoft (birthplace of the dread PowerPoint), bans such presentations. Instead he asks to see the material beforehand so that when he’s face-to-face he can cut to the chase and ask the questions that matter most right off the bat, rather than taking a long, winding road to get there. As he says, “It gives us greater focus.”1 Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership. Talent here lies in the ability to shift attention to the right place at the right time, sensing trends and emerging realities and seizing opportunities. But it’s not just the focus of a single strategic decision-maker that makes or breaks a company: it’s the entire array of attention bandwidth and dexterity among everyone.2 Sheer numbers of people make an organization’s cumulative attention far more distributable than an individual’s, with a division of labor in who pays attention to what. This multiple focus powers an organization’s attention capacity for reading and responding to complex systems. Attention in organizations, as with individuals, has a limited capacity. Organizations, too, have to choose where to allocate attention, focusing on this while ignoring that. An organization’s core functions—finance, marketing, human resources, and the like—describe how a particular group focuses. Signs of what might be called organizational “attention deficit disorder” include making flawed decisions because of missing data, no time for reflection, trouble getting attention in the marketplace, and inability to focus when and where it matters. Take getting noticed in the marketplace, where customers’ focus is hard currency. The bar for attracting attention rises continually; what was dazzling last month seems boring today. While one strategy for grabbing eyeballs tweaks our bottom-up systems with surprising, attention-compelling tech effects, there’s been a renaissance in an older method: telling a good story.3 Stories do more than grab our attention: they keep it. This is a lesson not lost in the “attention industries” like media, TV, film, music, and advertising—all of which play a zero-sum game for our attention, where one’s victory is the other’s loss. Attention tends to focus on what has meaning—what matters. The story a leader tells can imbue a particular focus with such resonance, and so implies a choice for the others on where to put their attention and energy.4 Leadership itself hinges on effectively capturing and directing the collective attention. Leading attention requires these elements: first, focusing your own attention, then attracting and directing attention from others, and getting and keeping the attention of employees and peers, of customers or clients. A well-focused leader can balance an inner focus on the climate and culture with an “other focus” on the competitive landscape, and an outer focus on the larger realities that shape the environment the outfit operates in. A leader’s field of attention—that is, the particular issues and goals she focuses on—guides the attention of those who follow her, whether or not the leader explicitly articulates it. People make their choices about where to focus based on their perception of what matters to leaders. This ripple effect gives leaders an extra load of responsibility: they are guiding not just their own attention but, to a large extent, everyone else’s.5 Take, as a case in point, strategy. An organization’s strategy represents the desired pattern of organizational attention, what every unit should share a degree of focus on, each in its particular way.6 A given strategy makes choices about what to ignore and what matters: Market share or profit? Current competitors or potential ones? Which new technologies? When leaders choose strategy, they are guiding attention. WHERE DOES STRATEGY COME FROM?

Kobun Chino, a master of kyudo, Zen archery, was once invited to demonstrate his skills at Esalen Institute, the famed adult learning center in Big Sur, California, just down the road from the San Francisco Zen Center’s Tassajara retreat. Comes the day and someone sets up an archery target on a grassy knoll atop a tall cliff at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Chino positions himself a good distance away from the target, places his feet in the traditional archer’s stance, straightens his back, very slowly draws the bow, waits a while, and then lets the arrow fly. The arrow zooms far over the target, arcs against the open sky, and falls into the Pacific Ocean far below. Everyone watching is aghast. Then Kobun Chino shouts with glee, “Bull’s-eye!” “Genius,” Arthur Schopenhauer observed, “hits the target others do not see.” Kobun Chino was the Zen teacher of Apple Computer’s legendary CEO, the late Steve Jobs. Among unseen targets Jobs hit was the then-radical concept of a computer that anyone could understand and use with ease, not just geeks—an idea that had somehow eluded every computer company of the day. After creating the first Apple desktop he and his team transferred that user-friendly vision to the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, each a handy product that we hadn’t realized we needed—or imagined in the first place—until we saw it. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, after having been ousted in 1984, he found a company with a sea of products—computers, peripheral products for computers, twelve different types of Macintosh. The company was floundering. His strategy was simple: focus. Instead of dozens of products, Apple would concentrate on just four: one computer and one laptop each for two markets, consumer and professional. Just as in his Zen practice, where recognizing you’ve become distracted helps you concentrate, he saw that “[deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”7 Jobs was relentless in filtering out what he considered irrelevancies, both personally and in his professionl life. But he knew that in order to simplify effectively you need to understand the complexity that you are reducing. A single decision to simplify, like Jobs’s dictum that Apple products allow a user to do anything in three clicks or less, demanded a deep understanding of the function of the commands and buttons being given up, and finding elegant alternatives. More than a century before Apple existed, another radical vision made the Singer sewing machine an enormous commercial success worldwide. The disruptive assumption was that housewives could operate a mechanical contraption—a radical thought in the nineteenth century, long before women in the United States won the right to vote. And Singer made it easy for women to buy the machines by extending them credit, another innovative move. In 1876 alone, Singer sold 262,316 machines, an enormous number in those days. One of its founders built the Dakota, a landmark Manhattan apartment building where luminaries like Yoko Ono and John Lennon have lived. In 1908, the brand-new forty-seven-story company headquarters, the Singer building, was the world’s tallest. My mother, who was born in 1910 (and passed away two months short of her hundredth birthday), owned a Singer from her teen years. I can remember as a child going with her to the local pattern store; women of her era routinely made many of their own and their family’s clothes. But by the time I arrived—her late-in-life third child—she bought my clothes. Culture shifts like housewives taking to sewing machines—and then later buying their family ready-made clothes, which then were increasingly made by cheap labor abroad—constantly open possibilities: new groups of customers, ways to buy, evolving needs, technologies, distribution channels, or information systems. Every advance opens doors to a host of potential winning strategies. Apple and Singer left fresh footprints in the snow that their competitors followed in a desperate game of catching up. Today a mini-industry of consultants stands ready to guide companies through a standard playbook of strategic choices. But those off-the-shelf strategies fine-tune an organization’s tactics—they don’t change the game. The original meaning of strategy was from the battlefield; it meant “the art of the leader”—back then, generals. Strategy was how you deployed your resources; tactics were how battles were fought. Today, leaders need to generate strategies that make sense in whatever larger systems they operate in—a task for outer focus. A new strategy means reorienting from what’s now business as usual to a fresh focus. Coming up with a radically innovative strategy demands perceiving a novel position, one your competitors do not see. Winning tactics are available to everyone, yet are overlooked by all but a few. Armies of consultants offer elaborate analytic tools for fine-tuning a strategy. But they stop cold when it comes to answering the big question: Where does a winning strategy come from in the first place? A classic article on strategy makes this offhand remark and leaves it at that: to find winning strategies “requires creativity and insight.”8 Those two ingredients take both inner and outer focus. When Marc Benioff, founder and first CEO of Salesforce, realized the potential for cloud computing, he was monitoring the evolution of a system-changing technology—an outer focus—along with his own gut sense of how a company offering such services would do. Salesforce uses the cloud to help companies manage their customer relationships, and it staked out an early position in this competitive space. The best leaders have systems awareness, helping them answer the constant query, Where should we head and how? The self-mastery and social skills built on self and other focus combine to build the emotional intelligence that drives the human engine needed to get there. A leader needs to check a potential strategic choice against everything she knows. And once the strategic choice gets made, the leader needs to communicate it with passion and skill, drawing on cognitive and emotional empathy. But those personal skills alone will founder if leaders lack strategic wisdom. “If you think in a systems way,” says Larry Brilliant, “that drives how you deal with values, vision, mission, strategy, goals, tactics, deliverables, evaluation, and the feedback loop that restarts the whole process.” THE TELLING DETAIL ON THE HORIZON

By the mid-2000s, the BlackBerry had become the darling of corporate IT. Companies loved that the system ran on its own closed network, reliable, fast, and secure. They handed BlackBerrys out to employees by the thousands, and the word crackberry (for the addiction of users) entered the lexicon. The maker rose to market dominance on four key strengths: ease of typing, excellent security, long battery life, and wireless data compression. For a time the BlackBerry was a winning technology, changing the rules of the game by displacing competitors (in this case, some functions of PCs and laptops, and, entirely, that era’s mobile phones). But even as BlackBerrys dominated the corporate market and were fast becoming a consumer fad, the world was changing. The iPhone ushered in an epoch where more and more workers bought their own brands of smartphones—not necessarily BlackBerrys—and companies adapted by letting employees bring their devices to the company network. Suddenly BlackBerrys’ lock on the corporate market evaporated as they had to compete with everyone else. Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian-based maker of the BlackBerry, was slow to catch up. When RIM introduced a touchscreen, for example, it was no match for those long on the market. BlackBerry’s closed network, once an asset, became a liability in a world where phones themselves—the iPhone, and those based on the Android operating system—had become platforms for their own worlds of apps. RIM was run by co-CEOs who were both engineers, and the brand’s initial success was built on superior engineering. After these co-CEOs were forced out by their board, RIM announced it would once again focus on companies as its prime market, even though most of its growth had come on the consumer side. As Thorsten Heins, the new CEO, put it, RIM had missed major paradigm shifts in its ecological niche. It had ignored the move in the United States to fourth-generation (4G) wireless networks, failing to build devices for 4G even as its competitors seized that market. It underestimated how popular the iPhone’s touchscreen would become, and stuck to the keyboard. “If you have a great touch interface, people are actually willing to sacrifice battery life,” Heins says. “We thought that wouldn’t happen. Same thing with security,” as companies changed their standards to allow workers to join corporate networks with their own smartphones.9 While once the BlackBerry brand had seemed revolutionary, now, as one analyst put it, they “seemed clueless about what customers wanted.”10 Though it continued to lead in markets like Indonesia, just five years after the BlackBerry dominated the American market RIM had lost 75 percent of its market value. As I write this, RIM has announced a last-ditch attempt to recoup market share with a new phone. But RIM may have entered a chapter in a company’s life that could be fatal—a “valley of death.” That phrase comes from Andrew Grove, the legendary founding CEO of Intel, who recounts a near-death moment in his company’s history. In its early years Intel made silicon chips for what was then the fledgling computer industry. As Grove tells it, top managers were oblivious to messages coming from their own sales force telling them that customers were shifting in droves to cheaper chips being made in Japan. If Intel had not happened to have a side business in microprocessors—which became the ubiquitous “Intel Inside” in the heyday of laptops—the company would have died. But back then, Grove admits, Intel suffered from a “strategic dissonance,” in shifting from making memory chips—its first business success—to designing microprocessors. The name of Grove’s book—Only the Paranoid Survive—tacitly nods to the necessity of vigilance, scanning for the telling detail on the horizon. This holds true in particular for the tech sector, where super-short product cycles (compared with, say, refrigerators) make the pace of innovation brutal. The rapid-fire cycle of product innovations in the tech sector makes it a handy source of case studies (somewhat akin to the role that frenetically procreating, short-lived fruit flies play in genetics). In gaming, Nintendo’s remote controller Wii grabbed the market from Sony’s PlayStation 2; Google blew away Yahoo’s supremacy as the favored portal to the Web. Microsoft, which at one point had a 42 percent market share for mobile phone operating systems, saw iPhone earnings mushroom to dwarf the total revenue of Microsoft. Innovations rearrange our sense of what’s possible. When Apple launched the iPod, it took Microsoft four or five years to release Zune, its version of a portable digital media player—and another six years to kill the failed product.11 Microsoft’s fixation on its cash cow, the Windows software family, analysts say, accounts for the company failing to match Apple’s march to market supremacy through the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. As Clay Shirky observes of the failure to disengage focus from comfort zones, “First the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then it’s a niche, then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.”12 THINK DIFFERENT

RIM during its difficult days offers a textbook example of organizational rigidity, where a company that thrives by being the first to market a new technological twist falls behind successive tech waves because its focus fixates on the old new thing, not the next. An organization that focuses inwardly may execute superbly. But if it has not attuned to the larger world in which it operates, that execution may end up in the service of a failed strategy. Any business school course on strategy will tell you about two approaches: exploitation and exploration. Some people—and some businesses like RIM—succeed through a strategy of exploitation, where they refine and learn how to improve an existing capacity, technology, or business model. Others find their road to success through exploration, by experimenting with innovative alternatives to what they do now. Companies with a winning strategy tend to refine their current operations and offerings, not explore radical shifts in what they offer. A mental balancing act—exploring the new while exploiting what’s working—does not come naturally. But those companies that can both exploit and explore—as Samsung has done with smartphones—are “ambidextrous”: they separate each strategy into units, with very different ways of operating and cultures. At the same time they have a tight-knit team of senior leaders who keep an eye on the balance of inner, outer, and other focus.13 What works at the organizational level parallels the individual mind. The mind’s executive, the arbiter of where our focus goes, manages both the concentration that exploitation requires and the open focus that exploration demands. Exploration means we disengage from a current focus to spossibilities, and allows flexibility, discovery, and innovation. Exploitation takes sustained focus on what you’re already doing, so you can refine efficiencies and improve performance. Those who exploit can find a safer path to profits, while those who explore can potentially find a far greater success in the next new thing—though the risks of failure are greater, and the horizon of payback is further away. Exploitation is the tortoise, exploration the hare. The tension between these two operates in every decision-maker’s mind. Do you stay with the battery technology your company has been getting better and better at making pay? Or do you pursue, say, R&D on a new energy storage technique that could make batteries obsolete (or not)? These are the hands-on strategic decisions that make or break a company, as Stanford’s strategy theory maven, James March, has been arguing for years.14 The best decision-makers are ambidextrous in their balance of the two, knowing when to switch from one to the other. They can lead switch-hitting organizations, which are, for instance, good at seeking growth by simultaneously innovating and containing costs—two very different operations. Kodak was superb at analog photography but stumbled in the new competitive reality of digital cameras. Danger here abounds during a business downturn, when companies understandably focus on surviving and meeting their numbers by cutting costs—but often at the expense of caring for their people or keeping up with how the world has changed. Being in survival mode narrows our focus. But prospering is no guarantee of ambidexterity, either. That switch can be hardest for those caught in what Intel’s Grove calls the “success trap.” He observes that every company will face a point when it will have to change dramatically to survive, let alone raise its performance. “Miss the moment,” he warns, “and you start to decline.” For too long, Grove says, Intel still had its best development people working on memory chips—even as the company’s survival had begun to depend on microprocessors, which over the next decade were to become a huge growth engine. Intel was having trouble unsticking from exploitation to exploration. Apple’s slogan “Think different” dictates a switch to exploration. Moving into new territory rather than hunkering down to increase efficiency is more than a contrast in stances—at the level of the brain the two represent entirely different mental functions and neural mechanisms. Attention control holds the key for decision-makers needing to make the switch. Brain scans of sixty-three seasoned business decision-makers as they pursued either exploitive or exploratory strategies in a simulation game—or switched between the two—revealed the specific circuitry underlying each kind of focus.15 Exploitation was accompanied by activity in the brain’s circuitry for anticipation and for reward—it feels good to coast along in a profitable, familiar routine. But exploration mobilized activity in the brain’s executive centers and those for controlling attention; searching for alternatives to a current strategy, it seems, demands intentional focus. The first movement to new territory entails disengaging from pleasing routine and fighting the inertia of ruts; this small act of attention demands what neuroscience calls “cognitive effort.” That effortful dab of executive control frees attention to roam widely and pursue fresh paths. What keeps people from making this small neural effort? For one, mental overload, stress, and sleep deprivation (not to mention drinking) deplete the executive circuitry needed to make such a cognitive switch, keeping us in our mental ruts. And the stress of overload, sleeplessness, and turning to substances that calm you down are all too prevalent among those in high-demand jobs.