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"The most significant gift our species brings to the world is our capacity to think. The most significant danger our species brings to the world is our inability to think with those who think differently. It is clear that to stay competitive in our global economy, we must learn how to think collaboratively and innovatively. But if you have ever sat through a mind-numbing meeting or tried to influence a colleague's view on a project or had a recurring argument with a family member or struggled to participate in a community project, you have recognized that most of us actually don't know how to think well together.
We take for granted that intelligence occurs within our own minds. We don't realize that it also occurs between us. What keeps us from tapping into that intelligence and communicating effectively is that most of us don't know how to think with people who think differently than we do. We habitually misread people and therefore miscommunicate with them."
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"All disruption starts with introspection. Self-disruption is akin to undergoing major surgery, but you are the one holding the scalpel. Most people avoid this painful process because they are not willing to risk what they have built for the opportunity to have something better. When I travel the world speaking at conferences, I ask people one key question: Are you really living life or just paying bills until you die? To thrive in this era of endless innovation, we all need a better understanding of our own internal value chains—how we view ourselves and how we interpret our personal strengths—is at the core of all external success.
I have applied these insights to raising over $800 million for startup companies as well as launching new businesses in billion-dollar industries as diverse as telecommunications, music, and ecommerce. I didn't go to the right schools or know the right people, but I did learn how to disrupt my own belief systems to be able to reposition myself to take advantage of new opportunities and achieve success. And I've been able to do it again and again—achieving resilience and security in an oftentimes unstable business landscape by disrupting myself."
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"To change behaviors in organizations, reorient to a different set of problems. Discussions of behavioral change fall prey to viewing things on a distinctly individualistic level, or through the traditional lenses of systems, structures and processes. Yet this isn't how people really work. Continually, leaders fail to recognize that organizations are dynamic social systems with webs of expectations occurring on a very local level. As a result of this failure, corporations are condemned to a merry-go-round of ineffective change initiatives.
While policies, systems and processes change, people's expectations of one another don't. These day-to-day, unwritten expectations tend to be much stronger drivers of what actually gets done in organizations. This web of implicit expectations and ways of working conspires against organizational evolution."
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"Imagine for a minute, a workplace where everyone is aligned with business objectives; where everyone understands the value they contribute; an environment where people actively seek to build mutually beneficial relationships across the organization. In other words, a workplace of politically savvy individuals.
If we define leadership as 'the process of social influence in which a person can enlist the support and aid of others in the accomplishment of a common task' as defined by the author in this Forbes article, then political savvy is most definitely a leadership skill. A fresh mindset about political savvy then replaces the self-serving and manipulative attitude that prevents talented employees from collaborating. With this new perspective, an active engagement in relationship building and a focus on understanding the most effective way to get things done becomes a positive force in the workplace."
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"What I urgently want you to understand is that we're entering an era in which the skills that make you valuable are not only changing—they comprise a fundamentally different kind of skills from those that have made people economically valuable up to now. As the economy is transformed, some people will do great, and plenty of others will suffer. The winners will be those who conceive of skills and value in a fundamentally new way, different from what we're used to."
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