Experience can be a great source of learning of course. It can certainly save a lot of time as we fit current problems into the learned categories from the past. Unfortunately, it can also waste time and cause disaster if we categorize prematurely and erroneously. Richard Nixon was regarded as one of the most effective managers (if not leader) among modern U.S. presidents. Friends and enemies alike, however, wondered at the bungling of the Watergate episode that led to his resignation in 1973.
He seemed so cool and rational with respect to foreign policy, but he was inept and emotional in dealing with his biggest domestic crisis. Perhaps Nixon simply categorized it improperly. He seemed to perceive Watergate as a political matter, not as an important national moral issue. He believed that after some temporary flack the hubbub would die down as people lost interest. The "political" cue mentally filed the problem into a slot that activated an inappropriate and inadequate response. Nixon was incapable of seeing Watergate deeply and uniquely until it was too late. You have heard of people who have worked for twenty years, but don't have twenty years' experience; they merely repeated the first year twenty times. Such people may treat a new problem as if it were like past ones, but in fact it is new and unique. Keeping alive this ability to perceive deeply requires frequent exercise. This means building into our daily life regular repetition of the process of letting go of the known and confronting the unknown-change for the hell of it. This doesn't require quitting your job, divorcing your spouse, and moving to Hawaii. Rather it means frequent small encounters with threatening changes. Here are some tactics.
After-action memos: The police and military generally require formal reports after significant actions. Since these reports become part of a permanent record, all too often they become somewhat fanciful or sanitized versions of reality. Nonetheless, writing a short "for my eyes only" memo after major projects or annual cycles like budget preparation or performance reviews can be a helpful device for avoiding making the same mistakes over and over. This is not a "cover-your-ass" memo but simply a note to yourself that can be filed with its predecessors.
Filed away, but not forgotten. Perhaps annually (1 found the first couple of summer vacation days particularly appropriate), peruse your memo file for patterns. Is there some communication habit you could change? Some routine but major task that you could handle differently. For example, while in process on major projects, I often under communicate upward. I simply haven't kept superiors adequately informed so they had to deal with their own anxieties while awaiting my results (as good as they should have known they would be).
This kind of behavioral pattern might emerge from your after-action files and be a candidate for the following innovation objective.
Innovation objectives: Every three to six months you might focus on one major aspect of your job and put it on trial for its life. Could it be eliminated? Could it simply be ignored until someone complains? Or could you experiment with changing it? In applying this tactic to my own work, for example, the task that jumped out at me was grading. After fifteen years as a teacher, I was experiencing increasing difficulty in evaluating student papers. I found myself giving no Fs or Ds and almost no Cs. Everyone was getting a B or an A. Had I become too lax? Had I been corrupted by the grading inflation that has affected schools everywhere? Did I court student popularity so avidly that I wanted everyone to be happy? Or was I such an outstanding teacher that all my students were able to master the material?
I would have liked to answer the last question in the affirmative, but I needed to probe deeper. What could I change? Perhaps I could give no tests or require no papers (sure to be popular with students, but a cop-out of a teacher's responsibility). Or perhaps I could delegate all grading to a graduate student assistant who could deal with unhappy students (tempting, but likewise irresponsible in my opinion). Or, perhaps I could change my testing format. Because I believe that life is an open book rather than a closed-book examination, I give only take-home cases and essay questions which require students to write fairly lengthy reports (which are of course easier to read than scribbled in-class quizzes). But grading such reports is quite subjective. It is often difficult to defend my judgment when an ambitious student complains. Perhaps I could change my method. Other professors use a more objective true-false or multiple-choice format. Such tests are easier to grade and seem to provide more defensible numbers as grades.
This specific example of my personal grading problem is obviously not important to most readers (and will not elicit your sympathy I'm sure), but the point is that we all have central aspects of our jobs in which we experience difficulty. I once asked a group of managers at one of the world's best-managed firms, Johnson and Johnson, what activity they found most difficult, so much so that it was the number one thing on which they procrastinated. Their most common reply was giving a negative performance evaluation, particularly to a subordinate older in age than the evaluating manager. They want to avoid an unpleasant confrontation, or they don't believe the older person will change anyway, or they are not confident of their performance criteria. What they might do is focus on one or two older, unsatisfactory subordinates for a few months, experimenting with changing the mode of performance feedback. Perhaps they could write a memo to themselves every time they observe the subordinate in action. Then they could schedule time every week to discuss these observations while they are fresh rather than letting unrecorded impressions pile up until a fruitless annual interview ritual. The new approach may or may not work, but the very action of confronting a difficult new behavior will help preserve your vitality.
Growth objectives: Most creative ideas don't spring fully defined from the creator's mind like Botticelli's Venus springing from the sea. Rather, most creativity is borrowing something from one context and applying it to another. So more creative people tend to have wider and more random interests outside their specialization.36 Quarterly, semiannual, or annual personal growth objectives are intended to encourage you to focus on a new field or activity-learning how to play the piano at age thirty-five; studying Spanish at age forty; starting to paint at fifty. All can be vehicles for keeping alive your ability to perceive uniquely.
I had been painting pictures with oil paints for many years when I decided to try watercolors. What to the uninitiated appears as a trivial shift, however, turned out to require very different observational skills. Oil painting for me is a spontaneous medium in which errors are easy to correct by simply painting over the offending portion. The smell and feel of the semi-solid paint is very physical. Water painting turned out to be entirely different. It is so planned and intellectual. Where you don't paint the whites is much of the finished picture. And errors cannot be covered up! The paint is too transparent. Consequently, the entire painting must be planned in advance in great detail so the scene being painted must be studied much more deeply than when oil painting. It is precisely this intense study that is the purpose of periodic personal growth objectives that involve modest but repeated confrontations with the unknown. In these encounters it is less important that you actually master the new than that you give it a good effort.
Maintenance objectives: The final periodic target is what improvement you might make in your diet, physical activity, or recreation. What can you do at the most personal level to improve your well-being? As the founder of my university, Benjamin Franklin, told us long ago, mastering your own eating, exercise, and play habits can provide a tonic to your total life situation. Being in control of yourself in mid-life will spill over onto the job and improve your taskmastery and flexibility.
My own first application of this maintenance objective led to the virtual elimination of soft drinks from my diet. Long a cola freak (since I didn't drink coffee, I had to find something containing caffeine to keep me awake in college and the Navy), I consumed more than six cans a day. Since 1 hated the taste of sugar substitutes, that is a lot of refined sugar. The reduced sugar intake was desirable and the twenty-pound weight loss rewarding, but even more beneficial was the verification that I could do it.
The major purpose of all these tactics is to help maturing managers to perceive situations as unique, to retain their ability to see how the present is different from the past, and how the future will be different still. As you grow older, you need to retain a tolerance for ambiguity.
Transcending Your Career
Numerous senior executives have said to me that they never really felt comfortable in their careers until they sort of "transcended" their ambitions. It is not that they gave up the race, but they became less concerned with the winning and happier with merely running. The key to this turning point lies in accepting oneself, in giving up the tyranny of external evaluations. Many come to recognize that if in old age they are lying on a bed somewhere dying, what they will be happy or sad about is not what they accomplished in their careers. Rather at the final critical moments, most of us will bear regret or pride about what we did for those we loved, particularly our children. Paradoxically, this very lessening of career centrality can often promote personal success as you become less fearful of making mistakes and more willing to run with intuition.
No one of course can truly "transcend" time, but ultimately the most effective senior executives seem to lift their time horizons. Most achievement-oriented managers are dominated by a Newtonian view of time as constant, unvarying motion in which each interval is unique but equal. The activist ethic associated with this perspective encourages constant, short-range activity. It discourages speculation and fosters guilt feelings when one is not busy. The paradox for managers is that they need to relax a little in order to work more effectively-relax the intensity of their work on present problems and address themselves more to future possibilities. They need to value today less and tomorrow more.
Managers tend to avoid thought about the future because it is ambiguous. Clear-cut, programmed, short-run problems are difficult but satisfying to solve. In contrast, formulating wishes about the future, conceiving what we want the future to be, and perceiving the future as history is difficult and threatening.
The threat is twofold. First, we tend to fear the kind of time necessary for such thought. It must be unstructured, open, and seemingly undirected-all attributes counter to time-haunted, efficiency-minded people. Wide-open time, like space, can be frightening. Second, incorporating concern about the future into the present necessitates clarifying what we really want, and this means defining fundamental values of management, organizations, and society. As we wrestle with problems of U.S. competitiveness, government debt, and environmental pollution, such clarification is critical for all of our futures.
An old American Indian proverb states, "All that is seen is temporary." The present is not unimportant nor is the world an illusion, but future-oriented, time-transcending executives should have the kind of detachment often found in people who accomplish great things while refusing to be devoured by current events and present time.
