‘Yes We Can’ become the great rallying cry of Barack Obama’s last Presidential campaign. It helped get him elected. Unfortunately, it hasn’t translated into significant accomplishment during his term. Maybe it needed to be ‘Yes We Will’.
Lots of people, in all walks of life, believe they ‘can’ get things done. That’s reasonable – most of us have the potential to accomplish almost anything we set our minds to. Sadly, belief that we ‘can’ do things isn’t enough. Belief needs to be supported by action and action is often in short supply.
It’s no different in business than in politics. We have meetings and workshops and conferences and we get people excited and we promise to get stuff done and we go away from the meetings and all the pain in the ass aspects of life take over and nothing changes. Yes we can doesn’t translate to the actions required for success.
I lead one such meeting last week. Cin7 brought its North American, Australian and New Zealand sales, marketing and customer support people together for a two-day meeting. Founder, Danny Ing (not to be confused with Burnley striker Danny Ings) set the scene on Thursday morning. The big takeaway for me was his observation that most people offer reasonable explanations why they can’t get something done. He’s looking for people who behave unreasonably – they jump higher and run faster and work harder and longer and crawl over broken glass, if necessary, to make sure that shit does get done. Screw reasonable people, we want unreasonable people!
Being an unreasonable person starts with saying ”Yes I will!”. It requires an ethos that NOTHING short of success is acceptable. It needs persistency and creativity and courage and patience and optimism. An ‘unreasonable’ person doesn’t take no for an answer and isn’t discouraged by failure. They aren’t dragged down by negative people and they don’t care if their peers don’t have confidence in their plan.
Just like the political types around Obama haven’t turned ‘can’ into ‘will’, most business people also fail. If we’re going to improve this situation, a few key things need to happen.
- We need to recruit people with the right characteristics to get things done. Techniques like behavioural interviewing and psychometric testing will help.
- We must have clear plans that everyone can understand and follow – success doesn’t usually occur randomly.
- We must create environments where people aren’t afraid of failure. Some of the greatest accomplishments of all time have come after repeated failure.
- We need to provide enough incentive for people to really care about succeeding. Whether the incentive is financial or not, there must be one.
I’m guessing that in the case of the Obama administration, failure has come down to a combination of the wrong people, plans watered down by political expediency and fear of alienating voters. Those things will never change and it’s unlikely that a new administration – from either side – will do much better.
In business, however, we have the chance to move from ‘Yes We Can’ to ‘Yes We Will”. It’ll be more difficult for public companies due to the need to constantly feed shareholders increased earnings per share – every quarter. Having said that, it hasn’t stopped Apple from constantly succeeding. Private companies – and that’s most of us – have no such inhibitor. The only reason for us not to take the leap from ‘can’ to ‘will’ is our own fear or reluctance or apathy or ignorance.
Get over it folks! Time to adopt the slogan “Yes We Will’.
david chaulk 