Games People Play: How to Derail Workplace Turf Wars

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Some people withhold information on purpose. They say yes when they don’t mean it. They may even schedule meetings when key players can’t attend.

These people seem to care more about dominating the terrain they’ve decided is “theirs” than they care about collaborating to improve everyone’s success.

If you don’t play their game, they may treat you like a threat. Initially you may avoid confrontation and try to work around them. And when the last straw lands it is easy to lose your cool or, worse, start playing games in return. The thing to remember is that unchecked, these games destroy trust, decrease the flow of information, sever relationships, unplug empathy, and waste resources.

Recognizing how many people interpret work primarily through a competitive lens is the first step to understanding these behaviors without demonizing the game players. We must find a way to turn them into allies: playing tit for tat only escalates bad feeling. It is sweet to imagine a game player suddenly seeing the error of their ways, apologizing, and collaborating, but it’s just a fantasy. Nope: The best way to build collaborative narratives at work is to help game players decide for themselves to stop playing games and collaborate for their own reasons.

Offering them the chance to change their behavior without ever admitting there was a problem gets the best results. Understand that for them, collaboration can feel like a loss. Sharing information, listening to diverse points of view, and backing up to rethink goals makes them feel unfocused and/or weak. Yet when we refuse to respond in kind and give game players a second chance to play collaboratively, we make more progress than if we stay silent or retreat.

Here are three common examples of workplace games — and what to do in response:

The Occupation Game

Back when territory was a matter of geography, strategies to control and occupy an area were tangible. Today, competitive players seek to control less tangible “territory” like information, relationships, and communication channels. Controlling conversations, withholding information, and mocking empathy are common strategies. Deterred by warnings to back off, many of us disconnect rather than risk “invading” their territory to ask for collaboration.

How to Respond

Disrupt the game by sharing some of your own “territory” to prove that work needn’t be a battle. Creating new channels of communication that reveal a bigger picture to produces more innovative solutions. Tell a story about the harm of “winner takes all” reasoning. Show up even when you aren’t invited. And stay present and alert instead of shutting down or getting angry.

The Intimidation Game

When a competitive player is threatened by what you have to say, they try to convince you to shut up. They often blame “how” you communicated, when the truth is that they actually didn’t like “what” you said. If they can get you to feel responsible for their failure to listen, it keeps you busy on the wrong tasks. Some of the behaviors used to intimidate and silence others include loud throat clearing, raising eyebrows, or verbal attacks. Some game players invade your physical space or threaten harm to your status. Unfortunately, sexual harassment is a terribly effective form of intimidation.

They may accuse you of being the one who is intimidating. This often happens in cases when male game players get emotionally triggered after women expose injustice.

How to Respond

Women who stay calm in the face of intimidation keep others calm as well. Developing the ability to hear/see/feel the threat while taking a deep breath and staying sane often flips the focus back on them and their bullying behavior.

When we persevere, we expose that most of these acts of intimidation are bluffs. So it’s key to speak up — and protect others who are being bullied.

The Invisible Walls Game

Competitive players often agree in public to collaborate only to buy time to set up roadblocks that keep people divided. Once they label you as an enemy, misdirection and disinformation seems justified. All it takes is a disdainful or mocking attitude to encourage others to also block efforts to collaborate. Impossible timelines, logistical impediments, and unwarranted barriers for participation keep their battle lines strong.

How to Respond

Once a competitive group characterizes decision-making as a prize to win rather than an opportunity to collaborate, they implement “control the narrative” campaigns to belittle the more complex strategies that blend multiple narratives into a new story. And yet we must avoid accusations of ill intent that escalate aggression. It may be necessary to go toe to toe for a bit to illustrate that you could fight, but you choose not to. If you suspect insincere agreements, your best strategy is to track progress and expose invisible walls before they do too much damage. Perseverance is vital.

Our ability to anticipate these games rather than being blindsided by them builds up a shared immunity to tactics like gaslighting and intimidation. There are many more kinds of games — filibuster, noncompliance, discrediting, shunning — that undermine collaboration every day.

The key is to encourage vibrant conversations about how this kind of game-playing harms relationships and results. Plan innovative experiments that demonstrate the successful results of collaboration. It is high time we stop undermining each other — and pay better attention to our shared safety and our shared goals. There’s strength in numbers, and grace and power in collaboration.

5 Fundraising Tips for Female Entrepreneurs

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Although it shouldn’t be, fundraising for female entrepreneurs can be more challenging than for their male counter parts, and unfortunately, it just seems to be getting worse (according to Harvard Business Review, 2021).

In 2020, female entrepreneurs secured only 2.3% of VC funding, down from 2.8% in 2019 (mainly due to COVID). According to a 2017 Fortune article, in 2016, venture capitalists invested $58.2 billion in companies with all-male founders, while women received just $1.46 billion. The discrepancy is due both to investors give less money less often to women; as female entrepreneurs, it’s a fact we must overcome. 

Because Female entrepreneurs receive only about 2% of all venture funding, despite owning 38% of the businesses in the country, securing funding as a female entrepreneur is statistically grim (Fortune, 2017).

Difficult as it may be, it is definitely not impossible. As a female founder that raised $2 million in funding in two rounds, (one round that closed in 3 days) here are 5 tips that helped me through fundraising for my small business.

  1. Everyone loves a good story.

Story telling is how we make connections, and connections are part of how you secure funding. That means your pitch to investors is a crucial aspect of fundraising. It should tell the story of you and your business and have an emotional hook that will draw them in. Your pitch should make them want to be part of the company. 

All that said, knowing your audience well will tell you how to tell your story. Is the group you’re pitching to passionate about investing in women? Push the female founded story. Are they interested in tech innovation? Gear your story toward how you’re changing the landscape in tech. By catering to what they’re looking for, they’ll be more likely to build a connection with you, and therefore invest in your company. 

  1. It’s all about mindset.

You’re not asking for charity; you’re bringing them an opportunity. Reframe the idea of feeling bad for asking people for money to feeling generous that you’re giving them an incredible opportunity to bring value to themselves and others. Reframing how you’re approaching the conversation will not only bring confidence to your pitch, but it will show the investors that you’re giving them the chance to be a part of something great and worthwhile.  

Having a confident, optimistic mindset is a powerful tool that can help you achieve your goals. If you’re fearful of raising capital, remember that the only way out is through. Stepping through your fear and preparing and perfecting your pitch will ease the stress. I know if I’m unprepared, my mindset is less confident and I’m more stressed. 

  1. Ask for double.

Plan, forecast, and get a good grasp on what you think you’ll need to launch or grow your business. Then double it. The forecasts, despite the best planning, are usually never right on, and unexpected setbacks will always happen. Plan for contingencies and disasters, because Murphy’s Law is all too real, and whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. 

Asking for double helps ensure that you won’t fail with the money you did secure because there was too little of it. Additionally, it prevents going back and asking for more capital too quickly after the first round. 

  1. Good money vs. bad money.

Taking money from someone is a commitment, to say the least. Don’t take money from just anyone because any investment is a long-term engagement. Just like dating, there’s good and bad out there, and you have to make sure they’re the “one” before signing to any terms. You don’t want to be desperate and make the wrong move for your business by taking bad money. Holding out for the right investors is worth it in the end because the investment will be on mutually agreed upon terms that serve both of you. Knowing where your money is coming from and what the expectations are sets you up for a trusting relationship with your investors—and trust is key. You don’t necessarily want your investors calling you every week asking for an update on financials. When your investor’s core values align with yours as a leader, they will better understand how and why you make decisions for the company. 

  1. Stick to your terms.

Setting your terms and not changing them was some of the best advice I received when raising capital. When you get in that room with each investor, they try to change the terms, so it better serves them, naturally. Setting and sticking to fair, reasonable terms that you’re confident in is imperative— you should have no problem having confidence in and sticking to terms that are fair for each party. 

Fundraising is difficult, and fundraising for females even more so, as attested in studies above. Following the aforementioned 5 tips helped me tremendously, and I know it can assist other female entrepreneurs out there hoping to scale their business and do what it takes to build a company.

Are You a Lonely Impact Leader? You’re not Alone

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As a business leader, choosing impact is a challenging career choice. Not only is it different from conventional shareholder-centric businesses, but many of us haven’t experienced working in for-profit organizations with an impact focus before.

You must accept that you’ll be inventing new ways to lead and that sometimes you’ll struggle. Hiring and retention are critical issues for all organizations right now, and impact-focused companies have some unique challenges and strengths in this area. Because we’re not venture-backed and focus on impact first, the incentives for working at our organization are different. Sometimes, there are fewer extraordinary monetary gains to be made; we are flatter in our structure and compensation, including our senior team.

Recently we were hiring for a business development executive and interviewed some great candidates. Still, many professionals in this field are more motivated by financial reward than impact, so it has been a challenging role to fill. We can show growth and great compensation packages, but it’s hard to compete on financial rewards alone. Instead, we compete by focusing on our culture and benefits and by offering support for employee health, wage growth, and personal and professional development. I’ve adopted a “stretch don’t break” approach to creating growth opportunities for everyone, and we recently adopted a 4-day workweek that allows for more personal time. You need to define what makes your organization a great place to work.

The results have been phenomenal. We’ve had amazing people approach us to see if we’re hiring and to find out how to get involved. We know our formula is working because we’ve attracted people who fit our culture and impact focus. But it’s not for everyone — and that’s OK.

The other area we see our impact model making a difference is in our growth strategies. When we launch a new product or service line, we are continually focused on the impact of that new idea. Does it bring something new to the marketplace? Is it having an outsized impact on our customers relative to its cost?

This thinking causes us to look for better ways to measure impact and focus heavily on innovation in our work. The easier path might be to chase all ideas that generate revenue, but revenue is not always a good impact indicator. For example, we launched the Fearless Leaders MasterClass to develop the next generation of leaders in response to succession pipeline challenges, but many HR leaders sought “microlearning” and online solutions. Those systems are an easy sell as they are low-cost and on-demand for employees, but do they really change behavior or elevate skills? So we decided to go for a product that has a lasting impact and stands for real change. As an impact leader, you sometimes forgo easy revenue to build something with lasting value.

Taking the Lead in Healthcare by Eliminating Wasted Expenditure

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At $3.8 trillion, the cost of healthcare in the US now surpasses federal revenue. It’s a tremendous burden for employers, and with medical debt as the leading cause of bankruptcy, consumers suffer as well.

Goodroot CEO Michael Waterbury (pictured above) says complexity drives up the cost and keeps it high. “I’ve never met an employer who fully understands the healthcare business. But after payroll, it’s often their biggest expense and it’s rising dramatically every year. It’s a black box that allows for excessive profiteering.”

Unlike sweeping initiatives such as Haven, the defunct healthcare partnership between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase, Goodroot’s approach to lowering healthcare costs is “reinventing healthcare one system at a time.”

Goodroot has affiliate companies — four new ones in 2021 alone — that disrupt one particular aspect of the healthcare industry. For example, by some estimates 80 percent of medical bills in the US contain errors. Auditing companies catch these errors for health plans, but since they’re paid by volume there’s no incentive to fix the problem. Penstock Group closes the loop with outreach to ensure the same errors don’t reoccur.

In a sense, Waterbury is the “10th man” of healthcare, trying the contrarian approach at every turn. It’s a dogged kind of innovation, and it’s working. Goodroot affiliates have eliminated over $800 million in wasted healthcare spending since 2015, and they’re just getting started.

Misaligned incentives

“We like to ignore that our healthcare system is full of conflicts of interest,” Waterbury says. “I reached a point where I couldn’t pretend the incentive to put profits over patients didn’t exist.”

Before he became an entrepreneur in 2015, Waterbury held a series of coveted healthcare executive jobs, including an executive role at the largest insurer in the US. The seed that grew into Goodroot was planted early in his career.

“In 2006, I was tasked with lowering the cost of chemotherapy in New York,” he explains. “In the data, we could see that patients were receiving chemotherapy right up until their deaths, long after any hope of recovery.

“I’m not a provider, but I know those drugs have horrible side effects and those patients died in pain. I also knew that a round of chemo generated $70,000 worth of billings at the time. Profit simply had to be a factor in some cases in the decision to continue chemo. I learned there was a term for it: ‘pouring chemo into a casket.’”

Waterbury says when he heard that phrase, he knew he had to change the status quo. But he makes it clear that he hates the game, not the players. “Oncologists should make a profit on chemotherapy. But we have to recognize that profit motivations can shape decisions about care and build a system around that.”

Employers have options

Waterbury says that employers, who generally accept 5 or 10 percent annual increases in healthcare expenses as a fact of life, have many levers to pull in order to lower healthcare costs. They just don’t know they exist, or how to pull them.

“Small businesses really get beat up in the healthcare landscape,” says Erik Wallace, president of Goodroot affiliate CoeoRx. The company launched in April of 2021 under Waterbury’s mentorship to help small employers increase their leverage in the healthcare marketplace. Wallace and his team use pre-negotiated pharmacy contracts, drug pricing outside of insurance, international prescription filing and other tactics most employers would never know to try.

Whether they’re working with CoeoRx or not, Waterbury encourages business owners to push back against rate increases. “Once you begin to use the right language and ask the right questions, you’ll find more flexibility,” he says. “Insisting on more info on drug rebates and the total cost of care can open doors.”

Companies should also consider their unique demographics and usage. Goodroot affiliate Famulus Health creates custom prescription cash price networks that provide discounts that are often lower than prescription copays on drugs your employees are most likely to need.

All of the Goodroot affiliates and their different methods of increasing healthcare access and affordability were borne out of other professionals, like Waterbury, who came to know the system so well that they could see a change that would be both feasible and meaningful.

And employers have a unique ability and responsibility to help move things in the right direction, he says. “You’re already in this healthcare fight whether you like it or not. Don’t leave one hand tied behind your back. Demand better and ask the direct questions. You owe it to your employees and their families to source all available options to fight for better care, costs and access on their behalf.”

7 Fun Ways to Create an Extraordinary Vision

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Taking intentional time to nourish vision is vital. It’s amazing what can happen when you make space for it, rather than waiting for it to fit itself into your life.

It’s also helpful to take yourself out of the goal mindset, as it can be limiting and invites pressure to think in terms of deliverables or specific outcomes, which is not necessarily helpful at this stage. Instead, consider the idea of receiving whatever comes along without any effort.

We are often so caught up in the idea of being productive without really being aware of it. What I mean by a “vision quest” is intentionally taking time out of your regular routine to open yourself up to receiving, or going deeper with, your vision. Here are some general tips for a mini vision quest.

Read old journals, blog posts, letters, or other pieces of writing that you have created. Do something unusual for you. This could be anything that is off your normal beaten path — basically, just trying something different. Examples could be a language or music class, exercise, meditation, drawing, or even writing with your non-dominant hand.

Explore a part of your community where you don’t normally spend time.

Go away somewhere with the intention of letting go of old ideas and being intentionally open to new ones.

Write a letter to your future self.

Draw a picture or create a mind map of what you’re seeing and feeling. This can be as simple as putting down a bunch of words or doodles that reflect whatever comes into your head. Indicate any relationships between the images or words. Let it be messy and don’t worry if it’s not linear. Imagine this as a cool, random road trip.

Tell someone about what you experienced and invite them to ask questions to tease out details.

Visit a domain registry site and search URLs that come to mind. This is one of my favorite activities, and it can ground your vision with a very meaningful yet practical step.  

This  is an extract from Madeleine Shaw’s new book The Greater Good

Facing a Tough Problem With a Polarized Group? Try This Unconventional Approach

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In the sunny outdoor restaurant of a small country hotel, a former guerilla commander and a wealthy businesswoman greet each other by name.

The workshop organizer tells them he’s surprised they know each other. The businesswoman explains: “We met when I brought him the money to ransom a man who’d been kidnapped by his soldiers.” The guerilla adds: “The reason we’re at this meeting is so that no one will have to do such things again.”

How did these two very different people come together to solve their shared problem? A process called transformative facilitation enabled this breakthrough.

The workshop they attended brought together a diverse group of leaders to talk about what they could do to transform their country. Seventeen months earlier, in June 2016, the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia guerillas had signed a treaty to end their 52-year war. Thousands had been kidnapped, hundreds of thousands killed, and millions displaced.

After decades of being at one another’s throats, Colombians were now trying, amid much turmoil and trepidation, to break through and work together to construct a better future. Our workshop was part of this effort.

The beginnings of their collaboration

In January 2017, in the troubled southwest of the country, two civic-minded leaders, Manuel José Carvajal, a businessman with connections to the elite, and Manuel Ramiro Muñoz, a professor with links to the grassroots, decided to organize a project to contribute to rebuilding the region’s society and economy.

Their idea was to bring together leaders who were representative of the region’s stakeholders: everyone with a stake in the area’s future and, therefore, an interest in making it better. They recruited 40 influential people from different sectors—politicians from opposing parties, former guerilla commanders, businesspeople, nonprofit managers, and community activists—who, if they could collaborate, could make a real difference in the region.

In November 2017, the first workshop of this group took place over three days at the country hotel. On the morning of the first day, the participants were tense. They had significant political, ideological, economic, and cultural differences—and significant disagreements about what had happened in the region and what needed to happen.

Some of them were enemies. Many of them had strong prejudices. Most of them felt at risk in being there; one politician insisted that no photographs be taken because he didn’t want it known that he was sitting down with his rivals. But all of them showed up anyway because they hoped the effort would create a better future.

To work together, the participants needed to create enough of a common language to be able to talk about the situation and how they could change it. We started by conducting open-ended interviews with every participant to enroll them in the project and hear their views on the key issues facing the region. We then compiled these views into a report containing a selection of their unattributed, verbatim statements, which we distributed in advance of the first workshop.

Our methods

On the first morning of the workshop, participants presented their perspective on the current reality of the region, along with a physical object they had brought (these included a stone, a book, a seed, and a machete), which produced fresh, symbolic images. They used toy bricks to build models of the social-political-economic-cultural system of the region in its larger context, enabling them to share and combine their different tacit understandings visibly and fluidly. And they wrote and organized their ideas on sticky notes, helping create and iterate their composite understanding of the current reality.

These methodologies created space for all the participants, including minority and marginalized ones, to express themselves equally and openly and make visible some of what had been invisible.

Most crucially, the participants needed to be willing and able to work together. To support them in connecting better with one another, we:

Agreed on a set of ground rules, especially about confidentiality, which helped them feel safer to make their contributions.

Ate our meals together at long tables, which created a space for informal conversations.

Invited them to go on walks in pairs, which enabled the development of personal connections across divides.

Introduced a framework for open, nonjudgmental, empathetic listening, which they practiced in pairs; the final step in this exercise involved looking into their partner’s eyes, and the unfamiliar and unexpected sense of connection in the room was palpable.

Facilitated an hour during which the participants told personal stories about their lives, which enabled them to understand better why some of them had ended up on opposing paths.

This approach—though unconventional—enabled the participants to contribute and connect equitably, and it helped this deeply polarized group move forward.

Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now

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In 2006, I hosted a dinner after a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, former vice president Al Gore’s seminal documentary on the climate crisis. 

We went around the table for everyone’s reaction to the film’s urgent message. When it came to my 15-year-old daughter, Mary, she declared with her typical candor: “I’m scared, and I’m angry.” Then she added, “Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it.”

The conversation stopped cold. All eyes turned to me. I didn’t know what to say.

As a venture capitalist, my job is to find big opportunities, target big challenges, and invest in big solutions. I am best known for backing companies like Google and Amazon early on. But the environmental crisis dwarfed any challenge I’d ever seen. Eugene Kleiner, the late cofounder of Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley firm I’ve been with for 40 years, left behind a set of 12 laws that have stood the test of time. The first goes as follows: No matter how groundbreaking a new technology may seem, make sure customers actually want it. But this problem led me to invoke a lesser-known Kleiner law: There is a time when panic is the appropriate response.

That time had come. We could no longer afford to underestimate our climate emergency. To avert irreversible, catastrophic consequences, we needed to act urgently and decisively. For me, that evening changed everything.

My partners and I made climate a top priority. We got serious about investing in clean and sustainable technologies — or “cleantech,” as they’re known in Silicon Valley. We even brought in Al Gore as the firm’s newest partner. But despite Al’s excellent company, my journey into the world of zero-emissions investing was pretty lonely at first. After the iPhone debuted in 2007, Steve Jobs invited us to launch our iFund for mobile apps from Apple’s headquarters. We were hearing great pitches from mobile app startups; I could see opportunities left and right. 

So why commit a chunk of capital to the uncharted territory of solar panels, electric car batteries, and meatless proteins? Because it seemed like the right thing to do, for the firm and for the planet. I thought the cleantech market was a monster in the making. I believed we could do well by doing good. 

We pursued mobile apps and climate ventures at the same time, despite doubters on both fronts. Our mobile app investments gave us a burst of quick wins. Our climate investments were slower out of the gate, and many of them failed. It’s hard to build a durable company under any circumstances, and doubly hard to build one to take on the climate crisis.

Kleiner Perkins got beaten up in the press. But with patience and persistence, we stood by our founders. By 2019, our surviving cleantech investments began to hit one home run after the next. Our $1 billion in green venture investments is now worth $3 billion. But we have no time for a victory lap. As the years roll by, the climate clock keeps ticking. Atmospheric carbon already exceeds the upper limit for climate stability. At our current pace, we will blow past 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the Earth’s pre-industrial mean temperatures — the threshold, scientists say, for severe planetary damage. The effects of runaway global warming are already plain to see: devastating hurricanes, biblical flooding, uncontrollable wildfires, killer heat waves, and extreme droughts.

I must warn you up front: We’re not cutting our emissions fast enough to outrun the damage on our doorstep. I said this in 2007, and I say it today: What we’re doing is not nearly enough. Unless we course correct with urgent speed and at massive scale, we’ll be staring at a doomsday scenario. The melting polar ice caps will drown coastal cities. Failed crops will lead to widespread famine. By midcentury, a billion souls worldwide could be climate refugees.

Fortunately, we have a powerful ally in this fight: innovation. Over the past 15 years, prices for solar and wind power have plunged 90%. Clean energy sources are growing faster than anyone expected. Batteries are expanding the range of electrified vehicles at an ever-lower cost. Greater energy efficiency has sharply reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

While a good many solutions are in hand, their deployment is nowhere near where it needs to be. We’ll need massive investment and robust policy to make these innovations more affordable. We need to scale the ones we have — immediately — and invent the ones we still need. In short, we need both the now and the new.

So where’s the plan for getting the job done? Frankly, that’s what’s been missing: an actionable plan. Sure, there are lots of ways on paper to get to net-zero carbon emissions, the point where we add no more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than we can remove. But lists of goals are not plans. A long menu of options, however excellent they might be, is not a plan. Anger and despair aren’t plans; neither are hopes and dreams.

A plan is only as good as its implementation. To achieve this monumental mission, we’ll need to hold ourselves accountable every step of the way. That’s the great lesson I learned from my mentor, Andy Grove, the legendary CEO of Intel. It’s a mantra I’ve seen proven over and again: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

To execute a plan, we need the right tools. In my previous book, Measure What Matters, I outlined a simple but powerful goal-setting protocol that Andy Grove invented at Intel. Known as OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, they guide organizations to focus on a few essential targets, to align at every level, to stretch for ambitious results, and to track their progress as they go — to measure what matters.

Now I’m proposing we apply OKRs to solve the climate crisis, the greatest challenge of our lifetimes. But before going all in (and this is an all-or-nothing proposition), we must answer three basic questions.

Do we have enough time? We hope so, but we’re fast running out of it.

Do we have much margin for error? No, we don’t. Not anymore.

Do we have enough money? Not yet. Investors and governments are stepping up. But we’ll need a lot more funding, from both public and private sectors, to develop and scale technologies for a clean economy. Most of all, we’ll need to divert the trillions spent on dirty energy over to clean energy options and use that energy more efficiently.

To put our plan into action, we need all hands on deck. Above all, we’ll need to execute our plan with unprecedented speed and unprecedented scale. That’s what matters most.

I’m not here to prod consumers to change their behavior. Individual actions are both needed and expected, but they won’t be nearly enough to reach this huge goal. Only concerted, collective, global action can get us past the finish line in time.

I might seem an unlikely advocate for this call to action. I’m an American, a citizen of the biggest historic polluter on Earth. I am an affluent white man, born in St. Louis, Missouri, from a generation whose negligence helped create this problem in the first place.

In my 15 years on this path, I’ve collected my share of scar tissue. Cleantech ventures demand more money, more guts, more time, and more perseverance than just about anything else. Their horizons stretch longer than most investors can stomach. The washouts are acutely painful. But the success stories — however few and far between — are worth all the setbacks and then some. These companies are more than turning a profit. They are helping to heal the Earth.

Entrepreneurs are those hardy individuals who do more with less than anyone thinks possible — and do it faster than anyone thinks possible. Today, bold risk-takers are innovating like mad as they rewrite the rules to avert a climate apocalypse. We need to bottle their entrepreneurial energy and distribute it as widely as we can to governments, companies, and communities worldwide.

A plan is not a guarantee. A timely transition to a net-zero future is no sure thing. But though I may be less optimistic than some, consider me hopeful — and impatient. With the right tools and technology, with precision-honed policies, and most of all with science on our side, we still have a fighting chance. But the time is now.

Now Is the Time to Go Global

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Despite the ongoing challenges facing the world as it navigates pandemic recovery, businesses across every sector are targeting growth. Having paused to meet the difficulties created by lockdown, organizations are now taking the harsh lessons learned during the past 18 months and using them to build ambitious expansion strategies.

For many, the future lies in going global, and enhanced global reach is the linchpin in the growth strategy of today’s corporations. Moreover, recent technological advances make it possible for virtually any organization to do business globally. 

The widespread adoption of the internet provided a huge catalyst for growth. Investors realized that the U.S. represented about 26 percent of the world’s economy, leaving close to three quarters up for grabs by domestic-focused software companies empowered by ubiquitous digital infrastructure.  

Today, this is reflected in the globalized structure of the world’s biggest and most successful businesses – companies listed on the Fortune 500 operate in an average of 317 international locations. There’s no doubt, therefore, that going global enables organizations to focus on transformational success. The motivation for doing so can vary and may be triggered by a range of opportunities: 

First-mover advantage 

Companies understand the potential beyond their domestic markets and borders, so the push to expand internationally is often fuelled by the transient opportunity to secure a first-mover advantage in their industry or product category. 

This has become particularly important in the digital economy, where the power that comes from being first in a region and a product category has helped many organizations to achieve a significant competitive advantage. This strategy typically sits at the heart of the need to deliver growth and supports a bigger, long-term vision for the company. 

The availability of local talent 

For others, hiring an individual in another country creates the impetus for global growth. In some cases, this is because the organization has successfully hired an established top performer in that territory. Conversely, there may have been a longstanding ambition to establish a local office, but the company has held off until it could locate a qualified employee. Either way, the catalyst is the availability of talent located elsewhere but who is believed to be critical for the company’s future growth. That professional’s geographic location then spawns a larger-scale effort to grow the company from that one location. 

Remote working has reached a tipping point 

As we all know, just over 18 months ago, workplace norms changed overnight as remote work moved from being a preference to a mandate. While millions of people headed home to conduct work from a makeshift home office, some moved out of cities temporarily to more remote locations, but all who could were still working.  

The change in workplace demographics was unprecedented in living memory. As of 2017, only 2.9 percent of the U.S. workforce, or 3.9 million employees, worked from home at least half the time, according to data from FlexJobs. By late 2020, research by Gallup revealed that two-thirds of U.S. workers who had been working remotely during the pandemic expressed interest in continuing to do so. 

Almost simultaneously, many of the traditional barriers to international expansion are quickly disappearing, with digital platforms available that allow organizations to cost-effectively outsource key operational functions, from HR and tax to compliance and payroll.  

Those organizations that embrace the potential in global expansion will be ideally positioned to reap the rewards in the short and long term. 

A Fatal Blindspot: Are You Preventing Bad News From Reaching the Top?

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A tall, thin man in his late fifties approached me after my closing keynote for a manufacturing association conference on how manufacturing leaders can avoid business disasters. He looked distraught and agitated. I hoped he wasn’t angry with something I said. 

Mark introduced himself and asked me to tell him more about one of the many dangerous judgment errors – what scholars call cognitive biases – that I discussed, the MUM effect. This cognitive bias causes those lower down in the organizational hierarchy to avoid passing bad news up the food chain due to fears of the “shoot the messenger” problem, namely that they’ll be blamed for the bad news. According to research in cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics, such mental blindspots stem from how our brains are wired.

Fortunately, recent research in these fields shows how you can use pragmatic strategies to address these dangerous judgment errors, whether in your professional life, relationships, or other life areas. 

You need to evaluate where cognitive biases are hurting you and others in your team and organization. Then, you can use structured decision-making methods to make “good enough” daily decisions quickly; more thorough ones for moderately important choices; and an in-depth one for truly major decisions.

Such techniques will also help you implement your decisions well and formulate truly effective long-term strategic plans. In addition, you can develop mental habits and skills to notice cognitive biases and prevent yourself from slipping into them.

Turning back to my exchange with Mark, I started giving some examples from my consulting and coaching experience of how the MUM effect tripped up successful companies and leaders. He grew increasingly and visibly agitated. Finally, he interrupted me and told me his story. 

He served as the CEO of a successful manufacturing company for over 12 years. Hit hard by the 2008 Great Recession; the company struggled for the next couple of years. Still, he believed his leadership was bringing it through the rough patch. 

Unexpectedly, the Chair of the Board of Directors called him in for a meeting in March 2010 and asked him to explain accounting discrepancies he heard about. Mark had no idea what the Chair was talking about and told him that. The Chair said that the Board received several anonymous whistleblowing complaints about accounting issues that cropped up over the last year.

Upset and surprised, Mark promised to look into it. The Chair asked him to coordinate on the matter with two members of the Board who had accounting expertise. 

What Mark and the other Board members found shocked them. The CFO and others in the accounting department were covering up much more severe losses than Mark knew about, using the same kind of tricks deployed by Enron and WorldCom. Naturally, Mark fired the CFO and other accountants implicated in cooking the books. 

Yet further investigation revealed that such accounting problems weren’t limited to the Great Recession, with smaller shenanigans occurring even earlier. Moreover, the issues didn’t stay in the accounting department. The organization’s culture prevented bad news from going up the organizational hierarchy, whether in the accounting department, customer service, or operations. As a result, safety problems in operations were swept under the rug, and customer service failures went unreported. 

The Board of Directors took a more active hand in investigating the situation. The result? The problem was Mark. 

The values of the CEO powerfully shape company culture. Mark – without realizing he was doing it – encouraged complacent behaviors, rewarding those who reported good news and punishing the bad. Unfortunately, too many business leaders share that trait, often without recognizing it.

Over his tenure, he grew more and more cut off from day-to-day operations. The people who surrounded him – those he rewarded with favor and promotions – were sycophants. 

 Hey, who doesn’t like people who praise them, right? But, unfortunately, surrounding himself with such people kept him from recognizing reality. The organization’s performance suffered as a result, with good people who reported the truth leaving and the company failing to adjust to shifting market conditions. 

The Board ended up firing Mark. He’s a typical example of many CEOs who found themselves in a similar position. A four-year study, which interviewed 1,087 board members from 286 organizations of all sorts that forced out their chief executive officers, found that almost one-quarter of CEOs – 23% – got fired for failing to recognize negative facts about the organization’s performance. Economic downswings often reveal such denialism and result in the removal of top leaders. 

Mark’s firing put him in a grim state of mind. He had trouble acknowledging his failure. Mark couldn’t face it at first, suffering a depressive episode. He slept for most of the day, didn’t want to eat, stopped spending time with friends, and snapped at his wife and kids. He lost over 40 pounds in five months. Finally, his family staged an intervention and pushed him to see a psychiatrist. He started taking medications and getting back on track with his life, including his career.

Mark went to the conference both to tap his network to find a new job and to see if he could learn how to prevent what happened to him from repeating. My keynote struck him hard, opening a wound that was still fresh. 

He grew tearful as he shared how he regretted not learning about the dangers of cognitive biases earlier in his career. He felt confident that what happened with the manufacturing company wouldn’t have occurred if he had known to watch out for such problems. Mark thanked me for opening his eyes about these dangers and committed to understanding how cognitive biases functioned in business contexts to make sure that he never suffered from these mental blindspots in his work. 

Within the following year, he found a new role as the COO of a manufacturing company somewhat smaller than the previous one he ran. Within a couple of years, he became CEO again, and at the time of publishing this article, he was still working there successfully. He made sure to spread knowledge about cognitive biases throughout the company. We still exchange emails sometimes when he has specific questions about them. 

Mark’s story stuck with me. Whenever I have a tough time dealing with disappointments and setbacks to help business leaders avoid the dangerous judgment errors that lead to business disasters, I remember Mark. He helps remind me of how high-flying careers and good companies get tripped up by people doing what’s comfortable and following their gut instead of suffering the temporary discomfort that can arise while making sound choices that will avoid business disasters and truly protect the bottom line. 

I hope you’ll recall Mark when you are tempted to do what’s easy and comfortable. I also hope you’ll look at your own professional activities right now and think about where and how dangerous judgment errors might be tripping you and your team up. Doing so is critical for the long-term success of your career.

How Many Dreams Should You Have For Your Future?

Posted on by Real Leaders

There are benefits to having one big dream and thinking day and night about how to make it come true, but there are also several significant risks. During the Dreamer stage, you are too young to limit yourself to one dream that may or may not work. In your first 18 years, I encourage you to develop several dreams for your future.

When you are in the Explorer stage, though, you might come up with a completely new dream! Life is dynamic and ever-changing, and you might learn or experience something that changes your entire worldview. However, the work you’ll need to do as an Explorer will force you to think long and hard about what it takes to realize a particular dream. What are the specific steps? Who can help you along the way? Which challenges will you face?

All these elements are part of the dream-creation process. Even if you ditch all or some of your dreams as you grow older, the work you invest in thinking about your original dreams will come in handy: you’ll already have a proven process. And who knows? Maybe you’ll get a chance to live out your early dreams at a later stage in life when you have the means, time, or experience that you lacked when you were younger!

Your dreams don’t have to be completely different from each other. If you love horses above everything else, one of your dreams could be riding competitively; another might be learning how to become a breeder; and yet another could be learning how to use horses for therapeutic reasons, such as working with children who have emotional issues. The love of horses unites all these dreams, even though each one would take you on a different path.

You will often have different visions for your future. Imagine wanting to pursue these distinct dreams:

•          Becoming a science fiction author

•          Becoming a professional surfer

•          Becoming a trader on Wall Street

These are vastly different dreams. Each one would take you on a different path, and each one would take years to pursue. If you want to become a writer, you could go to college and get a degree in literature, philosophy, or history while you continue writing and practicing your trade. You could instead skip college and take a creative writing class. Or you could just start writing with no formal training. Either way, it will take time—even years—before you can see whether your dream of becoming a writer will work out for you. The path to publishing is a treacherous road that requires a unique set of skills, from finding an agent to marketing your books, and you’ll learn them the hard way, with massive effort at each step.

If you want to become a pro surfer, you’ll have to compete with the most talented surfers in the world, just as any elite athlete does. Assuming you’re a talented surfer to begin with, the road to becoming a pro is a tremendously difficult endeavor that requires intense training, focus, and dedication. It will take years to see whether this plan pans out. 

You might ask yourself why you can’t pursue both dreams at the same time by surfing every morning and writing in the evenings. I wish you could, but things don’t usually work that way.

A good example of the need to focus on one dream at a time can be found in the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. In his twenties, right after college, he started a small jazz club in Tokyo. His friends and family predicted that he would fail miserably since he had no business experience, but he took out a sizable loan, opened the jazz club, and ran it successfully. This was his first dream, and he stayed with it for ten years, until he was thirty. Then he paused and took stock of his path up to that moment in time. His other dream was to become a novelist, and he realized that if he wanted to take a serious stab at it, this was the time to do it. He convinced his wife to sell the jazz club and pay back the loan so he could dedicate himself to writing.

Quite surprisingly for someone as young as he was, Murakami realized that he needed to give himself full permission to pursue his dream. He did not try to run the jazz club at night and write in the morning. A halfhearted effort simply would not do; he’d have to give it all he had. Murakami pursued two dreams in his Explorer stage, and he struck gold the second time. He went for it and immersed himself in trying to make it work. Only after you have done the same will you know whether you’ve gone far enough.

How many dreams should you cultivate for your future as a Dreamer? My recommendation is three—no more and no less. When you move on to the next phase, the Explorer, you will have enough time to explore all three.

Why not explore ten or twenty, you might be wondering. You’ll find the following sentence incredibly hard to believe, but even with the generous allowance of 18 years dedicated to exploration, you will run out of time. Exploring takes time, dedication, effort, and the ability to immerse yourself in your dream. Nothing worthwhile is easily achieved, but your unique combination of talents, passion, and personality will take you as far as you are willing to go.

You have nothing to prove as a Dreamer or Explorer—that’s part of the beauty of those stages. When you become a Builder in your mid-thirties, that’s when things get serious; that is when you have 18 years to build whatever you need to build. 

This is an excerpt from Eyal Danon’s new book “The Principle of 18: Getting the Most Out of Every Stage of Your Life.” www.eyaldanon.com

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