FOCUS SMARTER TOGETHER
How to revive your business Your business is dying – but it can be saved. Renewal demands a collective effort Writing Jennifer Sundberg & Pippa Begg
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few months ago, the Smiths Group chair and former 3M chief executive Sir George Buckley set us a challenge. “The core of every business is dying, yours included. You have to find a way to replace that dying core. What are you doing about it?” he asked us. His question has been ringing in our ears ever since. But it’s not an easy one to answer. You can’t replace a dying core with a few extra percentage points of margin. Innovation is the only option. Innovation requires perception, imagination, insight and judgment. But innovating fast enough to keep up with the pace and complexity of change, while replacing a decaying core, requires you to do all of these things all the time, in every corner of your business. It’s not something you can do by yourself. Even if you are the smartest person in the room, others will have ideas and see opportunities that you don’t. Amazon Prime was a visionary idea, but it didn’t come from Jeff Bezos. The iPhone changed
the world, but Steve Jobs initially hated it. Berkshire Hathaway made a fortune by investing in Apple, but the bet went against CEO Warren Buffett’s better judgment. In all cases, it wasn’t the genius boss but an employee who had a great idea, developed their reasoning, and convinced him to do something with it. Nor is innovation something you can achieve simply by asking people to do it. If it were as easy as that, catchy slogans on the office wall and rousing town hall speeches would stimulate all the lightbulb moments you needed. Smart leaders have long recognized that if they want their organization to thrive, they need to empower their people to think for themselves. It sounds great in principle, but in practice, many leaders remain quietly skeptical. After all, it’s the leader who bears ultimate responsibility for the consequences. To empower people you might not have met without abdicating responsibility for their actions, you need to be sure that they’ll apply their brains to the right problems, and that they’ll do so transparently and with rigor. So how do you do that? What we’ve seen in 15 years working with thousands of organizations, from Fortune 500s to non-governmental organizations, is that the most successful ones equip everyone with the skills, tools and confidence to produce breakthrough thinking that turns into decisive action. Rather than passively trust that things will work out, they actively build their ability to think as individuals and together. In other words, they create the conditions for collective intelligence. And this comes down to three things: critical thinking, great communication and a common focus on what matters.
How do you get everyone thinking?
Critical thinking, great communication and a common focus are key to collective intelligence
In Gainesville, Florida, in 1965, Dewayne Douglas suspected something strange was happening to the college football team he coached, the Florida Gators. No matter how much water players drank, they almost never needed the bathroom during the half-time break. He knew they were sweating, but surely not that much. Why weren’t they urinating more? Douglas couldn’t let this question go, so he asked a kidney specialist at the University of Florida, Dr Robert Cade. Cade conducted a series of experiments that revealed players were losing electrolytes as well as water. Their bodies were clinging onto every last drop of water to prevent the loss of more electrolytes. They had to sweat to keep cool, but trips to the bathroom could wait. All of this was affecting the players’ health – and their performance. Cade’s methodical efforts to solve this problem, sparked by Douglas’s initial curiosity, resulted in
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