The Investment Capital Growth Blog

Contributors: Kevin Cashman, Global Leader, CEO & Executive Development, Kevin Cashman, Global Leader, CEO & Executive Development, Kevin Cashman, Global Leader, CEO & Executive Development, Ronald Porter, Senior Client Partner, Global Human Resources Center of Excellence, Ronald Porter, Senior Client Partner, Global Human Resources Center of Excellence, Juliana Barela, Vice President & General Manager, RPO, North America, Elise Freedman, Senior Client Partner, Workforce Transformation Practice Leader, Dennis R. Baltzley, Ph.D., Global Solution Leader, Leadership Development, Andrés Tapia, Senior Client Partner, ESG and DE&I Strategist, Andy De Marco, Vice President, Human Resources, Americas, Divina Gamble, Office Managing Partner, Washington DC, Senior Client Partner, Co-Leader of Nonprofit Practice, Stuart S. Crandell, Senior Client Partner at Korn Ferry, and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director, and Executive Coach.

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Contributor: Melissa Hadhazy, Senior Client Partner and Cheryl D’Cruz-Young, Senior Client Partner, ESG and CPO Center of Expertise at Korn Ferry and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director, and Executive Coach

Money can’t buy loyalty. It just rents it for a while. If employers believe that higher wages alone can stop the Great Resignation as people quit their jobs at the highest rates on record, they’re probably in for a disappointment.

As bosses look for answers, culture is at the forefront—and the stakes are higher these days for almost every company on the planet. We’ve witnessed seismic shifts across the workscape, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Industrial Revolution. We’ve gone from subways and freeways to home office bedrooms and kitchen table desks. Liberating, but also isolating.

Culture can be the missing link. Unfortunately, it can also be a bit of a conundrum.

Ask six people to define culture and you’ll probably get 12 different answers. Some say it’s mission and values. For others, it’s Ping-Pong tables and work attire. However, culture really boils down to just one definition: It’s how things get done.

Culture will vary, company to company, industry to industry. It’s never one-size-fits-all. Culture needs to be lived, breathed, and experienced every day.

Companies have a culture quandary.

Having the right culture, at the right time, and with the right people can elude many companies. Often, it’s more art than science. In a survey our firm conducted, nearly three-quarters of executives described culture as being extremely important to organizational performance. Yet, only a third said that their culture was fully aligned with their business strategy!

We need to ask ourselves: How do we continue to empower people? How do we interact with and help each other? What should collaboration look like? How will the best ideas emerge? Do we need to be in physical proximity so that the happenstance of meeting in the hallway or getting coffee can spark insightful conversations? Or can we replicate that in other ways?

Lead by example.

The leader plays a disproportionately large role: Culture starts at the top, where it is created and shaped. Given all we’ve been through over the past few years, leading is all about “grace”—that inner voice that constantly whispers, “It’s not about you.”

When leaders make others’ success their priority, they help define and differentiate the culture. That’s why our Korn Ferry Institute describes leaders as having two core roles today. First, they are the culture champions: the role models who embody the mindset, beliefs, and desired behaviors. Second, they are the culture architects who make sure that the right structures are in place to support those desired behaviors. Leading by word and by example can ensure that a healthy, inclusive culture takes root and grows.

The culture fit factor

We all know the questions people ask as they weigh whether to stay in their current jobs or pursue new opportunities: “What is it like to work there? What’s the culture like? What are the people like?”

What they’re really asking (in many different ways) is simply: “How will I fit in?”

We’re all vulnerable, we all have insecurities. We want to be loved, to belong, and to be part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s the culture that opens the door and reassures people, “You matter, you make a difference, you belong here.”

There are unwritten rules.

Policies and procedures certainly have their place as an important way for guiding people to come together as a society, a community, or an organization. But these structures alone do not adequately describe culture. For that, we must look to the unwritten rules—and every organization has them.

It’s “code” for how things really get done. For example, there’s the entrepreneurial culture where it’s all about performance, and the norm is to “ask forgiveness, not permission.” Other places are far more hierarchical. But within every company, there are informal networks and unwritten rules that will never be found in any employee handbook.

Culture should be on the walls and in the halls and, most importantly, in the hearts and minds of every employee. Elusive to define, powerful when deeply felt, it is best experienced together. Indeed, it may be the difference between people staying or going.

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Gary Burnison, Korn Ferry CEO, and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director, and Executive Coach

As new competitive realities emerged during the pandemic, many companies embraced digital transformation. Most adopted tools such as Teams, digital payments, and marketing automation to improve productivity.

However, digital transformation can’t be viewed in an incremental, linear fashion. Siebel founder Thomas Siebel refers to digital transformation — the confluence of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things (IoT) — as a “mass extinction event.”

Entire industries and businesses will either adopt these technologies or be eliminated.

By reaching critical mass, the interconnectivity of billions of devices will drive the value created through big data and advanced analytics.

The bridge we must cross is from levering technology to improve service or reduce cost, to utilizing digital transformation to redefine our core product in a way that creates new demand and drives enterprise value.

Consider the case of an orange farmer. His core product has been found in nature for thousands of years and is a commodity.

What if the seeds he uses to grow oranges could be selected for ultimate flavor and yield by AI, planted and picked by autonomous vehicles, harvested at the ideal time based on moisture, heat, sunlight detected by IoT sensors, and sold at the highest market price based on advanced analytics?

While the product may be ostensibly the same, the grower would be far more competitive and profitable and would deliver a superior product using tools that are already commercially available today.

We must leverage these tools now, or face the consequences. Here are 4 ways digital transformation is taking form:

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Marc Emmer and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director, and Executive Coach

For many Executives and CEOs, leadership development is an ongoing challenge, and not just because they’re short on time. The problem comes from having too many options for leadership development activities, and too few ways to measure the ROI of those methods. How does a leader know whether it’s worth it to take that training program, watch that webinar or read that book?

Adding to this challenge, Executives and CEOs are under increasing pressure to expand their leadership competencies in a fast-changing world. In Deloitte’s Global Human Trends survey, 80% of respondents agreed that 21st-century leadership has “new and unique requirements” important to their organization’s success.

Here, we look at seven leadership development activities Executives and CEOs can use to develop as effective leaders, considering the potential perks and pitfalls of each option.

1. Books

It’s no coincidence that many world-class leaders, such as Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, are also voracious readers. Reading spurs creative thinking, builds vocabulary, sharpens communication skills, and encourages reflection — all qualities that are important for strong leadership.

As a tool for leadership development, books present two main challenges: One, it’s easy to fall into the trap of passively reading about ideas instead of actively applying those ideas. Two, it’s hard for Executives and CEOs to know what to read, considering the sheer number of titles available (Amazon alone has more than 60,000 books on leadership).

Two suggestions: One, consider this list of leadership books recommended by Vistage members and executive coaches. Two read something that has nothing to do with leadership at all. “Absorb yourself in a work of fiction, like The Alchemist from Paolo Coelho” to reduce stress, sharpen your focus and open your mind to new ideas, says Gair Maxwell, a Vistage speaker.

2. Online learning

There’s a lot to love about online learning: It’s convenient — something you can do at any time, on any device, and from any place in the world. It’s customizable — allowing you to learn at your own pace and focus where you want to. It’s effective — often featuring visuals and interactive components that make it easier to retain information. It’s also usually less expensive than in-person courses.

The downside? Online learning doesn’t allow you to have face-to-face interactions or informal conversations with peers, both of which are highly valuable for leader development. You might also find it hard to stay motivated and engaged in leadership training when the material is delivered remotely. Finally, online courses usually aren’t useful for building relationships or expanding your network.

3. Seminars

Whether delivered through a one-day workshop or a week-long business school program, seminars are a great way to take a deep dive into a leadership issue and develop stronger leadership skills. They get you out of your day-to-day routine, give you the time and space to focus, and create opportunities for networking with industry leaders. Most leaders also find it energizing and inspiring to learn directly from experts.

However, seminars fall short if they emphasize content more than context. This is a common problem among leadership development programs, note the authors of the McKinsey Quarterly article, Why leadership development programs fail. “Too many training initiatives … rest on the assumption that one size fits all and that the same group of skills or style of leadership is appropriate regardless of strategy, organizational culture, or CEO mandate,” the authors write.

4. Webinars

Leadership development webinars offer a convenient way to access expert insights from anywhere in the world. Typically catering to specific audiences with specific challenges, they offer targeted learning in a condensed timeframe. Recorded webinars offer additional convenience for Executives and CEOs who don’t have time to attend a live session or may want to revisit content later.

Webinars present a few drawbacks, however. First, many may limit your ability to ask questions of experts. Second, they can be difficult to engage with if you’re distracted by other tasks, such as answering email. Third, they demand a larger time commitment than, say, skimming a whitepaper.

5. Industry associations

Joining an industry association offers a few advantages: They can help you easily connect with a group of like-minded leaders. Some offer exclusive professional-development opportunities, such as conferences and meetings. The reputable ones can boost your professional credibility or the credibility of your firm. And associations that maintain a membership directory may help you find new clients or new partnerships.

The main downside of industry associations? They can be limiting if they only connect you with people who already run in your professional circle. Most of the time, these memberships won’t help you gain access to diverse perspectives and ideas from outside your sector.

6. Executive coaching

Executive coaches are great for helping Executives and CEOs explore issues from multiple angles, bringing attention to blind spots, and getting to the root of a problem quickly. Great coaches also know how to keep Executives and CEOs motivated, focused, and accountable for their actions.

“Leaders need coaches for the same reason that great athletes need a coach: They provide feedback.

“Tiger Woods needed a coach because he couldn’t see his own backswing. You need a coach to give you feedback on whether what you’re doing is working, and whether it’s the right thing to be doing.”

For all its benefits, however, traditional coaching has a few potential drawbacks. First, some people who claim to coach are not qualified to do so or haven’t delivered results. Second, some coaches focus too much on giving advice and too little on giving actionable steps. Third, short-term coaching sessions (e.g., those lasting one day) don’t usually provide lasting benefits. Fourth, a coach only has one opinion — their own — which can limit your perspective on an issue.

7. Peer advisory groups

As a complement to traditional coaching, peer advisory groups can make a significant difference in a CEO’s leadership development. They’re especially valuable for CEOs who feel “lonely at the top” and need support working through complex challenges or making tough decisions.

The best peer advisory groups are made up of high-potential leaders who come from diverse companies, industries, backgrounds, and areas of expertise. In this setting, group coaching helps leaders gain fresh insight, broaden their perspective, pressure-test their assumptions, and avoid the trap of confirmation bias.

Vistage Chair Ginnie McDevitt has witnessed the power of peers in her own Vistage group. As an example, she remembers how one business owner in her group couldn’t figure out why his company’s sales were slumping until he started talking about it with his Vistage peers. “The group challenged his assumptions,” McDevitt says, “and made him think about his problem completely differently.” Following the advice of his peers, the business owner changed his strategy and turned around his sales in just nine months.

This is not an isolated instance; it’s a typical one. Vistage analyzed the growth data of its member companies and found they grew 2.2x faster than non-member companies.

Which leadership development activities are the best?

The best approach is a comprehensive one, where Executives and CEOs draw upon multiple resources to address their weaknesses and hone their strengths.

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor:  Vistage Staff, edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

The pandemic has left scars for some businesses, but overall Vistage members are optimistic. The 2021 Q4 CEO Confidence Index showed that 74% of CEOs are projecting increased revenues for the year ahead.

Despite the positive outlook, there are challenges. And inflation tops the list of concerns. The effects of inflation are not exclusive to manufacturing and the supply chain. According to the Survey, increasing wages accounted for 72% of rising costs.

Savvy CEOs are finding silver linings and creative solutions to drive higher revenues while retaining employees and changing customer relationships. In a recent member roundtable for The CEO Pulse: Inflation Resource Center, three members share their approach to inflation.

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Vistage Staff and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director, and Executive Coach

The accelerating advancement of exponential technologies is actually old news.

So, what’s the new news?

That formerly independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology are beginning to converge with other independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology.

In other words, these waves are starting to overlap—stacking atop one another, producing tsunami-sized behemoths that threaten to wash away (read: “reinvent”) most every industry in their path.

For example, the speed of drug development is accelerating. Not only because biotechnology (sequencing, CRISPR, etc.) is progressing at an exponential rate, but because AI, quantum computing, and other exponentials are converging on the field.

When an innovation creates a new market and washes away an existing one, we use the term “disruptive innovation.” Such as when silicon chips replaced vacuum tubes at the beginning of the digital age. That was a disruptive innovation.

Solitary exponentials disrupt products, services, and markets—like when Netflix ate Blockbuster for lunch—while convergent exponentials wash away products, services, and markets, as well as the structures that support them.

No industry is immune.

As an entrepreneur, being able to see around the corner of tomorrow and being agile enough to adapt is critical to your success.

In today’s blog, I’ll share 4 emerging models (based on converging technologies) that will redefine business over the next few decades.

Let’s dive in…

4 BUSINESS MODELS THAT WILL SHAPE THE NEXT DECADE

As you read through these business models and the supporting examples, ask yourself: How can YOU leverage them for success?

(1) The Crowd Economy: Crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, leveraged assets, and staff-on-demand—essentially, all the developments that leverage the billions of people already online and the billions coming online.

Example: Airbnb has become the largest “hotel chain” in the world, yet it doesn’t own a single hotel room. Instead, it leverages (that is, rents out) the assets (spare bedrooms) of the crowd, with more than 5 million rooms, flats, and houses in over 100,000 cities across the globe.

(2) The Smartness Economy: In the late 1800s, if you wanted a good idea for a new business, all you needed was to take an existing tool, say a drill or a washboard, and add electricity to it—thus creating a power drill or a washing machine. In the 2020s, AI will be the electricity. In other words, take any existing tool, and add a layer of smartness.

Example: We all know the big names incorporating AI into their business models—from Amazon to Salesforce. But more AI startups arise each day: 2,300 AI-related startups around the world raised over $70 billion in 2021, more than double the amount raised in 2020.

(3) Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs): At the convergence of blockchain and AI sits a radically new kind of company—one with no employees, no bosses, and nonstop production. A set of preprogrammed rules determines how the company operates, and computers do the rest.

Example: While DAOs are just beginning to emerge, the platform DAOstack is working to provide these businesses with tools for success. For example, a fleet of autonomous taxis, for instance, with a blockchain-backed smart contracts layer, could run itself 24/7, including driving to the repair shop for maintenance, without any human involvement.

(4) Metaverse: We no longer live in only one place. We have real-world personae and online personae, and this delocalized existence is only going to expand. With the rise of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, we’re introducing more layers to this equation. You’ll have avatars for work and avatars for play, and all of these versions of ourselves are opportunities for new businesses.

Example: Today we have all mastered Zoom. Tomorrow, we’ll be diving deep in the SpatialWeb—moving back and forth between multiple virtual worlds and our physical reality using technologies like Vatoms (virtual atoms) and SpatialWeb.net to navigate the Metaverse.

FINAL THOUGHTS

What you should remember as you think about how to leverage these new business models is that the rate at which technology is accelerating is itself accelerating.

Yet even in this dynamic environment, countless businesses are still anchored by a mentality of maintaining—competing solely on operational execution.

But as an entrepreneur, it’s more vital than ever that you leverage these business models for success in the decades ahead.

Each one is a revolutionary way of creating value—each is a force for acceleration.

What challenges or problems will you solve with these new business models? How will you use them in your next venture?

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University, and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Welcome to this latest of unprecedented times, which is now being called an “unsettling monetary tightening cycle.” Inflation is sky-high, unemployment is under 4%, supply chains are a major challenge and the Fed just decided to stop babysitting the markets. Did you just sigh? Or choke? So did the global economy.

Barely a month and a half into the new year, executives worldwide are eyeing budget cuts, in an effort to hedge against impending lower profits in most industries. Sure, executives have a century of experience at trimming budgets, but this time they’re facing a confluences of often-contradictory financial indicators. Among the biggest: many leaders are staving off the great resignation by touting increases in bonus and merit pay, while the costs of goods and services also rise. “Companies’ costs are really going up crazily,” says Elise Freedman, workforce transformation practice leader at Korn Ferry. “Altogether it’s not sustainable.” It’s going to be an interesting year for budget planners.

To be sure, some businesses are nearly untouched by inflation, with plenty of profits to go around sans budget slashes. But for most, experts say that something must give—and it can’t be compensation (workers will quit) or prices (customers will leave), or materials prices (it costs what it costs). This leaves the spotlight on internal budgets.

Historically, organizations have trouble cutting budgets effectively. “My pet peeve is 10% cuts across the board,” says Andrés Tapia, global diversity and inclusion strategist at Korn Ferry. “Budget cutting should be strategic, not one size fits all.” But experts say too many firms commonly ignore this advice and do things like unilaterally ax expense accounts and travel allowances, which invariably turns off the executives who argue they need those perks to drum up business. Sometimes staffing additions are delayed, which succeed in reducing costs but may limit revenue sources.

Tapia says that leaders would do best to get out of the budget-cutting mindset, and instead focus on prioritizing. Perhaps instead of seven priorities, a company focuses on just three and adjust the budget accordingly. “It’s strategic. Just as everyone else is cutting spending by 20%, you spend more.” Advantage: yours. This strategy, experts say, proved successful for a slew of organizations in surviving the turbulence of 2008.

It can be very challenging to narrow down to a shortlist of priorities, says Nathan Blain, global lead for optimizing people costs at Korn Ferry. “Look hard at the bottom of your list, and ask, Do we need to do these initiatives? Can we do them another way? Or at a later time?” This initiative-based thinking can be extremely effective by ultimately avoiding the costs of entire programs. But it requires a shift away from the typical budget-creation mindset, where companies look at last year’s budget and add a bit to account for inflation.

Blain advises clients to also look at remote and hybrid arrangements, which are also still leaving money on the table for many firms. Most commonly, some travel and commercial leases can be targeted, as can the Achille’s heel of all businesses: complicated processes. You know you’re facing one when addressing a tech problem requires talking to four different help desk workers, or a financial transaction is proceeded by a dozen different risk calculations. Might six suffice? “Just make sure that you’re designing everything for simplicity. It’s good business hygiene.”

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Elise Freedman, Andrés Tapia, Nathan Blain, Korn Ferry, Senior Client Partners and edits by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

What made Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk succeed? Was it their technology or their mindset?

Personally, I think the mindset is an entrepreneur’s most critical asset. Yet few of us ever take the time to craft it — to purposefully select and sharpen the mindset(s) we desire.

Your mindset is the filter through which you see the world. It determines how you spend your time, what decisions you make, and where you invest your resources.

I’ve been asked over the years whether I’ve always had an Abundance mindset and an Exponential mindset… The answer is NO. They are both mindsets that I’ve crafted over the past 10 to 15 years.

So how do you craft and reinforce a mindset? Which mindsets am I most excited about? These are the questions I’ll explore in this blog.

Let’s dive in…

How mindsets work…

Before you choose which mindset(s) to focus on, it helps to understand how mindsets work.

Here’s an analogy: if you’ve been following developments in AI, you know that we can train neural nets to do image recognition. The challenge with these neural nets is that they’re only as good as the data you feed them.

For example, if you show the neural nets thousands of pictures of cats, and then you show them a picture of a dog, the algorithm will tell you that the dog is actually a cat. It doesn’t know any better.

The same is true for our brains, which are also neural nets.

If you constantly feed your brain with negative perspectives, your outlook will be negative. You won’t know any better.

So, how are you training your neural net?

Most of us don’t realize that we’re doing this training. It operates in the background. For example, through social media echo chambers or in our daily news intake of the CNN (Crisis News Network) or Fox.

So, what shapes your mindset? What are the things that have you trapped thinking the way you do? What would you need to change?

Crafting your mindset…

The two key inputs that shape our mindsets are the people we spend time with and the media we consume.

Life is who you go through life with

There’s an old saying in business that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

If you want to be fit, hang out with friends who exercise.

If you want to think big and aspire to change the world, hang out with people who have Moonshots and a massively transformative purpose (MTP).

Garbage in, garbage out

Just as you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, the same is true for ideas.

The news and media we consume are data that we allow to flow into our brains (AKA our neural nets).

What is your news diet? What kind of movies or documentaries are you watching?

What books or blogs are you reading? (Thank you for reading this blog!)

Do these inputs reinforce the mindsets you want? Or do they reinforce mindsets you’re trying to avoid?

As an entrepreneur, answering these questions is a critical part of your journey to be successful during this era of exponential change.

The next step on that journey is choosing the mindset(s) that works best for you.

Selecting your mindset…

There are MANY mindsets you can choose from. But for me, there are six specific mindsets that I find most powerful and important to hone during this era of exponential growth.

The following six mindsets are the ones I personally focus on:

1. Abundance Mindset: You have clarity, evidence, and conviction that technology is dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing products and services, creating increasing abundance on a global scale.
2. Exponential Mindset: You understand that computation and derivative technologies (AI, VR, 3D Printing, etc.) are growing exponentially. Thirty doublings drive a billion-fold improvement that the human (linear) mind finds difficult to grasp.
3. Longevity Mindset: You are focused on maximizing your health span, tracking the biotech breakthroughs able to add 20 to 30 healthy years onto your life and making “100 years old the new 60.” You seek key insights and early access.
4. Moonshot Mindset: You understand that most people are focused on incremental (10%) growth, but you seek 10x Moonshot growth. You desire tools and techniques that enable you to select and implement your Moonshots.
5. Purpose/Passion-driven Mindset: You seek to find, refine, or update your massively transformative purpose (MTP), which allows you to live a passion-driven life. You seek tools and a community to amplify and support your MTP.
6. Gratitude Mindset: You recognize how incredibly lucky you are on a personal and professional basis, and you take the time to acknowledge your blessings. You have created routines in your day that allow you to reflect on this, and to share this with those in your life in a way that brings you joy and uplifts those around you.

Which would you choose?

Can you imagine the benefits of having an Exponential or Abundance Mindset?

Would it help flip the way you see things? Instead of seeing a problem, can you see an opportunity? Remember that the world’s biggest challenges are also the world’s biggest business opportunities.

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Here are two Moonshot Culture hacks I learned from Astro Teller, the world’s authority on Moonshots:

1. Train Your Team’s Thinking: This first hack helps to put your team into the Mindset of accepting and encouraging Moonshot thinking.

• Weird is Good: You give your team massive congratulations for any 10X idea—no matter how insane. Remember how fragile these ideas can be. If you show the slightest disdain for one of these ideas, it will be the last “Moonshot” idea that you get from that person.
• Quick Kills are Good: Once you instill the idea that weird is good, now you’re ready to show them that you actually value “intellectual honesty.” Work with them to explore whether the idea can work, or if there’s a fatal flaw. In most cases, you can kill the idea on the whiteboard before you even leave the room… If they are successful in figuring out why the idea won’t work, congratulate them again, and give them another hug and compliment.

Show your team that they can earn “bonus points” for: (a) raising a crazy idea, and (b) even more bonus points for then killing the idea!

2. Create a “Learning List”: Learning from your mistakes is critical to creating an environment conducive to creating and achieving Moonshots.

This is where the idea of a Learning List comes in. You can use it by following four steps:

Step 1: Ask your team to create a list of action items in order of priority.

Step 2: Once your team delivers you their action list, you say, “Humor me and re-order your list so that the items at the top of your list would teach you the most in this project, giving you the biggest insights that you don’t yet have.”

Step 3: You then say, “Now go do the top two things on your Learning List.”

Step 4: Finally, when they complete those top two items, ask them to create a NEW list organized by importance. Chances are that this new list won’t look anything like the original list. That’s why we do things in “Learning Order.”

The lesson from this hack is to fall in love with the learning process—not with what you’ve built.

How do you think these Moonshot Culture hacks will work in your company?

Are you clear on which of your team members are the right fit for the 1,000% Growth Team versus the 10% Growth Team? ”

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Doing anything big and bold in the world is hard.

It takes passion, grit, luck, and often a decade or more of hard work to see a Moonshot materialize—much less succeed.

There’s no definite roadmap for a successful Moonshot. The path can be filled with obstacles.

But as Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues.

One of the key lessons I’ve learned from founding a number of successful companies and pursuing and achieving several Moonshots is the importance of what I call “staging your bold ideas.”

You have to break your bold vision into executable, bite-size chunks–what psychologists refer to as “subgoals.”

Let’s dive in!

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Creating a world of abundance isn’t about creating a world of luxury—it’s about creating a world of possibility.

But how exactly do we create such a world?

Today we’ll explore a powerful concept called “the adjacent possible.”

This is theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman’s wonderful term for all the myriad paths unlocked by every novel discovery—the multitude of universes hidden inside something as simple as an idea.

Abundance is one of those simple ideas.

And its time has come.

It is up to bold, exponential entrepreneurs around the world to unlock this adjacent possibility and help humanity live up to its full potential.

In today’s blog, I’ll discuss what the adjacent possible is, why it’s more relevant than ever, and how it can help us fulfill the promise of a truly abundant future—for everyone.

Let’s dive in…

WHAT EXACTLY IS THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE?

Before the invention of the wheel… the cart, the carriage, the automobile, the wheelbarrow, the roller skate, and a million other offshoots of circularity were not imaginable.

They existed in a realm that was off-limits until the wheel was discovered.

But once discovered, these pathways became clear.

This is the adjacent possible.

It’s the long list of first-order possibilities that opens up whenever a new discovery is made.

And our path of adjacent “possibles” has led us to a unique moment in time. We have wandered into a world where the expansive nature of technology has begun to connect with our inner desires.

As technologist Kevin Kelly explains it:

“For most of history, the unique mix of talents, skills, insights, and experiences of each person had no outlet. If your dad was a baker, you were a baker. As technology expands the possibility space, it expands the chance that someone can find an outlet for their personal traits . . . When we enlarge the variety and reach of technology, we increase options, not just for ourselves and not for others living, but for all generations to come.”

Over 50 years ago, Abraham Maslow pointed out that people whose basic needs were not being met had little time to spend on self-fulfillment.

If you’re trying to feed yourself or find medications for your children or survive other, similar threats, then living a life of possibility is not much of a probability.

But this is exactly, as economist Daniel Kahneman figured out, where the adjacent possible meets the road to abundance and produces some spectacular leverage.

THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE & THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

Several years ago, Kahneman set aside the question of cognitive biases and turned his attention to the relationship between income level and well-being.

By analyzing the results of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which asked some 450,000 Americans what brings them joy, he discovered, as the New York Times aptly put it, “Maybe money does buy you happiness after all.”

The operative word here is maybe.

What the data show is that one’s emotional satisfaction moves in lockstep with one’s income—as income rises, well-being rises—but only to a point. Before the average American earns $75,000 a year, there is a direct correlation between money and happiness.

Above that number, the correlation disappears.

This tells us something interesting: that in the United States, the freedom to flourish—to truly enjoy a life of possibility—costs roughly $75,000 a year (in 2008 dollars).

But what’s really important is what that money buys.

The typical American spending breakdown shows that 70% to 80% percent of the money we earn goes to meet basic needs such as water, food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education.

That figure rises to over 90% in many developing countries.

But in our abundant future, the dollar goes further. So does the yen, the peso, the euro, and so forth.

This happens because of dematerialization and demonetization, saved time, and a thousand other reasons.

So, you have to wonder: what does it take to make a real difference?

Not much, it turns out.

Daniel Kahneman’s calculation has since been extended to the rest of the planet. On average, across the globe, the point where well-being and money diverge is roughly $10,000.

That’s how much the average global citizen needs to earn to fulfill his or her basic needs and gain a toehold toward much greater possibility.

There is no debate that life has gotten considerably better at the bottom over the last 5 decades.

The developing world has seen longer life expectancies, lower infant mortality rates, better access to information, communication, education, potential avenues out of poverty, quality health care, political freedoms, economic freedoms, human rights, and saved time.

WHICH WAY NEXT?

But that $10,000 tells us that we’ve actually come even further.

Thirty years ago, most well-off US citizens owned a camera, a CD player, a stereo, a video game console, a cell phone, a watch, and a whole bunch of other assets that easily add up to more than $10,000.

All these now come standard on today’s smartphones.

In our exponentially enabled work, that’s how quickly $10,000 worth of expenses can vanish.

And importantly, they can vanish without much outside intervention.

No one set out to zero the costs of two dozen products.

Instead, inventors set out to make better cell phones—the path of the adjacent possible did the rest.

This time around, we can squeeze a bit of randomness out of the equation.

We don’t have to wait for history to help our cause—we can help it ourselves. We know which technologies need further development, and we know how to go from A to B much faster than before.

Unlike earlier eras, we don’t have to wait for corporations to get interested in solutions, or for governments to get around to our problems.

We can take matters into our own hands.

Meanwhile, the one-quarter of humanity that has forever been on the sidelines—the rising billion—has finally gotten into the game.

Most importantly, the game itself is no longer zero-sum.

For the first time in forever, we don’t need to figure out how to divide our pie into more slices, because we now know how to bake more pies.

Everyone can win.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Proverbs 29:18 tells us: “Where there is no vision, the people will perish.”

Perhaps that’s true, but it’s also myopic.

Abundance is both a plan and a Mindset.

This second bit is key. After all, our perspective shapes our reality.

So, while the Bible offers a warning, it’s helpful to remember that the inverse is also true: where there is vision, the people flourish.

The impossible becomes possible.

And abundance for all becomes imagine what’s next.

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Nothing is more important than your Mindset in the new year…

Let’s dive in…

1. Create a Daily Gratitude Practice: Every morning during my 10-minute meditation, I focus on gratitude and how I can be 30% more joyful throughout the day. In the evening, when I’m going to sleep before I drift off, I recall the 3 things I am most grateful for from that day.
2. Let the Most Important People in Your Life Know How Much You Value Them: Who are the people you’re most grateful for? Tell them how much you appreciate them! After all, “life is who you go through life with.”
3. Double-down on Your Passion: Your personal passion is your highest calling… the challenge you’re in love with, and the vision you have for yourself. It’s also the emotional fuel you need to keep you going in the face of inevitable hardships.
4. Develop Your Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP): An MTP is a clear, succinct statement that guides you, empowers you, and helps you decide what to do—as well as what not to do. My MTP is… “To inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity.”
5. Resolve to No Longer Resent Missed Opportunities: In a world of ever-increasing abundance, the future holds much more exciting, fulfilling, and profitable opportunities for you to pursue. Don’t regret the past. Live for your abundant future.
6. Go on a “Media-Diet”: Stop watching CNN, FOX, TikTok… Stop watching the dystopian news and wasting time on social media. This one step can boost your mood 10X.
7. Consume Optimistic / Future-Positive Content: There are a TON of incredible breakthroughs helping to create a world of abundance happening all the time. But you would never know this from the constant stream of negativity from most news outlets. Consider finding media sources that deliver you positive and optimistic insights.
8. Embrace Data-Driven Experimentation: Exponential entrepreneurs use rapid iteration and data-driven experimentation to foster creative solutions to previously unsolvable problems. What experiments can you run in 2022 to improve your business?
9. Digitize Everything You Can: Once you digitize a product or service, it jumps on the 6 Ds exponential roadmap and begins a journey towards becoming dematerialized, demonetized, and democratized. What parts of your business can you successfully digitize?
10. Identify and Pursue a Moonshot: Where can you go 10X bigger or better in your business while your competitors are pursuing incremental change? A Moonshot can fuel your life and make every day worth living to the fullest.

What other New Year Resolutions have you made? Email me at: [email protected]

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

When was the last time you felt grateful?

I mean truly grateful for all you have: your health, loved ones, the Moonshots you’re pursuing, the sunrise, and the extraordinary planet we inhabit.

In a world with an increasing abundance of opportunities and a dizzying rate of technological progress, we tend to live in a pervasive sense of “overwhelm.”

Overwhelm that can blind us to many of life’s simple joys.

What was once a technological miracle we now take for granted?

In part, this is because technology allows us to do so much more, so much faster, and so much cheaper and easier than ever before. We can fill every second of every day with increased productivity.

But it wasn’t always this way.

As a species, we used to work 80+ hours per week just to survive. To get access to basic food, water, and shelter. Life a hundred years ago was brutal, short, and filled with difficult choices.

Today’s exponential revolution has given many of us (though not everyone yet) a vacation from basic survival.

Being grateful means feeling and expressing appreciation and thankfulness for just how far we’ve come, and for what we have.

From a basic “standard of living standpoint,” each of us now has access to more fresh food, clean water, educational content, and medicines than kings and queens had just a century ago.

From an “entrepreneurial standpoint,” each of us has access to more communication capability, more knowledge, and more computational power than the heads of Fortune 100 companies just a few decades ago.

From an “impact standpoint,” each of us now has the privilege to work on a Massive Transformative Purpose. Taking on some of the world’s biggest problems is a luxury previously reserved for only the wealthiest philanthropists.

Problem-solving itself has been democratized, and we’re all better off because of it.

We should be grateful.

Being grateful involves regularly making the shift from expectation to appreciation, and from overwhelm to thankfulness.

It means constantly recognizing that we’re living in the most extraordinary time in history—that today is better than yesterday, and that tomorrow will be better still.

I believe that being grateful is especially important for entrepreneurs.

We have so many expectations for the future, and our role in creating it, that we often get impatient… why isn’t it here yet?!

5 BENEFITS OF GRATITUDE

Every morning, I try to get in at least a 10-minute meditation.

I’ll play a “100 Hz Binaural Beats” soundtrack on YouTube as background music (or the daily meditation from Sam Harris’ Waking Up course) and focus on gratitude.

It is an amazing way to start the day!

So, why should you focus on being grateful?

Here are 5 of my favorite reasons:

(1) You feel better! Expressing gratitude causes our brain to release dopamine and serotonin: the two crucial neurotransmitters responsible for our emotions.

(2) You make everyone else around you feel better as well! When you are in gratitude, you’re burning 30% brighter, 30% happier, and your mood influences everyone you encounter. You take the time to feel and express appreciation and thankfulness.

(3) As a leader, when you are grateful, it’s much easier to encourage your team to be grateful—which improves the relational well-being both for individuals and the group. 

(4) When you’re “in gratitude” you invest in relationships. Ultimately, “who you go through life with” is everything… Relationships bring joy, meaning, and love. And in your leadership role, you focus on what positive results you can create for others.

(5) You are more optimistic, more inspired, and healthier. And this attracts the most incredible talent and individuals into your orbit.

There is NO downside to gratitude, ONLY UPSIDE.

A SIMPLE PRACTICE

I will close with 2 simple gratitude practices that I use.

In the morning, during my meditation, I think about what it would be like for me to be 30% more grateful and 30% happier today. I imagine what impact this would have on those around me. And then I set that as a goal for myself.

In the evening, when I’m going to sleep before I drift off, I recall the 3 things I am most grateful for from that day. Amazingly, they rarely have to do with work or technology. They are most frequently about my boys, family, and friends. It keeps me grounded and helps me remember what matters most.

So, how would your life change if you were more grateful?

What are the 3 things you’re most grateful for in your personal life? In your work life?

Let’s work together and help you move towards your vision of success faster; schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Are you afraid of failure? Most people are. Do you know why?

I truly believe this and it’s one of Peter’s Laws, but how do we know that it’s true?

It turns out that there’s a predictable process for the evolution of great and breakthrough ideas. Ideas that are revolutionary.

I learned about this process from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the geostationary communication satellite and author of dozens of best-selling science-fiction books, including 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s I had the great honor to know Arthur C. Clarke, he was “Uncle Arthur” to me, Bob Richards, and Todd Hawley: the three co-Founders of International Space University.

Clarke described three phases of a great idea:

1. In the beginning, people will tell you that the idea is “crazy”—that it will never work.
2. Next, people will say: “Well, it might work but it’s not worth doing.”
3. Finally, they’ll say: “I told you that it was a great idea all along!”

In today’s blog, I’ll share a story that perfectly exemplifies this evolution: NASA project manager Tony Spear’s efforts to land an unmanned rover on Mars in the 1990s.

It’s a story about steadfast belief in a breakthrough idea and having the passion and persistence to pursue that idea—even in the face of risk and opposition from experts.

In short, it’s a story about entrepreneurship.

Let’s dive in… 

PHASE 1: BIRTH OF A “CRAZY” IDEA

When Tony Spear was given the job of landing an unmanned rover on the Martian surface, he had no idea that Clarke’s three stages would be precisely his experience.

A jovial, white-haired cross between Albert Einstein and Archie Bunker, Spear started his career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 1962.

Over the next four decades, he worked on Missions from Mariner to Viking, but it was his final assignment, as project manager for the Mars Pathfinder, that he describes as his “greatest mission challenge ever.”

The year was 1997, and the United States had not landed a probe on Mars since July 1976. That was Viking, a complex and expensive mission, costing some $3.5 billion (in 1997 dollars).

Spear’s assignment was to find a way to do everything that the previous mission had done, just faster, better, and cheaper.

And when I say cheaper, I mean a whole lot cheaper: fifteen times cheaper to be exact, for a fixed and total development cost of only $150 million.

That meant all the expensive, traditional, and proven stuff was out the window—including the types of retrorockets for landing that worked on the Viking Mission.

To pull this off under these seemingly impossible constraints, Spear and his team had to do everything differently: from how he managed the mission to how they landed.

As Spear recounts the story of those early days, “That really scared people. At NASA headquarters, I was assigned six different managers in rapid sequence—each of the first five found a different excuse to quit from the project. Finally, I was assigned someone about to retire who didn’t mind sticking with me at the end of his career. Even the NASA administrator, Daniel Goldin, nearly flipped out when he received his initial mission briefing—he couldn’t get past how many new things we were trying out.”

PHASE 2: “WELL, IT MIGHT WORK BUT IT’S NOT WORTH DOING”

Among the many things Spear tried out, nothing struck people as zanier than using airbags to cushion the initial impact, helping the craft bounce around like a beach ball on the Martian surface, before settling down into a safe landing spot.

But airbags were cheap, they wouldn’t contaminate their landing site with foreign chemicals, and Spear was certain that they would work.

The early tests, however, were a disaster, so the experts were summoned. The experts had a pair of opinions.

The first was: “Don’t use airbags.”

The second was: “No, we’re totally serious, don’t even consider using airbags.”

“Two of them,” recounts Spear, “told me flat out that I was wasting government money and should cancel the project. Finally, when they realized I wasn’t going to give up, they decided to dig in and help me.” 

PHASE 3: “I TOLD YOU IT WAS A GREAT IDEA ALL ALONG!”

Together they tested more than a dozen designs, skidding them along a faux rocky Martian surface to see which would survive without shredding to pieces.

Finally, just eight months prior to launch, Spear and his team completed qualification testing of a design composed of twenty-four interconnected spheres, loaded it aboard the Pathfinder Mission, and launched it into space.

But the anxiety didn’t end there.

The trip to Mars took eight months, during which there was plenty of time to worry about the fate of the mission.

Spear recalls:

“In the weeks just prior to landing, everyone was very nervous, speculating whether we’d have a big splat when we arrived. Goldin himself was wondering what to do: Should he come to the JPL control room for the landing or not? Just a few days before our July 4th descent to the surface, the administrator took a bold tack, holding a press conference and proclaiming, ‘The Pathfinder Mission demonstrates a new way of doing business at NASA, and is a success whether or not we survive the landing.’ ”

The landing went exactly as planned.

They had spent one-fifteenth the cost of the Viking Mission, and everything worked perfectly—especially the airbags.

Spear was a hero.

Goldin was so impressed that he insisted airbags be used to land the next few Mars missions and was quoted as saying, “Tony Spear was a legendary project manager at JPL and helped make Mars Pathfinder the riveting success that it was.” 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Arthur C. Clarke was a close friend and a mentor of mine.

And he was right: demonstrating great ideas involves a considerable amount of risk.

There will always be naysayers.

People will resist breakthrough ideas until the moment they’re accepted as the new norm.

Every breakthrough idea I’ve worked on, from the International Space University (ISU) to the $10M Ansari XPRIZE, has gone through these three phases where people ridiculed us and stood by the sidelines, only to eventually celebrate the successes.

Since the road to abundance requires significant innovation (and revolution), it also requires significant tolerance for risk and failure and tolerance for ideas that strike most people as absolute nonsense.

Peter’s dear friend Burt Rutan, who designed and built SpaceShipOne, the brilliant vehicle that won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE, put it best:

“Revolutionary ideas come from nonsense. If an idea is truly a breakthrough, then the day before it was discovered, it must have been considered crazy or nonsense or both—otherwise it wouldn’t be a breakthrough.”

What crazy ideas and Moonshots are you pursuing?

Let’s work together and build your Moonshot innovation, schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Like truth, art, or love—grace is often hard to define. But we know it when we see it, and when we experience it.

I’ll never forget—it was early in my days as a CEO. A member of our board, who was mentoring me, looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t just want you to be successful—I am going to ensure that you are successful.”

I was so moved by his words, which told me that he was invested in me. Looking back now, I see it as a gift of grace.

Unearned and unmerited, grace is the goodwill of human nature predisposed to helping others. And now, as we approach year-end and a time of reflection, we are reminded of the immutable power of grace.

Our colleague Dan, a global account leader in our firm’s Chicago office, told me just the other day about the recent passing of his older brother, Jeff, after years of battling type 2 diabetes, renal failure, and other medical conditions. Dan recalled how his brother, 12 ½ years older, had occupied a special place in his life—“part older brother, part trailblazer, who would show me the ropes of adulthood.”

As he prepared for the funeral, Dan confided that he wondered if Jeff knew how grateful he was for him: “Did he know the kind of influence he had on my life? Was he aware, as a pharmacist, pharmacology professor, and musician, of the impact he had on others’ lives? I think so, but you never know for sure.”

Yet even amid such grief, there was also grace, as Dan also shared: “In a true ‘circle of life moment,’ my niece (on my sister’s side) gave birth—just one day after Jeff’s passing—to a healthy baby boy. Another opportunity for gratitude.”

As we all strive to become our better selves, we can find inspiration in the five graces—gratitude, resilience, aspiration, courage, and empathy. Each captures an invaluable human trait, and together they literally compose the word “grace.” Here are some thoughts:

• Gratitude On the corner of my home office desk is a scrapbook: a celebration of the past 50 years of our firm. Whenever I need perspective the most, I turn to those pages and see the mosaic of colleagues’ past and present—the heart and soul of our firm—and I know why I am here. I see smiles and laughter and celebrations. I think of the stories people have shared—struggles, successes, and milestones along the way. We’ve congratulated each other on weddings and the births of children, we’ve comforted each other in times of illness, and we’ve expressed condolences on the loss of loved ones. Because when family and friends are deeply connected, that’s what they do. And for this we are grateful.

• Resilience. Over the years, and especially at holiday time, our parents, grandparents, and other relatives tell stories about their lives. These stories have a lasting impact, reminding us that there is always a way. I’ll never forget the story shared with me earlier this year by an executive about his mother who, when she was in her late 90s, contracted a serious infection that required hospitalization. As her condition worsened, the doctor gave the sad prognosis that she wasn’t going to make it. The time had come for the family to arrange hospice for her. Thinking that his mother was sleeping, the executive quietly approached the hospital bed and called out gently to her. Suddenly, this woman, who had seemed near death a few minutes before, snapped her eyes open and replied in a heavy Italian accent, “I heard what you and the doctors were talking about. I am not going anywhere.” Two weeks later, she was well enough to be discharged from hospice. Ever resilient, she lived another two years—nearly reaching 100 years of age! Moral of the story: never underestimate the indomitable human spirit. That’s the resilience that propels us forward.

• Aspiration. Hope, desire, longing, yearning, wish, aim… Each of these words speaks to an aspect of aspiration, but it is far more than all of them. Aspiration has nothing to do with those momentary wants—the kind of dreams that captured us as children. So many of us can remember sitting down with that thick Sears catalog and turning its pages full of pictures as we made our holiday lists. (One year, all I wanted was a Green Bay Packers jersey, helmet, and pads.) Aspiration, though, is far more than a passing fad or fancy. It is a vision—a goal—capturing no less than who we are and what we want to become. As we raise our sights, we elevate others.
• Courage. During these times of rapid change, things can get really uncomfortable. We’re in constant transition—like trapeze artists flying through the air. We can’t make the next trapeze appear automatically— we must wait for it. Then, as it approaches, we let go of the old trapeze so we can reach for the new one. At that moment—completely ungrounded—we need courage. Courage is not about having “no fear,” but rather to “know fear.” How else can we progress? By following our values and drawing from past experiences, we find a way forward—“knowing what to do when we don’t know what to do.”

• Empathy. We see people for who they really are, as we meet them wherever they are. This is the power of empathy—we can literally see it at work in our brains. As our Korn Ferry Institute explains, brain imaging shows us how different aspects of empathy engage our minds and emotions. First is cognitive empathy, which allows us to understand others’ emotional experiences while maintaining a healthy detachment. This is how we intellectually walk in someone else’s shoes. The second is sympathy—or emotional empathy—that allows us to feel what another person is experiencing. Too much sympathy, though, can make us feel pain as if it were our own. When suffering becomes too intense, we are prone to protect ourselves by putting up barriers. The third is compassion, or empathetic care, which we experience as concern for others. This form of empathy allows us to set aside our own concerns and reach out to help. Empathy is not just something we talk about—it must be felt by others.

Life and leadership are all about the journey and the grace-filled moments along the way. Indeed, that’s what truly matters—that’s what people remember the most. After all, grace is not defined by what we say, rather it is found in what others feel.

Let’s work together,  schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Gary Burnison, Korn Ferry CEO and edits by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Are you afraid of failure? Most people are. Do you know why?

Do you know why?

Whenever I ask people what they fear most about failure, I hear three consistent answers:

1. Fear of negatively impacting your reputation: “If I fail, I won’t get the promotion.”
2. Fear of wasting time: “I’ve invested two years of my life—we can’t fail now!”
3. Fear of wasting money: “I’ve invested way too much money—we can’t fail now!”

Why does this matter?

Because whatever the reason, fear of failure is actually fear of change—and therefore fear of innovation.

For an entrepreneur, fear of failure can be crippling—paralyzing your creativity and risk-taking, and ultimately lowering your odds of success.

So, how do you minimize the fear of failure in yourself and your team?

It starts with shifting your perspective about failure–and that’s what today’s blog is all about.

Let’s dive in…

SOME PEOPLE ARE NATURALLY MORE COMFORTABLE WITH RISK

Failure is not necessarily the disaster that everyone assumes.

Stanford Business School Professor Baba Shiv explains it this way:

“Failure is a dreaded concept for most businesspeople. But failure can actually be a huge engine of innovation. The trick lies in approaching it with the right attitude and harnessing it as a blessing, not a curse.”

Shiv studies the role that the brain’s liking and wanting systems to play in shaping our decisions: a field known as Neuroeconomics.

When it comes to risk, he divides the world into two mindsets:

Type 1 people are fearful of making mistakes.

For them, failure is shameful and disastrous. As a result, they are risk-averse, and whatever progress they make is incremental at best.

On the other hand, Type 2 people are fearful of losing out on opportunities.

Places like Silicon Valley are full of Type 2 entrepreneurs. As Shiv puts it, “What is shameful to these people is sitting on the sidelines while someone else runs away with a great idea. Failure is not bad; it can actually be exciting.”

From the Type 2 perspective, failure is not bad.

In fact, Shiv says, “From so-called failures emerge those valuable gold nuggets—the ‘ah-ha!’ moments of insight that guide you toward your next innovation.”

HOW CAN YOU BECOME MORE COMFORTABLE WITH RISK?

Since using exponential technologies to create a world of abundance requires taking risks, figuring out how to convert Type 1, or “riskphobic,” people into Type 2 “riskphilic” players is vital to this effort.

One way that companies have begun strengthening their fearlessness muscles is rapid prototyping: the process of brainstorming wild new ideas, then quickly developing a physical model or mockup of the solution.

As Shiv points out, “This process allows people to move quickly from the abstract to the concrete and lets them visualize the outcome of their ideas. Because not all prototypes end up as the best or final solution, rapid prototyping also teaches that failure is actually a necessary part of the process.”

Over a decade ago, Michael Schrage, a Research Fellow at MIT’s Sloan School, shared his “5-5-5 Rapid Innovation Method” with me.

It’s a concrete way of putting Shiv’s notion into practice and making your company’s environment more riskphilic and tolerant of failure.

Below is my variation on Schrage’s 5-5-5 concept in three steps:

Step 1: Teams of 5

First, break your company or group into teams of five people. Try to maximize diversity in the group (e.g., age, expertise).

Why 5 people?

Because there’s no need for a “CEO,” or an org chart, or a communication plan. Information flows freely and there’s the diversity of ideas. This is similar to Jeff Bezos’ “two-pizza rule” for ideal working team size.

Step 2: Allocate Budget ($500 or $5,000)

Your next step is to allocate a budget for each of the teams. Choose something on the order of $500 to $5,000.

This is the amount of money each team will spend during the 5-5-5 program: enough money for the team to try a few experiments without breaking the bank.

Step 3: Allocate Time (5 Days for 5 Weeks)

Finally, give the teams a fixed and short amount of time to run a number of experiments to see if their idea has merit and gets traction.

The amount of time should be short enough so that there are no negative consequences if nothing useful materializes.

CREATING A “RISKPHILIC” ENVIRONMENT

If Schrage’s methodology is used in a friendly, riskphilic environment—in which everyone understands that most ideas will fail—participants will not fear ramifications to their reputations.

Under these circumstances, there’s no downside to having a crazy idea, and a tremendous upside if that crazy idea turns out to be revolutionary, so people are much more willing to take risks.

And because each idea takes limited time and money to implement, no one worries too much about significant losses.

Will this process always lead to breakthroughs?

Doubtful.

But it does create a safe environment where people can practice stretching their imaginations, taking bigger risks, and learning to see failure as a building block of innovation rather than its anathema.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The road to success as an entrepreneur (and entrepreneurial company) is paved with failure.

You must have a strategy in place to encourage risk-taking, manage that risk, and learn from the inevitable mistakes.

A risk-accepting mentality is key to rapid iteration, failing forward, and ultimately entrepreneurship.

It means not being afraid to fail—because you will fail. And that’s OK!

It’s part of the journey.

Let’s work together and build a culture of innovation, schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Curating your community is one of the most important investments you can make as an executive or an entrepreneur.

Your communities shape your mindsets, passions, hobbies, and ultimately your success.

For example, if you want to think big and change the world, hang out with people who have a Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) and Moonshots.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have thriving communities in my life—from Abundance and Singularity University to XPRIZE and Fountain Life.

They inspire me, challenge my thinking, and keep me focused on my MTP and Moonshots.

But what if you don’t have such a community in your life?

One option is to create it yourself.

In today’s blog, Part 2 of a series on how to build a community, I’ll discuss the remaining five stages for creating a thriving community that revolves around your interests and passions.

Let’s dive in… 

In Part 1 (on community), we discussed the first three stages of building a thriving community: Establishing Your Identity, Designing Your Community’s Portal, and the Early Days of Building Your Community.

Here are the remaining five stages:

STAGE 4: CREATING COMMUNITY CONTENT

Below is a list of the five basic content categories you can draw upon:

1. Content about the Future. For example, you can preview an upcoming event or product launch. Or you can make predictions about the year ahead. Previews keep members informed, while predictions spark debate.
2. The News. This can be a news roundup, or breaking news, or news about just-released products. But be sure to make your news new. Give it an edge. Be funny. More critically, be sure to do a member news section.
3. The Interview. Choose a “member of the month” and interview him or her. Choose your oldest member and interview them. Equally important, do VIP interviews.
4. Advice. This can include advice from you as the founder. But you can also solicit advice from members themselves and then do a roundup of general advice from the community.
5. The Guest. Whether we’re talking about op-ed pieces or guest blogs from experts, giving outsiders a forum to communicate with your community can help serve the core and enlarge membership.

STAGE 5: ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES

There are two types of engagement that matter most:

First, low-friction engagement, such as a Facebook like or a re-Tweet. This type of cosmetic engagement matters because many newcomers want social proof that the community they’ve stumbled upon is the real deal.

But you also want deep engagement: building living bridges between members of your community. People join communities for the ideas—they stay for the emotions.

Below are five of the most powerful engagement strategies:

1. Reputation. A leaderboard or ranking system can add a gamification layer to your community. Publicly holding people accountable for their performance creates interesting social dynamics.
2. The Meetup. The goal is to generate real emotions, and nothing works better than live bodies in a room together. Of course, if you can’t get everybody together physically, get them together virtually, though don’t be afraid of hosting a structured discussion.
3. The Challenge. Whether it’s a group project or an incentive prize, challenging the community can be a great way to foster cohesion.
4. Visuals. Whether it’s how-to videos generated by you as the community’s founder, user-generated photos, or a simple SlideShare, ignoring the fact that the web is a visual medium will only hurt you.
5. Be a Connector. One of the best ways to engage them is to introduce like-minded members to each other. Make the introduction, suggest that they meet, and give them a topic or agenda to fuel the conversation.

STAGE 6: MANAGING YOUR COMMUNITY

Communities are messy places.

Yet you need to steer the ship no matter how turbulent the storm.

Here are the five lessons for managing a community that matter most.

1. Benign Dictators. The best communities are run by benevolent tyrants. You can do this by establishing parameters and then let your members make suggestions. The key is to be transparent about the process.
2. Stay Calm. Let the kids play. Will it get loud occasionally? Of course. But a little fighting is a good thing. So is a little meandering.
3. No Panhandling. Stop trying to market things to your community. The marketplace emerges organically, from the conversation, and not the other way around.
4. Retention Matters. Too many community leaders spend all their time chasing new members. Remember: bigger isn’t always better. Making sure your current members are happily engaged is far more important.
5. Delegate. Distributed leadership is key. Let community leaders emerge, and be sure to spread power around. You’re the benevolent dictator, so establish guidelines and clear responsibilities, provide training when needed, and create perks to reward all this participation.

STAGE 7: DRIVING GROWTH

Remember, you don’t need to be huge to be effective.

But if you’re looking to grow, the best place to start is with the basics. People like talking to one another, so do what you can to connect them.

With these basics in place, here are seven effective strategies for expansion.

1. Evangelism. Word of mouth is still the most effective way to grow a community. Get your members talking about your efforts.
2. Play-Well with Others. Partner with neighboring organizations. You can do this in the real world and online.
3. Competition. People love to compete. Leaderboards, rating systems, incentive prizes, whatever—give people a way to square off against one another and they will show up.
4. Pick a Fight. One of the best ways to strengthen a community is to go into battle against a common rival. Find an enemy. Take a stand.
5. Buzz Marketing. Edgy demonstrations of new tech, products, and ideas spark buzz and attract followers.
6. Host Events. It’s worth repeating: nothing brings people together like, well, actually bringing people together.
7. Technical Optimization. If you want a larger online presence, don’t forget the tried and true: search engine optimization tactics, advertising, etc.

STAGE 8: MONETIZATION

Monetizing your community can be more art than science, but there are several hard and fast rules worth remembering:

1. Transparency and Authenticity. If you plan on making money from your community, don’t hide this fact. And there’s a good chance your community is also looking for ways to make money from their passion, so drive engagement by making monetization a topic for discussion.
2. Sell What the Community Builds. The easiest way to make money without alienating members is to help those members make money too.
3. Cater to the Core. Give the people what they want. Sell products that are authentic and do so after you have an established reputation.
4. All the Typical Stuff. You can, of course, sell ads to outsiders and premium membership to insiders—these are typical approaches. But again, remember to cater to the core. For instance, make sure your advertisers are selling things the community really wants.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Communities are now empowered to tackle jobs far larger in scope and size than anything previously possible.

And as entrepreneurs, we have access to more capital, knowledge, and computational power than ever before.

This means that we now have the power to attack and make a dent in billion-person problems, such as hunger or poverty. This was unthinkable just a few decades ago.

Which of those grand challenges will you and your community take on?

Let’s work together and build your tribe, schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by and Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

When you come up with a crazy idea or talk about exponential technologies or brainstorm solutions to humanity’s grand challenges, do you have a support network that inspires and supports your big thinking? Or do friends shut you down and tell you that you’re a little crazy?

To be inventive, to make a difference in the world, an entrepreneur needs a safe and supportive network that will allow you to embrace and explore crazy ideas.

Your community shapes what you do.

But what if the community you need to pursue your passion and Moonshot doesn’t exist?

In true entrepreneurial spirit, create your own!

It turns out that there are eight stages to building a successful community.

In today’s blog, Part 1 of a two-part series I’ll discuss who should (and should not) create a community and the first three of those stages, including forming your community’s identity and practical steps you can take in the early days.

Let’s dive in!

FIND YOUR TRIBE

The ego-belittling truth the internet makes visible is that none of us is as unique as we’d like to believe. This is good news!

It means that if you are passionate about something, there’s a pretty good chance others share that passion.

Here are the first three stages you need to go through to build a thriving community. 

STAGE 1: ESTABLISH YOUR IDENTITY

It’s important to remember that people join communities because it reinforces their sense of identity.

So, start by finding your people.

What is your Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP)? Who is in your tribe?

Be as specific as possible. Write up a mission statement, post it in a visible place on your website, then live by that statement.

This is also why it’s important to tell your story.

A mission statement is nice, but unless you’re already a public figure, then people need to know who you are and why you’re doing what you’re doing.

This could be in written form, but even better: record a short video.

Let your passion shine through. 

STAGE 2: DESIGN YOUR COMMUNITY’S PORTAL

There are six basics regarding designing the look, feel, and engagement of your community portal:

1. Just Get Started and Design Something Authentic. Find inspiration in Reid Hoffman’s famous statement: “If an entrepreneur isn’t embarrassed by the first release of their product offering, then they launched it too late.”

The same applies to communities.

You want to start by starting. Don’t spend years designing the right portal, and don’t blow your bank either.

Authenticity matters. And having a personality is key, so people can quickly figure out if they belong in your tribe.

But giving people a place to have a conversation is more important.

You can always add better window treatments later.

2. Navigation. People need to know how to move around easily.

They want to know where to go and what they’ll find there, and if you can’t tell them this information quickly and clearly, there are plenty of other places to visit online.

The navigation bar is not the place to get creative.

3. Simple Registration. If it takes more than 30 seconds to become a member of your community, you’re not going to have many members.

Similarly, if you want much more than my email address, then I suspect you’re secretly planning to make money selling my personal information and I’m not interested.

Ask for my email. Tell me exactly what I’m getting in return. Promise me that you’re not going to resell my data.

And give me an easy way to invite my friends to join as well.

4. The Information. What to post on your platform is a matter of personal preference, but it’s helpful to remember that people join online communities for four main reasons:

• a sense of belonging
• a support network
• greater influence
• a way to satisfy curiosity/explore new ideas

Most everything you choose to put on the site should be designed to meet these needs.

5. Recognition. Whether you create a leaderboard/rating system, or you make your blog or message board open (so that anyone can post), be sure to highlight popular content.

Specifically, a short description of the post and, more important, a larger picture of the person posting.

Remember: people want to be celebrated for their contributions.

6. Scalability. Sure, you might think you want a gargantuan membership, but understand that good communities are messy places.

This is key.

You want some of this mess because it will generate more new ideas and help accelerate the rate of innovation and make those members who hate top-down authority feel more comfortable.

But you also need to be able to steer (not control) the mess. This means that you have to give members a way to break into smaller groups.

STAGE 3: EARLY DAYS OF BUILDING YOUR COMMUNITY

There’s no way around it, getting out of the gate is always tough.

But you don’t need many members to have an impact. In fact, the bigger a given community gets, the fewer people actively participate. This creates waste and it makes it harder for you to identify and work with the top members.

It’s better to extract 1 hour a day from 100 committed members than to have 50,000 mostly inactive lurkers.

So how many members do you actually need?

Most experts recommend handpicking your first 10 to 15 members so that when visitors drop by there’s something interesting going on. And for many communities, once they reach around 150 members, the community itself starts to carry the conversation.

Here’s how to get started:

• Be the First Mover. It seems obvious, but being the first one into any space gives you considerable leverage. If people want to have a conversation and your community is the only place to have it, you’re already winning. If you can’t be first mover in a space, then the problem you’re tackling (your MTP) better be significantly different and arguably more visionary than the competition’s.
• Handpick Early Members. Research suggests that your early adopters tend to become your most ardent supporters. Get the ball rolling by personally handpicking your first 10 to 15 members. Be sure to engage these folks in the community-building process. Ask for their advice. Integrate their input. And don’t waste your time going after big names. As a rule, these folks are busy with their own communities.
• Establish a Newcomer’s Ritual. You want to give members a way to feel like they belong—but they must earn it. Create a ritual and tie it to a specific membership milestone.
• Listen. No matter what your core vision is, you can’t get anywhere without your members. So, pay attention to what they have to say and be prepared to change direction when necessary. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

We forget how recently it was that our birthplace and the language we speak shaped our destiny, influencing our identity and potential.

This is no longer the case.

Today, each of us can search the world and find our tribe, wherever they happen to live in the world.

Your goal should be to find those who dream the same big dreams and believe in a better, more abundant world.

Let’s work together and build your tribe, schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

As we look back over years past, we see what matters most and what makes us truly grateful. Indeed, Thanksgiving can really help put things in perspective.

It was all about relationships and just being together—that was our real abundance.

I received a call this week from a friend. Despite our lighthearted conversation and laughs, as my friend spoke, I just knew something was off. I could hear it in his voice. “We’ve been friends for too long. What’s really going on?”

My friend paused, then let out a sigh. What followed was the same litany we’re all hearing these days: disconnected, isolated, long days that feel the same, and restlessness.

For many people, the connective tissue is fraying. Some lack the relationships they yearn for, others long for a listening ear. And for some, it’s simply about having that shoulder to lean on.

It’s what we all need to have—and who we strive to be for each other. And that’s our saving grace. It really does come down to gratitude for the people in our lives. Their inspiration should be our aspiration!

People want and deserve to be gratified by their work. They want to know that others notice and are grateful for them.

And so, as we start to look back on this year, even with continuous change and challenge, there is much to be grateful for—as long as we have the grace to recognize and appreciate it. Here are some thoughts for our gratitude list:

• Have we told everyone how great they are? Gratitude is timeless and has no expiration date. I’ll never forget the story an executive shared with me a few months ago—about her 92-year-old grandfather who made it a habit to deliver a heartfelt message to everyone who made a difference in his life. Whether he was speaking to family members and friends, or someone who served him at the local diner, he always said, “Did anyone tell you how great you are today?” Reflecting on her grandfather’s words, which she’d heard thousands of times, the executive told me, “It still snaps me out of whatever mindset I am in and humbles me into a simpler state of mind—of being loved and seen.” It’s the secret to sustainable success: when people are recognized, they’re happy; and when they’re happy, they’re motivated. And if they’re motivated, they’re more likely to feel part of something bigger than themselves. Indeed, gratitude makes all the difference.

• Our helping hands. I was sitting on a curb along a highway in Oklahoma not long ago. It was one of just a few trips I’ve taken in almost a year and a half, and I was driving a rental car along an unfamiliar road. Cell phone reception was sketchy, so with a conference call coming up, I pulled to the shoulder and found a place where the signal was strong. That’s when another vehicle pulled up. “Do you need help?” the driver and passenger asked me. With sincere thanks, I assured them I was fine. The whole interaction took only a few minutes, but I will never forget it. Even now, looking back, I feel so much gratitude for two strangers who selflessly reached out—with a helping hand. And this is what we constantly need to offer others—wherever, however, and anywhere we can.

• The true treasure. An attitude of gratitude starts with two small but extremely powerful words that translate in every language: thank you. It’s a gift that goes both ways. As we express our thanks, we are uplifted—often as much as the person being appreciated. We can never say “I believe in you” too often. I see you. I value you. You matter. You make a difference…. When people are told, “We couldn’t have done this without you,” the message delivered is, “You are loved.” It’s like a spark that ignites as others respond. Moods shift and positivity elevates everyone. At a time when we need to lead with heart, what more is there to say? Indeed, genuine gratitude is one of life’s most precious treasures.
• Love home. Love and leadership aren’t normally put together in the same sentence (for obvious reasons). But leading others really is a matter of the heart—whether we lead five people or 5,000 or even 50,000, or only ourselves. I was reminded of this earlier this year by one of our longest-tenured colleagues, who often ends his conversations with “Love home.” It’s his unique shorthand for good wishes to the person and their family or loved ones. When asked about this tagline, our colleague responded, “It’s endemic to my soul. It feels more natural to say instead of just ‘good-bye.’” It makes perfect sense while so many of us have been working at home—bringing our families, our partners, and our loved ones along with us. They are a bigger part of what we do than ever before.

• A recipe for gratitude. At Thanksgiving, as the year-end approaches, let’s strive to help others raise their sights. There is much that we all can do. It starts with reflecting on who we are and who we want to be.
  • Do I spend the time making sure someone feels better after an interaction with me versus how they felt before?
  • Is there daylight between my words and my actions?
  • How do I provide meaning to others?
  • Do I just assume people know I appreciate them or do I actually take the time to tell them?

Two of the most powerful words anyone can say are, “Thank you.” So easy to say, but so often overlooked. To all our colleagues, clients, friends, and those we are meeting along the way, I wish you an abundance of joy, love, and grace. And to those of you in the U.S., an early and heartfelt Happy Thanksgiving. May we each have the grace to be grateful—for others..

Let’s work together, schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Gary Burnison, Korn Ferry CEO and edits by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

There’s a tug-of-war going on in my house. I like it warm, but my daughter likes it cool. Whenever I walk by the kitchen where she’s studying, her, head snaps up. And if I dare touch that thermostat, she’s right there to change back the setting.

A thermostat runs entirely on a feedback loop, without anyone thinking about it—constantly responding to the climate, internal and external. And that’s what we need to do, as well: continuously meet others where they are—not where we are—and then transport all of us forward, together.

It’s not simply “feedback”—more importantly, it’s “feed-forward.” This is 2021, after all. We are just trying to help people get through, one day to the next—to see the blue sky through that tiny opening in the clouds.

One-and-done annual performance reviews conjure up images of sitting across a desk with a boss who is reading a list of all the areas where someone needs to improve. Let’s be honest: when anyone says, “Can I give you feedback?” what’s the likely reaction? People grip the arms of the chair and brace for impact—because what’s coming probably isn’t “great job.”

Today, more than ever, we need to engage others with intentionality, as Ann Powell, CHRO for Bristol Myers Squibb, told me. She recalled receiving so much constant feedback from a manager early in her career that it was uncomfortable. When she asked why, the response was immediate: “I push because I see your potential… because I care.” Once Ann understood the manager’s intention, it clicked immediately. That’s exactly how we move forward—with the intentionality of making tomorrow better than today, for all of us.

Just as we say to loved ones, “I’m only telling you this because I love you,” we need to let others know that we care. We want them to succeed—indeed, we want to help ensure they succeed. As Shelie Gustafson, CHRO of Jacobs, shared with me this week, feedback “isn’t about right/wrong, good/bad.” Rather, it’s about “being a source of information (data, observations, considerations) to give people what they need to ‘adjust their sails’ to navigate” at the moment.

With intentionality and a true connection, we can make explicit what used to be implicit when we were in the same room together. People learn the most from what they don’t expect to hear—and probably don’t want to receive. As one executive shared with me the other day, “My favorite phrase is ‘feedback is a gift.’”

That’s true, even when it doesn’t feel like much of a gift. My daughter Emily, who is a junior in college, was a finalist for an internship, the kind of competitive position where hundreds apply and only a few make it. Despite all the hours of preparation, and then waiting on pins and needles, Emily found out last week that she was not selected.

Amazingly, that news came in a phone call from a manager, who took the time to offer Emily some feedback that will help her in the future. It really was feed-forward. Who does that anymore—especially during a pandemic? I happened to be with Emily when she received the call. Afterward, I told her, “First of all, I want you to know how proud I am of you.” Then I gave her some perspective: “You will not appreciate it now, but calling you was a very classy thing for that firm to do. Trust me, that call was harder for them to make than it was for you to receive. You’ll understand one day when you’re the one who has to make that call.”

To feed-forward, we connect first, understand second, contextualize third, and provide input fourth. Here are some thoughts:

• Listen twice as much as you speak. First and foremost, our role is to listen. When a genuine connection exists, people are more willing to share the story behind the story. They may be struggling professionally or personally. When we’re the listener, we may hear things that we are not equipped to solve in the moment—and that’s okay. It’s not about what we have to say. It’s all about how we demonstrate that we care—listening with empathy, compassion, and a genuine desire to understand.

• Handle with ‘CARE.’ Performance isn’t a once-a-year task—so neither should giving feedback. That’s why, when offering career advice, I tell people not to wait for a summit meeting with their boss. As Lesley Uren, a member of our Consulting team based in London, told me, “If the rhythm of their work isn’t yearly, why should their review be annual?” It’s all about providing guidance and support at the point of performance. Michelle Stuntz, a Consulting team member in Washington, D.C., further emphasized the importance of focusing on today’s reality: “It’s absolutely feed-forward: this day, this week, this month, this quarter…” In these real-time conversations, the approach should be to “CARE” for others: Candid conversations, Asking people how they are doing, Reviewing how things are going, and Engaging them.

• ‘Keep it coming.’ Those were three of the most encouraging words I heard this week. It started with a conversation I had with a colleague in which I gave some direct feedback. Afterwards, though, I wasn’t sure this colleague felt any better. So, I made a second call to continue the conversation—to contextualize: “What you have done for us is unbelievable.” I tried to channel my best feed-forward so that, together, tomorrow would be better than today. Afterwards my colleague emailed me: “It doesn’t matter if it is positive feedback or critical feedback. Someone took the time… When people retreat from you, turn quiet, turn off, grow indifferent—that’s when it’s time to worry. Indifference is the enemy. So, keep it coming.”

• Trusting our radar. When she was seven years old, Linda Hyman, our firm’s Executive Vice President, Global Human Resources, used to tag along with her father, a radar specialist, when he went into the field to fix equipment. When she asked her father about his job, he explained that he fixed guidance systems: “They help keep people safe. It’s like what your mom and I do when we see your shoe is untied or you should wear a heavier coat because it’s cold outside.” At that moment, Linda told me in our conversation this week, she grasped the importance of guidance—with a loving intention. “That’s a huge shift in a relationship—and probably the most important part of establishing trust so that, together, we can move forward,” Linda said.

Indeed, feedback is a gift. It requires care on the part of the person providing it and courage for the person receiving it—and a relationship that connects them both.

Let’s work together,  schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Gary Burnison, Korn Ferry CEO and edits by Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Do you have an abundance mindset? What the heck is an abundance mindset? And what’s the advantage of having an abundance mindset?

Do you have an abundance mindset? What the heck is an abundance mindset? And what’s the advantage of having an abundance mindset?

That’s our conversation today…

In the middle of a pandemic, it’s hard to think about abundance… especially when people are losing their jobs or wondering if and when they will get access to a vaccine.

Nonetheless, the world is heading rapidly towards abundance, and understanding this could transform your life and your business.

Exponential tech like computation, AI, 3-D printing, robotics, VR are rapidly dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing products and services. What used to only be available to the richest and most elite, is now available to almost anyone on the planet. A child in the middle of Zimbabwe can Google any information or video conference for free with someone on the other side of the world.

Many things we paid millions of dollars for just two decades ago are now available for free on your smartphone.

The challenge is that our minds evolved during a world of absolute scarcity, and most people are trapped in an unhealthy “Scarcity Mindset”.

In a world of scarcity, there is a limited pie. If your neighbor gets a slice, that means you get a smaller slice. It’s a world of limited resources and fierce competition.

With an Abundance Mindset, rather than slicing the pie into thinner and thinner pieces, we just bake more pies… millions of more pies. This is the future that exponential tech enables. And this is true across almost every sector whether or not people see it or recognize it yet.

Creating a world of abundance isn’t about creating a world of luxury, it’s about creating a world of possibility.

In next week’s blog, I’ll focus on what I call “Proof of Abundance” and show you the data…  how we are driving abundance in almost every sector relevant to humans. It can be hard to believe given our innate scarcity-focused neural wiring, but the data doesn’t lie.

I believe that an Abundance Mindset is 1 of the 6 critical Mindsets for a leader and an entrepreneur to actively develop and firmly command.

So, what are the benefits of an Abundance Mindset? And how do you develop one?

Here is a summary of WHY you should desire and develop an abundance mindset:

With an Abundance Mindset…

1. You understand that the world is becoming more abundant, and this allows you to maintain a hopeful and compelling vision for the future. (Note: supporting data and evidence will be presented in next Sunday’s blog.) This positive mindset sets you apart from others and attracts the best team to your mission.
3. You don’t resent missed opportunities because you understand that you are living in a world of ever-increasing opportunities. The future holds many more exciting, fulfilling and profitable opportunities for you to pursue.
4. You don’t fear the future. Instead, you embrace it and are excited to learn all you can to create the future you and your business desire.
5. You view competitors as potential collaborators in a world of ever-increasing business opportunities. Why worry unnecessarily about your competitors when you can create another, larger pie? You focus your time, attention, and resources on pursuing Moonshots that are 10x (1000%), versus fighting in the trenches for 10% improvements.
6. You are reinventing your business through a digital lens — constantly dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing your products and services, making them available to a larger and larger customer base at a lower and lower cost.
7. As a leader, you convey a hopeful and compelling future that inspires and guides your employees and customers. People inherently want good news: *data-driven optimism* rather than a continuous dribble of negative, crisis-oriented, amygdala-energizing banter.

How would your life change if you had an Abundance Mindset?

What would crafting and mastering an Abundance Mindset mean for your business?

Let’s work together,  schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by and Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

Our brains are composed of 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections.

But despite this vast processing power, we are unable to process all the data entering through our senses.

Because of that, our brains take shortcuts called “heuristics” that unfortunately introduce a number of (sometimes dangerous) cognitive biases.

These cognitive biases can sometimes warp our decision-making process and lead us to incorrect conclusions.

A key step to overcoming these biases is to first acknowledge them.

In today’s blog, I’ll discuss what cognitive biases are, how they affect our view of the world and our Abundance Mindset, and what this means for you as an entrepreneur.

WHAT EXACTLY ARE COGNITIVE BIASES?

Cognitive biases come in all flavors. They are the result of time-saving and energy-saving shortcuts our brain takes in analyzing the flood of data coming in through our senses.

Here are a few examples:

1. Negative Biases our tendency to give more weight to negative information and experiences than positive ones.

This tendency has roots in our evolution.

Every second of every day, our senses (eyes, ears, touch) bring in way too much data—more than we can possibly process in our brains. And because nothing is more important to us than survival, the first stop for all of that data is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala.

Our amygdala is our “early warning system.” It sorts and scours through all our senses looking for anything in the environment that might harm us.

…and when our brain senses danger, it puts us on *red alert.*

As a result, we pay 10 times more attention to negative news than positive news!

It’s for this same reason that the nightly news and the New York Times (pick your favorite rags, I don’t read any of them) have a 10-to-1 ratio of negative news stories to positive ones.

2. Anchoring Bias: An anchoring bias is the tendency to be overly influenced by the first piece of information that we hear. For example, the first number voiced during a price negotiation typically becomes the anchoring point from which all further negotiations are based.
3. Familiarity Bias: Simply put, this is your brain’s tendency to give greater credence to conversations and information from people who look like you, dress like you, and are in a similar socioeconomic and cultural bracket to you.

This is the shortcut the brain uses as it judges who is a “trusted source” of information.

4. Recency Bias: Imagine you’ve listened to a public debate. Your brain will give greater weight to the data presented at the end of the debate, versus what you received at the beginning. Why? It’s simply the human brain saving on energy and time—remembering the data that you received most recently.
5. Self-Serving Bias: The self-serving bias is the tendency for people to give themselves credit for successes but blame others for their failures. When you do well on a project, you probably assume that it’s because you worked hard. But when things turn out badly, you’ll call it bad luck.

CONFIRMATION BIAS – CRITICAL FOR ENTREPRENEURS!

The most important cognitive bias to be self-aware of is Confirmation Bias.

This is the tendency to listen more often to data that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. Through this bias, people tend to favor information that reinforces the things they already believe.

This is the one that we as entrepreneurs must carefully avoid.

If you go out of your way to surround yourself with advisors and employees who only compliment your work and never criticize you, you’ll rapidly get yourself into trouble.

In one of Peter Diamandis’s conversations with Elon Musk, he imparted some wisdom we should never forget: “My friends tell me how great all my products are, but my BEST friends are the ones who give me the most brutal criticism.”

Your ability to recognize and not fall prey to Confirmation Bias, the ability to really hear everybody’s thoughts (including the negative ones), and then weigh and balance these beliefs, is vital to an entrepreneur.

Question your core beliefs and surround yourself with people who think differently from you.

Turn intent into impact.

Let’s talk about working together,  schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by and Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

ESG and sustainability can easily be added to the top of your agenda.

But how are you going to ensure you have the right strategy for success?

Our latest paper unpacks five factors to consider for building a sound ESG and sustainability strategy that will help you harness the collective ingenuity, energy, and commitment of your people to enable you to achieve your ESG goals.

Turn intent into impact. Report

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Contributor: Clive Smit, Rajen Makhijani, Camelia Ram, Enrique Lindeberg at Korn Ferry. Reviewed: Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach

IT ALL STARTED DURING WORLD WAR II…

In 1943, the US Defense Department called Kelly Johnson, the Head of Engineering at Lockheed, with an impossible task.

German fighter jets had just appeared in the skies over Europe, and America desperately needed a counterpunch.

Johnson accepted the critical mission and designed, tested, and delivered America’s first jet fighter, the P-80, in a record 143 days.

Think about that: you can rarely negotiate a contract in 143—let alone deliver a final product!

Johnson’s success and his team, Lockheed’s Skunk Works, changed the course of the war.

They also helped to create a philosophy for rapid innovation that’s still used today by the most innovative companies.

“GOING SKUNK”: 4 SECRETS TO INNOVATION

Today, we use “going skunk” to describe the creation of an environment that empowers a small group of people to design a new idea by escaping routine organizational procedures.

Beyond Lockheed’s Skunk Works, incredibly innovative companies like X: Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory (formerly Google X) use these same principles.

There are 4 big secrets to their success that are worth learning and repeating.

SECRET #1: SETTING MOONSHOTS

Companies don’t “go skunk” for business as usual.

They do so to tackle Herculean challenges: Moonshots.

You go skunk when you want to go 10X bigger (1000%) while your competitors are pursuing incremental (10%) change.

Moonshots lead to the best outcomes. They significantly outperform small goals, medium-sized goals, and especially vague goals for 2 reasons: focused attention and persistence.

Your team will be more willing to try again if they fail the first, or second, third… or one-hundredth time.

So how do you form a Moonshot Organization or Team?

There’s no one better suited than X’s Captain of Moonshots Astro Teller to teach how to build and lead a Moonshot team.

He’ll be sharing his insights about how to develop a Moonshot Mindset and how to build a Moonshot Organization, reach out and I’ll make an introduction for you.

SECRET #2: EXTREME ISOLATION

Steve Jobs famously said, “It’s better to be a pirate than join the Navy.”

And he hoisted a pirate flag outside the building housing the Mac development team.

This may be the most important key to success in Skunk Works.

You must wall them off from the rest of the company.

Why?

Because most companies suffer from “organizational inertia”: the notion that once a company achieves success, its desire to develop and champion radical new technologies solutions is often tempered by the stronger desire to not disrupt existing markets and lose money.

Many successful organizations develop an internal “immune system” against significant change!

Isolating your Skunk Works team in a location, physically isolated from the “mother ship” stimulates risk-taking, encourages weird ideas, and acts as a counterforce to organizational inertia.

Organizational inertia is fear of failure writ large.

It’s the reason Kodak didn’t recognize the brilliance of the digital camera, and why IBM initially dismissed the personal computer.

As Astro Teller puts it, “In any organization, the bulk of your people will be climbing the hill they are standing on. That’s what you want them to do. That’s their job. But you also want another team, your Moonshot Team, looking for a bigger and better hill to climb.”

SECRET #3: EXPERIMENTATION & RAPID ITERATION

The road to success as an entrepreneur is paved with failure.

You must have a strategy in place to handle risk and learn from inevitable mistakes.

This strategy includes having a bias for action, experimentation, and rapid iteration.

It means following Reid Hoffman’s philosophy: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

This is the spirit of rapid iteration.

A risk-accepting mentality is key to rapid iteration, failing forward, and ultimately entrepreneurship.

Trying out crazy ideas means bucking expert opinion and taking big risks.

It means not being afraid to fail—because you will fail. And that’s OK!

It’s part of the journey.

SECRET #4: INTRINSIC REWARDS

For most of the last century, science focused on extrinsic rewards, that is, external motivators.

These are “if-then” conditions of the “do-this-to-get-that” variety.

With extrinsic rewards, we incentivize the behavior we want more of and punish the behavior we dislike.

For example, in business when we want to drive performance, we offer classic extrinsic rewards: bonuses (money) and promotions (money and prestige).

Here’s the problem: a growing body of research shows that the costs of extrinsic rewards outweigh their benefits.

Once people’s basic needs are covered and are no longer a constant concern, extrinsic rewards lose their effectiveness. They can even crush the high-level, creative, conceptual abilities that are central to current and future economic and social progress.

On the other hand, intrinsic rewards, meaning internal emotional satisfaction, become far more effective.

The secret to high performance is largely based on 3 factors:

1. Autonomy: the deep-seated desire to direct our own lives
2. Mastery: the desire to extend and expand our own abilities
3. Purpose: the need for our lives to mean something

Gaining autonomy, mastery, and purpose is motivation enough to make us work to our highest potential.

Ensuring that your team is given these intrinsic motivators is critical. And having a corporate “Massive Transformative Purpose” (MTP) and a corporate “Moonshot” is part of the DNA required to make this happen at scale.

ARE YOU READY TO GO SKUNK?

Since Lockheed’s massive success, everyone from DuPont to Walmart has gotten in on the skunk game.

In the early 1980s, Apple Cofounder Steve Jobs leased a building behind the Good Earth restaurant in Silicon Valley.

He stocked it with twenty brilliant designers and created his own Skunk Works.

The result was the world’s first Macintosh computer.

This approach can be applied to any business, group, or organization that wants to innovate and go bold.

We live in incredible times.

The potential for you as an entrepreneur to disrupt yourself and your industry has never been greater.

Let’s talk about working together,  schedule a call: www.calendly.com/clifflocks

Contributor: Peter Diamandis, Founder, X Prize Foundation and Chairman of Singularity University and edited by and Cliff Locks, Investment Capital Growth, Managing Director and Executive Coach