Why Optimists will Win the Future

It’s understandable why so many leaders approach their work with a sense of anxiety. The business climate feels more uncertain than ever, from the fate of the Euro to the spotty pace of job-creation in the United States to the rise and stock-market fall of Facebook. It’s hard to predict the future, and plan accordingly, when the future seems so unpredictable. Yet as Alan Kay, the legendary Xerox PARC researcher said so memorably some 40 years ago, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Indeed, I have spent the last 25 years—first as a young editor at Harvard Business Review, then as cofounder of Fast Company, now as someone who writes books and delivers lectures—learning from fast-growing companies, hard-charging startups, and leaders in all sorts of fields who have won the future by inventing it themselves. 

And wherever I go, the executives who have won the most are the ones who are the most optimistic. Not naïve, not blind to the turmoil around them, but confident in the conviction that tough times can be the best times to separate themselves from the pack and stand out from the crowd. 

The challenge for leaders in every field is to emerge from turbulent times with closer connections to their customers, with more energy and creativity from their people, and with greater distance between them and their rivals. 

So what does it take to build an organization that is capable of thriving in an environment that seems more uncertain than ever? Truth be told, I don’t have an easy-to-apply program to win the future of business. But I can suggest four questions that leaders must answer for themselves as they prepare their organizations to compete going forward. 

I’m optimistic that if you can devise solid answers to these basic questions, you’ll be in a great position to prosper. 

Four Questions that Will Shape Your Success

Question 1: What ideas separate you from everyone else? 
If there’s a core theme at the heart of my take on the future, it’s that the most successful organizations won’t just offer competitive products and services, they will stand for important ideas—ideas that will shape the competitive landscape of their field, ideas that will reshape the sense of what’s possible for customers, employees, and investors. 

For so long, we lived in a world where the strong took from the weak. If you had the most locations, the deepest pockets, the most established brand, you won just by virtue of showing up. That world is finished. 

Going forward, the new logic of success is that the smart take from the strong. The most successful organizations won’t just work to outcompete their rivals. 

They will aspire to redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world filled with me-too thinking. What are the ideas that define your company and its offerings? How are those ideas shaping how you do business? 

Consider, as an entertaining case study, the rise of Cirque du Soleil®. As a live experience, Cirque du Soleil has been delighting audiences for some 25 years. As a company, it has been celebrated by business pundits (and in management classics such as Blue Ocean Strategy) because of its willingness to rethink every element of the traditional circus. 

What’s immediately striking about Cirque du Soleil shows is the lack of live-animal acts—the industry’s signature identity for a century. Moreover, there are no larger-than-life “stars” at a Cirque du Soleil show—the show itself is the star. The result is a unique experience—and a business model that eliminates as much as 70 percent of the operating costs of its traditional rivals. 

By challenging industry convention, Cirque du Soleil has run circles around the rest of the industry, generating annual revenues of roughly $1 billion and selling more than 100 million tickets to its shows since its founding. 

For so long, so many of us have been comfortable operating in the middle of the road. That’s what feels safe and secure, that’s where all the customers are (in theory at least). 

But as we move forward, with so much pressure, so much change, so many new ways to do just about everything, the middle of the road has become the road to nowhere. 

What do you promise that no one else in your field can promise? What do you deliver that no one else can deliver? 

Question 2: Do you and your people care more than everyone else? 
Even the most creative and disruptive leaders recognize that strategy and performance are not just about thinking differently from other companies. 

They are also about caring more than other companies—about customers, about colleagues, about how the organization conducts itself in a world with so many opportunities to cut corners and compromise on values. 

Sure, new business models allow innovators to transform the sense of what’s possible in their industries. But sustaining performance is as much about cultivating a spirit of grassroots energy, enthusiasm and engagement as it is about unleashing a set of game-changing ideas. 

Tony Hsieh and his colleagues at Zappos.com have created one of the most beloved brands on the Internet, in part because of the economic value proposition they offer to customers shopping for shoes, handbags and other fashion items. 

But the real magic of Zappos is its “values proposition”—the personal, fun, incredibly responsive level of service the company offers, delivered largely over the telephone. 

How does CEO Hsieh maintain such a high level of service? 

By offering in-depth cultural training to new employees, and by encouraging them to quit if they conclude, early on, that the values that make them tick are not consistent with the values that Zappos embraces.

Indeed, several weeks into the training program, Zappos offers to pay new hires $2,000 to leave the company! Those who accept the offer are conceding that there isn’t a great fit between them and the culture. Those who turn it down turn up their loyalty to the company even higher. 

The best companies I have gotten to know, the ones that are most equipped to shape the future of their fields, are the ones that are as serious about the human factor in business as they are about R&D, finance and marketing. 

Importantly, they also recognize that great people don’t have to work for you as full-time employees in order to work with you. 

One of the great opportunities for organizations today is to invite outside brainpower—engaged customers, world-class partners, smart technologists and engineers who want to be part of what you’re doing—to innovate and co-create with you. The most successful companies work as distinctively as they compete. 

Does yours? 

Question 3: Do you have customers who can’t live without you? 
This is an urgent question for companies in every industry, because every industry has customers with a vast array of products and brands from which to choose. 

Remember, in a world defined by unlimited choice and sensory overload, if you have customers who can live without you, eventually they will. 

That’s why it’s not enough to satisfy customers rationally. You have to engage them emotionally, to conduct yourself in ways that are unusual and unforgettable. 

One of the make-or-break challenges for any organization is to become irreplaceable in the eyes of its customers. Sure, leaders have to work every day to make their products and services more functional, more reliable, more affordable. 

But the real leverage in the marketplace, the real source of long-term advantage, is when leaders make their organizations more memorable to encounter. 

Question 4: Are you learning as fast as the world is changing? 
I first heard this question from strategy guru Gary Hamel, the world-renowned innovation expert, and it remains the ultimate challenge for any executive determined to unleash big change in difficult circumstances. 

In a world that never stops changing, great leaders never stop learning. The challenge for leaders at every level is no longer just to out-hustle, out-muscle and out-maneuver the competition. It is to out-think the competition, to develop a unique point of view about the future and help the organization get there before anyone else. 

If you believe that what you see shapes how you change, then the challenge for leaders is to see opportunities that other leaders don’t see. 

But remember: You don’t have to look all by yourself. These days, the most powerful insights often come from the most unexpected places—the hidden genius inside your company, the collective genius of customers, suppliers and other smart people who surround your company. 

Tapping this genius requires a new leadership mindset—enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to know you don’t have all the answers. Nobody alone is as smart as everybody together. 

So those are four questions that are easy for me to ask—and incumbent upon you to answer. 

And those questions are impossible to answer without an authentic sense of optimism, a deeply felt conviction that the defining opportunity for leaders is not just to improve on the present, but to invent an exciting and compelling future. 

William C. Taylor is cofounder and founding editor of Fast Company and author of Practically Radical.

By William C. Taylor

Source: Chief Optimist