Team Leadership Culture

You might be surprised who recently spoke those words.  In a recent blog about Trekking, I talked of being inside your own bubble where the biggest risk in the bubble seems like the biggest risk anywhere.  To avoid being stymied by our own risk environment, we need to get outside of our bubble and put things in perspective by seeing and experiencing other perspectives.  The interesting part is that we don’t necessarily need to go to a bigger or more audacious bubble.  We just need to go to a different bubble (or more appropriately many bubbles).

The words in the title of this blog were part of the following quote, “I just feel like people aren’t working enough on impactful things.  People are really afraid of failure on things and so it’s hard for them to do ambitious stuff.”  It’s easy to feel like the world is passing us by at a rapidly increasing pace.  I’ve always had a love of technology and in some ways my life feels somewhat coupled with the computer age.  The first transistor was invented at bell labs the year I was born.  The programmable microprocessor (that makes all of these high tech gadgets starting with the pc possible) was invented the year I graduated from college.  The first pc’s appeared when I turned 30.  You get the idea.  But more recently, there have been advancements that boggle the mind.  In the world of supercomputers they reach speeds of one petaflop (thousand trillion floating point operations per second) just three years ago (2008).  By October 2010 speeds of 2.5 petaflops had been achieved.  Just this month (May 2011) Cray computer announced a 50 petaflop capable computer.  I would ask you to stop and think about that but who can think about 50 thousand trillion executions per second.

Let’s think about it in terms that our mind can grasp.  Those pc’s that appeared when I was thirty took 15 years to sell 175 million.  I also bought one of the very first Blackberry’s.  It took them 11 years to sell 135 million.  iPhones? 90 million in 4 years.  iPads?  15 million in one year.  The pace of change is accelerating and it’s happening because people are taking risks, thinking in innovative ways, doing impactful things.

So who is the author of the words about people being afraid to fail?  He co-founded a company that is not yet 13 years old and yet is already one of the most impactful, ambitious companies ever.  Larry Page, co-founder of Google makes that statement in the book “In the Plex, How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.”  The book says that Page and Sergey Brin, his co-founder are “sensitive to the charge that the company was a ‘one-trick pony’”.  The concern is that most of their new ideas, YouTube, Android, Google Docs, Google Voice and even parts of Google Maps are coming from outside the company following acquisitions.  Inside the “Plex” Page is concerned that they are not working on impactful things and they’re afraid of failure and yet they are bringing in fresh blood and thinking.  They are getting outside their own “bubble” and gaining new perspectives on the world.  No matter what our size, scope or impact, it’s very easy to not see beyond our own bubble and become risk averse within our own sphere.  Continuously expand your understanding of others perspectives.  It’s the only way out.