Robert Rubin and Uncertainty

This week Robert Rubin resigned from Ford to avoid a conflict of interest since Citigroup, where he is a director, is advising Ford on strategic options.

More interesting, though, is David Leonhardt's recent observation in the The New York Times that Rubin championed the idea, during the Clinton administration, that "uncertainty was an inevitable part of life and only the foolish imagine they could eliminate it."

Yes, Leonhardt goes on to write, you evaluate all the data, assess the risk and act. However, a good decision can still produce a bad outcome.

In an uncertain world, you have to hit for a high average. On any given day, you have to make ten decisions. I go for making seven good ones, two so-so and one bad. You just have to hope that the bad one doesn't kill you. Then you have to understand what caused the failure, learn from that and do better next time.

Freedom and Initiative is Good - But what about the discipline

Freedom is a powerful motivating idea. But motivation alone is not enough. The Greeks at Salamis fought better than the Persians because they were motivated by their desire to defend their land and their ideology.

In the same way, in a different war: the revolutionary war, the American colonists were ready at Lexington and at Bunker Hill to defend themselves against the British. However, throughout the war, there was a tension between amateur militia soliders (like those at Lexington) and the regular army led by Washington. Washington believed that only a regular well-trained, well-led army of regular soldiers could systematically defeat the imperial British army. He regarded the local state militias as auxiliiary troops to his regular ones. And in small skirmishes, in fight-and-flee tactics, the militias did well. But in pitched fights, sieges and attacks, discipline powered by ideology was more critical than ideology alone.

After his defeat in New York in 1776, Washington realized that he could not win a major pitched battle against British regulars (as much as he longed to -- to justify his strategy and his view of himself as a regular soldier) so he adopted the fight-and-flee strategy. The success of this strategy led to his victory at Trenton -- which started out as a successful pitched engagement, became a retreat when threatened by a superior reinforcing army and then became a battle again at Princeton, followed by a retreat across the river back into Pennsylvania.

In business, you can have great strategy and great passion, but, if you don't have the discipline of the organization to adjust strategy and to execute, you will not succeed.

Personal Leveraging Engine

Read an interesting article by Nancy Fox, author of the Sixty-Second coach. She writes how most of us under-leverage our resources and contacts to help us with our business opportunities. I think that the key is to do personal due diligience. We do our due diligence whenever we do a deal, and sometimes we close the deal and sometimes we walk away. Why don't we do this for our most crucial and critical personal opportunities?

Here are Nancy Fox's five top tips for revving up your personal Leveraging Engine:

-Shift your thinking.

Your results are not going to improve dramatically with only better time management, working more hours, or longer to-do lists. Once you embrace the perspective that all around you are resources to be leveraged, what blind spots are uncovered? What processes can you simplify or even eliminate? What relationships are waiting to be tapped to assist you in producing the results you desire?

-Make a list of your resources and review them once each month.

Spend at least one hour each month reviewing your resources. Brainstorm with other colleagues on this topic so that you speed up uncovering the blind spots.

Here are some examples of commonly under-leveraged resources:

Your computer (go beyond how you are currently leveraging your computer)
Your hobbies
Your special interests
Your unique areas of knowledge
Your talents (you have more than you acknowledge)
Your service providers, vendors, etc.
Your local college
A current project
Your colleagues
The person to whom you report
The people that report to you
Your entire contact base
Their contact bases
Your brand
Your coach

Keep adding to this list.

-Make one unreasonable request each week.

Very often, we don’t leverage others’ desire to be of assistance. We often give ourselves reasons why we can’t ask for something. However, most people do want to be of service. When you leverage this opportunity, you give the other person a chance to make a difference and be generous. You gain the experience of being powerful and not being stopped by “reasons.”

-Interview people whom you admire and who have accomplished the kind of results you would like to.

Leverage the knowledge and experience of others who have attained what you would like to accomplish. How have they done it? What mistakes did they make? What worked well? Often, people enjoy sharing their history and their path to success, as well as the pitfalls they wished they had avoided.

-Put an implementation program in place regularly.

Good ideas are a dime a dozen. Without implementation, most good ideas evaporate into thin air. Put a regular process in place weekly where you ask yourself:

What are the biggest challenges I am facing right now?
What am I not leveraging now that I could be leveraging? (What are my blind spots around this?)
What new results would that produce?
Write down your answers. (Writing them down gives them a concrete reality in your brain.)

War Strategy - Ideology at Salamis

In 480 BC, the Greek sailors led by Themistocles soundly and horrifically defeated the Persian navy of Xerxes, even though they were outnumbered 2 to 1. The importance of freedom to the common Greek sailor, drawn and bound by a single national idea, was a more powerful driver of success than the mercenary payment promised the forced conscripts that came from all over the vast Persian empire. In his book, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, Victor David Hanson notes that the Greek ideas of personal initiative, free speech and flexibility was a critical motivator; in contrast, all these elements that forge the foundation of what we take for granted in Western demoncracy, were an anthema to Persian thought.

During the battle, Xerxes sat on a throne high above the seas and watched his navy destroyed, while Themistocles was in the lead ship, urging his navy onward.

Strategy, teamwork motivation and initiative are all hallmarks of how we like to think we can be successful. In the West, they continue to be fundamental to how we think and how we act.