What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (13 page)

Since there are fewer puzzles than there are teams, participants have to decide if they’re going to compete, collaborate, or both to collect the necessary puzzle pieces. This situation is meant to mimic the real world: participants know all the pieces exist to complete the task, but no one team controls them all. Teams have to find ways to get the resources they need to be successful. Additionally, since there aren’t enough puzzles for every team, some teams have to find an alternative way to create value. As in the real world, there are many different roles to be played within an ecosystem. Also, the world is not static. After the game begins, every ten minutes or so something happens. I might auction off the puzzle pieces that I held back, or sell photos of the completed puzzles, or require one person from each team to move to another team, taking a few puzzle pieces with him. The changing environment requires both creativity and flexibility.

In order to be successful, the teams must work together. They start the game by trading and bartering, trying to figure out how to maximize their own benefits without giving away too much. This requires balancing strategy with action, figuring out how to divide the labor among team members, and how to walk the line between competition and collaboration, all in an ever-changing environment. Since they know there are fewer puzzles than there are teams, at least one team has to decide to
not
build a puzzle and to instead take on a different role. Sometimes one team chooses to divide up and join other teams. Sometimes two or three teams merge. At other times a team may take on the role of broker, buying and selling puzzle pieces from the other teams. And sometimes all of the teams merge into one huge team and work on all of the puzzles together. I like to do this exercise with larger groups that I can divide into two or more ecosystems, each with six teams and five puzzles. Doing so allows different strategies to evolve in parallel, which makes for interesting comparisons afterward.

The very worst outcome results when all of the teams decide to compete against one another. They hold back puzzle pieces and refuse to trade pieces needed by other teams. These groups become so focused on winning that they all lose. Sometimes the teams actually acknowledge that they would do better if they collaborated, but ultimately decide to compete anyway. Competition is so built into our culture that it becomes the natural response. Additionally, those teams that work hard to make other teams lose end up losing themselves. For example, the first time I ran this simulation, one team decided to hold on to a handful of pieces that other teams needed. Toward the end of the hour they planned to sell them to the other teams. This backfired. When the time was up, the teams had spent so much time competing with each other that they weren’t even close to completing a puzzle. This meant the final pieces didn’t offer any additional value.
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This exercise offers a strong reminder that in environments where there are limited resources, being driven to make yourself and others successful is often a much more productive strategy than being purely competitive. Those who do this are better able to leverage the skills and tools that others bring to the table, and to celebrate other people’s successes along with their own. This happens in sports as well as in business settings, which are both often thought to be purely competitive environments. For example, in
It’s Not about the Bike,
Lance Armstrong provides details about how competitors in the Tour de France work together over the course of the race in order to make everyone successful. And many competitive companies, including Yahoo! and Google, embrace “coopetition” by finding creative ways to work together, leveraging each business’s strengths.

When it comes to being fabulous, many businesses select one area where they really shine. BMW focuses on top-notch engineering; Walmart promises the lowest prices; Disneyland strives to be the happiest place on earth; and Nordstrom works hard to deliver a world-class customer experience. If you ask people familiar with the store what they think about Nordstrom, most will offer at least one story about the incredible service they have received.

I had an opportunity to meet with two of the three Nordstrom brothers, Erik and Blake, who now run the company, and learned how they instill their employees with customer-centric values. Surprisingly, there are no specific rules or secret recipes for providing an outstanding customer experience at Nordstrom. Essentially, after only a short orientation, salespeople are charged with using their best judgment in solving the problems that come their way, and are empowered to act on their customers’ behalf. Because each salesperson is different, they deal with their customers in unique ways, leading to a wide array of approaches to similar challenges. There’s also a culture of telling stories at Nordstrom, and great customer service stories serve as lessons and inspiration. By empowering employees to be inventive in solving problems, the Nordstroms also give them the freedom to make mistakes. Blake and Erik both pointed out that if an error is made in an effort to serve the customer, it’s quickly forgiven—and the same mistake is rarely repeated.

At Nordstrom, all incentives are aligned to create a terrific customer experience. Each manager works to make his or her own team successful, and all employees view their customers as the ultimate “boss.” The senior managers of the company, including Blake, Erik, and their brother Pete, spend half their time visiting stores, where they walk the sales floor, interact with customers, and talk with the sales personnel. They’re very familiar with this environment, each having started his career working in the Nordstrom stockroom, selling shoes, managing shoe departments, serving as buyers, managing individual stores, and then as regional managers. Now, as leaders of this multibillion-dollar business, they’re still constantly looking for ways to improve. They watch and listen carefully, with great humility, and then, based on the information they have gathered, act with confidence and conviction. They’re so intent on continuing to enhance customer satisfaction that they’ve made it remarkably easy for any customer to reach each of them. All three brothers answer their own phones, read their own e-mail, and respond to messages personally.

The idea that the customer comes first is so embedded into the culture of Nordstrom that the brothers describe the organization as an upside-down pyramid, with the customer at the top and the senior management at the bottom. When you advance in the company, you literally move
down
the corporate ladder. There’s also no chief executive officer at the bottom. Blake is the president, Erik is the president of stores, and Pete is president of merchandising. They work as a very tight team, each brother playing to his own strengths. They share a vision for the business and work in a concerted and collaborative manner.

My favorite customer service story from Nordstrom is of a customer who asked the men’s department for two blue button-down shirts with white collars. The salesperson helping him couldn’t find these in stock or at any of the other Nordstrom stores. But, instead of telling the customer they couldn’t meet his request, she took two white shirts and two blue shirts to the store tailor and asked to have the collars switched so there were two blue shirts with white collars and two white shirts with blue collars. She presented the blue shirts to the customer and told him that if he wanted the reverse, that was now available, too!

Both Blake and Erik point out that every experience with each customer is like a fresh chance at bat. Each interaction is another opportunity to deliver a great experience for the customer and to enhance the salesperson’s reputation. Even if their actions don’t lead to a specific sale, the investment eventually pays off.

As you can see, being fabulous comes in many flavors, but it all starts with removing the cap and being willing to reach for your true potential. This means going beyond minimum expectations and acknowledging that you are ultimately responsible for your actions and the resulting outcomes. Life isn’t a dress rehearsal, and you won’t get a second chance to do your best.

I have a confession to make—I easily could have titled all of the previous chapters “Give Yourself Permission.” By that I mean, give yourself permission to challenge assumptions, to look at the world with fresh eyes, to experiment, to fail, to plot your own course, and to test the limits of your abilities. In fact, that’s exactly what I wish I had known when I was twenty, and thirty, and forty—and what I need to constantly remind myself at fifty.

It’s incredibly easy to get locked into traditional ways of thinking and to block out possible alternatives. For most of us, there are crowds of people standing on the sidelines, encouraging each of us to stay on the prescribed path, to color inside the lines, and to follow the same directions they followed. This is comforting to them and to you. It reinforces the choices they made and provides you with a recipe that’s easy to follow. But it can also be severely limiting.

In Latin America there is actually a phrase that translates into “jacket puller” to describe people who try to pull others down—presumably by the tails of their jackets—to prevent them from rising higher than they have. People in other parts of the world call this the “tall poppy” syndrome, where those who stand up taller than those around them are cut down to size. Staying with the pack is the norm, and those who get ahead risk being dragged backward by their community. Worse still, there are also regions of the world in which those who do things differently are literally viewed as criminals. In Brazil, for instance, the traditional word for entrepreneur,
empresario,
translates loosely into “thief.” Historically, there are not many local role models for successful entrepreneurs, and others assume you’ve done something illegal if you’ve successfully broken the mold. This was a significant problem for Endeavor, the organization whose goal is to enhance entrepreneurship in the developing world. When they launched in Latin America, Endeavor told people they wanted to stimulate entrepreneurship and they were met with great resistance. In response, they literally coined a brand-new word,
emprendedor,
to capture the true essence of innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. It took several years, but eventually emprendedor entered the lexicon. Endeavor now faces a similar challenge in Egypt, where they again intend to create and promote a new word for entrepreneur.

At the d.school much of our work focuses on giving students permission to challenge assumptions and to stretch their imaginations by breaking free from traditional ways of thinking. Every assignment requires them to leave their comfort zones and engage anew with the world around them. The faculty poses the challenges, but we don’t have the answers. Additionally, the d.school classroom space invites experimentation. All of the furniture is on wheels and moves about easily to create different workspaces. Each time students arrive, the space is literally configured differently. Bins of paper, wood, plastic, paper clips, rubber bands, colored pens, pipe cleaners, and tape invite them to build prototypes to bring their ideas to life. The rooms are filled with movable white boards covered with colored stickies for brainstorming. The walls are peppered with photos and artifacts from past projects that serve as inspiration for creative thinking.

Our students are given real, open-ended challenges. For example, they might be asked to figure out how to improve bike safety on campus, or to find a way to entice kids to eat healthier food. Besides these local projects, d.school students in the Design for Extreme Affordability class, taught by Jim Patell and Dave Beach, work with partners in developing countries to identify problems and determine how to solve them in a cost-effective way. This project has led to a number of exciting products that are already on the way to market. For example, one team designed a brand-new baby incubator, Embrace, after visiting hospitals in Nepal and finding that traditional Western baby incubators, whose original price tag was $20,000, were not well suited for the local environment. Many were broken or in need of unavailable parts. The operating instructions and warning labels were in a language foreign to the nursing staff. Most important, the majority of births occur in villages far from city hospitals with incubators. Therefore, premature babies who need to be kept warm with an incubator rarely get access to the help they need.

The team identified the need for a low-cost, low-technology incubator. Over the course of a few months they designed a tiny sleeping bag with a pouch-insert containing a special wax. The melting temperature of the wax is 37 degrees centigrade, the temperature needed to keep a newborn baby warm.
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For just $20, as opposed to $20,000, parents or local clinics can now take care of a premature baby on site or in transit. They remove the wax insert and place it in hot water to melt the wax. The insert is then put into the insulated sleeping bag, where it stays warm for hours. When it eventually cools down, the wax can easily be warmed up again. No technical training is needed, no electricity is required, and the design is inexpensive enough to be deployed in underserved communities without access to urban hospitals.

The students leave these courses changed forever. They have a new appreciation for the power of paying attention to the problems in the world around them, and learn that they’re empowered to fix them. As David Kelley, the founding director of the d.school, would say, “They are leaving with creative confidence.”
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They know they have permission—both explicit and implicit—to experiment, to fail, and to try again. What we must all recognize is that every one of us has the same permission—we just need to recognize that it’s ours to grant and not something extended from outside.

The message that we each determine how we view the world was driven home to me in an unexpected way. A few years ago I took a creative writing class in which the professor asked us to describe the same scene twice, the first time from the perspective of someone who has just fallen in love, the second from the point of view of someone who has just lost a child at war. You were not allowed to mention falling in love nor the war. This simple assignment revealed how completely different the world looks depending on your emotional state. When I imagined walking through a crowded city in a state of bliss, my mind was focused on the colors and sounds and my view was expansive. When strolling through a similar scene in a depressed state, everything looked gray and all the imperfections, such as cracks in the sidewalk, jumped into focus. I couldn’t see beyond my own feet, and the city seemed daunting, as opposed to stimulating. I dug up what I wrote for that assignment nearly a dozen years ago:

Linda leaned over to admire the bouquet of peach-colored roses she had just bought. Her mind wandered fancifully from the flowers to the wonderful smell of fresh bread coming from the bakery next door. Standing to the side of the entrance was an amateur juggler. With his wildly colored costume, he attracted an audience of children who giggled each time he made a mistake. She watched a few minutes, and found herself giggling too. He finished his performance with a foppish bow toward Linda. She took a deep bow in return, and handed him a rose.

Joe walked with his head down, protecting himself from the icy fog, as wind-whipped newspapers sailed through the air, slapping against the buildings before taking off again. “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. Step on a line, break your mother’s spine.” These words kept running through Joe’s mind as he passed each crack that disrupted the rhythmic pattern of the sidewalk. The childhood taunt became a low drone in the back of his brain as he focused on the uneven path that stretched in front of him.

This was a valuable assignment not just for practicing my writing skills but for life in general, a poignant reminder that we choose how we view the world around us. The environment is filled with flaws and flowers, and we each decide which to embrace.

I shared some of the stories from this book with my father, who then decided to take some time to reflect on his most important insights, looking back over the eighty-three years of his life. Despite his currently comfortable position, his path was far from preordained. He moved to the United States when he was eight years old. His family escaped from Germany in the 1930s, and they arrived with essentially nothing. My father spoke no English and his parents didn’t have enough money to support their two children, so he lived with relatives, with whom he couldn’t communicate, until his parents could afford to bring him home. From these humble beginnings, my father built an impressive life and career, and retired as executive vice president and chief operating officer at a large multinational corporation.

Reflecting on his life, my father determined that his most important insight is that you shouldn’t take yourself too seriously nor judge others too harshly. He wishes he had been more tolerant of mistakes he made and those made by others, and that he could have seen that failure is a normal part of the learning process. He realizes now that most of our errors are not earth-shattering, and shared the story that brought this home for him. Working at RCA early in his career, he and his team had a project that was going very badly. My father and his colleagues stayed up for days on end trying to fix the problems. Working to find a solution became their entire focus for weeks. Shortly after the project was successfully completed, the entire program was cancelled. Even though the project was the center of their universe, to others it was expendable. He learned many times over that most things in life, especially our failures, aren’t as important as we think they are at the time.

My father also reminded me that success is sweet but transient. When you’re in a position of influence, authority, and power, the benefits are wonderful. But once the position is gone, the perks evaporate. Your “power” comes from the position you hold. When you’re no longer in that position, all that goes with it quickly fades away. Therefore, you should not define yourself by your current position nor believe all your own press. Savor the spotlight when you have it, but be ready to yield center stage when it’s time to go. When you leave a job, the organization will go on without you, as you are not indispensable. Of course, you will leave a legacy of all you have accomplished, but that too fades with time.

Today, my father is also acutely aware of the joy of being alive. Several years ago he had a heart attack, and his implanted defibrillator is a constant reminder of his mortality. We all know intellectually that each day is precious, but as we grow older or deal with a life-threatening illness, this sentiment grows increasingly more palpable. My father works hard to make each opportunity stand out, to appreciate every moment, and to avoid squandering even a single day.

In looking for inspiration for this book, I literally and figuratively opened every drawer and looked into every closet of my life. In the process, I stumbled upon a canvas duffel bag I’ve been dragging around for thirty years. The two-foot-long bag is filled with “treasures” that seemed important to me over the years. When I was twenty, this bag was one of my few possessions. I carried it with me from college to graduate school and everywhere I’ve lived since. Though I rarely open it, I always know where to find it. The bag and its contents are a tangible link to my past.

When I opened the bag, I found a small collection of un-remarkable rocks and shells from far-off beaches, faded photo IDs dating back through my years of high school and college, a stack of old letters, and some of my early “inventions,” including prototyped LED jewelry that I crafted out of modeling clay and watch batteries. I also found a small notebook of poetry, titled “Experimental Artifacts.”

When I wrote the poems in this book they represented the flip side of the organized scientific experiments I was performing in my neuroscience lab while in graduate school. One of the poems, called “Entropy,” jumped out at me. This poem is about the process of constantly reinventing oneself, of always changing the game plan, and of taking risks without knowing what will happen. I wrote that poem in September 1983. At that time, the future was murky, filled with vast uncertainty because I couldn’t see very far into the future. Twenty-five years later I see it differently. Uncertainty is the essence of life, and it fuels opportunity. To be honest, there are still days when I’m not sure which road to take and am overwhelmed by the choices unfolding in front of me. But I now know that uncertainty is the fire that sparks innovation and the engine that drives us forward.

Hopefully, the stories in this book underscore the idea that boundless possibilities result from extracting yourself from your comfort zone, being willing to fail, having a healthy disregard for the impossible, and seizing every opportunity to be fabulous. Yes, these actions inject chaos into your life and keep you off-balance. But they also take you places you couldn’t even have imagined and provide a lens through which to see problems as opportunities. Above all, they give you growing confidence that problems can be solved.

The poem I wrote twenty-five years ago is a poignant reminder of the anxiety I experienced in my twenties when I looked ahead, not knowing what lay around the next curve. I wish someone had told me to embrace that uncertainty. As the stories in this book demonstrate, the most interesting things happen when you get off the predictable path, when you challenge assumptions, and when you give yourself permission to see the world as opportunity rich and full of possibility.