"Whether you make it and whether you stay there, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you."

So said Jim Collins, author of "Good to Great" and co-author of "Built to Last."

All the media are telling us that this will be a very tough year. I agree.

My feeling is that this will certainly be a tougher year than last year. However I also believe that for the prepared and the fortuitous 2009 will be a year of great challenge, opportunity and abundance.

I have been reading over the holidays a number of books relating to talent. Interestingly the common theme in all of them is that successful people and successful teams think differently about what they do. They can reframe, learn, adapt and most importantly they work really hard on what they what they need to be really really good at.

In his recent Blog the international leadership guru Robin Sharma said:

"I'll paraphrase Einstein and state: amidst great difficulty lies big opportunity. And you know that the Chinese character for crisis looks a lot like the one that stands for opportunity. Every setback holds an even bigger gift. Leadership is all about seeing it and then leveraging it to make things even better".

He also went on to say "Leaders Without Title are so much different. They are realistic optimists. Yes, they have the discipline to recognize the current market realities. But they never lose sight of the fact that hard times are rich with giant opportunities. So they constantly pay attention to them. And prioritize around them. And take passionate and concentrated action to realize them. And that's what makes them special".

This is really very true and is also reflected in Malcolm Gladwell's new book - Outliers: The Story of Success.

You will remember Malcolm Gladwell from his previous books Blink and Tipping Point.

The very best summary of this book is covered in a recent interview that he did with Fortune magazine for their 24 November issue. I urge you to go onto the Fortune website and read it.

In his book - Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell makes the case that talent isn't innate and in the Fortune article Jennifer Reingold has a very fascinating interview with him.

Some of her questions and his answers are as follows:


Q - What link does practice have to success?

A - The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.


Q - So let's broaden this out. Are there lessons in this book that are applicable to the business world?

A - Instead of thinking about talent being something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop. P & G is a great example of a company that does that and has prospered as a result. Look around Wall Street, or what's left of it today, and you'll see lots and lots and lots of people from Goldman Sachs. That's not a coincidence. It's because they took their mission to invest in people seriously.

And from this interview there was a very memorable quote from Malcolm Gladwell...

"Successful people are people who have made the most of a series of gifts that have been given to them by their culture or their history."

Which brings us back to the change and challenge that we are living through now and over the next two to three years.

Successful people and organisations will be the ones that think differently about what they do and then really rigorously apply themselves to doing what they need to do while constantly learning, leveraging and adapting.

And as Jamie Dimon (one of the smartest bankers in the States) said...

"I am shocked at the number of people who are still worrying about their strategic plan for 2009. We cancelled all that stuff - all of it."


And so back to another quote from Fortune magazine from an article by Geoffrey Colvin which I really think sums this all up (especially if you have read anything on Lance Armstrong)...

"Marathoners and Tour de France racers will tell you that a race's hardest parts, the uphill stages, are where the lead changes hands. That's where we are. When this recession ends, when the road levels off and the world seems full of promise once more, your position in the competitive pack will depend on how skilfully you manage right now".

And so it is.

Date: Tue 20th Jan 15:48 PM     Author: Terry McCloy