Why you will fail to have a great career (Part 2)

By Neil Patrick

My earlier post with this title got a lot of hits when I tweeted it the other day.

A few days ago I also set out some thoughts here on why it’s a myth that the young are technologically superior to their parents. And I mentioned the H word, “hipsters”. Deliberately actually, as at the time I was reading the pre-publication version of a new book by my friend and author George Verdolaga.

George has insightfully and engagingly set out how our society creates two basic types of attitudes and behaviours. George has labelled these groups “Mavericks” and “Hipsters”.

I enjoyed the book so much that I volunteered to write about it on this blog to help George reach more people who might benefit from, or be interested in it. It’s called “The Maverick Effect – How to be a daring innovator and effective change maker”.

My wife read it also and despite being a very different personality to myself she loved it too!

If you’d like to obtain a copy, it’s available now at Amazon here.

The book was written for anyone who has ever felt excluded, discounted, discriminated against, ridiculed, or bullied.

Within its covers is an explanation of so many aspects of society, attitudes and behaviours that I think it will be of interest to a very wide audience. Moreover it provides valuable help for anyone struggling to overcome prejudice, discrimination or alienation.

More than that, if you are or know someone who is experiencing such agonies, the book actually describes how this state of affairs can be turned into a catalyst for such people to not just overcome these traumas, but to achieve really amazing things with their lives.

After I’d read it, I was delighted to interview George about the book and the ideas within it. Here’s the transcript.

NP: So George, what’s The Maverick Effect basically about?

GV: It’s a book that’s designed to teach people how to develop the confidence necessary to be a winner in life and at work

NP: How did you come to write the book?

GV: I decided to write it when I finally came to realize that the challenges that I was going through were not designed to keep me down but to give me the strength & resilience to overcome life’s obstacles and achieve whatever I’d set out to do. And then when I saw the earlier lives of famous people (which I’d written about it my book) they all went through the same kind of difficulties I did and that’s precisely what enabled them to achieve the level of success that they attained. They had the hunger for success and that’s really the key differentiator between people who are successful and people who aren’t.

NP: How can we tell if we are a maverick or a hipster?

You’re a hipster if you’re careful not to rock the boat and like to just go with the flow. Popularity and being on-trend is important to you. Mavericks on the other hand tend to be disliked or misunderstood and they sometimes have these ideas that are considered “strange” or “totally out there”. They don’t have a compelling urge to be followers. They have strong personalities that may turn people off initially but at the same time they do have a magnetism that draws others to them, even if it may be for the wrong reasons, mostly because they’re passionate about their ideas no matter how radical these may be. You’re a maverick if you’re not afraid of rejection or scorn and don’t mind being regarded as an outsider. Mavericks can be hard-headed and stubborn but they also know with absolute certainty that one day they’ll be proven right.

NP: Is our category pre-determined by personality and genes, or are we free to choose it?

GV: People definitely have a natural personality but that can be influenced by upbringing and life experiences. In other words, we may each have a natural disposition but that can be tempered by what we learn and what we see around us. So choice plays a big part in our life outcomes. It’s not just about personality, in other words.

NP: Do you have a sense of what proportion of people fit might into each category? Are there differences by age, location, gender etc?

GV: I would say that between 90% - 95% of the population are hipsters that just choose to go with the flow and not disrupt the status quo and 5% - 10% of the general population are visionaries that lead the other 90% - 95% who are only too willing to follow them. There is no difference between age, location or gender as Mavericks tend to come from different parts of the world.

NP: How does this phenomenon manifest in the workplace?

GV: Most people tend to fall in line and go hipster. The few that don’t and become outspoken get quickly labelled as trouble-makers. Some of them are in fact misfits but a few really are mavericks. They’re meant to either rise up the company ladder or most likely start their own companies. Mavericks are usually outspoken and don’t follow rules very well as they like to make up their own. Companies are usually hidebound places that are tough to change from within so mavericks either have to leave or learn how to dance (so to speak) until they eventually get their way.

That’s why in my book, I show mavericks how to walk two worlds, the one they see in their heads (the future) and the one they have to currently live in. For mavericks to really influence the world and get their way, they have to win the respect and admiration of the hipsters (who will end up joining their cause and eventually promoting them so they can make that “I- found-them-first” boast) so they have to be just a little bit subversive enough to be sexy (ex. think jazz or rock and roll when these were new and readily embraced by teenagers wanting to rebel against their parents’ tastes) enough to draw attention to themselves but also mainstream enough to be able to attract a followership. It’s a fine line that one has to walk.

NP: Your argument is that mavericks eventually change the world, but that hipsters perpetuate the status quo is convincing. Yet doesn’t this imply that the greatest short term rewards are from running with the pack?

GV: Yes, you’ll definitely be rewarded in the short term by running with the pack but you’ll be forever invisible. Geniuses aren’t discovered because they did their best to blend in and not rock the boat. They become celebrated because they dared to challenge existing truths (ex. ‘the world is not flat - it’s round’) or dominant groups. You can certainly escape being bullied or ridiculed by shape-shifting to fit in. But you’ll most likely be average the rest of your life. Being a powerful and influential maverick requires hard training, much like military boot camp. If you don’t pay the price and go thru this tough apprenticeship, then your brilliance won’t shine through. You’ll be like a raw diamond… nothing but pure undeveloped potential.

NP: What advice about jobs and work choices would you give to A) mavericks and B) hipsters?

GV: Mavericks would make great inventors, pioneers, explorers, scientists, engineers and inventors. They like to create things from scratch and go to uncharted territories. Hipsters would make great museum curators, newspaper reporters, TV news anchors, editors, film critics, trend forecasters, salespeople and marketers. They like to look at other people’s work and then deconstruct, critique or promote this.

NP: You mention that businesses which are most successful are genuinely different. But doesn’t this also mean that they have a higher failure risk simply because they are in uncharted waters?

GV: Businesses that are innovative are able to minimize their failure rate by testing products before they launch these to market. If companies don’t test and simply launch new products they will experience failure more often that’s for sure. But you don’t have to be a pioneering company to experience failure. You can be a copycat business and still fail. Being first has nothing to do with failing. Not testing your product or service – and not being attuned to what your target market wants – has more to do with failure than being first to market or simply being different. People like different. But there’s a way to do different that ensures success.

NP: Companies want to retain and grow their talent; how can your ideas help them do this?

GV: Feedback is important. I think that few people can work effectively in a vacuum. Training is also important. When the economy (or a company) is in a downturn this is usually the first thing (training) that gets thrown out the window. Bringing in outside speakers/trainers who can see the forest for the trees is often a great idea for bringing fresh ideas into a company that may be getting stale or too set in their ways. And leadership training implies not following the herd but leading it. So when everyone else is cutting their training budgets and slashing costs, you’re doing the opposite and investing more and more in your people in order to build loyalty.

NP: Thank you George! I’d just like to add that the book is a really great and easy read. And I know from experience that writing plainly is much, much harder than it sounds!

GV: Thank you Neil, it’s much easier when you are doing something you love.

I’d like to thank George for providing me with the advance copy of the book and for taking the time to answer my questions about it. Totally recommended reading!


GEORGE VERDOLAGA BIO:

If you wish, you can connect with George here:

Website : www.georgeverdolaga.com
Linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/pub/george-verdolaga/1/956/582
Twitter: https://twitter.com/georgeverdolaga

George Verdolaga is a prolific author and speaker. His two biggest passions are teaching and helping people to get out of their own way so that they can reach their personal, career, or business objectives as quickly and painlessly as possible.

George was the president of the Westdrive Educational Foundation (WEFI) and served as the administrator and program advisor for both the elementary and pre-school departments for ten years. He continued his involvement in education by volunteering as a grade three Teacher at the parish religious education program (PREP) of St. Andrew’s Parish in Vancouver’s East Side community for ten years, with his wife Maita. Both of them are also active members in their local church.

In 1999, George established Flowform Design Group, a residential interior design company. When the recession of 2008 hit the global economy, he saw many people get laid off and attempt to get back on their feet by blanketing the entire city with their resumes and receiving no callbacks. As a result, George created the ‘Sitting Pretty’ Home Study Course, based on his experience of successfully finding work in places like Manila, Milan, New York, and Vancouver in as little as eleven days by talking directly to decision-makers who had the power to hire him on the spot.

After the 2008 recession, many twenty- to thirty-year company veterans found themselves out of work and unable to land a new job. As a result, George wrote The Contractor Lifestyle to show careerists how they can have jobs for life by adopting an entrepreneurial mindset while they work for other people. More recently, he created The Job Farmer where he shares the most effective way to find work—or get business clients—by “farming” rather than “hunting”. George wrote his third book, The Maverick Effect, to show potential innovators and change-makers that their earlier hardships prepare them for the leadership role that they will assume later on in life.

George has been president of various business associations and has sat on the boards of several non-profit boards including the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation (JDRF). He currently serves as a mentor at the Multicultural Helping House Society and AIESEC UBC which is an international business organization for university students.

Why managers are in danger of extinction

By Neil Patrick

A headline caught my attention this week that the online retailer Zappos, now owned by Amazon is in the process of removing managers and all job titles from its structure. Instead, the traditional top down hierarchy is to be replaced by a series of self-governing circles.

You can see the original news post by Jena McGregor on the Washington Post website here.

To quote from the original article:

"... this gives employees more of a voice in the way the company is run.

According to Zappos executives, the move is an effort to keep the 1,500-person company from becoming too rigid, too unwieldy and too bureaucratic as it grows.

“As we scaled, we noticed that the bureaucracy we were all used to was getting in the way of adaptability,” says Zappos’s John Bunch, who is helping lead the transition to the new structure. The company has become a force in online shopping as it expanded beyond shoes into apparel, housewares and cosmetics.

The holacracy concept is the brainchild of management consultant Brian Robertson, a serial software entrepreneur who says he launched the idea after realizing he was “more interested in how we worked together” than in his own job. The concept has a couple of high-profile devotees — Twitter cofounder Evan Williams uses it at his new company, Medium, and time management guru David Allen uses it run his firm - but Zappos is by far the largest company to adopt the idea.

At its core, a holacracy aims to organize a company around the work that needs to be done instead of around the people who do it. As a result, employees do not have job titles. They are typically assigned to several roles that have explicit expectations. Rather than working on a single team, employees are usually part of multiple circles that each perform certain functions."

This may be a portent of a much more general trend I think and here’s why:

Hierarchies prioritize command, control and consistency...and are slow Traditional hierarchies have been used for centuries to organize all sorts of human endeavors from military operations to the manufacture of goods to the delivery of public services. But I think we should at least consider alternative styles of structure for some organisations in the 21st century. For a start, a rigid hierarchy just cannot respond fast enough in a world where customer interactions are measured in seconds and minutes, not hours and days. Which is preferable for the consumer – a uniformly average service or one in which they feel perfectly satisfies their individual needs at that moment?

Businesses must reflect the nature of the environment in which they operate. We all know that digital media doesn’t work in a top down fashion. It’s the most democratic form of media ever created. And it scales laterally. Influence is gained or lost not by the endorsement of our superiors, but by our peers. The organisational corroborative of this isn’t a flat structure, it’s a democratic one. If we accept this, then why shouldn’t teams of professionals working together be able to choose who has authority in any given situation?

Hierarchies stifle dissenting voices AND suffocate innovation. A hierarchy ensures that positional authority trumps specialist expertise every time. Sometimes this is for the greater good. Sometimes it creates dissent, frustration and resentment. Depending on the culture and individuals involved, it can also lead to a clamping down on innovative thinking as responsibility for direction is always deferred upwards.

Hierarchies are too slow for consumers. Customers hate slow service and slow decisions. When you are trying to serve consumers, you are always going to have a minority who for whatever reason are unhappy. Whether their complaint is justified or not, the one thing you must do is act fast. And that means that your staff must be empowered to do whatever is necessary to rectify the problem without the delays imposed by referral up the hierarchy. The converse is that if your organisation is hyper-adaptable to customer feedback, you’ll be more agile and better able to capitalise on what they are telling you.

For these reasons, I think that the idea being implemented at Zappos, shows some real vision and genuine merit. It’s not without weaknesses too of course. Where does accountability rest in this model? If decisions are made more or less democratically, who ensures that the decision is consistent with the wider strategy of the organisation? For sure there are lots of operational practicalities to be ironed out.

But I do think this may be a glimpse of the future.

What do you think? I’d welcome comments below.

Proof at last - older employees are not less innovative than younger workers

By Neil Patrick

For decades now, there have been several highly persistent myths about older workers which have negatively influenced organisations' behaviour and had a detrimental effect on their performance.

The widespread negative stereotyping of older workers has led to many managers believing without a scrap of scientific evidence to support it, that older workers:

1. Have poorer health and thus greater absenteeism and lower productivity 
2. Have shorter job tenure, demand higher salaries and pension benefits and hence are more expensive 
3. Are less technologically competent 
4. Are more rigid and resistant to change 
5. And last but not least, are less innovative and creative in the workplace and their jobs. 

Myths 1-4 above are relatively simple to disprove through even the most cursory scrutiny of available data and research. For example, earlier research by Ng and Feldman (2008) showed conclusively that, ‘older workers exhibit stronger extra-role performance and less counter-productive behaviour than younger workers’.

Firm conclusions about creativity and innovation however have proved elusive due to the complexity of acquiring reliable data. Until now.

Last month, The Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology published new research by Thomas W. H. Ng and Daniel C. Feldman from the University of Hong Kong and The University of Georgia, respectively.

Titled excitingly (!) ‘A meta-analysis of the relationships of age and tenure with innovation-related behaviour’, this research proves conclusively that older workers are no less innovative or creative than younger workers, and under the right conditions are much more so.

By the year 2020, Americans who are over 55 years old will comprise close to 30% of the residential population of the United States and a similar percentage in the UK and Eurozone countries. The over- 55’s will also by that time comprise c.25% of the workforce.

Not surprisingly therefore, this topic is assuming a greater than ever degree of importance, not just from the point of view of fairness, but also from the perspective of the maximisation of the value of organisations’’ human capital.

‘Innovation-related behaviour’ (IRB) was the focus of this latest research. As innovation has become more critical component of an individual’s contribution to an organisation’s performance, an accurate assessment of the relationship between employee age and IRB is becoming even more important for managers to understand.

Moreover, as Sternberg (2001) and Choi and Chang (2009) have emphasised, ‘creativity only adds value when the people who generate new ideas can persuade others of their utility and can convince others to implement those ideas. If new ideas do not gain widespread attention, are poorly implemented, or are never implemented at all, they have virtually no impact on the organisation’s ability to innovate’.

The often superior levels of communication and influencing skills displayed by older workers give them a distinct advantage in this valuable respect too.

The methodology adopted by Ng and Feldman involved the meta-analysis of 98 empirical studies. Put another way, this means that no fewer than 98 separate previous studies and their respective data were selected and aggregated to create not only a diverse but also an up to date sample. The results therefore have a high degree of statistical reliability.

The research conclusions are summarised in the research report thus: 

• Contrary to common belief, the results of this study show that age and tenure are not negatively related to innovation-related behaviours. 

• Older and longer-tenured workers do not engage in less innovation-related behaviour than younger, more junior workers 

• These results hold true even at the high end of the age and years of service continuum 

• This study concludes that the negative stereotype that older and longer tenured workers are less innovative is not based on accumulated empirical evidence.

• As such excluding older workers from innovation-related tasks is counter-productive. 

Sadly I do not think that this report will be the end of the matter. Stereotyping takes years to eradicate in all areas of life, but I am hopeful that gradually, the findings of this important piece of work will filter through to organisations and start to eliminate the perpetuation of these myths and falsehoods. It’s vital not just to older workers, but to all of us and the success of the organisations we work in.