Don't Waste The Next Ten Years

Ten years ago, it was easier for Sony to become Apple than for Apple.

Ten years ago, it was easier for Blockbuster to become Netflix than for Netflix.

Ten years ago, it was easier for Kodak to become Facebook than for Facebook.

These companies didn't try to become what they are today. Shadows of their former selves. And in the case of Blockbuster and Kodak, bankrupt.

They just didn't try hard enough not to.

Greatness is not about your potential. Or your intentions. Or your carefully written strategy. 

It is about what you do.

And every decision you make, and every one you don't, moves you closer or further away from your dreams.

If you want to be great, know where you're headed and act with purpose.

If your goal is just to stay competitive, plan for the probability that you soon won't be.

Lessons of Lily, Sarah and Grace

You should not be reading this.

And I should not have written it.

Because we should not be here.

In fact, we should not exist. 

And the odds that we do exist are so impossibly small that we can not conceive of a number that finite.

Smaller than a step in a walk to the far side of the universe. Smaller than a single grain in a world full of sand.

It would take the change of but one mundane act since the beginning of time for either you or I to have never been born. Any one. A chance introduction. A door left open. A letter lost in the mail. A train that left on time. Or didn’t. A sliding door. A moment’s hesitation. A glance, a nod, a wink. 

But we are here. And by any definition, mathematical or mystical, that makes us miracles. Whether we exist for a day, or a hundred years, or less than ten, we are miracles.

Which suddenly makes what we do today a decision of some consequence.

I have known Madonna Badger since 2008. First as a client, and then as a friend. And I have met her husband Matt briefly a few times.

Yesterday, Chris and I attended the funeral of their three daughters: Lily, Sarah and Grace.

For those of you who haven’t heard this unspeakably tragic story, Lily, Sarah and Grace and Madonna's parents, Lomer and Pauline Johnson were killed in a house fire on Christmas morning. As the fire fighters pulled Madonna away from the burning house she said to them, “my whole life is in there.”

I can say I have never heard anything of which I was more certain that that. Those five people were her life. She was limitlessly committed to them, her life revolved around them. She would have died for them. For any one of them.

We went to the funeral yesterday, pre-judging her by the expectations we would have of ourselves in those same circumstances. That simply to breathe would no longer be possible. That existence itself would be more than we could bear. We expected to find a broken woman.  

Instead we found a woman whose strength filled a church of well over a thousand people, and who left me with a personal reference point that is unshakeable.

That life is an opportunity. A chance. An unimaginable gift.

And we should treat it that way. Every day. 

In the way that little girls do. Exploring, trying, learning, loving, playing, living.

Because when the last of these is suddenly taken from us, what will be left is what we did. 

Not what we meant to do. Not what we intended to do. Not what we thought about doing.

But what we did.

Lily, Sarah and Grace were prevented from doing more.

But what they did was life-changing.

For their mother, who will be their mother forever, and will use their power to change the world.

And for any of us who use their memory as fuel to fight against assumption.

That tomorrow is the same as today.

That we are in control.

That it will work out in the end.

We should not be here. We should not exist. It is impossible that we do.

After all that, living life with the wonder of a little girl should be a piece of cake

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I have included the text of Madonna’s eulogy below. That she was able to give it in person, is the bravest act I have ever seen.

January 5th, 2012

Thank you all for being here today. 

I want talk to you about my girls, my three little girls Lily, Sarah, and Grace Badger, and this is going to be really hard. 

Lily Grace and Sarah are not here with us today and they won’t be here tomorrow and I am trying to come to terms with this and I know that Matthew is and I know that all of us are. But I feel very strongly and the reason why I wanted to speak to you today is to let you know who my girls were and that our girls, my little girls are not gone from us entirely because my girls are in my heart they’re right here and this is where they live now and they live in Matthew’s heart and they live in the heart’s of all of you who knew them and even those who didn’t know them. And I want you to remember my girls out loud to fight for them to never be forgotten. This is why I can stand before you today because they were my little girls and they were my little girl tribe and I want you to hear about them from me.

So I’m going to tell you just the tiniest of snippets, little stories that are the smallest of drops in a ocean of memories, because there were Christmases and Easters and Thanksgivings and so many days of just being a girl tribe together, and dancing and singing and playing and loving one another.

My Lily. Lily was my angel and my life and she was my first baby, and when Lily was first born I would put her in my baby Bjorn and we would walk around New York City for hours, with diapers in my pocket and my breasts full of milk and it was all we needed. And we’d walk the city. 

Lily sang before she spoke and she made-up songs constantly. She made-up elaborate games with her Nana and all of the little animals that she loved to play with, and these animals all had names, and they all lived in very special kingdoms. Lily loved her Ricky and her Mister Wiggles and Lily loved her Jessica so very much. 

And most of all Lily loved her sisters. They were her best friends and she celebrated all of their unique qualities, and she never changed them and she never harmed them and she always gave them love. Lily was naturally shy and her smile was sometimes hidden, but when she let her smile show it glowed completely.

And Lily was a dancer, a natural born dancer and when Lily danced it was with moves that far outdid Michael Jackson. Lily was calm and confident and full of who Lily was. When she was first met you she wasn’t sure about you, but once she determined that you were okay, you were one hundred percent in with Lily forever.

When Lily and I went to the Met and we saw all the Pietàs because apparently I had made a wrong turn and all the Pietàs were right there, but anyway when she saw the Pietàs at the Met when she was only 5, Lily broke down on the floor and she begged me to tell her when she was going to die. And I told her after a lot of not knowing what to say, that life is a mystery, it’s a total mystery, and we will never know when we will die. And she accepted that. And I did too.

My darling, Sarah. Sarah is spirited love and her greatest joy in this life was to make you feel good and at ease and loved. As many of you know, my parents - their Nana and Papa - were true givers. And one Christmas my dad as his alter-ego Santa, in full regalia, went to the village nursing home, and my mother had made sugar cookies and put them in little bags and everybody walked into the nursing home and it was scary. And Lily was there, and Sarah and Gracie and Matthew, and it was Sarah who grabbed the little cookies and started handing them out to the very sick and very old people, and the entire room changed and it was full of ease and full of light. Sarah later said to my mom, “Nana, now somebody better tell the tooth fairy that this is where she needs to bring all the teeth, cause these people really need them.”

I had a fever once and Sarah came and she sprayed my face with magic mist and she put a toy dog in my hand and she said, “don’t worry Mama these things are going to help you sleep and make you well.”

Sarah had a very, very fragile heart and it was hidden behind a lot of love and lot of smiles and the smallest slight would cost such deep deep damage that I swear you could see the tear right there in her heart.

Sarah liked to lie with me at bed time and hold my hand and tell me how much she loved me. And she was my whipper snapper. One night I asked Sarah to do something, and it was silly - I can’t remember what it was -  and she put her hands firmly on her hips and she said, “no can do, Mommy.”

Once her Nana said, “Sarah Badgers can you hear me?” And Sarah said “Nana I can hear you. I’m just not listening to you.” 

And Doctor Solar said that Sarah was the mayor of Windward, their school. And she knew the names of all of their brothers and all of their sisters, and recently they had to call a special meeting at Windward, Dr. Schwab had to call a meeting with the second grade girls so they could figure out a way of how they were going to take turns being close to Sarah. This was my Sarah, my little Sarah, my little whipper snapper, love and lovable and totally loved.

My Gracie. My best friend Jenny once said that Grace was light in a previous life and I think she was right. Grace was fearless, she was the first one to pick up the most creepiest most grossest bug you could possible find and try to give it to me because I hate creepy crawly things. Gracie was fearless. She was the first one on the trapeze in our last spring vacation and she begged and begged to go on it again and again. Gracie was in love with her sisters and in awe of Lily. And Gracie always used to say, “right Lily, right, isn’t that right?”

Sarah and Grace had a special language and a special bond. For instance they called one another ‘RaRa’ when they were little toddlers and it was the name that they had given one another because it was the ‘Ra’ in both of their names that was only thing that was the same. And it took us a long time to really know if they knew the difference between which one was Grace and which was Sarah.

Grace loved math and she would do problems that were like 10 numbers long and she would add them and subtract them. And then she would make us all check her work, and she was so proud of what she could accomplish with her numbers.

Grace was a fisherman, an adventure and an inventor and her imagination was boundless. And there was nothing Grace Badger couldn’t make with a Band Aid. Band Aids were balls and they were wrapping paper and they were everything. Nobody loved Band Aids more than Grace Badger.

And Gracie wanted to know everything. She wanted a microscope and a telescope and I think she wanted to see the seen and the unseen. And she could have cared less if you liked her or approved of her, she found her own way always and when she loved you she loved you completely. And Grace’s tender kisses were always given when she wanted to give them and her hugs were so full and so loving.

Grace asked me a thousand times, if she was going to die before me and I said, “No Gracie, no, that is never going to happen.”

But it happened. And people, everyone, including me, wonder ''Why? Why did this happen, and why my children, and why my parents and why now?''

But nothing will bring my babies back, or my parents, or the life I had or Matthew’s. And here’s the one thing that I know is not a mystery. That there is no power greater on this Earth than love. And that is what is going to keep Lily and Sarah and Grace with us forever.

In this, in all this incomprehensible loss and chaos, all I can hang on to is that love is everything. And God, as I choose to call my higher power, is love. And so, God is love and God is everything.

I have been asked a million times, ''how can you do this, how are you talking, how are you surviving?'' Because when I used to hear about people losing a child, or if a child got very, very sick, I would say, "I could never survive that. I could never live through that, I could never, ever, ever live through losing my babies.”

But here I am. Here all of us are. Because Lily and Sarah and Grace live in my heart now, as do my parents, Lomer and Pauline. I was a daughter and a mother, and I still intend to be both, so I can make my girls proud and carry them forward in love. This love, I am realizing, is to be my children’s legacies because they left the world at such tender ages that all they left behind was love.

And I think and I pray and I hope that it is all of our great responsibility to spread that love. And for me, God does not call on us just to love because that is too easy. He also calls on us to be of service. Service to our friends, our families to those we know and those we don’t.

So the message I want to share today, on behalf of Lily and Sarah and Grace, is that we can talk all day long about love, but love without service is not enough.

Please keep our little girls in your hearts by showing your love with acts of pure kindness, by loving each other and finding a way to help each other every day for Lily, for Sarah, and for Grace. This is what will keep them alive forever. 

Thank you all for coming today and for all of your words and prayers and support. They have meant the world to me, they have meant the world to my family and to Matthew.

Think Different - Say No

Like many people I mourned the news of Steve Jobs’ death with tears in my eyes, and that feeling in your chest that arrives only when the world becomes a little less.

Less magical. In this particular case.

Millions of words will be written about Steve Jobs in the coming weeks. Appropriate consideration for a man who sits alongside Franklin, Edison and Ford when measuring his impact on the world.

To say that he understood us better than we do ourselves is only the slightest hyperbole. 

To point out that he imagined not only possibilities but the ways to make them come true is to recognize the man’s true genius. For without the capacity to make the complex simple, and to then do so by the millions, he would have been a man on a stage in a black turtleneck talking to an empty room. 

It is no accident that for the last several years Apple has been recognized as having the best supply chain in the world. “Amateurs talk about strategy. Professionals talk about logistics.” And in hiring Tim Cook to build the world’s best supply chain, Steve Jobs proved he was not only a visionary. But a professional.

Of all the things I have thought and read and heard so far about Steve Jobs, however, one thing stands out to me as the foundation to Apple’s success.

In 1997, on his return to the company he had founded, he met with a group of developers and began to explain how he was going to re-design Apple. 

For too long, he explained, Apple had been less than the sum of its parts. And rather than trying to make Apple be more, he was first going to make it be less. 

He was going to force Apple to focus. To decide where it was going. To decide how it was going to be great.

And to focus, Apple was going to have to say ‘no’. A lot. To everything that didn’t bring it closer to being the company he envisioned.

This was part of his creed. To simplify. To focus. And to relentlessly say no. "Because only then can you concentrate on the things that are really important."

Of all the many lessons we will be studying for years to come, this is the one that rings most deeply to me.

Whether you call it your Purpose or your Mission or your “Why”, no business succeeds without knowing what it intends to be.

It is a journey that begins not with a yes. But with a great many ‘no's’.

And ends when you have changed the world.

Making Change Happen - Starting Monday

Today we put together a panel for Advertising Week that discussed the challenges of making ideas come to life.

We focused on creating practical steps that people could start to take immediately.

So much content came from the conversation that we decided to capture it and put in in a White Paper.

We've included the Introduction to the White Paper here.

You can download the entire White Paper Here.

Introduction

We’ve been involved in change from a lot of angles. 

Multi-national networks, entrepreneurial partnerships, guiding the early years of Oprah, and taking our own international business through the entire business cycle. In the process we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

This paper combines some of our experiences with those of four business leaders who recently joined us to discuss how they make change happen in their company.

From Graham Barkus of Cathay Pacific comes the challenge of bringing about change in a 25,000 person airline and the need to take into account the human factor.

From Lori Senecal of kbs+, the insights of how a change agent has quickly and successfully shaken up an established business, by doing things that matter.

From Toni Hess of Rosetta, the ability of a creative leader to add art to her company’s’ pragmatic foundations by helping to purpose the passion of her staff.

And from Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly, the willingness to throw away the model and start again by answering the real questions.

To these we’ve added some additional insights based on our own work as consultants, coaches, organizational architects and entrepreneurs.

Change is hard. 

Change is risky. 

Change in inevitable.

Making it happen on your terms is the key to success for any business.

You can download the entire White Paper Here.

A Decade of Recklessness

I started to write this a couple of weeks ago. But a variety of things have been in the way of my blog this month. So let me uncork the bottle again and begin with this.

If we have learned anything from 9/11, we have learned that with actions there are consequences.

And change comes regardless of whether we want it to or not.

Ten years on, we live in a world that satisfies so few. One we seek to change in so many ways.

If, ten years from now, we are not going to be disappointed again, we need to be mindful of how we want the world to be better. And what we are going to do differently this time to make that happen.

That starts with those corners that we can influence. None more so than the business we choose to work at every day, and whose potential rests in our hands.

For anyone reading this blog, their business is their life. And making it count is measured in a hundred ways. Measurements that are hard to track in real-time. But which will stop and take our breath away when we least expect it.

There are many events we can not control along the way. Including how it ends.

Making sure that when it does we have done what we could, is a measurement for no-one else to judge.

And an opportunity of limitless potential.

Three Things Any Business Can Learn From Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett

It’s hard to know which piece of news of the last 18 hours will have the greatest impact over the long-term. Steve Jobs’ announcement that he is stepping down as Apple’s CEO, or Warren Buffett’s decision to invest $5 billion in Bank of America.

Earlier this year I wrote about the only real failing one could realistically pin on Mr Jobs - the lack of a clear succession plan for when this day finally came. Whether August 24th, 2011 comes to be seen as the day that marked Apple’s zenith, or just another milestone in a company history littered with milestones, remains to be seen of course. Personally, I hope fervently it is the latter.

If this is as good as it gets for Apple, we shall all notice the loss of innovation and inspiration and personal freedom and expression and competitive challenge that he brought. Whether you like or use Apple products or not, he raised the bar to staggering heights for everyone. The long-term implications of that are enormous. 

Warren Buffett’s announcement, however, may in fact be the piece of news with the more far reaching impact on our lives. Stabilizing a financial system that some are saying is showing all the signs of the 2008 crash but with consequences this time that would be far, far greater - there being no money left with which to bail anyone out. 

Which, of course, is what happens when you leave it to committees to solve giant problems. Today, the banks are even bigger, while still operating on foundations designed to support a different economy.

Out of all this uncertainty, however, come three truths that any business leader can learn from. Follow these and you are learning from the best:

1. Do What You Love.  These men built their success on following their passion, and allowed their natural talents to solve problems they cared about solving. This is not a small thing. Notice how your own creativity emerges, unbidden and unforced to solve problems that really matter to you, and how you then apply those experiences to push yourself further. The trick to doing what you love is getting paid for it. But if you aren’t doing what you love somewhere in your life, there’s no chance that will ever happen. 
2. Invest in What You Believe. Both people and companies are guilty of showing too little commitment to their beliefs. If you believe in something, put yourself at risk. A least enough to feel the consequences if it doesn’t work the way you expect. If it turns out well, you gain confidence and capital (financial or intellectual) to invest again. If it doesn’t, you have something perhaps even more valuable in the short-term. Knowledge.
3. Believe in the Power of the Individual. It is argued by many economists that Warren Buffett prevented the collapse of the global economy by choosing to invest in Goldman Sachs at the height of the crisis. If Goldman had gone under, there was no-one - before or since - who could see where the bottom would have ended up. His actions this morning, have sent a wave of relief through the banking industry, and as we all know to our cost, most of the modern economy is driven by confidence.

Steve Jobs’ announcement has raised a central question amongst the millions of words already and still to be written about him. Is it really possible in today’s technological, information driven society that the world’s most valuable company can really be dependent on one man?

The answer, of course, remains to be seen. The fact that it can even be posed is a reminder to all of us that we are capable of more than we know, and restricted only by the magnificence of our dreams.