Willow Creek GLS--Rasmus Ankersen

(Notes from the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit -- whew! This leadership stuff can get complicated!)

I want to start by showing you something (old model cell phone Nokia.) In many ways it embodied resiliency, quality, and innovation. It led to a case study at business schools around the world. Nokia is not just a story about success; it’s also a story about a company that lost their mojo.  Maybe we don’t talk enough about the challenges that follow success: arrogance, complacency, resistence to change.

Human beings are living longer and longer but companies live shorter and shorter.

As leaders we need to think about how we keep our organization relevant and fresh? How do we reinvent from a position of strength?

If it can happen to Nokia, it can happen to you too.

Two stories—one about football and one about a statistician.

Outcome bias= we assume good results always come from superior performance

Newcastle United football (soccer) club plays at St. James Park and has 50,000 fans at the stadium every week.  In 2012 they finished 5^th in their league—an amazing performance for them.  They rewarded the head coach with an unbreakable eight year contract and tried to keep the squad together.

The following seasons they dropped to 16^th place. Nothing had changed yet they dropped 11 places in a year. In football there’s an old expression “The League Table never lies!”  But it’s not that simple according to a gambling pro—an Oxford grad in physics.  We discussed whether gambling strategies/predictions would apply to predicting football success.

What you need to understand is “The League Table ALWAYS Lies” because football is a very random game. The fewer goals there are in a sport the more impact there is from random events. The best team wins less often in a low-scoring game like football.  The way a gambler deals with this he looks at underlying performance that has more predictive value.

All goals in football are important but not all are equally important.  This is called goal differential. Another statistic gamblers look at is shot differential.  They look at these rates to see which teams are most likely to have sustainable success. 

We can assume that good results are always the result of good decisions or performance, BUT

“Success turns luck into genius.” 

Successful organizations should think more like good gamblers. Why were we successful?

Lego has been willing to evaluate their success. After they sent out 30,000 sets of police station Legos and all were sold they realized one piece was missing in each set. Less than 2% of the people who bought it called for a replacement part and the rest may have just bought a competitor’s product the next time.  When we hear from 5,000 complainers there may actually be a million complaints.

1)   Never trust success

Second story  --4 Ethiopian runners winning gold medals in the London Olympics and all came from Bekoji, Ethiopia that has 17,000 people and produced many gold medals.  

35% of the world’s best female golfers are from South Korea. 

What can this teach us about how to develop high performance success?

The Gold Mine Effect --  video of Kenya training camp; Jamaican training camp, South Korean golf training camp; -- 6 months I traveled around the world and trained in each of these places.  I wrote a book called “The Gold Mine Effect”

Jamaica—Usain Bolt—fastest man on the planet—people say “there must be something in the water in Jamaica”.  Let’s rule out super-genetics.  I got to the training camp early in the morning and couldn’t see a running track.  Ten minutes later Stephen Francis head coach of MVP track in Jamaica arrived.  He’s never sprinted; he graduated with a statistics degree.  I expected to see a modern training facility but all they had was a grass track and a shack with rusty weights.  Stephen Francis said,  “I believe strongly a performance center must be designed with work in mind and not comfort.” 

The important question is: who cares the most? Who wants it the most?  Sometimes comfort becomes more important than improvement.  Too much comfort=no real improvement.  Can you have too much comfort?  As leaders how can you create the discomfort you need to move forward?

Back to Lego—who is the main competitor? Is it another toy company or is it Apple? Coca Cola won the battle against Pepsi but then said what if we’re competing not just against other soft drinks but against any beverages in general? 

2)   Re-think your potential

Make the world bigger and yourself smaller.