Imagine doing everything that I've shared with you so far, what would you get? What kind of team would you have? Let me think about that. Well, superbosses begin by hiring unusual talents, special talents the way that we described, people that are sometimes more intellectually gifted than their peers and might be different. They unleash this talent by inspiring them, fueling their motivation, the yin and the yang, pushing them to the limit while giving them the confidence to excel, and crafting a vision that's compelling and that's energizing. If that weren't enough, super bosses go one crucial step further, they tell their people, "Now you're expected to rethink everything, go change the world." Guess what, more often than not, these teams and these organizations do change the world and that's why they become the most successful or among the most successful companies in any industry sector. What superbosses have to offer us is actually nothing less than a formula for creating dynamic organizations. Companies that never stop changing, that adapt constantly to new circumstances, they plunge headlong into the future. Managers and business academics alike have long thought about this. How can leaders create such organizations? For example, and really, a seminal book called Leading Change, Harvard Business School's John Kotter wrote and argue that leaders who seek to change their organizations need to create a sense of urgency among their people. Change is hard, so you need to create what Kotter called a burning platform on which to build change initiatives. There are two assumptions built in this common, I'm going to say misconception of change. First is that people hate change, and second, that change can only happen when an organization is in a really, really bad place. When a market or an industry has already evolved and a company is so woefully out of touch, that immediate change has become necessary. Let's think about that for a moment. Don't you think it's a little bit crazy? Is it necessary for your house to be virtually burning down before you do anything about it, before you try to fix it? Is it necessary to be incredibly unhealthy and sick before you start to eat better or exercise better and try to live a little bit healthier lifestyle? What kind of logic is it that says, we need to be near disaster before we change. Now I realized that's what happens for some companies, but why would we want that to happen? Wouldn't we want to be much more engaged with trying to adapt and adjust in real time all the time? Why is it necessary to assume that people hate change? Yeah, a lot of people hate change but not everybody does. Depending on how you create a culture, depending on how you manage them, depending on how you work with people, change doesn't have to be the scary thing. So many things I've talked about that superboss leaders do are all going in the same direction that says change isn't actually such a bad thing. So I have a better alternative to share with you. Now everybody loves change, we got that, but that's also because they haven't been around leaders that are playing a different game like superbosses do. The organization superbosses create are so continually adaptive and even inventive that they're, in effect, built to change, and that's an interesting phrase. Because if you remember, many people may recall Jim Collins, a very well-known thought leader. He wrote a book called Good to Great, which is among the most famous books on management and leadership. Earlier, he wrote a book called Built to Last, and the book Built to Last is fine, but I don't like that metaphor, I really don't like a Built to Last metaphor. What is it saying? It means let's just hold on. Let's just survive. Let's just crawl our way across the finish line and somehow just make it. What kind of ways that to live a life? What kind of way is that to run a company? What kind of way is that to spend so many hours we all do in our jobs. Wouldn't it be much more fun and actually successful and profitable if we adopted a different metaphor? That metaphor is built to change. Not built to last, but built to change. Don't you want to be in an organization that has this metaphor of built to change? Isn't that so much more compelling, so much more exciting? By the way, if you create a culture, a team, an organization that's built to change, it turns out you're going to actually last a lot longer. So you're going to get the best of all worlds, but it's going to be just so much more fun. For me, maybe it's a personal thing. But if I see the finish line ahead of me and it's a goal that I care about I'm trying to accomplish, I'm going to go for it. I'm going to do everything I possibly can to plow through it, and then I'm going to be ready for the next one. I'm going to be ready for the next goal, the next target, and not say, I just somehow survived and made it across the finish line. We only live once and why would we want to go for it? If you're a boss, if you're a manager, and you're clear about your non-negotiable vision, this uncompromising vision, then why not commit yourself to declaring open season on changing all that is negotiable. So many organizations have the expression elephants in the room, these are things that everyone knows what's going on, but nobody wants to talk about it. Specific practices or rules that never change because nobody has the courage to question them. With time, more and more of these "undiscussables emerge," and it restricts the flow of ideas and impedes a healthy process of questioning. These are not ways to win. We live in an economy, in a world where everything is changing all the time. This is true for our company, this is true for our team, it's true for our jobs, it's also true for our own individual careers. When we think about all the things that we need to get better at, we need to adapt, we need to stay ahead of the artificial intelligence train that's coming for us in industry after industry, and so we need ourselves to be built to change, not just as a strategic or a company or a leadership mindset, but for our own individual careers and our own individual lives, that's really what we want to be part of. So it's doable, we could do it. When we think about the things I've talked about already, these are the building blocks that can help us create that culture, that mindset of being built to change. Wrapping up this module. We now have talked about five of the key elements of the superboss playbook. Hiring great talent, motivating by raising the bar, the yin of motivation. Motivating by inspiring other people, the yang of motivation. Crafting a compelling vision that makes people really want to jump on that train, leaving the station before it's too late, and number 5, unleashing the creativity that people around us. All of this creates this culture of change. In the next module, we move on to how superboss leaders actually develop talent day to day? How did they help people fulfill their potential? How did they help people sometimes even accomplish more than they ever thought possible? So the next stage and in module 3, we dig into that.
