When I was talking about vision, I said that the superboss vision was uncompromising. Remember that? It's not like a great word. Uncompromising. Doesn't sound like something you would think is a great thing. Well, I tried to explain why it was that they really believe in what they believed and you have to buy into that. But there's a second part here. Another way to say it is not so much that their vision was just uncompromising, but these superboss leaders were uncompromisingly open. Which is another neat paradox. As long as you bought into their vision, then they wanted you to be a full player in trying to figure out how to fulfill that vision. In other words, they unleash the creativity of the people around them to a level that I just haven't seen in working with leaders and companies for decades. I've never seen any group of people better than superbosses at really getting and creating an opportunity for people to have a role, have a seat at the table. It's that word creativity that I referenced earlier in the module, and it comes up, they wanted people to come up with ideas. They didn't just want people to come up with ideas, they expected people to come up with ideas. They gave people a seat at the table. They were created themselves, of course, as you heard some examples already, and when they looked at problems, they had a natural tendency to think about them in terms of opportunities as opposed to threats, which is also an important thing. But they didn't think they had a monopoly in all the great ideas out there. When I've talked to Millennials about this and Gen Z, I mean, this is something that really resonates with them. The reason why it resonates with them is that, well, they want that seat at the table, and superboss leaders will give you that seat at the table. You don't have to be in the job for 20 or 30 years before you have decision-making authority. You are a player, but you got to keep that seat. The only way you keep that seat is by being creative, by being innovative, by being able to execute on those ideas, by being great, and superboss leaders are not afraid to take that seat away, which is, of course, fair. There's no such thing as tenure for people in a superboss world. You have a chance, and if you're great and you're contributing, everything's going to work out great, and you going to have bigger and bigger opportunities. But not everybody can, but at least you have that chance, and that's why I think Millennials and Gen Z really are bought into this idea and are looking for their superboss leaders. The interesting question is, well, how do they do this? How do they nurture openness and innovation and creativity in the people around them? What we learned, and I'll share with you right now, is there are really three things that they do. Again, as with pretty much everything I've been talking about and we'll talk about in this module and in this course, these are things you can do. First, superbosses really encourage risk-taking. One of the people I interviewed, Kyle Craig, his named former Chairman and CEO of Steak & Ale, who worked with Norman Brinker for a long time, said, "Norman Brinker, he would he would challenge you. He would say, 'What do you think you could do there? What is working? Go try something.' It was very empowering because it gave you a license to say, we can do some things differently." As another protege recalled, "You were expected to take risks, and as a matter of fact, you got yourself into more trouble with Norman Brinker if you weren't doing anything differently." How does that compare to how most managers think about their jobs, and how most people think about working for their bosses? A lot of bosses they don't want you to take any risks, they're afraid. But superbosses, that's an essential thing. For most superbosses, risk-taking alone isn't even enough. Employees are expected to take risks proactively. Have you ever heard an executive say that he or she wishes their team would just take initiative when someone has an idea. Why are they always asking for permission? They wonder. Well, often people know just what the answer is to that question. They're better off checking in first because the executive probably isn't as open-minded as he or she thinks. I've seen that by the way in some of the consulting work that I've done, where the senior executive is saying, I want them to take initiative, I don't want them to be always asking for permission. Then when I talk separately to his team, they tell me, we can't do anything without getting approval because it just doesn't work out well, and so let's face up to what we're doing. Superboss leaders blow right through this dance. A protege of Jay Chiat, her name is Adelaide Horton, actually a former Chief Operating Officer at Chiat/Day, she remembers that at the agency, "Doers were rewarded and anything was possible. If you came to Jay Chiat with an idea of how things could be done better, he would say, 'Go ahead and do it.'" Amazing, right? Superbosses create work environments where creativity and innovation can thrive. Another one of Jay Chiat's proteges told me, "Working for Jay Chiat was the most unique work experience of our lives because there was this sense of creativity and personal freedom. Another example. You know Roger Corman? The legendary film producer who made all these B movies? It turns out he really is a superboss because so many people worked for him, and got their start. You can go look up the number of people. Like Jack Nicholson. Pretty much every director out there got their start working for Roger Corman. This legendary guy. He was known for lending his actors do their own thing when they were in front of the camera, one actor said, no thinking about Corman's logic, "I don't recall him ever telling me how a line should be red or telling actors I was working with what our motivation should be. That was us, he wanted us to do that without a boss breathing down their necks at every turn, employees in general feel as if they have implicit permission to take chances and express themselves in their work." Superbosses trusted them and that's precisely why Roger Corman and all these other superbosses hired people, they trusted those people. Compare that to many offices today, where employees send emails to colleagues at all hours in the day and night because they don't really feel confident to make a decision on their own and if you're one of those people that you're afraid to do anything about getting all these different approvals and double checking, triple checking, you know you now working for a superboss leader and you know frankly, there's another way. Another method that superboss leaders do to nurture openness and innovation is by encouraging their employees or associates to never, ever rest on their laurels, to be and stay a great musician, Miles Davis used to teach, "You've got to always be open to what's new, what's happening at the moment." You have to be able to absorb it if you're going to continue to grow and communicate your music and that turns out to be a pretty big theme that we saw with superboss leaders. Time and again, I found that superbosses were these consummate, let's call them cool hunters, always on the prowl for the next great product idea, the next great trend, the next great person to hire. Back to Saturday Night Live. One of the alums from SNL is Conan O'Brien, pretty famous guy in his own right, pretty successful. He said about SNL, "You always get the sense that the show is almost like a shark that's constantly on a mission to find what's new, what's hot, and what people are into now, and chomp its teeth into it." Lorne Michaels, he affirmed that same observation and an interview I did with him, he noted that constant change and a future oriented outlook were perpetual features of running the show. He said, "The show must change, I know it's supposed to be the show must go on, but the show must change," that is also important. The image of a shark always on the hunt, I think it's apt for almost every superboss I studied and work with. They all had this inexhaustible drive to improve, in part a reflection of competitive pressures for sure. Alice Waters told me she perceives and felt this constant need to change and she said, "Just a compulsion, an obsession, and I don't know where it comes from. It's just pushing me." One of Jay Chiat's proteges, David Murphy said, "Jay's middle name was innovation. He had a singular vision that it was totally acceptable to risk, playing it safe was just not acceptable." There's a story that I heard and talking to Jay Chiat and his people about how one of his teams was going for a big contract and they presented their advertising ideas and was really out there, was pretty avant-garde and they didn't get the deal. The client wanted something a little bit more conservative and Jay Chiat was fully alert to everything was going on and they didn't get the deal. But Jay Chiat had actually said, "You know what? We didn't get this but we made the right type of mistake," and he actually gave a bonus to that team that didn't get the deal, imagine that. A bonus to the team that didn't actually close the deal because they were so creative and the reason that they didn't get the deals because they were so creative and Jay Chiat and said, "If we're gonna fail, this is the reason we want to fail because we're further out there. I don't want to fail because we're timid, because we're afraid" and it's amazing. If superbosses fear anything, it isn't that they're going to go off the deep end with their innovations, but that they'll stop innovating and maybe get old and complacent. Sal Cesarani worked with Ralph Lauren in the early years for a couple of decades and I interviewed him he was so interesting and he said, "I will tell you that Ralph doesn't ever want to be the older guy. Cary Grant was great, but when Cary Grant got older, what parts do we put Cary Grant in? Do we put them in as a grandfather? It's not going to work, Ralph is not going to do film, but what Ralph could do next, no one knows, he will think of the next thing." Isn't that something? That's how superbosses think, they are creative, they are innovative themselves and they unleash the creativity that people around you and who doesn't want to work for somebody who wants to know what you think and once they give you some runway to make that happen? That's pretty exciting. That's part of that superboss playbook as well.
