Resilience

Aug 14, 2022

In this episode, NAA founder, Brenda McCabe, talks about the “soft" aspect of personal and professional success; Resilience. Like a three-legged stool, resilience is best found when all three legs are present:

1) knowing oneself and how one best performs and learns;

2) having options and making choices and

3) being thankful.

 

transcript:

01:17
Hello, this is Brenta. I'm with NextAct Advisors. I'm here to read one of my evergreen posts that actually you can find on my website www.nextactadvisors.com.

01:33
There are three cornerstone pieces, I like to call them evergreen pieces, around the type of work I do with founders um and founding teams and entrepreneurs around uh growing, creating uh a  viable, scalable, well-governed uh company. And resilience is one piece.  The second  piece is around poised for growth.

02:02
And the third piece  is around uh corporate purpose,  right? Fit for purpose. So at Next Act Advisors, my mission is really quite simple. I want to assist entrepreneurs  and entrepreneurs in building scalable, well-governed, and resilient businesses. I want to help entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs commercialize business ideas to make.

02:31
a better world. This blog is titled Resilience Managing One's  Self and Gosh Darn Managing Others.

02:42
There is nothing like hindsight and many years of experience to speak to a soft aspect of personal and professional success. I would coin it resilience and we'll talk about some definitions here of resilience. Like a three legged stool, resilience is best found when all three legs are present. The three legs I'm gonna talk about and break out in this.

03:11
in this  podcast is  knowing oneself and how you best perform and learn. The second leg is around having options and making choices. And the third  leg to that stool is being thankful. But let's first jump into, you know, what is resilience? Let's define  it. I did a little bit of research myself and resilience is a very complex concept.

03:41
that lends itself to many, many meanings.  And um there is a resilience research  center. um

03:55
They've done a research project based on 15 years of research. They did metadata  on research papers and the like.  And in this, they found that in light of the current adverse pandemic situation, so they wrote this just recently, resilience  is in the context.

04:22
of exposure to significant adversity. Resilience is both the capacity of individuals  to navigate their way to the psychological, social, cultural, and physical resources that sustain their well-being  and their capacity individually and collectively to negotiate for these resources to be provided in culturally meaningful ways.

04:52
A second definition that I found and I go back to this book time and time again, but written by bestselling author Jim Collins, it's good to great. In one of the chapters  called the Stockdale paradox,  you find an alternative and really chilling definition of resilience. When Jim, the author,  asked Admiral Stockdale,

05:22
who didn't make it out of the Vietnam Prisoner of War camp where he was after eight years in prison and having suffered tortures, he responded, the optimist, the optimist. All they were the ones who said, we're going to be out by Christmas, and Christmas will come, and Christmas would go. Then they'd say, by Easter. And they died of a broken heart.

05:52
The survivors were able to be realistic by confronting the brutal facts and working and improvising with whatever resources they had.

06:06
I myself have coined a formula explaining resilience for enterprises. It's the agility to generate options, the ability to make decisions, plus the creation of a sense of belonging among the community of followers that is inclusive of  all stakeholders,  your employees, your shareholders, and any communities that you touch.

06:36
And by the way, resilience for enterprises,  if done well, increases enterprise value. Back to  the three-legged stool.

06:49
I just gave you some definitions around resilience. The stool may lack one leg and still be functioning. I would argue though that with two missing legs, you will have a broken stool. So the first leg is around knowing  oneself. And this goes to you, CEOs, founders,  owners of  companies. um I follow,  I absolutely, uh

07:19
and  have been influenced by Peter Drucker,  a management guru, and one of his seminal pieces  has followed me,  I want to say over 25, 30 years of my life, and it's titled Managing One's Self. And in this seminal piece, he talks about the knowledge economy in which we're all working today.  Matter of fact, 82 % of GDP of the United States comes from intangibles.  It's all around knowledge, right?

07:50
And he wrote back 25 years ago, actually it was 1999 when he published this piece of work. He was probably 50. said, to survive in today's economy, you constantly have to retool yourself to succeed and be fulfilled. And he walks you through what that means.

08:20
blog on resilience, I've specifically identified uh how Peter Drucker describes  knowing oneself. You want to manage yourself, but let's know yourself first. And how you know yourself is how you perform and how  you learn as a leader. And he gave some incredible examples  in this seminal piece.

08:51
How you perform is really around how you get things done. And it's not a question of nature, genetics. It's really a question  of uh personality.  And he coins  two terms.  Are you a reader in how you perform? Or are you a listener in how you perform? And he cites Dwight Eisenhower.

09:21
who was first a commander, uh very successful commander of the Allied forces in Europe  during World War II. He was quite the darling of the press. His press conferences were famous for their style.

09:39
However, 10 years later, he became president of the United States. And some of the journalists that covered him when he was uh commander and chief of the Allied forces were often in contempt. He never, ever addressed the questions when at a press conference. He rambled indelibly about something else, and they constantly ridiculed him for butchering the King's English.

10:08
Apparently, based on Drucker's How Do I Perform, Eisenhower did not know that he was a reader.

10:19
not a listener. When he was the darling of the press, he had a full staff  of writers that would prepare questions and answers for when he was a friend of the press. This did not happen. He'd carried that same performance style over to the presidency  and did not have staff writers. And that's why he was held in contempt by journalists. A few years later, Lyndon Johnson

10:49
destroyed his presidency in large measure by not knowing that he was a listener. His predecessor, John Kennedy, was a reader who had assembled a brilliant group of writers as his assistants, making sure that they wrote to him before discussing their memos. And once he would read their memos, he was able to articulate the ideas to the American public.

11:19
I myself am a reader  and  I need to have things written and studied and assimilated as you'll find,  dear listener, as I read my blog post and publish and speak with guests. I do a lot of preparation writing  out how I want to describe the ideas I share.

11:48
not only talked about how do you perform.

11:53
but as well, how do you learn? So how do you acquire the knowledge you have to perform as a leader?

12:04
So  one  performs is to  how one learns. Winston Churchill, also going back to World War II, was a very, very poor student. um He  did not excel academically. Academic institutions back then and still today have a lot of rote uh teaching methods.

12:33
and he would get bored in class.  And the explanation that writers do not, as a rule, learn by listening and reading.  They learn,  like Winston Churchill, by writing. And schools did not allow them to learn this way. Beethoven, another example,  would leave behind an enormous

13:02
amount of sketchbooks, yet he said he never actually used them when he composed. When someone asks him why he sketches, goes, if I don't write it down immediately, I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook, I never forget it.

13:23
And so to manage oneself is to know oneself. And you need to know how you perform, how you get things done,  and how you learn. And by knowing these two kind of complex concepts, but I bet if you sit down after this podcast, you'll discover how you can better lead the organization.

13:52
onto the second leg of the stool. It's around options and making choices. know, having options is very powerful in life.  It's also very powerful in business.  And  you must not only have those options,  but you also need to decide and exercise those options by making choices. I have written another piece

14:21
of uh work um titled Against All Odds, Why Options Are Good, and it walks you through scenario planning that you would do with your C-suite team to look at your base case scenario, your best case scenario, and your worst case scenario. And you constantly have to go back to generating these options  and shuffling priorities within the organization.

14:50
What I also enjoy around working with founders and the second leg of the stool on generating options is actually quite fun. m It goes back to like table games and strategy and  battleships.  But more importantly, it's not only the generation of options, but it's the capacity to take those options and

15:20
and do something with them. So the decision factor. And William James  in a dialogue or speech he gave to uh an educational institution  talks to teachers on psychology and to students on some of life's ideals quoted, um action  and feeling go together by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will.

15:50
we can indirectly regulate the feeling. So if I were to summarize  this quote by William James,  action and feeling, so action is the decision and feeling are the different options. You know, I feel like we can do this  and let's put a probability against it. But by doing, so by moving through and making those decisions,  you can get things done.

16:19
and you actually control.

16:24
kind of the helm of the company.  And  by doing this on a regular basis, looking at how you've exercised these options with what payback, with what KPIs,  you can then modulate  and maybe pull back and prioritize a second option that you had. A third uh leg of the stool and the last, but not the least important,

16:54
is  the act of being thankful.

16:59
Being a founder of a company  is  very challenging.  It's exciting, but at the same time, it's a very long and tenuous road  to that coveted exit, either via IPO, management buyout, or a simple sale. And through that journey, the act of being thankful, showing gratitude towards

17:29
others that accompany you on the journey, not only the employees of the company, your shareholders, your family members, the  persons that have influenced you either in your academic world or other companies. By showing gratitude towards these people, the payback you get is quite large  psychologically, but also

17:58
by recognizing through just giving simple thank you for  doing this or thank you for doing that, people  are very responsive and do not expect  these little symbols of gratitude and they tend to outperform. And um before I sign off, uh actually when  I bring on new clients,  I do assess

18:27
not only will they read Peter Drucker's piece of  Managing One's Self,  but I also like to assess a founder's openness to work with me from my white glove advisory company, Next Act Advisors, by asking if she or he is willing to write a thank you letter to a person that has been influential in their personal or professional journey and allow me to see it.

18:56
By asking this, um quite frankly, a lot of people have these thinking notes and they never thought that the value they'd have in building  strength you will need as an entrepreneur. But also it shows a humility that this  is  not uh a project of one's sole proprietor, but it does take a village and to build a resilience.

19:25
enterprise scalable, well governed business, you do need to be thankful every day. So signing off, thank you for tuning in to the founder sandbox. Have a great day. Thank you.