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When you write online, no one checks to see if you have a journalism degree before they start to read. If you experience an earthquake and want to report on its danger or safety, no one asks your credentials before you report to Ushahidi. And if you were interested a creating a new company, you can simply initiate the idea and get funding through Kickstarter or Indie GoGo.

The gateways of power have changed.

Or have they?

When I look around, I see a culture that honors being prepared, doing the right things to get ahead, and achieving more and more, starting with our education — we need to go to the right high school to get into the right college, to get the right job after college. Our culture also honors fancy titles and brand affiliations, as visibly celebrated by the first question most Westerners ask on meeting someone new: “And who are you?” It’s as if knowing one’s title and affiliation will let you know if a person’s ideas are even worth considering. And of course, premiere venture capitalists talk with pride about “pattern recognizing” for success, signaling that they typically fund a 23-year old from Stanford over say, women, people of color, or those with a more diverse life experience. All this, even though research shows creativity and innovation peak later in life.

So, which is it?

I’d like to explore this topic with you by sharing two arguments about what defines power today.

Argument 1: You Are Powerful Beyond Measure

Academic degrees, once a status differentiator, are no longer required to create good ideas. After all, Peter Thiel pays kids to leave school. Title and status are no longer essential. Opportunities that were once vetted opportunities — limited to a select few — are now available to many.

Case in point: Crowdsourcing solutions often allow us to include voices and talent we’ve never heard before. One such “game,” Fold It, allows any individual to work with sequencing amino acids to figure out how that protein is going to fold. This particular work is very important to research and medicine, and is usually conducted by scientists with PhDs. But when Fold It studied who was the best protein folder in the world, it wasn’t someone they “expected” to see. Instead, it was someone who is an executive assistant by day — a woman — and is the world’s best scientific protein folder at night. This individual, driven by her own skills and passions, is not being assigned the work, nor being vetted to do the work, but is simply doing the work.

The Social Era unlocks new doors of both who can contribute and what can be created, and thus changes the very source of power itself. Crowdsourcing, SaaS models, open source, social networks, virtual workforces and other new meshy processes, tools, and business models have enabled new ways to create value. And, just as the Social Era shifts how an organization can create, deliver and capture value across its business model, it shifts — of course — the source of power for each of us, too.

The ingredient level of the social era starts with and is built off a single unit, that of a social human. Where the industrial era rewarded accreditations and employee numbers, the Social Era will reward those with the ability to connect, create, and contribute. As it stands, work has been freed from jobs, and each of us can find many ways to have impact without someone else telling us “we are allowed.”

Argument 2: Power is a Limited Commodity

We still live in a world where being part of a powerful, exclusive group gives you power, whether that group is educational (the Ivy League, Skull and Bones, Harvard Law), professional (McKinsey, Google, Exxon Mobil), or demographic (white, male, straight). Who would argue that such affiliations no longer confer some degree of power?

I was recently talking to someone (a white male) who I considered a friend and fellow management thinker. I went to him for help crisping an idea; he gave me this advice:

“As a brown woman, your likelihood of being heard above the noise is next to nothing. For you to do so, you need to be way more edgy. But if you are too edgy, you’re not safe. As a brown woman, you need to be safe for people to hear your ideas. And so don’t be too edgy.”

I asked him if there was any specific way that any human being could actually do what he suggested. He stared at the floor, and then shook his head.

Now here’s the embarrassing part. After a couple of days of retelling this story and receiving only blank stares or uncomfortable silence in return — with no one saying anything close to “this advice is stupid” — within a day or so I started to believe… that it was true. I started to believe my skin color wasn’t right to be seen as a management thinker. I started to believe that my ideas were not right because my history wasn’t right. I started to believe that what mattered was not the power of these ideas, but whether I fit the mold of a “powerful” person enough for these ideas to be seen.

Reconciling the Two Points of View

So, let me ask you: Is power that thing assigned by others? Is it about getting top grades in the right school, and having the right titles and rank at work? Is it about being born to the right parents, into the right gender, in the right country? Are you more powerful if you are on the top org chart, or less powerful if you’re at the bottom of the ladder? Do these external assignments define any of us as more or less powerful?

Or is power something that each of us manifests by knowing our purpose, applying it to what we create, and using that to define how we see ourselves in the world?

Power has been defined in terms of the ways in which you can have control over others — by paying them to do things, to direct activities, by allocating resources. In this view, some people have power and some don’t. It’s a win-lose construct.

But, the Social Era shows us that power can also come from how we create with others. In this way, power can be about what we can each affect. It comes down to contributing based on what we can each uniquely bring, something I’ve called owning our “onlyness.” When each of us recognizes our own agency, we have power enough to each create and contribute what we can.

What I see is a shift in the nature of power and influence. And I wonder if we might want to call out two specifics:

1. Power is open. Power used to be the thing that got things done, and influence used to be the thing you used to try and get things done. But today, the power of connections, community, and shared ideas offer a different lever in what can be accomplished. It is open-source software and encyclopedias written by crowds and revolutions seeded on Internet portals. It is Kickstarter, Meetup and Ushahidi and any number of other platforms that allow disparate, diffuse strangers to marshal the kind of influence that once only centralized institutions could. This power is different than the traditional classification of hard and soft power. It is networked, engaged power.
2. When power is assigned from the outside world (based on others’ opinions or on status), then it is power that can also be taken away by that world. But by granting ourselves agency — a power that comes from understanding our individual ability to contribute to the world — we give ourselves a power that cannot be taken back.

It does not define you. No. You define it.

There is a cost to defining power in the traditional, limited way. If we keep defining power in the same way, we end up staying in place. Look around. There are plenty of signs that suggest that what we’ve used so far isn’t working. The act of reimagining our own notion of power might very well be central to what happens next, in our own lives, in our organizations, and in the economies in which we live.

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This post was originally posted at Harvard Business Review here, and in long form: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/just_how_powerful_are_you.html. As is my normal practice, I ask that you add comments directly there.

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There were too many fruitless visits from child protective services. There were too many police cars that arrived to “quiet things down” only to let them flare up again the next day. There were too many visits to the hospital ….The police men, the agency representatives, and even the hospital workers seemed unable to do anything about what they clearly knew was a problem. There were still too many holes in the wall from when the rolling pin aimed at me, missed.

Since those adults were unable to help me, it’s no wonder that I started to imagine a hero in my father, whom I did not remember and hadn’t seen since I was a toddler. I created a fantasy life where he rode to my rescue. Finally, when I was 12 years old, I met him again. And, of course, while the specific story is complicated, you won’t be surprised to find out that the person who had abandoned me when I was a baby wasn’t the person who was going to save me years later.

The day I met him, I realized something that would shape the rest of my life: there was no Hero (or Heroine) who was going to save me. I needed to save myself.

So, it’s with that life context that I am watching the beatification of Steve Jobs. Google the term, “Steve Jobs tribute” and you get back 5 million plus results. And I’m fairly sure that’s an undercount. There’s a good reason for this; the Hero Narrative has deep roots in our culture. We find it in history books and religions, in our sports teams and, yes, even in our corporate cultures. We obsess. We deify, as if there is a single defining idea of how innovation works, what makes a leader great, or how success happens.

This is not new. It is the idea of The One and it shows up in many ways: Who will be the next leader of the free world?  What nation will be the next superpower? Which visionary company is the single conqueror of industry? (It’s Amazon, it’s Google, it’s Facebook, it’s Apple!). And we have it in management disciplines with debates like: isn’t it better to have one smart person than lots of ordinary people working for our organizations?

But I wonder if this framework is wrong.

Let’s take another look at Steve Jobs’s own example. He didn’t study other people; he followed his own passions. He didn’t seek meaning by trying to emulate someone else’s life, or even emulating the winning business practices of his day – as I’ve written before, he created a clarity of purpose for himself.  The same principle can apply to all of us.

Certainly, we need inspiration to show us examples of clear purpose. But I wonder what happens in a world where we each figure out why we do what we do and we can live and work from that place. We might refocus on our own work and the community with which we get that work done. We might learn to define success in our own terms. We might even come up with our own mantra around this:

1: I shall not obsess over others’ success: not copying, idolizing, or mindlessly emulating.

2: I shall know my purpose and know why I’m doing something.

3: I shall ally myself to a tribe with a common purpose, though the tribe’s members may work in vastly different fields and forms.

4:  I will make ideas stronger by uniting with others to do great work, not by holding my ideas all to myself but releasing them into the wild.

5: I recognize the truth in the credo that the future is not created, the future is co-created and will do my part as a part of the whole.

In doing so, we might go from a culture of find-a-fits-the-mold superhero to a system of heroes- and heroines-next-door. We might create, rather than copy. We might initiate, rather than wait for permission. We might see ourselves as powerful enough. We might not believe that solving the many problems around us is someone else’s responsibility. We might each be willing to disrupt ourselves as Whitney Johnson suggests we do. We might reimagine our careers, with clarity of purpose, and this might show up in our work with others. We might just transform the organizing principles of the places we work. We might even end up reinventing our economy. We might recognize just how connected we are.

For my own situation when I was a kid, once I realized there was no hero coming to save me, I found ways to manage the situation. I said “enough” to what was going on. I also started to claim the things that mattered, like an education.  As a result, I was ousted from my family — but I also started developing the sense of purpose that has led me to the work I do today and the people I do it with.

The cultural change when people know their own purpose and their own power in creating change is what could change everything: for ourselves, for our organizations, and our economy. So, go ahead and buy that Walter Isaacson book. But, let’s not obsess over being the next Steve Jobs or starting the next Facebook or [whatever]. Let us, instead, be inspired to find our own purpose in the world, and a tribe of people to do it with.

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As is true for all my HBR posts, please make comments at that original posting. Many thanks for helping me have one conversation.

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In the decades from 1870-1920, society witnessed more technological revolutions than the world had seen in the previous four centuries. We got photography, cinematography, the telephone, the car, the airplane, and I’m sure a bunch of things I’m neglecting to mention.  The problem for everyone doing their existing thing was that their tried-and-true well honed craft was now obsolete. They saw it coming to a point but then … kabam, the revolution was there. Artists then needed to find a new way of seeing – to reinvent their work to be relevant in the new era. Cezanne did this by abandoning what was realistic drawing to create what is now abstract art. In his footsteps, came Picasso and others who took this new medium of modern art to another level.

(By Cezanne, artist, born in Aix-en-Provence. Learned this contextual story while there in the summer 2010. Also hiked this mountain in the picture, called Mont St. Victoire, which is unsurprisingly the name of this piece.)

It may not be obvious yet, but I’m going to call it: we’re having a similar revolution and it will affect all of our organizations.  There is enough inklings of this change that it’s not that much of a call, really. Yet, if you look around, you’ll notice….all existing players are still holding onto what they already know. With a vengeance. Like the artists of the earlier era, they are hoping they can just tune around the edges, hoping to not really have to change. The revolution I speak of is fueled by social era. And it disrupts every big organization we see.

Every organization desires to be the “800 Lb Gorilla” in their space – that dominant position an entity owns when they have the size and strength to crush anyone in their path. But many 800-lb gorillas look more like dinosaurs. From technology companies, to the entire banking industries, educational institutions, to automotive firms, across health care and certainly even including the publishing industry … organizations that once dominated now struggle to meet ever changing, faster market requirements, while they face an ongoing online conversation about their relevance.

This is somewhat predictable. Clay Christensen’s thesis was that new technology emerges that excels in different dimensions of performance, gains a foothold and fundamentally changes the cost structure. While his original body of research proved the point, the web and the social dynamics have brought it to life.

It is not new news to say the cost to create information is effectively zero, and that ubiquitous platforms provide zero information distribution costs. Tapscott and O’Reilly have eloquently spoken and written about it, for years. With this free (or nearly free) ability to create value, profit and power can be created by models previously unthinkable.

But let’s play this out for existing organizations. In this context, what happens to the proverbial 800-lb Gorilla? Is their goal in this new context to do more, faster? Or is it to do things, entirely differently?

You likely already know the answer. But apparently most firms don’t.  No, they are focusing on companies to buy, or to put their previously packaged software-apps online, or focusing on operations to make themselves more efficient through cost cutting or doing price increases. Each of those decisions might absolutely be right if viewed close-up and narrow to the company. But these actions appear more like moving the seats around on the Titantic if viewed in larger context. What these firms might have in size and scale, they lack in nimble responses, and velocity of innovation. What they have in efficiency and cost management, they lack in soul. What they have in many people defined as boxes in an org chart is just too many people waiting to be told what to do.

The Occupy Wall Street thing is not a meaningless act of randomness; it is yet another sign of the revolution afoot. Just because work in the past century has been a construct largely without soul, maximizing efficiency, and treating people hierarchically, doesn’t mean it will continue to be that way. We have something possible today that we’ve never had before, because of the social era. We now have the possibility to create value collaboratively because of shared meaning and purpose. It should be said that it will be done with people, not at people. This can change not only how we communicate but also how we work at the most broad levels — how we organize every single part of our organizations – from what we make, to how we product and distribute, to what we market and sell. Everything.

Do we know exactly what the new organization looks like? Do we know what we exactly needs to be changed? I believe you and I see the early signals, signs, and have indicators of where to go. We see it when we look at what Firefox Mozilla has been able to do with an army of volunteers in the open community. We see it when we look at TED and the global community of TEDx who accomplish more because of passion than budget would ever allow. We see it with Kickstarter, where a community invests in an idea, and that shifts capital from purely economic return to a deeper social measure. We see each one of these stories (and more), and see them as early signals. But the 800-lb Gorilla sees this and thinks it is an anomaly.

Each of  these examples show us that social will enable a different kind of organization, a different kind of world of work. By “loving” Firefox, the web community is saying that they believe an open web browser is valuable to the world. By loving TEDx, a volunteer army of people are saying they believe in smart ideas that get people to think more about their world is an idea worth putting energy into. More than what a company produces, this shared purpose creates leverage because it allows everyone to work towards a shared goal. When people know the purpose of an organization, they don’t need to check in or get permission to take the next step, they can just do it. When people know the purpose, they are not waiting to be told what to do. As I talked about in my first book, New How, through shared purpose, alignment happens without coordination costs. Shared purpose makes customers, and team-members more than transactions and payroll recipients. This enables the inherently collaborative nature of work – people can own the co-creation of ideas within the enterprise, or blur boundaries between customer and company by being co-producers of product lines. This new era is defined by this truth: the future is not created, the future is co-created. Play this concept out in the marketplace, and it is the disruption of our century. Shared purpose will do to business what photography did to art in the early 20th century — it will create a different paradigm entirely.

Chezanne invented what we now call the impressionist method only after perfection came in through the photography method, and displaced what was perfectly viable until nearly moments before.  It seems to me we might very well see that Kabam moment for organizations, and soon. I can imagine that the parallel will hold – that we will see something the same until we see it differently and anew.  Only later will we be able to explain that this was because of the impact of the social era, and specifically shared purpose, on our enterprises.

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While there are many things worth celebrating of Steve Jobs’ life, the greatest gift Steve gave us is a way to design our own lives.

Steve Jobs was known for being a design god who sweated experience, and pixels and, well, everything. “Design,” he once said, “is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it’s how it really works. You have to grok what it is all about.”

In our society, thinking for ourselves is not highly valued. Our education model was designed with the 19th century more than the 21st century in mind. It reinforces fitting in and suppresses much of the natural creativity we start with. That’s how we go from drawing and acting and make-believe to PowerPoint. If we allow creativity at all, it is limited to arts and sports. “Real work” has us looking like a Dilbert character. Between the pressures of our teachers, parents, and ultimately co-workers, we often give up any search for personal meaning as we aim to belong to a tribe. After a while, we may not even believe we have something unique to offer. Rather than figure out what we are each about, far too many of us live within the boxes others define.

But when we define ourselves by what others want, we are trying to kiss a moving butt. To live in a box defined by someone else is to deny our uniqueness. Each of us is standing in a spot no one else occupies. That unique perspective is born of our accumulated experience, perspective and skills, and our vision. When we deny these things, we deny that which only we can bring to the situation, our onlyness. And that is surely not the way the world is made better.

I’m reminded of the ad copy Steve initiated when he returned to Apple:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. (Apple Inc.)

The problem with being a rebel, a misfit, a troublemaker is that the masses will not be cheering you on. Rosa Parks might be a heroine today, but at the time, she lost her job. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr both had huge dissension within their own communities. It took Jobs years to come up with a turnaround strategy that showed what Apple could do. People forget the years between 1996-2001 where much of the market called him more insane, than insanely great.

But he knew that his journey was to apply what only he could — from his meticulous design methodology, to reimagining computing, to building a different type of company. He realized — and showed us — that our real job is not to conform to what others think. Instead, we need to recognize that our life’s goal is to find our own unique way in the world, to find the way that we move from being kiss-ass to being kick-ass.

That is the fundamental gift of Steve Jobs. His insane greatness was to find his own journey and to live his life this way. He didn’t worry about being weird; he only wanted to be himself.

I have been in love with Apple products since my first Apple II, which I practically bought with quarters and nickels earned in small increments. I grew up picking apricots on the property where Apple buildings now stand. I worked at Apple during the “dark days,” as alumni refer to the years between Steve Jobs’ departure and then his much-needed return. He was competitive, sure, but mostly against himself. And that, too, is a lesson for us. It has been an honor to use his products, and it was an honor to work at his company. But the greatest honor has been to emulate what he showed us by his life. That each of us must find our own path. The unmarked path.

So I ask you to join me in honoring Steve’s greatness not by trying to be Steve, but by trying to be your greatest self.

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During this transition, I went to a party to celebrate Nancy Duarte’s latest book, Resonate. I was standing in a group when I was introduced to “Todd, from Apple“. And around the circle, we continued: Glen Lubbert, CEO of Mojo Interactive. Harry Max, advisor at Google. When it came to my turn, because I lacked a title or a “place” on which to anchor, I answered “I am not doing anything right now” to the question of “who I am?”.

(image source: Computer History Museum website)

The lack of title was disarming. I felt small and awkward. Sure I had many accomplishments thus far, and I knew at some level the value that I bring to people and teams would find a new way to manifest. Yet, at that VERY moment, I had no easy handle to capture that. Without the title, I felt at a loss. It was as if I didn’t belong. I actually had the sense right then that I shouldn’t have come to Nancy’s party. And then, both Harry and Glen chimed in to augment the impression I was creating — to add some things I care about, and the kind of work I’ve done to clarify I was “more than” the absence of title at that moment. Even as I write this again, nearly a year later, I am over whelmed by their generosity to step into that void with me. (Could this be a role model for the next time an under-employed or unemployed person is part of your circle?) Since then, this experience has happened over and over again. “What do you do” is persistent. It seems to be the way some people size up to decide whether someone gets attention, or not. It seems to be a way of asking “are you better, or equal, or below me”, which embodies both hierarchical thinking and creates separation between people. When I went to TED2011, I put “board member” of my university (something I spend what, 30 hours of the year doing?) to put something, but that surely didn’t define the whole me. And yes, I did notice the dismissal by some people. And I wondered then what TED could be if the titles were removed.

Because having a title or not does not define someone. The truth is more this: none of us are easily definable. I am not my title. I am not what I do on any given day. And I am not who I am affiliated with. I am none of those things; there are roles I play but they are not me. The lack of my title or easy handle on which to explain myself does not reflect my truth, nor does any outsiders’ validation of it. No amount of titles would make it clear my unique gifts in the world, or yours.  (Yet, actually paying attention to what matters to people might actually let us connect with each other.) Titles are simply false standards by which we come to define who we are. But, because they are so pervasive, we believe in them as a truth.

To accept the simple truth of “I AM” changes things. The stance of “I am”, independent of anything, provides a certain freedom. Paul Buchheit describes this by using the phrase “I am Nothing”:

I am nothing. It’s simple. If I were smart, I might be afraid of looking stupid. If I were successful, I might be afraid of failure. If I were a man, I might be afraid of being weak. If I were a Christian, I might be afraid of losing faith. If I were an atheist, I might be afraid of believing. If I were rational, I might be afraid of my emotions. If I were introverted, I might be afraid of meeting new people. If I were respectable, I might be afraid of looking foolish. If I were an expert, I might be afraid of being wrong. But I am nothing, and so I am finally free to be myself.

I would add: If I had a title and I lose it, I have lost myself. If I define myself without title, then I am able to create regardless of any specific role I have at the time.

Our titles are illusions and not reflective of one’s truth. This works both ways. I am not a grand pooh-bah if I have a fancy set of titles. And I am not a lowly piece of shit if I have a junior role within the organizational structure. And we don’t need to have our mobile voicemail message say I am so-and-so-of-such-and-such.

We are each more than our titles; we are each own unique selves. Letting go of these false exterior identities can be difficult and takes time, possibly our entire lifetime. But it starts with us realizing the falsity first, and then moving in the right direction of action. The point is not the title, the point is to do good value-creating, life-affirming, purpose-filled work. You are not nothing, you are endless possibility. How we manifest that endless possibility is our life’s work.

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During these long nights, I would try and re-imagine each crucial conversation, or drawn-out fight, or a pivotal decision that we made, to find some alternative path that would have “fixed it”.  When I was unable to design the imaginary fix, I would move on to rationalizing, over explaining, or trying to find an excuse for what happened.  As in, “since I’m a product of a broken family, it’s no surprise I got a divorce”, or “we overstretched our finances, so of course our relationship was strained” or “sending someone to Law School might not have been a good idea” to externalize what was going on, and make it about this or that, as if somehow I hadn’t made those decisions.

And then somebody very wise said this:

It doesn’t matter what you should have done, then.
It only matters that you know to do better, now.

And there it is. We all do our best. Until we know better. And focusing on what we should have done, doesn’t actually help to fix the past.

If you’ve read my work for any length of time, you know I explore failure and learning, and what stops humans from being open to new things, and perseverance, and all that stuff. I am so into that stuff intellectually. And,  I don’t really want to tell you this. But you need to know. Emotionally, I don’t want to grow. Well, more specifically, I don’t want to experience the growth. If it could just happen with a snap of a finger, I’d sign up. But to grow, I have to first live in a very uncomfortable place. To learn, I have to first accept not knowing, and then start that very grubby and messy process of figuring out new skills, trying new approaches, somehow learning what works, and integrating them so they are natural.

Aside from the intellectual desire of growth, what I think most of us want emotionally is certainty and clarity. As in: I Want To Know, Darn It (foot stamped!). We want to know that if we try the new thing, it’ll actually succeed. After all, we know the past. We know what it looks like, feels like, and even what is wrong about it. The future is all about the unknown. We don’t know that if we try to learn something, we’ll actually learn it. There are no guarantees. In fact, it might turn out that we just fail in a whole new way. And, who wants that? And, it might hurt. Or suck, or be visible to others that we’re failing.

These last few weeks I’ve been working with people who know they need to try some new approaches and methods to grow their businesses, but most of what they know they need to starting doing is unknown stuff to them. And there’s a certain line of thinking that goes about “what if it doesn’t work; better to stick to what we already know, which works okay enough”. It’s a certain kind of gravitational force to stay in the “known” space.

In business or in life, even if we know we need to try a different approach, it is much easier to keep doing the thing we know to do. And we can find all sorts of excuses masked as reasons to rationalize this choice. For example, you might hear a team say, “that method isn’t proven yet…better to wait”. But let’s recognize that it’s just an excuse that we use to hides our fear of change. All of this stuff – fear of the unknown choices, a desire to de-risk situations, and lots of things already on our plate that we would need to move aside – are just our excuses to not have to face that discomfort.

The truth is ugly: discovering a new and better way is risky. It means we need to put down whatever is our equivalent of comforting BBQ potato chips. We need to suck it up and start the hard work of learning new skills, and trying new things, and experimenting to discover what will work better – none of which is guaranteed to succeed. Nope, not even. But, deferring it doesn’t help. To be the people (and the businesses) we are meant to be, we must gather the courage to make the choice that we know we need to make, now.

Related articles

• Looking for the right excuse (sethgodin.typepad.com)

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It would be so easy to quit.

But a part of you knows that many a failure turns into the big success story. In start-up land, Air B&B notably went for 4 years with scraping the barrel kind of funding and just recently received $112 million. Most people don’t remember how dire the Apple situation was in 1997 when Steve Jobs returned. A share of Apple back then would buy you a cup of coffee; now it’ll get you a nice bottle of Opus One from, say, 1987.

Business is full of stories of perseverance and pursuit – of the almost-failed hero who didn’t quit when times were dark. Those stories admonish quitters, and honor the survivors. I should know. I am both.

My dark night literally came in a late evening 1987, when I was attacked by a serial rapist (I was #24 in a long string of crimes, I came to learn later) as I walked home alone to my rented room after a college study session at Denny’s restaurant. After the attack, I spent hours with the police capturing details, viewing a police lineup, and visiting the ER to do the rape kit and get sutures for a knife wound.

There were moments in the middle of that night when I thought about quitting. By this time in my life, I had already experienced enough child protective services, enough violence, enough sadness, and enough battles to last many lifetimes. Until that point, I had believed that these struggles were escapable. But the terrorizing thoughts that ran through my mind that night were that I was somehow doomed to this kind of existence. That I must have deserved this. That it was a punishment from God for being disrespectful to my family in even trying to escape. The terror was that I must have done something to bring this on.

If there is such a thing as hell, I am convinced it feels just like that night when a fire of ugly thoughts burns you up from the inside. I admit that I wanted to give up on my life, to end it then because I didn’t want to face the shame. I didn’t think my friends would want to know me. I didn’t think I had the strength to face the pain that would surely follow as the incident took its course through the justice system, interminable counseling sessions, and vivid night terrors. But I did fight. I fought for my dignity. I fought for strength, and I fought for the love-filled life that I experience today.  If I had given up, I would not be here to experience any of today’s joys, probably the most precious of which is my relationship with my husband and son.

I could have shared a professional business story because I have those too, but it is the visceral nature of our darkest moments I want us to connect to. The desire to quit never comes on a sailboat, feeling the wind on your face, during long hikes in the mountains, or after joyous mountain bike summits. It’s not those puppies and sunshine moments that test us. It is when we feel lost, overwhelmed, and exhausted that we feel the desire to quit. Wanting to quit comes when you are tired of the fight and sick of being beaten down in the darkest times of suffering and loss.  It’s when we can’t raise funds and we will be forced to shut our doors. It is when we find out we were betrayed by a fellow founder. It’s when a product that needs to work isn’t living up to its promise and the marketplace is beating the crap out of the company. It’s when we don’t know if we’ll have another client and we don’t know how we’ll feed our families. These relentless fears crowd in on us, taking up space.  We need something to break our way our way, but instead just the opposite happens – we feel more trapped than ever. That’s when the desire to quit floods in.

While I am a survivor, I am also a quitter. In 2010, I shut down my strategy consulting company. I just wasn’t able to find a way for it work without a level of persistent attention and energy that had become unsustainable. What had once been inspiring and challenging had become a grind; it was sapping me of my energy. After 11 years of building it, I did what seemed to others a sudden about-face and quit. Colleagues, clients, friends almost universally thought I had lost my mind. I was told I had failed, and I heard that people said to one another that I lacked courage.  Hmmph. I mean really. Hmmph.

Life is full of twists and turns. But it also has straight stretches of open road. As each one of us has to learn for ourselves, failure can lead us to a new place. Many times that means sticking it out, pushing through, and yet, sometimes that means putting the thing down. Perseverance is needed in life to be successful, and it is wisdom that lets us know when enough is enough. Sometimes, to get where you’re going, you first have to leave where you’ve been.

If I hadn’t put down Rubicon, I know I would still be doing that one thing. All. The. Time. And many people I respected pointed me back to the consulting life because I had proven to be successful at it. As if what I’d done up to this point defined all of what is possible in the future. But a part of me imagined there could be a different way to contribute my domain expertise, and passion for igniting cultures of innovation. And this is key; I imagined it before it was true. I had no proof that I would find a new outlet to use my abilities. That is until this week, when I joined the Board of Directors of EPAX, a NASDAQ-traded education company.

And so sometimes quitting lets us create space to create the next thing. My career wasn’t going to be over just because I didn’t stick to the firm I had started, and built and led for 11 years.

While your story of wanting to quit will certainly differ from mine, I want to share this: just because you stop doing something doesn’t mean you are quitting. Sometimes it’s bravery to know it’s time to stop and walk away. Experiencing failure isn’t the same thing as failing. Letting go doesn’t mean you’re giving up. And stopping isn’t quitting; it is just a pause that lets you sort out where you’ll turn next. In our black-and-white, win-or-lose society, we admonish quitters and we celebrate survivors. But life is more nuanced than that.

When might it be your time to “quit”? I can’t answer that for you, but I can give you this as a guideline: You can quit things like businesses or projects if you know they are merely one means to your passion. You know if you’ve done your very best to make it work. But what you can’t quit is fighting for your purpose, and living, and finding new, more effective ways to bring forth your passions in the world. We can quit things, but what we can’t quit is fighting for our dreams.

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As is true for all my writing that I do first for and with my fabulous editors at Harvard Business Review, I ask you to please not add comments here but to continue the conversation over at the original posting site: Don’t Give Up at HBR. (thanks).

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Innovation! Isn’t it Great?!

We just love talking about innovation and thinking about innovation, and tweeting about innovation. But we actually suck at it, for entirely human reasons. There are 3 things we need to understand about our own humanness in order for us to unleash our own potential (and the potential of our organizations):

- How we deny power to ideas,

- What bias looks like in every day life, and

- How we hold ideas to allow them to be big (or not).

The future is owned by those who know how to innovate. And when it comes to work, the key how is whether we allow ideas to be brought to force, and embraced, and built into something bigger than what any one person can create …

These are the things that will let you be innovative, and your organization to compete.

The post TEDx: How We Deny Innovation appeared first on Nilofer Merchant.

We manage numbers because it’s easier. We say we value people but we focus on the things we can track, we can inventory, we can show, and we can log in and out of. We focus on stuff that matters, surely, but we are doing the thing of managing the measurable, rather than the meaningful.

In a recent post, called “People are Not Cogs,” I argued that we still think performance or people, when we ought to think performance through people. Management experts, marketplace results, and thorough research all proves that people are central to what we produce today and how well we can produce results.

But we continue to talk about people like cogs and numbers and inputs and outputs. The cost of that is that we’re missing how to harness the power of people in our businesses. We need to recognize the need for both performance-based decision-making and people-based decision making. The former creates efficiencies and propels markets; the latter drives creativity and innovation. Both are important to the health of an organization, and to growth, and to viability. Yet given the current focus on performance-based data, how might we bridge the gap?

Maybe, as a start, we ought to describe peopley stuff in more economic language, by putting it in some context that will help our CFO and engineering friends better understand how things relate to one another.

Here is a proposal for a bridge-the-gap model:

S(uccess) = P(urpose)T(alent)^C(ulture)

Or: S = (PT)^C

Let’s talk about each one in turn.

Purpose. Purpose is when people come together because they believe in what they are there to do. A friend was interviewing for a firm where at first they said, “This guy’s asking too many questions.” He challenged their thinking, asking as many questions during the interview as they were asking him. Knowing that he was going to apply his creative energies, he inquired about purpose and mission and vision. And the reason that the team struggled with this is that they were looking to fit him into a box.

But when you look around, notice that failure today rarely happens because Employee X failed at their part, their box. Failure today happens between the boxes. It’s when engineering doesn’t deliver what marketing said the consumers want. When we have shared purpose, when we know why we joined the company and what that company hopes to do, people own the commons and we don’t let things fall between the gaps. Organizations need to be able to index how well we are communicating, and thereby understanding purpose.

Talent. Then there’s talent. Jim Collins told us many years ago to focus on getting the right people on the bus. He didn’t say shove them in the back seat and ask them to sit down and shut up and let us drive. But, at too many organizations, we live in a hierarchical bus where one group largely tells the other groups what to do.

We need to think about what we do with people after we get them on the bus. Google acts like a modern company in that way. They don’t just define box-like roles then try fill them; they hire talent as they find it. It’s the 21st century way of thinking about talent. Secondly, they enable their people to know the big picture. In most companies, only 5% of people know the strategy. That’s absurd. We ought to have 100% of our people to know the direction we’re going. Why? Because then each of us, not some manager for an hour, can work on aligning what we are working on to the big picture. This makes each of us more responsible, it’s necessary. Does it require each of us to step up? Yes, of course it does. It’s the reason Google attracts talent, as do so many companies that say: we don’t want to be told to sit down and shut up, but we do want to join organizations where we can add our strengths to co-create the future. Organizations ought to ask their people how their work ties to the big picture.

Culture. Culture’s all that invisible stuff that glues organizations together. If you follow me here at Harvard’s blog, you likely already know that I believe culture will trump strategy every time. Culture mostly comes down to two things, which are flip sides of the same coin:

Do We Trust Each Other? A team I was recently working with reminded me of 6-year-olds playing soccer, where every team member simply surrounds the issue much like a team of kids surrounds the ball. I worry that as this team grows, and they’re not all in the same room, they will fail. By always huddling, they’re signaling that they don’t know how to trust one each another to do their unique parts. They — like many teams — simply don’t know how to “let go” to and with others, thus risking their ability to scale results.

Who Cares About the Baby? A team recently described an issue where they do their best right up to a hand-off milestone, then relinquish any part of the project’s ultimate success. They described their discomfort with a baby analogy: “Will you take care of my [baby] the same way I would, knowing our shared goal is to [get this kid to a good college]?” When the “baby,” or in this case, business performance, isn’t co-owned by everyone, things can easily fall through the cracks. And truth be told, that’s where most business problems happen in our high velocity world — between the cracks of divisions or silos or the “white space” no one owns.

A healthy culture allows us to produce something with each other, not in spite of each other. Measuring that has multiple elements to be sure. The bottom line is that this is how a group of people generates something much bigger than the sum of the individuals’ outputs.

Let’s take another look at our equation. Success is a function of Purpose, Talent, with a Culture accelerant. Or: S = (PT)^C

Why arrange these terms like this? Why not add them all together? Because these characteristics have multiplicative and exponential effects on each other. If you have zero purpose or zero talent, you’ll get zero product. But if you’ve got a modicum of each, you’ll get something, even if culture is zero. As you improve culture, the chances of success increase dramatically — and there’s no limit to how high they can go. That’s why I put such a focus on building cultures that fuel innovation. Culture is the exponential element that has eluded us for so long. It’s the key velocity factor for how companies outpace everyone else.

No, people are not cogs. Our job is not about measuring inputs and outputs, our job is to reinvent work to bring in purpose and talent and culture and create the kind of value that can happen when we allow it to happen.

We know enough to know people matter. But we’ve got to find a way to define how well we are doing against objective measures of purpose, talent alignment, and culture. Building a bridge means developing a common language so each of us understands that everyone else is acting out of shared interest. The equation is a first step, but certainly not the last. There’s more work to be done to create standards to let companies measure their purpose, talent alignment, and cultural norms over time and against their competitors. It could do for the world what NetPromoter did to the soft fuzzy stuff of customer love. So while I know this preliminary equation isn’t nearly complete in our ability to quantify our work fully, it’s a start for how to talk and measure what we’re doing inside our organizations.

Ultimately, blending performance and the “peopley stuff” will let us build the organization of our future, respecting all the factors affecting performance.

(Note: This post was originally published at Harvard Business Review, in June 2011. Because I value the conversations happening there, I’m going to ask if you can not comment on this blog but add to the conversation here: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/06/the_success_equation.html)

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