Start With Why

WHY are obsessed with what others are doing.
    The ability of a company to innovate is not just useful for developing new ideas, it is invaluable for navigating struggle. When people come to work with a higher sense of purpose, they find it easier to weather hard times or even to find opportunity in those hard times. People who come to work with a clear sense of WHY are less prone to giving up after a few failures because they understand the higher cause. Thomas Edison, a man definitely driven by a higher cause, said, “I didn’t find a way to make a lightbulb, I found a thousand ways how not to make one.”
    Southwest Airlines is famous for pioneering the ten-minute turnaround—the ability to deplane, prep, and board a plane in ten minutes. This ability helps an airline make more money, because the more the planes are in the sky, the better the company is doing. What few people realize is that this innovation was born out of struggle. In 1971, Southwest was running low on cash and needed to sell one of their aircraft to stay in business. This left them with three planes to fly a schedule that required four. They had two choices: they could scale back their operations, or they could figure out how to turn their planes around in ten minutes. And thus was born the ten-minute turnaround.
    Whereas most other airline employees would have simply said it couldn’t be done, Southwest’s people rallied to figure out how to perform the unprecedented and seemingly impossible task. Today, their innovation is still paying dividends. Because of increased airport congestion and larger planes and cargo loads, Southwest now takes about twenty-five minutes to turn their planes around. However, if they were to try to keep the same schedule but add even five minutes to the turnaround time, they would need an additional eighteen planes in their fleet at a cost of nearly a billion dollars.
    Southwest’s remarkable ability to solve problems, Apple’s remarkable knack for innovation and the Wright brothers’ ability to develop a technology with the team they had were all possible for the same reason: they believed they could and they trusted their people to do it.

The Definition of Trust
    Founded by Sir Francis Baring in 1762, Barings Bank was the oldest merchant bank in England. The bank, which survived the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II, was unable to survive the predilection for risk of one self-proclaimed rogue trader. Nick Leeson single-handedly brought down Barings Bank in 1995 by performing some unauthorized, extremely high-risk trades. Had the proverbial winds continued to blow in the right direction, Leeson would have made himself and the bank extremely rich and he would have been hailed as a hero.
    But such is the nature of unpredictable things like the weather and financial markets. Few dispute that what Leeson was doing was anything more than gambling. And gambling is very different from calculated risk. Calculated risk accepts that there can be great loses, but steps are taken to either guard against or respond to an unlikely but possible outcome. Even though an emergency landing on water is “unlikely,” as the airlines tell us, they still provide us lifejackets. And if only for peace of mind, we’re glad they do. To do otherwise is a gamble few airlines would be willing to take, even though the actuarial tables are heavily weighted on their side.
    Leeson strangely held two positions at Barings, ostensibly serving as both a trader and his own supervisor, but that fact is not interesting given the subject matter. That one man had such a tolerance for risk that he could create so much damage is not very interesting either. Both of those are short-term factors. Both would have ended if Leeson had either left the company or changed jobs, or if Barings had assigned a new supervisor to oversee his operations. What is more interesting is the culture at the bank that could allow these conditions to exist in the first place. Barings had lost its WHY.
    The culture at Barings was no longer one in which people came to work inspired. Motivated, yes, but not inspired. Manipulated by the promise of massive payouts for performance, for sure, but not inspired to work in the best interest of the whole. As Leeson reported in his own account of how he got away with such risky behavior for so long, he said it was not that others didn’t recognize that what he was doing was potentially dangerous. It was worse than that.