"Mavericks at Work' by William Taylor and Polly Labarre is a wonderful read and explains the success of companies across the world whose unconventional ideas and groundbreaking strategies help us to think bigger, aim higher and deliver better services.
They ask us to consider these questions:
- do we have a distinct sense of purpose that sets us apart?
- do we have a unique and compelling language and vocabulary?
- are we sufficiently focused on the long term mission?
- why should great colleagues join us?
- do we know great colleagues when we see them?
- do we teach our colleagues what works and what wins?
- if we disappeared tomorrow as a company who would miss us and why?
Chris
3 comments:
I have noticed that you have posted a number of recent comments on the relative "importance" of attitude and facts.
I wanted to offer some remarks which might serve to clarify this issue.
First, the idea of importance probably needs to be specified here. We need to ask what we mean by importance - important in what sense, and relative to what concerns?
I suppose that the focus of your discussion is the question: what makes each of our lives go well? One's attitude, you claim, is more important to whether one's life goes well, than the facts one is presented with.
This leads a problem:
Is attitude really to be contrasted with facts here? Isn't the important thing my attitude towards the facts? In other words, these are part of one equation, as follows:
I cannot ignore the facts I am presented with. I must take an attitude to them. Of course that attitude is important. But it depends on, is inevitably parasitic on, facts which are more fundamental. If my attitude did not takes its cue from the facts I am presented with, I would be at risk of having bizarrely disconnected attitudes which had no relation to my circumstances.
Of course, this does not mean the facts are more important in all senses than attitude. But the above discussion establishes that the facts come first, and that the facts limit the range of attitudes I can reasonably adopt.
If it were otherwise, I could reasonably have an attitude utterly disconnected from everything going on around me. In one sense, nothing would matter to me. My attitudes would be random and capricious. This cannot be a defensible conclusion.
Of course, you may have in mind a very different claim. There are many senses of "more important". My comments here are only intended to stimulate debate. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
I think that you have missed the point, interesting as it was to read this highly intelligent treatise on the meaning of life the universe and everything. What I said was that what you think about yourself is the single most important factor in your life...
Everything about you:
o Your personality;
o Your actions;
o How you get along with other people;
o How you perform at work;
o Your feelings;
o Your beliefs;
o Your aspirations;
o Your talents;
o Your abilities…
They are all controlled by how you see yourself.
The facts I was referring to are those that people use to deny their control of situations and their failure to accept responsibility. You can learn to play a musical instrument, learn a new language or stop smoking. The fact is it is up to you.
Chris
Chris,
I recently came across a rejoinder I wrote when I first saw your above post, responding to my thoughts on attitude and facts. While I forgot to post it at the time, I thought I would share it with you now:
"Christopher,
Your latest comments open up new avenues for debate. However, let me first deal with your allegation that my previous comment “missed the point”.
In your post of 4 May 2008, you quote Charles Swindoll at length. As you will recall, Swindoll makes a sustained and general claim about how attitude is more important than facts. Let us call this the General Argument, which can be summarised as:
(1) Attitude is more important to one’s life than the facts which feature in that life.
This is a very general claim. As I acknowledged previously there are many senses of “important”. I challenged one aspect of this general claim. I did so on the grounds that facts must be prior to, and partially determinative of, the attitudes it is reasonable to have. Otherwise, one’s attitudes are disconnected from the people, events, actions and practices which, in large part, make up the circumstances of one’s life. For more on this, see my previous post.
You now purport to make a distinct claim, which demonstrates that my previous thoughts missed the point. Let us call this the Specific Argument, which can be summarised as:
(2) Attitude is the most important thing in my life
(3) My attitudes control everything important about who I am (you list beliefs, actions, personality, abilities – I take this to be shorthand for “the important things which make a person who he or she is”)
(4) The only thing that stops me using my attitude to change myself for the better is the (false) invocation of certain facts as an excuse for a failure to change my attitude, and in turn myself, for the better.
At first sight, these propositions appear relatively independent. It seems that one could endorse each of them without necessarily endorsing any of the others. However, it now seems to me that you take (3) to be an explanation of (2). In other words, (3) gives us the sense in which attitude is so important – attitude is important as it is determinative of who I am. This is why I call this argument specific – it tells us why attitude is important, in a way the general argument did not.
I have two initial worries about (3) as an explication of (2). I deal with these under A and B below.
A: My first worry is as follows: the claim that attitude controls who I am (my personality, beliefs, abilities, etc) is to put the cart before the horse. The problem here is that I must already have a personality and set of beliefs before I am able to take an attitude to anything at all. It is me (the already existing personality and set of beliefs) who takes the attitude in the first place.
We can put the point another way by observing it is not obvious that attitude can have much effect on several of the attributes you list. This is particularly true of personality. Personalities generate attitudes, not vice versa. If I am an ambitious person, and one of my ambitions is promotion at work, this will determine my attitude to that work – I will take the attitude that the work is important and that I should work hard. As this example demonstrates, my personality drives my attitudes.
Similarly, it is not clear that my attitude should have much effect on many of my beliefs. What I believe tends to be determined by what is true and false – I believe there is a computer in front of me, that the world is round, that slavery is wrong, all because I believe these are true. Attitudes are very separate entities – they have nothing to tell me about what is true and false. Therefore, they should not determine those of my beliefs which we might call “truth-apt” beliefs – those which can be true or false.
B: Even if we ignore A, there is a second worry: facts are also a large part of what controls who I am, and who I can become. Proposition (3) overlooks this. It is here that, contrary to your earlier assertion, my previous comments are on point. For reasonable attitudes are partly controlled by facts which come first. Attitude alone cannot determine my beliefs and actions, for I can only develop who I am in light of the factual scenarios which face me. These limit the range of attitudes I can reasonably adopt.
Take an example. If a person close to me dies, I am faced with very different facts to if I have just been promoted at work. These facts are partly determinative of the attitudes I should adopt. I cannot reasonably take the attitude that I shall be nothing but joyful and humorous in the face of such loss. This is bizarre, and potentially harmful to my self and others. Similarly, if I am promoted at work, I should not adopt the attitude that I am now going to rule the world. I may only have been promoted from junior assistant to assistant secretary. These are the facts I must contend with. I cannot ignore them in becoming who I am.
I suspect that it is B you will most disagree with. I suspect at this stage you rely on proposition (4) above and say that in the scenarios above I use facts as an excuse for failing to adopt appropriate attitudes. My response is as follows:
Facts must be relevant to one’s attitudes, for if it is otherwise, nothing matters. Why? Because as demonstrated above, even the loss of a loved one ceases to matter to me if my attitudes ignore the facts. I simply proceed to be joyous and humorous, as I would have been anyway. To accept the relevance of the facts in this case is not to use them as an excuse. It is to react to the facts as any rational being would: such a loss is a loss of value to me. This provides me with a reason for sadness and, potentially, regret. My attitude should be responsive to this fact. In short, my attitude should be responsive to the facts which make up my life, for it is in this way that I engage rationally with the world. The only other option is to ignore reality, and to proceed oblivious to that which makes up the world outside.
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