Don’t get ill in the UK!!!

This is the 1^st of a 2 part blog which examines the performance problems of the UK National Health Service.  Today’s blog uses the current story of my father-in-law to highlight these issues graphically.  Tomorrow’s blog will explain how I believe these problems should be addressed, based on my relevant experience.  The lessons can be applied to the quest for excellence in all types of organisation.  

___________________________________________________________________________

In last weekend’s blog Is trouble brewing? Read this… I mentioned the previous week’s publication of Sir Robert Francis’s report on whistle blowing (staff flagging up problems or even deliberate wrongdoing) in Britain’s National Health Service (NHS). 

The NHS is already a huge (literally) political football in the run-up to the UK General Election on May 7^th.  Political parties are vying to stretch credibility beyond its elastic limit yet again by telling us that somehow they will magically succeed where they and their predecessors have abysmally failed and solve the intractable problems of this chronically diseased, sclerotic, impenetrable bureaucracy, the 2^nd largest employer in the world after the Chinese Red Army. 

For me the trouble with the NHS is that brutal honesty is one of its thousands of avoidable casualties annually.  Until the patient is told the bad news about their diagnosis nothing of importance can or will change.  For an explanation of the life-saving Stockdale Paradox see my recent blog The truth may hurt, but seeking it sets you free.

Little did I know the awful realities of the NHS would be brought home to me immediately and in stark personal terms this week!  Admittedly, borrowing from the title of last week’s blog, trouble has been brewing for some time with my 79 year old father-in-law’s health, but it exploded in our faces at 6.45am yesterday having deteriorated rapidly this week. 

Having metaphorically frothed at the mouth with frustration and anger about it for 24 hours and decided to make it the topic of this week’s blog I woke up this morning with a strange calm and an incisive clarity.  The problems facing the NHS are in fact common to most organisations, but tend to be much worse in the public (government) sector than the private sector, simply because in the private sector the marketplace eventually extracts an often savage price for incompetence and failure to adapt whereas in the public sector dinosaurs do not die off for years because they remain protected species.  The larger and more labyrinthine the organisation the worse it gets, whether public or private sector.

Fundamentally the problem in the NHS is one of values, or precisely of translating values into urgent, radical and proven effective action instead of repeatedly parroting them as mindless, inane rhetoric to the point of utter meaninglessness, which is what politicians, NHS bureaucrats and wealthy consultant doctors insult our intelligence by doing. 

Unfortunately inertia, vested interests, smug complacency, stupidity, and a failure to face brutal reality and learn and adapt breed the sclerosis (hardened, unyielding arteries) of the NHS that must be broken down.  The patient may soon be flat-lining – this winter has seen unprecedented failures to meet targets in Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments in many hospitals as the system creaks at the seams.  To use another analogy, it’s running far too hot in the red zone and something has to give.

Ironically the main problem I see in the NHS is NOT lack of money, which is the standard mantra on most people’s lips.

So what is the problem, how can it be fixed, what does it teach us for our own organisation(s), public or private sector, and can I justify my solution with hard evidence (answer – yes!)?

To bring the problem to life here’s my father-in-law’s healthcare story so far. 

• He has had Type 2 diabetes for over 25 years.  Diabetes is an epidemic affecting 2.9 million people (4.5% of the population) in the UK, a number which has more than doubled in 20 years.  It is one of several chronic diseases imposing unsustainable burdens on the NHS.  This time last year it was causing major, prolonged problems with his eyesight which unfortunately coincided with the death of the lady he’d lived with for 26 years. 

• He was told 7 months ago that his left hip joint needed replacing.  Since then he has struggled with increasing pain and decreasing mobility, resorting to crutches, unable to drive, increasingly housebound and unable to sleep comfortably at night.  He lives 60 miles (100km) from us but my wife and I have each tried to get down to see him once or twice a week.  Moving him to stay with us might seem an obvious option but we live in a remote, rural area whereas he is in Manchester and his doctor, friends and good amenities are all on the doorstep, relatively speaking.  And home is home, all the more so when you are suffering.

• In early-December he was told that his operation would be on 22^nd January.  He relaxed and enjoyed the Christmas break, safe in the knowledge that the pain, discomfort and lack of mobility would soon be a thing of the past.  He spoke enthusiastically of driving again and getting out to visit some of his favourite places.

• 10 days before the operation he went for a pre-operation assessment.  Tests revealed that his blood count was not satisfactory and he lost his place on the waiting list, a major psychological blow.  He was told that he would need an endoscopy – a camera investigation of his oesophagus and stomach.  

• A date was set – 20^th March – more than 2 months away!  This was depressing.  His physical condition continued to deteriorate.  His mobility has worsened significantly and over the last few weeks we have noticed him looking increasingly jaundiced.   We believed that his doctor’s surgery was trying to get the endoscopy brought forward and that they were aware of his condition.

• On Wednesday I persuaded him to call the surgery to ask them to make a private referral to the consultant so that we, his family, could pay to get his endoscopy done rapidly.  At that point, only at that point, he was told that it was pointless us spending the money because his endoscopy had been set for 20^th March for clinical, not organisational reasons, connected to his specific symptoms.  Still no assessment of his all-round needs.  I told him to call them back and arrange an assessment.  They told him they were not responsible for at-home care, and did not tell him which agency to call or give him a phone number.  He asked if the doctor could come out and see him.  It took some time to convince them that he was unable to come into the surgery to see the doctor – he was essentially immobile and in almost constant pain, in spite of the painkillers he’d been prescribed which his friends had collected from the surgery.

• Late on Friday afternoon I called to see him briefly – I had been at a meeting in Manchester and needed to get home for a charity function that evening.  I was very concerned by his condition.  In retrospect I should have stayed with him.  My wife was due to visit him early yesterday morning.  I left after making him as comfortable as I could.  20 minutes later I phoned him and told him I’d come down this afternoon and stay as long as necessary.  He was extremely grateful.

• At 6.45am yesterday he called us to say he’d fallen and couldn’t move.  We rang his late partner’s daughter who went over immediately with her boyfriend.  They could not move him, which was just as well – it was not the right course of action.  They called an ambulance and got him into hospital.  My wife went straight to the hospital and spent the day there.  He was initially admitted to Accident and Emergency (A&E) where they gave him morphine to ease the pain.  His hip was X-rayed several times because they couldn’t tell if it was broken from the fall.  Eventually they decided it wasn’t – it had just disintegrated ‘naturally’ over time.  Don’t pinch yourself – this is 2015, not 1815!

• I’m on my way to see him this afternoon.  Apparently they’ve done more tests and X rays this morning.  They’re saying there are underlying health problems which the diabetes has masked, which have to be fixed before he can have his hip replacement.  We’re not medics, but we could have told them that – it’s the sort of thing a child’s instincts would have detected.

I tell the story pitilessly to hammer home the brutal realities.  It’s typical of the stories of thousands of patients and their impotent families occurring every week in the 6^th richest economy on Earth.  One of my business partners lost his father 4 years ago when he went into hospital to have an ingrowing toe-nail attended to, caught a hospital-borne infection, and died.  14 years ago my mother endured a similarly Dickensian level of care during the final stages of her battle with cancer.

In tomorrow’s blog I’ll propose an approach, with supporting evidence, that I firmly believe would dramatically improve NHS performance and can improve your organisation too.

___________________________________________________________________________

I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton

Trouble brewing? Read this...

Wherever you look it seems there is corporate or individual wrongdoing on an industrial scale.  In business and professional life cynics could be forgiven for citing corruption, deceit, bullying and abuse as prerequisite ‘qualities’ for leadership!

Sadly this should come as no surprise.  The vast majority of us fall into two camps – ‘takers’, who pursue selfish goals at the expense of others and occupy disproportionately the positions of power and highest reward in all walks of life, or the so-called ‘herd’, too scared, apathetic or blissfully ignorant to question or offer resistance!  Many takers know it is too easy to manipulate the herd and thus live a life of easy complacency – most of the time they away with it since “evil happens when good people do nothing” (Edmund Burke).

There is compelling evidence that a third way is safer and comprehensively rewarding on all counts, including financial and ego-related.  What’s more the Internet era is destroying the power of secrecy like a bushfire, smashing down boundaries and nourishing emerging global generations with values of openness, sharing and empowered democracy.

Combine this with rising indignation at avoidable suffering and the obscene, indefensible, dramatically widening discrepancies between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and you have potentially career-, power- and wealth-threatening conditions for the much of the anti-social elite.

It’s a good time to be a freedom fighter for positive values – here’s why.  

_________________________________________________________________________________

In the UK this has been the week of the whistle blowers - people who highlight their organisation’s misdemeanours to their managers or (more often) to the outside world.  Normally they are forced underground or have to go public because organisations have a predictably depressing track record in acting against wrong doing, whether individual or collective, and tend to ‘shoot the messenger’ by finding ways to punish them. 

After all, turkeys never vote for Christmas, do they?!

Firstly we saw the publication of Sir Robert Francis’s report into whistle blowing in the National Health Service (NHS), the 2^nd largest employer on the planet after the Chinese Red Army.  The NHS is a dizzying hierarchy stuffed with petty, mediocre, ‘target driven’ bureaucrats, and clever technocrats – wealthy, highly respected top consultant doctors.  Many NHS doctors at all levels of seniority work incredibly hard and under great pressure, but in the minds of a significant minority this only serves to emphasise their Messianic self-importance.  Those in some of the less pressurised disciplines have pampered lifestyles and pick and choose their working hours.  In addition to high NHS salaries they often have lucrative posts at private hospitals and clinics.  They are powerful beasts - difficult, if not impossible, to manage, often supremely intelligent and with intimidating egos and commanding reputations.  A significant minority exhibit Autistic and other anti-social tendencies.  Their breadth of life and organisational experience in fact may be quite limited, but their behaviour is nonetheless imperious.

A few months ago I saw one of those superbly satirical cartoons that hits the nail squarely on the head.  It showed a white-coated senior consultant doctor on his daily hospital rounds, accompanied by a dozen student doctors, all of them wearing white coats too and holding clipboards.  They stood around the foot of a hospital bed whilst the consultant addressed the patient lying in it.  The caption read “Mrs Blenkinsopp, do you mind the students listening in whilst I conceal the details of your botched operation?”!

This week’s second whistle blowing story concerns the Swiss private banking arm of HSBC allegedly helping wealthy private banking clients to evade UK tax.  Throughout the financial crash of 2007-08, the subsequent recession and in recent years HSBC has enjoyed a reputation as the most competent and ethical of the UK’s Big 4 banks.  Former CEO and later Chairman, Conservative peer Lord Stephen Green, a friend of Prime Minister David Cameron and, extraordinarily for a career banker, an ordained minister in the Church of England, resigned this week from a leading City of London advisory group because he felt the focus on him and the tax scandal would detract from the group’s role.  Cameron was fiercely questioned in Parliament and angrily denied that he or the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Finance Minister), George Osborne, were aware of details of HSBC’s support for illegal tax evasion.  And the whistle blower, Herve Falciani, who first reported his concerns to the UK tax authorities in 2008 and got no response, gave an interview to BBC Business Editor Kamal Ahmed in which he said there were more revelations to come.  He told the BBC of the horrible personal struggle of the last 7 years, which has included a jail sentence, and the vilification of his personality – he flatly denied claims that he had sought payment for data about tax evasion which HSBC claims he stole.

To be confronted with your, or your organisation’s shortcomings is usually threatening.  Some find it deeply threatening.  To those in positions of money and power, many of whom are vain, full of hubris and over-confident, it often represents loss of face and potential loss of authority, even loss of income.  So the temptation to either a) avoid dealing with the revelations; or b) stamp on the whistle blower is usually very high.  Two weeks ago I highlighted another example, the Rotherham child abuse scandal, in The truth may hurt, butseeking it sets you free.  Last August I pointed out some of the most common dysfunctional organisational behaviours in Humanweakness – a competitive advantage?  In November I highlighted how all of us, no matter how refined, educated and sophisticated, respond to threat in How the brain works and why you should know and Why selflessness is good business.  

So with these issues in mind here are 8 actionable points for staying out of trouble and improving your results, individually and organisationally:

1.       Secrecy is invariably a bad idea.  Over the years I’ve learnt it’s safest to assume people will find stuff out, domestically, socially or professionally.  If they don’t find out they will often suspect, which can be even worse!  So act accordingly.  Intelligent disclosure is always the best policy.  Understand your motives for wanting secrecy – are they really valid?  People will often bend over backwards to help you if you admit you’re having difficulties, especially if you’re in a leadership position, since it makes you more human so they can relate to you better.  It can be the difference between success and failure.  You ain’t expected to have all the answers yourself, or to act like a cyborg!

2.       The role of leaders and bosses is to enable and empower others.  This is enlightened self-interest.  If you dedicate yourself to advancing others you will receive far more than you give, and you will avoid one heck of a lot of trouble, period!

3.       Giving is always the healthy option.  It’s far less stressful and much more fun.  DO NOT fall for the cynical standpoint that all of us are as bad as each other so you should not be so ‘naïve’ as to be selfless.  Humans are neurologically hard-wired to collaborate – the majority of us respond warmly and reciprocally to anyone who does so, especially if they are in a position of authority, and even more so in environments full of takers, since it represents a sharply contrasting breath of fresh air and reassurance that real human values still matter.

4.       If you observe bad behaviour in positions of authority you can be 99% certain others have seen it too.  So don’t try to tackle it on your own.  Find out who else knows and work out a common action plan.  You can guarantee that ‘cornered animals’ will fight; don’t let that stop you, be brave, be smart and be patient.  Gather the facts and data.  Behave as if it is a court of law – the case must be proven on evidence, not emotion or hearsay, and you will be subject to potentially brutal cross-examination, so strength comes in numbers and cold, hard analysis.  As I’ve often put it, revenge is a dish best eaten dipped in liquid nitrogen…..

5.       Do not keep your head down and hope it will go away.  99% of the time it won’t – it will get steadily worse.

6.       Do not fall for the self-limiting lie that there are no alternatives.  Frankly that’s rubbish – it’s a trick our minds play on us all the time because we’re afraid of change and confrontation.  Putting up with bad situations is always worse than taking action to improve or exit from them, though you must avoid impulsiveness.

7.       Always seek advice and act in balanced moderation, after sober reflection.  Righteous indignation is good and healthy, counter to what many will tell you, and change does not have to be negative, but you must ensure you are acting on rational grounds.

8.       Do not lose heart, and do not give up.  It will probably not be easy, there may be brickbats, but it will be worth it in the end.  Life is not about avoiding scars – that’s impossible.  It is about growing and becoming a better person.

Life is too short to put up with unhealthy, unhappy situations caused by chronic bad behaviour.  If you do so you are stealing – stealing your own time, happiness and potentially health, and stealing that of others around you who might also benefit if you refused to accept the status quo.  Facing up to unsatisfactory situations and seeking change helps you, those around you and your organisation to grow healthily and sustainably.

________________________________________________________________

I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton

Focus on what you want - easy, right?!

One of the most contentious words in collective human endeavour is focus. It's elusive. It's used as a stick by the self-righteous to beat those they call 'undisciplined'. What one person describes as 'focus' another deems as 'unhealthy obsession'!

The focus on focus often reminds me of Peter Drucker's inspired comment about efficiency (substitute the word 'focus' for 'efficiency'): "There's nothing quite as pointless and soul-destroying as doing with great efficiency that which one should not be doing in the first place!"

Focus is not a word, or a single concept.  It's an entire language and an art form. It's subtle and nuanced, not the blunt instrument so often employed by too many, especially in business. The unthinking application of the concept of focus is at the root of far too much mediocrity.   

Here are some thoughts on why, how to guard against it and thus improve your game dramatically.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Years ago a close friend of mine had an article published in a national newspaper about a spoof scientific concept he'd invented called 'Jardin's Principle'. In essence it was a 3-stage model for ideas and principles, pitched as follows:

1. The vast majority of ideas are simplistic, even childish, to start with and many stay that way. Over time they become diluted through incorrect or over-usage since they are used as throwaway shorthand, substituted in place of the need to think.  'Focus' is a good example - too often it is bandied around like a facile religious mantra, as if its mere mention will somehow confers special powers on a situation and solve all the problems that those to whom it is said have supposedly failed to address already.
2. Many ideas then go through a second stage where they become highly complex. They are applied rigidly and bureaucratically, diminishing their power.  'Focus' is a good example here too.  Organisations impose systems and procedures to 'maintain focus' and 'improve decision-making', but the criteria for doing so are too often inappropriate, ill-conceived and stifle innovation.
3. Very few ideas ultimately make it into the sunlit uplands of profound simplicity, where they usually have great power and fuel exceptional performance. This generally only happens when people step back, think intelligently about what they really want, and start designing their activities from sound first principles.  

Here are some topical examples hopefully illustrating the pitfalls of Stage 1 and Stage 2 and the huge upside that Stage 3 confers on exceptional performers who get it:

• This week the entire 7 member cabinet of Rotherham Council resigned following a devastating report, which they themselves had commissioned, into their failure to admit and address the serious child sex abuse scandal which has made the South Yorkshire town notorious. Persistent, detailed investigative journalism by a respected national newspaper uncovered an appalling legacy.  For many years a large group of Pakistani men in the town sexually abused an estimated 1,400 white teenage girls, a truly staggering number, most of whom were damaged and vulnerable, many of them in the so-called 'care' system (a contradiction in terms, it seems).  The men responsible were mainly connected with local taxi firms, predominantly run by Pakistanis, and it is alleged that they were protected by two powerful Pakistani councillors who themselves instilled fear in council officials, particularly in the unfit-for-purpose Children's Services Department.  Deluded by the naive, self-defeating culture of political correctness so pervasive under Tony Blair's New Labour and Gordon Brown's UK governments (1997-2010) council managers and employees substituted the wrong focus for the right one and lost the plot completely. They knew of, or strongly suspected, the alleged child abuse but were far more worried about being accused of racism so they failed to act against it. Until recently, in response to the unfolding crisis, senior managers at Rotherham Council buried their heads in the sand, adopted a defensive, bunker mentality and lied about what they knew. In this textbook example of the perils of groupthink (see my blog Human weakness - a competitive advantage?) they convinced themselves it was an unfair, politically motivated witchhunt against them and steadfastly refused to accept the mounting evidence of how severe the problem had been and how dire were its consequences. Instead of facing upto the brutal realities (see last week's blog, The truth may hurt, but seeking it sets you free) they pretended there was no problem. 

• During the weekly Skype call on Friday morning with my business partners to review the startup of Resolve Gets Results LLP we examined a set of 'traffic light' templates that two of the partners had prepared for the purpose of selecting, discarding or deferring, then monitoring and managing individual start-up/business development projects.  One of the criteria they'd chosen as a key variable was the amount of time required on each project in the current Quarter.  When I replied that this was an impossible question to answer I was met with the kind of well-intentioned, tut-tutting disapproval no doubt administered to mavericks like me daily in companies the world over!!  I can hear the offstage discussion in my imagination - "Mark really does need to be managed - he lacks discipline!"  My response was unduly impatient and tetchy - sorry guys!  But it got me thinking, and I realised that Jardin's Principle explained my unhappiness.  So here's a more measured response.  I was being presented (mostly implicitly) with a Jardin's Stage 1 and Stage 2 argument about focus.  What was needed however was Stage 3 thinking which goes something like this.  There are four questions to ask about each project under consideration - 1) Will it generate income in the next 3-6 months sufficient to justify (in the round - we can't predict it accurately) the time, effort and cost we'll need to put into it?  2) How important is it to us strategically?  3) What assumptions are we making, explictly or implicitly (there are always far more of the latter and they are the kickers) that we need to test carefully? and 4) What risks do we need to identify and manage?  If the answer to Q1 and Q2 (following debate) is 'Yes' then we find a way to do it and we look closely at Qs 3 and 4.  If we end up with more projects that tick boxes than we can deal with then we either bring in additional resource, we defer some of the work to the next Quarter or we unleash our creativity to solve the problem, which is highly motivating.  Attaching numbers picked largely out of thin air to create a pseudo-objective decision-making process wastes time and energy, is self-delusional, demotivating and is likely to provoke unnecessary disagreement. 

• Google are exceptionally good at this and have a keen understanding of the parameters for good decision-making and focus.  Listening yesterday to CD7 of 'How Google Works' (Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, 2014) I came across yet another great example.  Google's focus is always on the end-user of their products - what does he or she need?  How can we innovate to create new value for them?  Google's approach, like Apple's, contrasts sharply with the approach of most companies.  Schmidt and Rosenberg describe for example the culture they came across in Motorola, which Google acquired in 2012.  Motorola was full of product teams working on separate projects for different market segments and customers - to Motorola a 'customer' was one of its corporate partners, not the end-user of their mobile phones.  The result was a complex, labyrinthine organisational structure more reminiscent of a military hiearchy than a well-adapted, nimble, 21st Century high technology corporation.  This inefficient, cumbersome, slow-moving and unimaginative structure, replicated in thousands of companies round the world, was a direct result of Motorola's choice of focus.  In effect Motorola was mass-producing inefficiency (back to Peter Drucker again)!

In the chaotic, dynamic 21st Century fluid. adaptive leadership and organisational models are essential for survival, let alone prosperity. There are two over-riding principles which I believe govern wise decisions about where to put focus and resources, and how much.  

One is the research finding, borne out again and again, that nearly all highly successful organisations deliberately foster a culture in which motivated people exercise great self-discipline without needing to be managed to do so. They decide for themselves that they need to, because their organisation acts like a mature, supportive and encouraging parent, not a pedantic, bullying schoolmaster, and because it encourages a fiercely entrepreneurial mindset focused on adding value for the end-user, like Google and Apple do.  (In most other ways Google and Apple are as alike as chalk and cheese.)  In this culture alot of management problems simply melt away and everyone gets far better at a) getting the job done and b) adding more value.

The second principle is Lean Startup, about which software entrepreneur Eric Rees wrote an excellent book (2011).  The term Lean Startup is somewhat confusing, but it means an adaptive approach to doing projects, any projects, which require rapid learning and testing of assumptions in order to move fast and avoid Drucker's trap of being efficient at working on entirely the wrong stuff.  Ries has spawned a worldwide movement of people focused on slick project execution by using this method. It really works and there are many case studies, including Ries's own, that prove it.  The core principle of Lean Startup is to figure out your assumptions and then construct experiments, or test relatively crude prototype products as fast as possible with end-users.  They will tell you what you're doing or thinking wrong and then you can fix it quickly, easily and at much less cost than if it went undetected till later.

So don't get mired down in Jardin's Stage 1 or Stage 2 thinking about focus. Work out what results you need from your work, focus on those, set milestones, learn, iterate the process, and review constantly.  Like Google make sure your objectives are firmly focused on end-users' needs, not your organisation's or your business partners'.  Drive your business this way and seek a constant stream of feedback from your end-users.  Do NOT try to manage using 20th Century methods - resource inputs, budgets and 'internal' requirements.  Stage 3 thinking says ultimately the only thing that matters, and will allow you to survive and prosper, is adding increasing value for your end-users.  

All else pales in comparison!

________________________________________________________________

I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

 If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton

  

The truth may hurt, but seeking it sets you free

Research shows that two of the defining characteristics of Top 1% leadership and organisational performance are the rare, closely related abilities:

• to accept and embrace paradoxes, which are often deeply discomfiting. A paradox occurs when at least two seemingly incompatible facts are true simultaneously

• to accept the brutal realities of a situation but hold on tightly to an unbreakable belief that you can and you will prevail in the end, no matter how long it takes or what you must endure. This is the ‘Stockdale Paradox’, a term coined by Jim Collins and used by his research team in ‘Good to Great’ (2001) for reasons I’ll explain for those who do not know it.

I have been keenly aware this week of the vital importance of these essential truths, both in global human affairs and personally. This blog explains why. I hope it helps you to understand and apply them.

__________________________________________________________________

It’s been another unpleasant and worrying week in international news. Two particular events have struck me.

The dreadful news came in yesterday that everyone had feared. The Islamic State released a video of the beheading of Japanese journalist Kenji Goto. Japan is in deep shock. Goto had gone to Syria to try to secure the release of another Japanese prisoner, Haruna Yukawa, who was beheaded last week.

On Friday Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg released the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)’s annual report with a gloomy prognosis that Western relations with Russia are at their worst for 30 years. Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC Fiona Hill, an expert on Vladimir Putin’s Russia, gave a chilling insight into his mentality. Essentially Russia remains paranoid from generation to generation about the West’s intentions, thanks to Napoleon’s invasion in 1812 and Hitler’s in 1941. To put this in context 32 million Soviets died in World War II. This is equivalent to wiping out a full 50% of the UK population in just 4 years of brutal warfare. By comparison the Russians feel that for us lily-livered Westerners World War II was a walk in the park.

Ms Hill explained that historical documents now available from Russia and Eastern Europe confirm that in 1983, when the US sought to deploy Pershing nuclear missiles in West Germany, the Russians believed the West was planning a pre-emptive nuclear strike, even though Western governments thought this irrational fear so preposterous that they dismissed it out of hand. The result was that we came far closer to nuclear Armageddon in Europe than anyone understood at the time. This was horrifying stupidity on a cataclysmic scale by Western governments led by Ronald Reagan and the much vaunted Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher. Their gung-ho rhetoric and hardball tactics apparently almost destroyed us.

According to Ms Hill there is a serious risk the West will repeat the same mistake for the same reasons. Putin is convinced we are hell-bent on overthrowing him and interprets the extension of the EU and NATO into Eastern Europe as acts of naked aggression. Ms Hill says his defiance of the West and illegal adventures in Ukraine are fuelled as much by paranoia as by imperialism. The scariest thing of all, she says, is that Western governments just don’t get it!! The dramatic increase over the last 12 months in incidents where Russian military aircraft make unauthorised incursions into Western airspace – in the latest two of them brazenly flew the length of the English Channel last week – is intended to probe how serious Western intentions are.

Personally it has been a remarkable week. Last Sunday I posted a blog called Why was Churchill so great? The title certainly caused a stir – over 33,000 have read it at the time of writing today’s blog and it has proved controversial. Prior to writing it I confess I had not understood the depth of hostility towards Churchill, particularly in India and in some sections of the British population. Antipathy towards him from Ireland and France came as less of a surprise.

The post has drawn over 750 likes on LinkedIn, over 800 shares, and over 250 comments, most of them complementary. However some people took me to task for supposed bias/hero worship, and failure to quote a balanced range of historical sources and point out Churchill’s mistakes and ‘crimes’. I said in response that I wrote the blog to reflect on two programmes – one on radio and one on TV about the Spitfire WW2 fighter plane that didn’t mention Churchill as far as I recall. It was a blog written to inspire people, not a historical treatise or biography, and I am a businessman, not an academic. But no matter; I had touched on a raw nerve and my critics’ ire was aroused. One launched a sustained, vitriolic personal attack on me, making numerous slanderous assertions about my personality, supposed racism and extreme politics! Unfortunately he did so under the banner of his employer, and I have drawn it to their attention and to LinkedIn’s.

All three subjects I’ve mentioned – the killing of Kenji Goto, the heightened tensions with Russia and the reaction to my Churchill blog highlight the problems posed by paradoxes and uncomfortable, brutal realities. These problems are an acid test of our character and moral courage.

The vast majority of right-thinking people would condemn outright the despicable, barbaric actions of Islamic State. The vast majority of Muslims would denounce its twisted ideology as an affront to the Prophet. But how many of them are prepared to say so publicly and unequivocally? That takes courage and a willingness to risk condemnation in your own community. Most people are afraid and prefer to keep out of ‘trouble’. Many are seduced by the easy and morally reprehensible way out – if Christian cultures did not apparently oppress Muslims these things would not happen, they say.

People in the democratic West and especially in former Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe are afraid of Russian aggression and cannot comprehend that the Russians’ behaviour is largely driven by the fact that they are actually more afraid of us than we are of them! Are we prepared to start from that true premise, think through its profound consequences, and develop radically different, emotionally intelligent strategies for tackling the ‘Russian problem’ with safer and more sustainable solutions than simply ‘facing down the bully’, though we must continue to demonstrate implacable strength in defence to the Russians?

I have resolved to look objectively at the evidence of Churchill’s political behaviour in India, where my critics claim he was personally responsible for genocide, and at some of the contradictory accounts of his attitudes towards, and efforts on behalf of ordinary working people in the UK. This will allow me to reach a better-informed conclusion on whether there are unpalatable facts about him. As a deeply grateful, freedom-loving Englishman – or should that be jingoistic, nostalgic, racist, imperialist, toffee-nosed, privileged, boarding school Tory bigot as one of my critics suggests?! - I appear to have been kept in blissful ignorance – or should that be deliberately buried my blind, sycophantic, puerile, hero-worshipping head in the sand?!

I believe that by his moral courage, inspiration of the British people and defiance of Hitler in 1940 Churchill saved not only Britain, but the whole of Europe, from decades of evil Nazi tyranny and its Jewish and Gypsy populations from annihilation. But I love the truth and critical, objective, factual thinking (Aristotle’s ‘Logos’) most of all, even if sometimes it hurts and may even shatter my illusions! So I'm braced for the worst, but only if I read about it from dispassionate, rigorous and balanced historical scholars.

The Stockdale Paradox

Jim Collins gave this name to a profound piece of wisdom which he learnt from Vice Admiral James B Stockdale. Collins was on the faculty at Stanford Business School in California in the late-1980s when he met Stockdale, an honorary Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University.

Stockdale, a US Navy pilot, was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese in 1965 during the Vietnam War. He remained in captivity until 1973, the highest ranking US officer held by the North Vietnamese. He was regularly kept in solitary confinement and subjected to such brutal torture on dozens of occasions that his body became permanently disfigured. Despite the desperate bleakness of his situation he always believed that one day he would be released and return to normal life with his wife and children. He and his wife wrote a book called ‘In Love and War’ that movingly chronicled their respective lives during that terrible 8 years.

Stockdale as a POW (1965-73)

Collins learnt that the secret of Stockdale’s survival was that he combined this undiminished hope for eventual release, which he said he could never afford to lose, otherwise he would have died, with an acceptance that his current situation was likely to last indefinitely. He faced up to it, and instead concentrated his energies on small matters that he could influence rather than his freedom, which he could not. He devoted himself to the welfare of his fellow POWs. For instance he knew that no-one could withstand torture indefinitely, so he developed a system whereby after so long prisoners could divulge certain pieces of information.

Many of the prisoners sadly died because they could not come to terms with their situation. As Stockdale put it they would say “We’ll be out by Christmas!” Christmas would come and Christmas would go, and then they would say “We’ll be out by Easter!” That didn’t happen either. In the end, as Stockdale told Collins, many of them died of a ‘broken heart’ – they gave up.

Years later Collins’ research team were debating some of the characteristic, distinctive behaviours of the 11 ‘Good to Great’ companies they had identified. As they discussed it Collins suddenly realised it bore all the hallmarks of Stockdale’s behaviour during his 8 years in captivity. These companies confronted their situations with brutal honesty and recognised there were no magic wands or quick fixes. But they always continued to believe that they would, in the end, find the solutions and move into better times.

I have found the Stockdale Paradox a priceless maxim to guide my own life since I first discovered it 9 years ago. Also the basic understanding of neuroscience which I have gleaned in the last few months has convinced me that the survival and further evolution of the human race depend on it. If you want to know more read my blogsHow the brain works and why you should know and Why selflessness is good business.

Our primitive brains (aka our ‘chimps’ – see the excellent ‘The Chimp Paradox’ by Dr Steve Peters) cannot deal with the messy, nuanced realities of truth. Instead they fall back on simplistic ‘certainties’ that are only a tiny fragment of reality. The more we feel threatened the more dogmatic these ‘certainties’ become. You see this in the behaviour of extremists such as Islamic State, the attitudes of Russia and the West towards one another, and in the aggressive responses from some people to my Churchill blog last week. To feel a debt of gratitude to Churchill is not to deny any other, unpalatable truths about him, and to say that he was a complex character who made serious mistakes is not to condone bad things he may have done which many people, including me, may not previously have learned of. Hence the reason I intend to find out - I am not afraid of the truth!

The bottom line is this. The truth can sometimes hurt, but seeking it earnestly, and with an entirely open mind, is the essence of critical thinking and therefore the key to human advancement. This holds true in every aspect of life, including business. That is why for example I advocate getting hold of as much raw, unfiltered customer feedback as possible to guide your business strategy and actions. The vast majority of human behaviour may hide behind a pretence of logic, but the brutal reality is that it is driven by our primitive brains and is self-delusional.

So learn to love paradoxes, especially the Stockdale Paradox! It is only the most sophisticated, most recent part of our brain, the neo-cortex (upper brain) that gives us the capability to grasp them.

________________________________________________________________

I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to read this post. If you find it helpful please share it. And make a difference - be a smart giver and do something positive for others this week. Pay it forward.

Recent blogs you may find helpful include:

Leadership - can you master it?

High business growth - gold at the end of the rainbow?

10 reasons to stick your neck out!

Do you ever think you've got it tough?

Be wise as a serpent, harmless as a dove

How the brain works and why you should know

Was Tesco's Terry Leahy really such a great leader?

Stop your company's demons coming back to haunt you

Do organisations thrive without the 'old timers'?

If this blog is particularly relevant to you, your organisation, or to someone else you know, I may be able to help or advise. I strive to be a smart giver – Adam Grant’s excellent book “Give and Take” (2013) explains why smart givers are the highest 25% of achievers in all walks of life. They go out of their way to help others, intelligently, without allowing themselves to be widely exploited. In this way they inspire higher performance and create sustained new value through collaborative exchange.

My business Resolve Gets Results provides commercial expertise, leadership capabilities and in some cases financing to different sized businesses with long-term growth potential. I work with a superb small team of Board-level professionals, each a leader in their field with over 30 years’ business experience. We are based in the UK but have international business backgrounds, in my case including 5 years in the United States, where I ran a high growth machinery sales and service business.

You can find my contact details under the ‘Contact info’ tab near the top of my LinkedIn profile.

Mark Ashton