Stop listening to success stories
Ok it’s pretend time. Imagine a world with no sat-nav, GPS, Google Maps or any route planner of any kind. No doubt for some of you that will be quite hard as you’ve never known a world without those things, but just try. It’s holiday time. You’re off to Montpellier in the south of France. But hold up, you’ve never been to south of France before. How are you going to get there? It’s ok, because you know someone, someone who’s done it before. So you ask them, hey someone, how did you get to the south of France?
“We drove.” Ok… but how? “In our car.” Ok, but which way? “South.”
I’m being pedantic but you see what I’m getting at. So far they’ve just been telling you what they did to achieve success. Now you could probe and probe and probe and get every excruciating detail out of them, getting a detailed list of directions on how they went from Reading to Saint-Tropez. One small problem though. They went from Reading to Saint-Tropez… and you need to go from Milton Keynes to Montpellier. The starting and end destinations are fairly close, but not really.
Now just for a second, to make a very obvious point. What if you’re not capable of driving there? Maybe you don’t have a car, maybe you don’t have insurance that covers driving overseas. Perhaps you don’t trust the rust bucket you call a car to make it all the way there. What good are those instructions now? Also, maybe they drove because they needed to use their car when they got to their destination but you don’t. Could you fly instead?
For the case of simplicity, say you are going to drive. Let’s look at the instructions you’ve got. They started at Reading, went round the bottom of London no doubt using the M25. They heading south through France via Paris, down through Lyon and finally past Marseille and into Saint-Tropez. And at first glance, it looks like this would be basically the same journey that you’d take for your holiday. Except, it’s not.
What do you do to start? Do you head down to Reading first and then follow in their footsteps? That’s a lot of extra effort. Then similar at the end, do you follow their directions to Saint-Tropez and then make your way back to Montpellier? Again, that’s a huge wasted effort. In fact, even if you made your own way to the first logical intersection that your journeys merge (somewhere around Maidstone on the M20) and then proceeded to follow their instructions, very quickly you’re going to be taking a non-optimal route for your particular journey. At Paris the two routes diverge. With yours continuing down through Clermont-Ferrand instead of going further east to Lyon. Going via Lyon is an option, but that’s adding an extra 17 miles onto the route. Ultimately, at some point, you’re going to have to go off plan.
It is inevitable that you will have to tailor your journey to fit your needs.
You’ve got a different set of people going on the holiday. They went as just a couple, you’ve got kids and a dog. They didn’t factor any stops at a service station into their journey, you absolutely are going to have to. Maybe they had a car with a better mileage and only needed to stop every 600 miles. What if your car isn’t capable of that? Do you know where you’re going to stop and get petrol? You can’t do it where they did. There is a very long list of factors that went into their journey which were unique to that specific journey. Even if they were to try to repeat it again it wouldn’t be the same, so it definitely won’t be the same if you try to do it.
So if you were looking to go on holiday in the South of France, would you blindly follow the guidance of someone I know that has been successful with doing exactly that? No, you’d use that as a guide, learn from some of the lessons they learnt, benefit from some of their wisdom and then create your own route based on your own individual needs. And this is something really simple we’re talking about here. Driving from point a to point b.
So why is it, that we accept we need to develop our own journey for a simple road trip but we constantly try to plug processes and solutions created by others into our businesses. A far more complicated endeavour.
The number of people I’ve spoke to who say something along the lines of, “We’re implementing the Spotify model”. Or, “We’re using SaFE because our competitor did”. Is unbelievable. And what I have to say to those people is STOP LISTENING TO SUCCESS STORIES. They are only hurting you, not helping you. There are a lot of success stories out there to look at.
Yes. The Spotify model did work. For them. With their people. And their product. In their industry. With their funds. And their infrastructure and their culture. With their challenges.
It will not work for you.
You need to think outside the box. You shouldn’t replicate what Spotify did, but how they went about finding their solution.
Spotify had problems. Problems they wanted to fix. Problems they needed to fix. So they looked at their problems and worked to solve them with their own solutions one at a time. I have no doubt that Spotify wasn’t the first to come up with the model that they implemented, and there’s a good chance that they took inspiration from others. And that’s the key, take inspiration, take ideas, take sparks which lead to eureka moments on ways to solve your own problems but don’t just copy paste what someone else did into your environment and expect it to work, because it won’t.
Approach your organisational and business problems with the same level of entrepreneurial thinking you encourage your engineers to approach their daily challenges with. You’ll very quickly find innovative and creative solutions to your unique problems, which will deliver results far and above anything else could. In the words of the man Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in his recent movie Fighting with my Family, “Don’t be the next Spotify, be the first you”.
I am available to give talks in England on how to build a culture and environment that breeds productivity and fulfilment through effective leadership. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let’s talk some more: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martyn-puddephatt-14b08757/.
Follow me on Twitter @mistermartynp
