As my heroes before me, I set out to become an innovator and disruptor — and sometimes I failed. The learning curve on my goals was more challenging and difficult than I ever expected. But today, I'm sharing with you the lessons I learned in that struggle to succeed to help kick start the next generation of heroes in their quest to build a better world.
Define Your Heroes to Define Your World
One of the things I love about working in cybersecurity is the opportunity for disruption. When I was young, I was asked the same question that I'm asking of you today:
“Who are your heroes, and why?”
We don’t tend to talk and share much about our heroes today, but we all have them. And our idea of them, real or imagined, influences not just how we see the world but how we live in it.
Like probably many of you, my heroes were always the rebels, the challengers, the disruptors. In fiction, they were Hans Solo, Shaft, and Dirty Harry. In the real world, they were Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Jordan. They challenged the way the world worked, delivered amazing innovations and brought existing powers to their knees.
I wanted to be them. For me, technology was a way to escape my real world and enter a new one. One that I imagined.
Something better.
I fell in love with innovation and technology at early age. I remember vividly when my mother got one of her co-workers to teach me how to program. It opened up a whole new world for me. I saw it for what it was: beauty, power, and magic all in one. For those with imagination and determination, it created a world without constraints. And that was a world that I desperately wanted and needed.
"Best Practices" Are Not Always Your Best Self
For a long time, I was part of and led teams and businesses that made functional products but not great ones — definitely not innovative ones. We were aggressive, we were smart and we understood "best practices" in depth.
But we — the organization, the business — were not innovative. I always thought that innovation was about fighting entrenched competitors, or pushing the boundaries of the technology itself. But what I discovered was that learning to innovate was really a struggle to iterate myself.
My career started much slower than I expected. I finished school with good grades and was energized to take on the world. I poured my heart and soul into my work. The resulting deliverables met the goals, but they left both my clients and me uninspired.
To add insult to injury, I wasn't relating well to my team or to my clients. I'll never forget the time I was asked “to sit this one out because the client didn’t like your style.” Oh, the horror of mediocrity! My heroes would not have been proud.
So I changed, I evolved.
I learned the "best practices" on building businesses and designing products. I learned how best to communicate in various settings, how to effectively present. I nearly memorized Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I mastered the art of functional learning.
And it worked, at least on paper.
My career started to accelerate. But deep down, I knew that I'd just moved up to a flashier car on that same mediocre, uninspired train. While I gained so much through self-teaching, I lost my sense of self. I lost my joy. And when the joy was gone, so was the magic, the wonder that brought me to technology in the first place, learning to program from my mother's coworker all those years ago.
Recovering that joy required both a change in attitude and a change in approach. At first, I held the foolish notion that I was a finished product. I was just making changes to appease others, to get that promotion or to fix specific situations. And, rightly, the joy remained elusive.
What I learned is that there will always be times when your best is not enough. In those situations, you’ll have to decide whether you change and adapt, or whether you stagnate. Evolution and development are good, but the attitude you have toward that evolution is what matters most. Our attitude is what sets us apart, and determines what we get out of the process. Will every dime we spend trying to fix ourselves put a corresponding dollar in our resentment account? You won’t maintain your joy that way.
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Don't Just Be Innovative: Be Expansionary
Don't Just Be Innovative: Be ExpansionaryThe problem wasn't just my attitude about myself; it was also my attitude and approach to learning.
I'd always enjoyed learning in the academic sense. I even enjoyed learning in the functional and work sense. But somehow I missed that true learning is about more than facts and science. It's also about people: their motivations, their behaviors, their beliefs and biases.
It's not a skill you can just read about; it's experienced through engagement of not just the mind, but also the senses. It's expansionary.
Now, my colleagues and I think of ourselves as "expansionary" beings. We look for opportunities to grow and evolve, and in the process we hope and expect that we'll be better people in the future than we are today. I don't know if we'll be successful, but I can tell you it makes the ups and downs, the process of learning in this messy world, a whole lot more fun.
I believe the best innovators are those who define expansionary: they expand not only their knowledge, but also their perspectives, their senses and their connections. They notice deeper truths about the world, imagine new ways of being, and then bring that vision to life.
Disruption Is a Team Sport
That last part—bringing the vision to life—is not a solitary journey. It's about the power and impact of teams, organizations and society. I had to learn this the hard way, and it changed the way I thought about disruption. The way I thought about my heroes in the world.
For me, that was the struggle against an idea—an idea that I love: the idea of the disruptor, the rebel, the lone wolf, the hero. The story of the solitary man or woman facing down all odds that has always been seductive.
How could I reconcile this idea of a lone disruptor—a hero—versus the reality I saw, one in which it takes teams and organizations to make any type of significant impact? For me, it clicked when my thinking evolved from the idea of a lone hero to seeing a team of heroes.
So I set out to create just that, a team of amazing individuals with shared goals and shared vision.
In the fall of 2013, that formula was tested. It was one of those moments when everything seemed to go wrong all at once. My wife and I struggled to support our son, who was born prematurely with a birth injury, while at the same time taking care of our daughter and each other. My company was going through one of the toughest periods in its history. I needed a great team, but instead, what I had—what I had built—was a group of amazing people.
The Difference Between Great People + Great Teams
The best groups and teams both have amazing people at the core. But a great team has a shared purpose as well as a shared commitment to one another. Groups communicate, but great teams are deeply aware of each other without the need to verbalize. Great teams notice the nuance and subtext in each other as individuals. And noticing then allows them to not only support each other, but also build off each other's ideas and insights in the most powerful ways.
The most important, the most powerful of those weapons is that teams negotiate. Strangely, that's a weapon that we've been taught today is the greatest sign of weakness. The most powerful innovations are brought to life through a collection of diverse individuals with diverse backgrounds working on behalf of highly diverse customers.
Their power is not in the diversity itself, rather their power comes from channeling these differences into creating something greater. How often do you see something fragmented and inconsistent defeat something whole and purposeful? Negotiation and commonality are the weapons that allow great teams to harmonize and channel their power for maximum impact.
In early 2014, I started employing these tools to create a true team. It was time-consuming and expensive. We honed our purpose by creating a clear mission. I went through the painful and incredibly messy process of getting people to truly listen and pay attention to one another. Instead of allowing people to make decisions in isolation, I forced them to make shared decisions.
And, along with the team, I had to teach myself how to negotiate with one others as partners. It was a painful process, but we came out the other side of it not just stronger but more resilient, more committed, and more effective.
New Age…New Needs: A Call for Builders
Purpose, commitment, awareness and negotiation. These are the four building blocks of great teams and great organizations.
But they aren’t the tools of disruption—they are the tools of builders. So, I gave up the identity of disruptor and instead picked up the one of builder.
Without any doubt, I can tell you that building something up is 100 times harder than disrupting it.
But the experiences gained at Bentley's McCallum School, with its focus on the intersection of business, technology and ethics, prepares you well to be the builders that our society so desperately needs.
People don't trust their government, their employers, or their churches.
Governments don't trust employers and employers don't trust governments.
Church membership is on the decline. (At least here.)
High-integrity journalism is dying.
And we are becoming more divided as a nation all the time.
So, who are your heroes?
These times demand a different type of hero than the ones I had so admired. Society requires heroes who are able to build, bind, and bring together the best in people.
Jobs and industries can be created.
Trust can be earned.
And we can negotiate and engage one another to become stronger and more united.
You can be the new heroes we need to create a better world.