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Posts Tagged ‘Margaret Heffernan’

Willful blindness? Even when Mortality rate is sky high?

Posted by: on: August 7, 2016

Willful blindness?

Gayla Benefield was just doing her job — until she uncovered an awful secret about her hometown that meant its mortality rate was 80 times higher than anywhere else in the US.

But when she tried to tell people about it, she learned an even more shocking truth: People didn’t want to know.

In a talk that’s part history lesson, part call-to-action, Margaret Heffernan demonstrates the danger of willful blindness, and praises ordinary people like Benefield who are willing to speak up.

Margaret Heffernan. Management thinker

The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns — like conflict avoidance and selective blindness — that lead organizations and managers astray. Full bio
Filmed March 2013
In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there’s a little town called Libby, Montana, and it’s surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky.
And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated.  In Libby, Montana, there’s a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield. She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she’s been there almost all her life, a woman of Russian extraction.
She told me when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing. Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters — gas meters, electricity meters.
She was doing the work in the middle of the day, and one thing particularly caught her notice, which was, in the middle of the day she met a lot of men who were at home, middle aged, late middle aged, and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks.
It struck her as strange. Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension. He’d been a miner.
Patsy Z shared this link

Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there’s information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage Not to know, the law deems that you’re willfully blind. You have chosen not to know…

The dangers of willful blindness
ted.com|By Margaret Heffernan
She thought he must just have been worn out by the work. But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever.
In fact, Gayla’s uncle is still alive to this day, and learning how to waltz. It didn’t make sense that Gayla’s mother should die so young. It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies. And as she did, other ones came to mind. She remembered, for example, when her mother had broken a leg and went into the hospital, and she had a lot of x-rays, and two of them were leg x-rays, which made sense, but six of them were chest x-rays, which didn’t.
She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents’ life, trying to understand what she was seeing. She thought about her town. The town had a vermiculite mine in it.
Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners, to make plants grow faster and better. Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts, huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters.
Vermiculite was in the playground. It was in the football ground. It was in the skating rink. What she didn’t learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos.
When she figured out the puzzle, she started telling everyone she could what had happened, what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons. But she was really amazed.
She thought, when everybody knows, they’ll want to do something, but actually nobody wanted to know. In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, to her friends, to other people in the community, that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said, “Yes, I’m from Libby, Montana, and no, I don’t have asbestosis.”
But Gayla didn’t stop. She kept doing research. The advent of the Internet definitely helped her. She talked to anybody she could. She argued and argued, and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area, and she told him her story, and at first, he didn’t believe her, but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right.
now she had an ally. Nevertheless, people still didn’t want to know. They said things like,
“Well, if it were really dangerous, someone would have told us.”
“If that’s really why everyone was dying, the doctors would have told us.”
Some of the guys used to do very heavy jobs said, “I don’t want to be a victim. I can’t possibly be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents.”
But still Gayla went on, and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town — 15,000 people — and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States.
That was in 2002, and even at that moment, no one raised their hand to say, “Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing. It’s lined with vermiculite.” This wasn’t ignorance. It was willful blindness.
Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there’s information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you’re willfully blind. You have chosen not to know.
There’s a lot of willful blindness around these days.
You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.
You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but everyone studiously ignored it.
You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored.
You could see willful blindness in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those, and it also exists on very small scales, in people’s families, in people’s homes and communities, and particularly in organizations and institutions. Companies that have been studied for willful blindness can be asked questions like, “Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise?”
And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States, what they find is 85% of people say yes. Eighty-five percent of people know there’s a problem, but they won’t say anything.
And when I duplicated the research in Europe, asking all the same questions, I found exactly the same number. Eighty-five percent. That’s a lot of silence. It’s a lot of blindness.
And what’s really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me, “This is a uniquely Swiss problem.”
And when I go to Germany, they say, “Oh yes, this is the German disease.” And when I go to companies in England, they say, “Oh, yeah, the British are really bad at this.”
And the truth is, this is a human problem. We’re all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind.
What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear. They’re afraid of retaliation. And some people are blind because they think, seeing anything is just futile. Nothing’s ever going to change.
If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother? Better not to see this stuff at all. And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say, “Well, you know, the people who do see, they’re whistleblowers, and we all know what happens to them.”
So there’s this profound mythology around whistleblowers which says, first of all, they’re all crazy. But what I’ve found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is, actually, they’re very loyal and quite often very conservative people. They’re hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for, and the reason that they speak up, the reason they insist on seeing, is because they care so much about the institution and want to keep it healthy.
And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, “Well, there’s no point, because you see what happens to them. They are crushed. Nobody would want to go through something like that.”
Yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride. I think of Joe Darby. We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq. But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby, the very obedient, good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in. And he said, “You know, I’m not the kind of guy to rat people out, but some things just cross the line. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but you can’t put up with things like this.”
I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for 5 years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies. And I asked him why he did it, and he said, “Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it. She came up to me one night, and she just said, ‘Dad, you can’t let the kids die.'”
Or I think of Cynthia Thomas, a really loyal army daughter and army wife, who, as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq War, was so shocked by their mental condition and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome that she set up a cafe in the middle of a military town to give them legal, psychological and medical assistance.
And she said to me, “You know, Margaret, I always used to say I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grow up. But I’ve found myself in this cause, and I’ll never be the same.”
We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn’t here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want.
But freedom doesn’t exist if you don’t use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have. And what they’re very prepared to do is recognize that yes, this is going to be an argument, and yes I’m going to have a lot of rows with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends, but I’m going to become very good at this conflict.
I’m going to take on the naysayers, because they’ll make my argument better and stronger. I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do.
These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent. When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being, a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn’t want to acknowledge that she’d been right.
I sat in a diner, and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway, carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil.
I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla. And she said, “Why? What’s the big deal?” I said, “She’s not a movie star, and she’s not a celebrity, and she’s not an expert, and Gayla’s the first person who’d say she’s not a saint. The really important thing about Gayla is she is ordinary. She’s like you, and she’s like me. She had freedom, and she was ready to use it.” .
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And if you Dared to disagree? Could you keep your job?

Posted by: on: February 6, 2016

Dare to disagree

Margaret Heffernan. Posted Aug 2012

In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart. And Alice was unusual partly because, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s.

And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians. She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids, and even after she got divorced and was a single parent, she continued her medical work.

00:43 And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science, the emerging field of epidemiology, the study of patterns in disease. But like every scientist, she appreciated that to make her mark, what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it.

The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers. Most disease is correlated with poverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent families. So, what, she wanted to know, could explain this anomaly?

01:23 Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research. In the end, she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize. And that meant she knew she only had one shot at collecting her data. Now, she had no idea what to look for.

This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search, so she asked everything she could think of. Had the children eaten boiled sweets? Had they consumed colored drinks? Did they eat fish and chips? Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbing? What time of life had they started school?

01:54 And when her carbon copied questionnaire started to come back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of. By a rate of two to one, the children who had died had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant. Now that finding flew in the face of conventional wisdom.

Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point, a threshold. It flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age, which was the X-ray machine. And it flew in the face of doctors’ idea of themselves, which was as people who helped patients, they didn’t harm them.

02:46 Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956. People got very excited, there was talk of the Nobel Prize, and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared. In fact, she need not have hurried.

It was fully 25 years before the British and medical — British and American medical establishments abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women. The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know. A child a week was dying, but nothing changed. Openness alone can’t drive change.

 So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands.

How did she know that she was right? Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking.

She worked with a statistician named George Kneale, and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn’t. So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse. Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients. George frankly preferred numbers to people. But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship. He said, “My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong.”

He actively sought disconfirmation. Different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching the data in order to disprove her. He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories. Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right.

04:55 It’s a fantastic model of collaboration — thinking partners who aren’t echo chambers. I wonder how many of us have, or dare to have, such collaborators. Alice and George were very good at conflict. They saw it as thinking.

05:21 So what does that kind of constructive conflict require? Well, first of all, it requires that we find people who are very different from ourselves. That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them. That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.

05:57 And the more I’ve thought about this, the more I think, really, that that’s a kind of love. Because you simply won’t commit that kind of energy and time if you don’t really care.

And it also means that we have to be prepared to change our minds. Alice’s daughter told me that every time Alice went head-to-head with a fellow scientist, they made her think and think and think again. “My mother,” she said, “My mother didn’t enjoy a fight, but she was really good at them.”

06:35 So it’s one thing to do that in a one-to-one relationship. But it strikes me that the biggest problems we face, many of the biggest disasters that we’ve experienced, mostly haven’t come from individuals, they’ve come from organizations, some of them bigger than countries, many of them capable of affecting hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives.

So how do organizations think?

Well, for the most part, they don’t. And that isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s really because they can’t.

And they can’t because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict.

In surveys of European and American executives, fully 85 percent of them acknowledged that they had issues or concerns at work that they were afraid to raise. Afraid of the conflict that that would provoke, afraid to get embroiled in arguments that they did not know how to manage, and felt that they were bound to lose.

Eighty-five percent is a really big number. It means that organizations mostly can’t do what George and Alice so triumphantly did. They can’t think together. And it means that people like many of us, who have run organizations, and gone out of our way to try to find the very best people we can, mostly fail to get the best out of them.

08:14 So how do we develop the skills that we need? Because it does take skill and practice, too.

If we aren’t going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking, and then we have to get really good at it. So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe, and Joe worked for a medical device company.

And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on. He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people. He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help.

But when he looked around his organization, nobody else seemed to be at all worried. So, he didn’t really want to say anything. After all, maybe they knew something he didn’t. Maybe he’d look stupid. But he kept worrying about it, and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved.

09:21 In the end, Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns.

And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation. It turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts. So now Joe had allies. They could think together. And yes, there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument, but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative, to solve the problem, and to change the device.

Joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower, except that like almost all whistle-blowers, he wasn’t a crank at all, he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served. But he had been so afraid of conflict, until finally he became more afraid of the silence.

And when he dared to speak, he discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined. And his colleagues don’t think of him as a crank. They think of him as a leader.

10:42 So, how do we have these conversations more easily and more often? Well, the University of Delft requires that its PhD students have to submit five statements that they’re prepared to defend. It doesn’t really matter what the statements are about, what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority. I think it’s a fantastic system, but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people, and way too late in life. I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development, if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society.

11:29 The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we’ve witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can’t handle, don’t want to handle, the conflict that it provokes. But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.

12:10 Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential. But the truth won’t set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. Openness isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.

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Drop the Super-chicken Model in the workplace

Posted by: on: July 9, 2015

Drop the Super-chicken Model in the workplace

An evolutionary biologist at Purdue University named William Muir studied chickens. He was interested in productivity — I think it’s something that concerns all of us — but it’s easy to measure in chickens because you just count the eggs.

He wanted to know what could make his chickens more productive, so he devised a beautiful experiment.

Chickens live in groups, so first of all, he selected just an average flock, and he let it alone for six generations.

But then he created a second group of the individually most productive chickens — you could call them superchickens — and he put them together in a superflock, and each generation, he selected only the most productive for breeding.

After six generations had passed, what did he find?

Well, the first group, the average group, was doing just fine. They were all plump and fully feathered and egg production had increased dramatically.

What about the second group? Well, all but three were dead. They’d pecked the rest to death. (Laughter)

The individually productive chickens had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest.

As I’ve gone around the world talking about this and telling this story in all sorts of organizations and companies, people have seen the relevance almost instantly, and they come up and they say things to me like, “That superflock, that’s my company.” (Laughter) Or, “That’s my country.” Or, “That’s my life.”

All my life I’ve been told that the way we have to get ahead is to compete: get into the right school, get into the right job, get to the top, and I’ve really never found it very inspiring.

I’ve started and run businesses because invention is a joy, and because working alongside brilliant, creative people is its own reward.

And I’ve never really felt very motivated by pecking orders or by superchickens or by superstars.

But for the past 50 years, we’ve run most organizations and some societies along the superchicken model. We’ve thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men, or occasionally women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power.

And the result has been just the same as in William Muir’s experiment: aggression, dysfunction and waste. If the only way the most productive can be successful is by suppressing the productivity of the rest, then we badly need to find a better way to work and a richer way to live. (Applause)

What is it that makes some groups obviously more successful and more productive than others?

Well, that’s the question a team at MIT took to research. They brought in hundreds of volunteers, they put them into groups, and they gave them very hard problems to solve.

And what happened was exactly what you’d expect, that some groups were very much more successful than others, but what was really interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those where they had one or two people with spectacularly high I.Q.

Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate I.Q.

Instead, they had 3 characteristics, the really successful teams.

1.  they showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. This is measured by something called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. It’s broadly considered a test for empathy, and the groups that scored highly on this did better.

2.  the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers.

3. the more successful groups had more women in them. 

Now, was this because women typically score more highly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, so you’re getting a doubling down on the empathy quotient?

Or was it because they brought a more diverse perspective?

We don’t really know, but the striking thing about this experiment is that it showed what we know, which is some groups do better than others, but what’s key to that is their social connectedness to each other.

How does this play out in the real world?

Well, it means that what happens between people really counts, because in groups that are highly attuned and sensitive to each other, ideas can flow and grow. People don’t get stuck. They don’t waste energy down dead ends.

5:13 An example: Arup is one of the world’s most successful engineering firms, and it was commissioned to build the equestrian center for the Beijing Olympics. Now, this building had to receive 2,500 really highly strung thoroughbred horses that were coming off long-haul flights, highly jet-lagged, not feeling their finest.

And the problem the engineer confronted was, what quantity of waste to cater for?

Now, you don’t get taught this in engineering school — (Laughter) — and it’s not really the kind of thing you want to get wrong, so he could have spent months talking to vets, doing the research, tweaking the spreadsheet.

Instead, he asked for help and he found someone who had designed the Jockey Club in New York. The problem was solved in less than a day. Arup believes that the culture of helpfulness is central to their success.

Helpfulness sounds really anemic, but it’s absolutely core to successful teams, and it routinely outperforms individual intelligence.

Helpfulness means I don’t have to know everything, I just have to work among people who are good at getting and giving help.

At SAP, they reckon that you can answer any question in 17 minutes. But there isn’t a single high-tech company I’ve worked with that imagines for a moment that this is a technology issue, because what drives helpfulness is people getting to know each other.

Now that sounds so obvious, and we think it’ll just happen normally, but it doesn’t.

When I was running my first software company, I realized that we were getting stuck. There was a lot of friction, but not much else, and I gradually realized the brilliant, creative people that I’d hired didn’t know each other. They were so focused on their own individual work, they didn’t even know who they were sitting next to, and it was only when I insisted that we stop working and invest time in getting to know each other that we achieved real momentum.

Now, that was 20 years ago, and now I visit companies that have banned coffee cups at desks because they want people to hang out around the coffee machines and talk to each other.

The Swedes even have a special term for this. They call it fika, which means more than a coffee break. It means collective restoration.

At Idexx, a company up in Maine, they’ve created vegetable gardens on campus so that people from different parts of the business can work together and get to know the whole business that way. Have they all gone mad?

Quite the opposite — they’ve figured out that when the going gets tough, and it always will get tough if you’re doing breakthrough work that really matters, what people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help. Companies don’t have ideas; only people do.

And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks.

When you put all of this together, what you get is something called social capital.

Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust. The term comes from sociologists who were studying communities that proved particularly resilient in times of stress.

Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust.

What does this mean in practical terms?

It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candor and openness.

And time is what builds value.

When Alex Pentland suggested to one company that they synchronize coffee breaks so that people would have time to talk to each other, profits went up 15 million dollars, and employee satisfaction went up 10 percent. Not a bad return on social capital, which compounds even as you spend it.

Now, this isn’t about chumminess, and it’s no charter for slackers, because people who work this way tend to be kind of scratchy, impatient, absolutely determined to think for themselves because that’s what their contribution is.

Conflict is frequent because candor is safe.

And that’s how good ideas turn into great ideas, because no idea is born fully formed. It emerges a little bit as a child is born, kind of messy and confused, but full of possibilities.

And it’s only through the generous contribution, faith and challenge that they achieve their potential. And that’s what social capital supports.

Now, we aren’t really used to talking about this, about talent, about creativity, in this way. We’re used to talking about stars. So I started to wonder, well, if we start working this way, does that mean no more stars?

So I went and I sat in on the auditions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. And what I saw there really surprised me, because the teachers weren’t looking for individual pyrotechnics. They were looking for what happened between the students, because that’s where the drama is.

And when I talked to producers of hit albums, they said, “Oh sure, we have lots of superstars in music. It’s just, they don’t last very long. It’s the outstanding collaborators who enjoy the long careers, because bringing out the best in others is how they found the best in themselves.”

And when I went to visit companies that are renowned for their ingenuity and creativity, I couldn’t even see any superstars, because everybody there really mattered.

And when I reflected on my own career, and the extraordinary people I’ve had the privilege to work with, I realized how much more we could give each other if we just stopped trying to be superchickens.

Once you appreciate truly how social work is, a lot of things have to change.

Management by talent contest has routinely pitted employees against each other.

Now, rivalry has to be replaced by social capital.

For decades, we’ve tried to motivate people with money, even though we’ve got a vast amount of research that shows that money erodes social connectedness. Now, we need to let people motivate each other.

And for years, we’ve thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected, all by themselves, to solve complex problems.

Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together.

We know that this works. When the Montreal Protocol called for the phasing out of CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons implicated in the hole in the ozone layer, the risks were immense.

CFCs were everywhere, and nobody knew if a substitute could be found. But one team that rose to the challenge adopted 3 key principles.

The first was the head of engineering, Frank Maslen, said, there will be no stars in this team. We need everybody. Everybody has a valid perspective.

Second, we work to one standard only: the best imaginable. And

Third, he told his boss, Geoff Tudhope, that he had to butt out, because he knew how disruptive power can be.

Now, this didn’t mean Tudhope did nothing. He gave the team air cover, and he listened to ensure that they honored their principles. And it worked: Ahead of all the other companies tackling this hard problem, this group cracked it first.

And to date, the Montreal Protocol is the most successful international environmental agreement ever implemented.

15:00 There was a lot at stake then, and there’s a lot at stake now, and we won’t solve our problems if we expect it to be solved by a few supermen or superwomen.

Now we need everybody, because it is only when we accept that everybody has value that we will liberate the energy and imagination and momentum we need to create the best beyond measure.

Patsy Z and TEDxSKE shared a link.
Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work
Organizations are often run according to “the superchicken model,”
the value is placed on star employees who outperform others.
And yet, this isn’t what drives the most high-achieving teams.
Business leader Margaret Heffernan observes…
ted.com|By Margaret Heffernan
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