Escape From Excellence

This post shares a personal anecdote to make a point about Leadership Mastery, specifically the results of leading from vision in mastery, vs. managing in excellence. We recently moved to a new house that we are remodeling and renovating. The entire project gave me an opportunity to overcome my personal bad side (controlling, micro-managing, worrying), and gave me a chance to practice what I preach. An example of Leaderdship Mastery in action?

Background: We live at home, and we also work at home. In addition, we exercise at home, and my audio recording studio is at home. We’ll do pod and video casting from home. So it’s not just a house, it’s headquarters. Upon moving in, we immediately needed: a new kitchen, a new mudroom, a new roof and roofline, two new offices and a meeting room. We also needed a master plan for improved deck, patio, planting, bathrooms, and for a fourth floor media room. Also, the offices and studio would need acoustic treatments for soundproofing. My wife Michele and I collaborate on everything, and we really enjoy design. But the stakes are high and the budget is never high enough! Plus, we’ve already got a lot on our plates. Would this put undue strain on us? It’s a very enlightening micro-case study.

Managing from Excellence would have had us set big goals regarding scope, timing, and costs, do extensive due diligence, assemble and vet a crack team, closely manage the details, require hard work, seek efficiencies, confirm quality, confront unexpected crises, acknowledge emotional needs, and manage all of this against strategic goals based on our desired outcomes (multiple usage, business growth). Had we taken this approach, perhaps the team (architects, vendors, contractors, and sub-contractors) would have respected and admired us in the end, and maybe they would have feared us. We’d meet our contractual obligations, always act professionally, and maybe tip a few people. Either way, the job would be done on time, on budget and well. And it would have nearly killed me, and everyone who had to deal with me! The Excellence Trap would have extracted its inevitable hidden costs.

Instead we chose Leadership Mastery, leading to an experience in which the ”only-do-it-if-you-have-to-because-it’s hell” of remodeling turned out to be a piece of cake, a delight, with better results at a lower price, and at a lower personal and business cost. How did we do it? By leading from vision; by inviting, enthusing, and inspiring everyone we worked with to participate in that vision; by encouraging them to bring their vision to the project; and then by getting out of the way! More specifically, we made the Five Shifts of Leadership Mastery.

Here’s the story, as briefly as I can tell it: (more…)

In my late youth, when it seemed that I prefered reading heavy European books instead of frolicking outside in the sunshine, I once read where Soren Kierkegaard (big deal Danish philosopher) railed against the faults of what he called “the busy man of affairs,” by whom he meant movers and shakers in business and politics. He seemed to think they were all vacant and shallow phonies who stroked their own egos while achieving nothing of value (in his view, the Copenhagen of his day was one big fat bourgeois nightmare). Well, OK, that can be true sometimes, especially when mediocrity dresses up as excellence. But it never rang entirely true to me. Kierkegaard was a giant in many ways, but he wasn’t the most well-adjusted fellow, and even his fans often have to shake their heads sometimes at his emotional foibles (he died of exhaustion and a broken heart after he lost a battle, that he started, in which he attacked, well, basically everybody in town, in print).

Many years later, I learned that Hindu’s believe that all work is good, and necessary. Great news! Take that Kierkegaard! It turns out that burgermeisters and industrialists are people too. The problem is that while it may be all well and good to do the work of a merchant (business person), you have little chance in traditional Indian society to reinvent yourself or escape the mere excellence of your caste of birth. You have to be born a brahmin.

So I wondered (as I do): can there be a business brahmin? Can one be fully integrated and at their best, as a business leader? Short answer: Yes. But you have to escape from the mediocrity and excellence that Kierkegaard so despised, and make the transition to mastery. Then, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, there is nothing in this world more powerful and unstoppable than a fully realized brahmin. Then business isn’t busyness. It has become innovation, creativity, and vision made real for the substantive benefit of all involved. Leadership Mastery is like that.

We’ve all heard the old saying about how success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. That’s true, but it’s really only true if you’re in the excellence trap! Sure, it takes work to bring a good idea to life. And it takes skill. The Big Book of Failure is full of ideas that never saw the light of day because their creator had no idea how to take ideas from concept to reality. But when in the excellence trap, inspiration really is front and center only 1% of the time. And that’s too little. Only 1% inspiration keeps innovation rare, change small, and growth incremental. And worse, most people in excellence don’t really know how to be inspired, only driven. And there’s a difference!

Think about it. Drive is about commitment and effort, two of the virtues of excellence that get corrupted into entropy and fixation, and so become costs of excellence, specifically depletion and misalignment. On the other hand, true inspiration is about both unexpected, non-linear, innovative thinking, and genuine enthusiasm to do something with it. It comes from the Five Virtues of Mastery (energy, expression, perspective, intention, and wisdom).

The masters I know are about inspiration 70% of the time, and the rest of the time they bring it to life, more efficienlty and effectively, with lower costs and greater results. Look at the efficiency of the perfect golf swing, the effortless expression of the great saxaphone player, and even the lose-track-of-time quality of doing what you love.

Do these people look like they’re working? We’ve all known people who say, “That’s why they call it work.” But I have never met a master who says that! Only failures and mediocrities say that. They may be nice hard working people, salt of the earth, but they’ve lost the plot. Instead, masters say, “All work in sacred.” If you interrupted, say, Tiger Woods or Charlie Parker during a training or practice session, they’d likely tell you how hard they are working, and they are. Then ask them if they’d rather be doing anything else. Anyone want to guess what they’d say? (Hint: rhymes with snow). Their work and their inspiration are one. That is sacred work. That is mastery.

Each 1% increase in inspiration can create an exponential return. So let’s maximize return on investment by increasing Return on Inspiration.

Let’s talk about the crucial idea of the Falling Point. This is where the rubber meets the road, or really more like where the poop hits the fan. This explains just how and when the Excellence Trap gets us.

When we surpass the built-in limit of any of the Virtues of Excellence, which inevitably occurs, we reach the Falling Point. When this happens, our lifelong upward arc gradually takes a new direction, and at first we don’t even notice. This is the great irony of being excellent; eventually it bites us, and we don’t know why. But, like a subatomic particle or distant star, we can’t see it directly; we can only “see” it by its effects.

These effects include all the costs and challenges that we observe confronting those hardworking, well- intentioned, capable, successful, and excellent people we mentioned earlier: struggling to achieve the extra 5%, sustain peak performance and innovation, while confronting merely incremental change, marginal outcomes, limited advantage, and inconsistent inspiration, focus, and alignment with values and goals.

The Falling Point is sort of like the point of diminishing returns, except that it is really more like the point of incurring and accruing hidden and unnecessary costs. Big difference.

The moment we reach the Falling Point, on any one of the Virtues, the Corruptions of Excellence set in and the Costs of Excellence come racing behind. This explains why good people aren’t enjoying a life of mastery. And this is precisely what forces the choice between 1. falling back into mediocrity or 2. ascending to mastery, if you’re even fortunate enough to make the choice; most driven people just stick it out in excellence, not knowing what hit them, until the costs become too high. In the meantime, they ride the roller coaster, play the odds, and try to beat the clock, all the while wasting time with the Five Failed Strategies of Excellence.

But take heart, every master was there once. Then they escaped from excellence.

 Remeber this: We don’t cross the Falling Point because we have failed in any way. Quite the opposite. We only cross it if we are excellent! And that is how excellence traps us, every time.

Everybody is replaceable, right? Well, 99% of the time this is true, even when talking about successful, excellent leaders. But this weekend, in episode four of the series John Adams on HBO, I watched with interest as Thomas Jefferson corrected Ben Franklin by telling him that he could never replace Franklin as US Representative in Paris, but could only succeed him. Putting Jefferson’s own future achievements aside, this one line speaks volumes: masters can never be replaced, only succeeded. The goal of any master is to be succeeded by another master. And each master is unique. Jefferson at once recognized Franklin’s mastery, and made an implicit claim for his own!

But excellence is replaceable. Always. Because excellence is based on things like skill and effort, however advanced, it is replicable. In this way, “succession planning” may be a useful nicety to spare our feelings, it is a misnomer. It should be called replacement planning. That sounds bad, but it tells a difficult truth. If you are excellent, whether you’re the crack new recuit or the successful CEO, you are replaceable. And of course, that is good for the ongoing health of the excellent business. If excellence were good enough (it isn’t).

But masters leave a different legacy. Masters can only be succeeded. If they are succeeded by another master, all will be well. If not, the company throws the dice and hopes for the best, dealing with excellence, mediocrity, and failure over time and in turn. But in great mastery traditions, unlike business, for example in martial arts, music or comedy improvization, and monastic Buddhism, and probably in symphony conducting, there is a process of identification, initiation, and development into mastery, beyond excellence (you already have to be excellent even to be considered). In these places, mastery is planned and demanded. No mastery, no mantle.

But most so-called corporate “succession planning” only deepens the excellence, and the excellence trap, of the candidate for leadership; and in this it often succeeds. Unfortunately, the excellent leader then spends his or her time in leadership dealing with the limits and costs of excellence (read all about them here). 

We need Mastery Planning. A leader must work to develop mastery before taking the helm, or as quickly as possible thereafter. And the bench must include other masters in training, while the entire organization develops a culture of mastery, not just of success. Band-aids like “Lessons from Company X” pale in comparison to what would happen if a leader (and everyone else) learned and applied the lessons of a genuine mastery tradition. That would be something! This could be approximated by appropriating the methods of the various mastery traditions. But in practice this is usually a force fit when applied to business, and often fights with business. Business needs it own mastery; business needs to become a mastery tradition in it’s own right! A better way may be to check out what we’ve created, specifically for business, here.

I recently spoke with the members of the senior management team of a global industry leader, all of whom described the team, each other, and even themselves, as all but paralyzed by fear. The fear of being called out by the CEO, criticized by the CEO, thrown under the bus by the CEO (or each other), of making alliances, of taking a stand, of not knowing something, of the person below them who wants their job. As with any senior management team at a successful company, this is a group of highly accomplished, well compensated, confident players with strong personalities and a take-the-hill mindset, individually and collectively. So what the hell is going on? Labeling the CEO a tyrant is most likely true, but it’s a cop out. Why? Because masters have no fear. If there was ever a group of people trapped in excellence and back-sliding into mediocrity and failure, this was it.

We are all hardwired for fear, as a way to protect ourselves. This is good. But in a business setting, strategic acumen is too often replaced by crippling fear. Not good. Let’s take a look at fear from the perspectives of failure, mediocrity, excellence, and mastery. Only mastery has no fear.

For the failure, fear takes over. The fear of a failure is terror. Terror paralyzes us into inaction, and defeats us. We become weak in the face of fear, choosing a flight response. The actions we do take are desperate, leading nowhere. Metaphor: the Deer, frozen in the headlights.

For the mediocre, fear manifests in swagger or bravado, which only denies fear and overcompensates with a fight response. The mediocre person rallies themself and blusters their way into a fight. Their actions are misguided and wasteful. They are aggressive and mercurial, and at times violent. But it is only themselves they are hurting. Metaphor: the Stinging Bee.

In the excellence trap, we see bravado evolve into bravery. Bravery is good insofar as it draws upon our internal character to find the strength to face fear. Excellent people do what they have to do, despite fear, and they work hard to do it well. Metaphor: the Adventurer. The problem is that they are still in fear, and fear takes a toll. No person functions at a peak level in fear, whteher they face it or not. No leader innovates, makes wise decisions, and holds a vision at a masterful level when in fear. They can only hope to maintain or, at best, grow just a little. Any it appears that many excellent leaders are in fear much of the time.

In mastery, the leader has no fear. He or she doesn’t give in to it, attack it, or even face it; they simply don’t have it! A leadership master reframes fear as an illusion and rejects it. Everyone else around them is either shaking in their boots, lashing out, or living with a knot in their stomach, but not the master. He or she replaces all this fear with trust: in themselves, their resources, other people and their ability to work with the best in people, and in life itself. This is not a naive trust, but rather a wise equinimity or unflappability in the face of challenges or imagined dangers. Masters know that fear is a con. Metaphor: the Acrobat. They use all that the absence of fear leaves them with to soar high, dazzle, and inspire.

So when a wise sage says, “Have no fear,” they mean exactly that! They didn’t say “Be brave,” as admirable as that is. Instead, they called us to change the game.

So I ask the terrified and terrorized managers: what’s worse? getting your ass handed to you by a tyrant, or losing your mojo? Being embarrased, and maybe even punished, or sacrificing the best of you on the alter of  mediocrity and failure, at best pushing the boulder uphill while stuck in the excellence trap? ”Hey, I want to keep my job and get promoted so I can be good to my kids” some of them might protest. Give me a break! No kid wants or needs a compromised and fearful zombie dressed up as an exec for a parent. And no wise CEO will promote one. No, better to work toward mastery, so fear simply goes away. Masters ALWAYS flourish. And a group of Masters in one place is unstoppable. I recommend that this management team work to that goal, and I work with all of my clients to exactly that goal. I must say, maybe the CEO isn’t a tyrant. Perhaps he is challenging them to get past fear, however clumsily (Hmm..can there be a zen tyrant? Probably).

Here’s an exercise. Try this at home, or during a commute or trip. Make an inventory of everything you have decided in the past day, week, month, year, decade, or lifetime (focus only on bigger decisions as the timeframe expands). Be brutally honest, and then put each decision into one of two columns. Column one represents the House of Fear, and column two is the House of Faith (or Trust). Bluster and bravado will only screw it up, so put that aside if it shows up. And bravery, while excellent and admirable, carries a cost. Be honest.  Do any decisions seem masterful, truly fearless? Put them in the House of Faith column. Let’s work for more of that!

I live for Leadership Mastery, and I invite you to experience it. But what is it?

Let’s start with mastery itself, and what it is not. Mastery isn’t the pinnacle of excellence. You don’t reach it by being most excellent, in Ted-speak. That will only keep you out of mastery. Mastery is different from excellence not in degree, but in kind. Every master knows this; but nobody else seems to be in on the secret. As Charlie Parker said, “Learn all this stuff (to be excellent) and then forget it (to be a master).”

So what is it? Mastery is when performance increases exponentially, while costs fall dramatically. That bears repeating. In mastery, performance increases exponentially, while costs fall dramatically. It accounts for how the best athletes, performers, artists, sages, and even warriors can blow our minds with what they do, inspire us, and serve as iconic frames of reference, while making it look easy, with grace and style. It is what differentiates the best from the rest, decisively.

 But what is Leadership Mastery? This used to be a tough question because, unlike athletes, performers, etc., leaders have not had a vision or path to mastery. So most have been trapped in excellence. The only exception would be if a leader had achieved mastery in another field and translated it somehow to his or her own leadership in an organization. This is extremely rare because most people, if they are masters in a field (for example golf, acting, painting, music, thinking, or inventing) stick to that field; it is their identity.

Like all mastery, Leadership Mastery is defined by exponentially increased performance and dramatically reduced costs. In organizational leadership we see more innovation, alignment, efficiency, sustainability, focus, capacity, integrity, return, growth, and vision, and less struggle for that extra increment of performance, as well as dramatically less of the financial and human costs that characterize the merely excellent organization. The masterful leader aligns more, inspires more, gets it right more often, sees more, creates more, and keeps himself or herself whole in mind, body and spirit in a way that is remarkable to all who observe, follow, or compete with them. They soar high, while appearing relaxed and ready for more. Leaders in Mastery put incremental growth and marginal change, achieved at a high cost, behind them once and for all. And so do their teams, organizations, and partners.

It’s not magic, not a put on. It’s not superhuman. It’s not the result of cutting a deal at the crossroads. But it is rare. And it is teachable and reachable because leaders now have a path to mastery. This blog, my keynote speaking, workshops, and work with clients all focus on doing exactly this. If you are tired of seeing excellent people and organizations pay a high price for incremantal growth and marginal change, you’ve already taken the first step. So welcome!