The Right and Left Brain Blog

Have you heard of Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Chad Hurley, or Jawed Karim? They are under 40 years old and the founders of companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook and PayPal. All of these entrepreneurs and thousands of others have tremendous skills, have developed revolutionary concepts, bucked the system, followed their dreams and devoted unending energy to make their efforts successful.

This is not a new phenomenon. America was built by great innovative entrepreneurs such as Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison. The challenge is to change our individual, organizational, and cultural norms to focus on encouraging rather than diluting exceptional performance. In today’s challenging environment, we need to explore ways to overcome the bleak the realities and step out to face new challenges. How do we really promote excellence at the individual, organizational and social level? There are easily doable actions:

1. Recognize your strengths and weaknesses and pursue the strengths. In particular, it is the weaknesses that are frequently ignored.
2. Seek opportunities where you can succeed. People are frequently loathe to quit many dead end jobs or admit they are wasting their careers.
3. Have the confidence to pursue what you should be doing. Many times both individuals and organizations minimize risk even if the payoffs more than the justify risk. Similarly, we need to work on the factors that reduce confidence. For example, working in troubled organizations can simply be deadly.
4. Spending too much time trying to correct weaknesses rather than exploiting advantages can result in significant lost opportunities. Organizations continue to feed lost causes and ignore realities.
5. You cannot achieve excellence or meet goals if you are not measuring the result and getting and receiving feedback. In particular, rewarding success both small and big in terms of both psychological and career rewards becomes a self fulfilling prophecy in creating more excellence.
6. If you don’t mistakes, you aren’t trying hard enough. This is the best phrase I have heard in terms of learning to accept risk. The key issue is not to encourage failure but do the successes justify then total effort.
7. We must recognize the importance of upgrading ourselves, our organizations and our society.

In summary, it is clear that both individuals and organizations have over emphasized the risk of failure versus the rewards of success. One need only look at the old line industries such as automobiles, and furniture to realize that many of them are simply not adapting to their changing environments and taking the necessary risks to survive. Similarly, individuals underestimate the risk of staying in poor situations and the rewards of trying to maximize their capabilities.