Leadership Excavator

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

...it can be the difference between success and failure.

What critical information are you trying to communicate? How could you present it more clearly?

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

you must present it in a way that makes the implications crystal clear. They ruthlessly simplify their message, highlighting the relationships that matter most. They know that in critical moments, clarity isn't just about good communication –

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

They overwhelm their audience with data rather than highlighting the key relationships that matter most. They bury their main message in unnecessary detail rather than bringing it to the forefront.

The best leaders know that having the right information isn't enough –

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

Engineers at Morton Thiokol tried to prevent the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger in January 1986, they had the data to prove it was too cold for a safe launch. But they failed to present that data in a way that made their case compelling.

The result was catastrophic.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

We see this same pattern play out in organizations every day. Leaders often have critical information or insights, but they fail to communicate them in a way that drives understanding and action.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

The relationship between cold temperatures and O-ring failure would have been immediately apparent to anyone looking at such a graph. Instead, the engineers buried their crucial insights in complex tables and cluttered slides that obscured that key relationship.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

Data visualization expert Edward Tufte later showed that a simple scatter plot of O-ring damage versus temperature would have made the danger obvious.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

Source:

https://t.co/MBoWQDqb0U

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

If you can defeat an organization’s core values with a layer of paint… were they even core values to begin with?

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

If they’re only showing up in vinyl font on a hallway, your organizational issues go much deeper than a layer of paint.

Values should be lived.
Leaders should wear them like a forehead tattoo.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

@TheSamerAli I'm sure you do, Samer. Never a down-side.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

Inside the "rules" of a team sport. Picking a fight to motivate your team may be very effective.

But would you lose credibility in any other arena for doing this?

https://t.co/hDbi0a5Wjt

[𝗦𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗿 𝗔𝗹𝗶™ @TheSamerAli]

Baker Mayfield knew EXACTLY what he was doing at the end of this play. He woke up the rest of the offense in that moment, and they fucking needed it. Leadership comes in many forms... #WeAreTheKrewe

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

So ask yourself...
How will I feel about this decision next week?
...next year?
...next decade?

Is 'future you' just as comfortable with the behavior?

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

Imagine choosing to do something similar in business to a competitor... only to recognize that you've lost the ability to make a lateral move to another company because of who you might have offended.

The best leaders know how to be effective while keeping relationships intact.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

Many times, the way to explore a question like this is by stretching out the time horizon.

Maybe even Baker Mayfield would regret doing this in five years time if he has a handful of different teammates on a new team who were on the Saints defense at the time.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

What is a leader to do when the message is right, but the timing of it draws this kind of criticism?

We will see in the coming days if Allstate chooses to continue to lead on this point, despite the criticism, or if the team who wrote this 30 second spot has already been fired.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

Tom Wilson, CEO of Allstate, sponsor of the SugarBowl that was played in New Orleans a day after the terrorist attack, opened the broadcast with message.
https://t.co/LDtC6nMUWP

[Steve Cortes @CortesSteve]

Tone deaf, PC moron Tom Wilson delivered a message, as CEO of ⁦@Allstate⁩ — mowing down 15 innocent Americans with a truck is just an “imperfection”???

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

The response online was swift and harsh.
It also kinda proved the point Tom was trying to make.

Do we "need to be stronger together by overcoming an addiction to divisiveness and negativity"?

or

Do we just treat the call to be better with negativity and divisiveness?

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

-resilience in the face of setbacks
-a commitment to self-improvement
-the ability to recognize when a strategy isn't working
-the creativity to find alternative paths
-the courage to bet on yourself and make your own opportunities.

[Leadership Excavator @LeaderExcavator]

Strong leaders don't wait to be chosen - they choose themselves and make things happen through their own initiative and force of will.

In summary, this article highlights several key behaviors that are worth cultivating as a leader:

[Billy Oppenheimer @bpoppenheimer]

A few years into trying to land acting jobs, in 1988, Matt Damon auditioned for Dead Poets Society.

Again, he didn’t get it.

Soon after, he got a summer job at The Janus, a single-screen movie theater in his hometown.

“It played 1 fucking movie the entire summer,” Damon said:

“Dead Poets Society.”

“So, you go from the possibility of being in the movie to the guy wearing a maroon vest and black bow tie, tearing the ticket, and watching people come out crying because they're so moved by the movie.”

“It was like getting kicked in the teeth three times a day, every day.”

Damon persisted on the auditioning circuit, and over the next few years, he landed a few small, uncredited, and non-speaking roles.

Then in 1995, he auditioned for the part of Aaron Stampler in Primal Fear.

From years of reading scipts, auditioning, getting rejected, and watching other's careers take off—Damon developed an instinct for recognizing when something had potential to be a break-out role.

After reading the Primal Fear script, Damon said, “I spent money I didn’t have on a dialect coach because it was clear that whoever got that role was going to blow up.”

Edward Norton got the role. Selected over 2,000 other prospects, Norton made his acting debut, a break-out performance for which he won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination in the same category.

After watching Norton’s rise, Damon decided to change his approach to trying to break into Hollywood.

“I knew there wasn’t going to be many more of those roles to come around,” he said.

“It was like, ‘What are the odds that a movie with that good a role is going to make it all the way through the ranks of known actors, and then get thrown to the wolves, and then after all of us fight for that scrap, one of us gets it? This ain’t gonna work. I got to do my own thing.’”

“That was really the impetus behind Ben [Affleck] and I writing Good Will Hunting...We wrote that movie specifically because we wanted the parts as actors.”

Takeaway 1: Do Not Fight The Last War

In The 33 Strategies of War, Robert Greene uses the phrase “fighting the last war” to describe the tendency to get stuck repeating the same tactics, strategies, ways of thinking, and so on.

In warfare, a general who carries the tactics from a previous battle into the next is said to be fighting the last war, a critique of their failure to adapt to present realities and circumstances.

In civilian life, Greene writes, “what most often weighs you down and brings you misery is...your tendency to fight the last war...You must force yourself to strike out in new directions. Attack problems from new angles,”

Repeatedly trying and failing to be selected for roles—Damon was fighting the last war.

Finally, he struck out in a new direction and attacked the problem from a new angle.

Takeaway 2: Make Your Own Turn

Like Damon, Greta Gerwig spent many years not doing what she wanted to do. Since she was a kid, Gerwig wanted to be a director. At one point, she met with executives at Sony Pictures to try to persuade the studio to let her direct an adaptation of Little Women.

“Who are you?” one exec said. “I don’t know who you are.”

Accepting that to get what she wanted, she’d have to “will it into existence,” Gerwig wrote an original screenplay, Lady Bird, with which she made her directorial debut and earned 3 Oscar nominations, including Best Director.

After Lady Bird’s success, she said, Sony “came back around and said, ‘do you want to direct Little Woman?’”

Reflecting on her path, Gerwig said,

“When you’re coming up, you kind of have this sense that somebody at some point will be like, ‘Now it’s your turn. And it doesn’t ever happen like that...There’s no man behind the curtain who goes, ‘ok, your turn now.’ You have to make your own turn. You have to will it into existence.”

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“The system is not built for you to succeed. You have to break through it.” — Matt Damon