Design for Your Strengths PART I
Paul Leinwand, coauthor of Strategy That Works,
introduces a counterintuitive lesson in how to achieve breakthrough performance
in your organization from Olympic medalist John K. Coyle.
In their efforts to compete, business
strategists often forget a basic principle: Build from your strengths. The most
successful companies have a clear, well-articulated view of what's important to
them and their customers. They understand that the way to win consistently is
through what they do rather than what they sell.
These companies also understand that “what
they do” is unique to them; they have their own capabilities and practices that
no other company could quite duplicate, even if it tried. In that sense,
building from your strengths is the most reliable way we have found to
differentiate your company.
This advice is easy to state and difficult to
follow — not just in business, but in every aspect of human endeavor. Focusing
on what you are great at doing is intuitively compelling, but few companies
drive their strategy this way. It’s too easy to get caught up in chasing what
others do — fixing the inevitably long list of weaknesses in your company, or
seeking out what’s new in a world of change.
But when you understand what you’re great at,
and design your capabilities and strategy accordingly, you can define how you
want to compete, and shape your own future rather than waiting for others to do
it for you. John K. Coyle understands this. He has been through grueling
challenges to his competitive edge, both in his profession (as a design
engineer and consultant) and as an Olympic athlete (in speed skating). As
you’ll see, he came out the other side with new triumphs and a sharper
understanding of the best way to prepare to compete.
As a senior at Stanford University in 1989, he was
passionately interested in mastering two capabilities. The first was design
thinking: an influential creative problem-solving method, closely tied to his major in product design (and to the work of management theorist Herbert A.
Simon and the IDEOdesign methods, among others). Design thinking involves a
continuous cycle of innovation: understanding an issue by gathering data about
it, empathizing with the people involved, ideating new approaches, prototyping
one or two of them, and then returning to the understanding stage.
Practitioners continually revisit and reframe challenges to ensure that they
are solving the most relevant problems.
The other capability he wanted to master was
speed skating. He was confident he could qualify for a near-term Olympic bid, for
the 1992 Winter Games in Albertville, France. During his senior year at
Stanford, while studying full time and training himself — no coach, no training
program, and very little ice time — was placed 12th in the world
championships for short-track speed skating. He expected that by joining the
Olympic team full time, with all the support that entailed, he would soon go
from 12th to sixth to first.
He says "Little did I know that my two passions would
soon intersect in a way that would teach me the essence of building on my
strengths. I would undergo a profoundly humbling experience, in which I would
have to treat immense challenges unemotionally, as opportunities to learn and
reframe, and to pursue solutions as a design thinker would, with intense
passion and unemotional curiosity at the same time.
Most of all, I would have to do the opposite
of what others were doing and what most experts were telling me to do. Instead
of trying to compensate for or fix my weaknesses, I would have to focus on my
natural strengths. This did not feel like the right thing to do at first, and
bucking the status quo is never easy, but I now believe it is the only way to
truly excel. And, I believe, this counterintuitive lesson is exactly what
anyone seeking to build a distinctive capability for a team or enterprise must
learn.
I did not know this at the time. But through
experiences such as my training in Olympic speed skating, and in my coaching of
and working with others, I have come to recognize four key rules inherent in
designing for your strengths: (1) accept your weaknesses; (2) recognize your
specific strengths; (3) solve the right problem (which is not necessarily the
problem other people have diagnosed for you); and (4) double down on your
strengths by accentuating the things that make you great. I spent years focused
on improving my weaknesses, and in the end that made me a poorer performer.
There is far more leverage in designing for your strengths.
1. Accept Your Weaknesses
After graduation, I moved to Colorado Springs
to join the U.S. Olympic speed skating team, living and training at the Olympic
Training Center. I was full of hope and confidence, excited to work with the
best coaches in the world. Upon arrival, I was put through a series of tests
known as the SATs of sports. These included a “maximal volume of oxygen” (VO2
max) test, which is said to be the most predictive measure of an athlete’s capability
in speed skating. It is an aerobic torture test. You ride a stationary bike
and, while you are breathing through a tube, the speed and resistance are
ratcheted up until you feel like you are going to die. During my session, I put
everything I had into the pedals until I collapsed. I was proud of my effort
until I received my results: I had the lowest measured VO2 of the entire team,
by a large margin. I had lasted barely 13 minutes. Later that morning, a
17-year-old Lance Armstrong lasted twice as long. According to the prevailing
knowledge about the test and the sport, this meant I didn’t really have a shot
at being a great speed skater. The current state of knowledge was wrong, of
course, but I didn’t know that yet.
All of us — individuals, teams, and
organizations — have weaknesses. These are not skill gaps; those can be
corrected with learning. Weaknesses are inherent deficiencies of talent or
capability that do not change even after aggressive efforts to improve them.
Pride and our ingrained work ethic may cause us to deny our weaknesses, but
acceptance is the first step toward designing for strength.
Neither the coaches nor I wanted to accept
the results of the test. But we had to, especially after I took a second test,
the Wingate, or max power test, two days later. On a stationary bike, you pedal
as fast as you can for 30 seconds against heavy resistance, while the device
tracks your power output. To my surprise, the Wingate results were even more
catastrophic: I passed out cold after 18 seconds, falling off the bike and
failing to finish. Again, I had the lowest score on the team for average power
output, but the data was interesting in one critical respect. For the first 15
seconds, I had an advantage. When analyzed second by second, the data showed
that I had in effect a small thermonuclear reactor in each quadriceps. At its
peak, five seconds after the start, my anaerobic output registered 1,740 watts
per kilogram, the highest peak power of the team by far. (Anaerobic activity
uses no oxygen and thus does not affect the cardiovascular system, but it
increases muscular strength.)
Unfortunately, given that the shortest event
in speed skating took at least 40 seconds, this strength didn’t seem
particularly useful. The coaches, after some debate, decided to try to “fix” me
as an athlete by focusing on my weaknesses.
“John, you will train harder and longer than
anyone else on the team to strengthen your aerobic capacity,” said one of them.
“While everyone else does jumps and squats, you’ll be doing 100-mile bike rides
and 15-mile endurance runs. In two years, we’ll have you strong enough for the
next Olympic Games.”
In
making this decision, the Olympic team was “benchmarking” me — a practice as
common in sports as it is in business. The best-in-class standard in this case
was five-time Olympic gold
medalist Eric Heiden. If I wanted to win, they believed, I would
have to train like Eric. They said this with conviction and compassion; they wanted
only the best for me. Sadly, they skipped the step that design thinkers call
empathy. In retrospect, I see that all of us were ignoring the second rule, ...."
CONTINUES
IN PART II
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