MERITOCRACY REDEFINED AS RESULTS
COHERENCE AND RESULTS
THINKING AND RESULTS
Disclaimer:
I am sure that much of what I present to you is not totally accurate. It cannot be. Our perceptions of life cannot be precise. Please feel free to disagree and/or correct me.
Enrique Aboitiz Mendieta
February 2017
I have been asked by some of you to write about leadership more. I hope you find these two books I have come across to be educational. I have merged them into one subject – LEADERSHIP FOR RESULTS.
In his insightful book, Listen Liberals, Thomas Frank speaks about Meritocracy as understood by the Obama administration. Apparently they brought in 90 of the brightest into the White House to run the government. Notice that I do not use the words “best” and “the brightest.” They brought in the brightest. Obama and his wife, Michelle, apparently felt that they and those who received the best education America could offer were on a special class of their own – The Ivy League Professional Class of America. They forgot what they were voted and hired for, which was to create an atmosphere where more and better employment was to be created. In this specific period in time, it was to reverse the inequality that had begun many years before, primarily driven by accelerated technology that was replacing jobs.
Obama had not responded to those changing needs. There were two Americas that had started emerging decades ago – Retro and Metro, according to Frank. The legacy industry America of steel mills, agriculture and automobiles, and the America of Steve Jobs and Google. The former was losing jobs to automation and robots, not to China, which misleading politicians like to blame. The latter was creating jobs. One is taking away jobs from the older, unskilled, mostly white lower middle class and the other giving jobs to the young, educated, modern, technologically proficient, up-and-coming generation.
The single most important task of Obama was to do something for those that were being displaced. This was not an easy task. It was not Obamacare nor the opening up of Cuba, even though they were still to be done and are still of value. These initiatives were not the main event – addressing inequality was! Cuba was to add to a failing list and mainly a distraction albeit a good one. There seems to be a professional class in the U.S. that thinks education is the solution to everything, and that one is assessed by which school he attended. The rise of so many people is driven by education based on a school’s name as this is their interpretation of Meritocracy. This professional class seems to think they are a special class.
This is simply not true.
Meritocracy is purely about results—results that matter the most at that point in
time!
And if you are entrusted with governing a country, they matter even more!
The education one gets is the base for a continuous life of learning and achievements, mistakes, triumphs, and more learning, more achievements, more mistakes, and more triumphs. It is the base for one to attain more and more results – results that matter. Getting things, which make the most difference at that point in time, done.
He separates the driver of results in a pyramid that starts with physiology at its base. Physiology drives Emotions, which drive Feelings, which drive Thinking, which drives Behavior, which then drives RESULTS.
Today, we are surrounded by all kinds of tests. He thinks we are looking in the wrong area. It’s how we feel that has a direct impact on how we think, and it is how we think that has a direct impact on our results. Raw energy that is going through our bodies comes from our basement — our physiology, defined as data streams running throughout your body 24/7.
The real drivers of performance are positive or negative emotions, and they are both driven by different hormones. I won’t get into the details. You can get that by reading his book Convergence. The point being that high performance is very much easier when your entire system is on the positive side.
What really matters for performance is whether you are on the left (positive emotion) side of the grid or the right (negative emotion), and not whether you are on the top side (activation) or at the bottom.
Passion is what drives performance, not being relaxed. Being relaxed can be about apathy and detachment. We discourage people that are excited and we encourage being cool and relaxed. Well, he claims that is not necessarily so. Look for passion. This is me talking — have you seen real engagement and ownership without passion? In my years with WG&A, the partners we had there would say we Aboitizes were emotional. They missed the point. We were passionate in discussion but dead cool in decision. Our friends at WG&A were always controlled in discussion but super emotional when it comes to making decisions, with the traditional Asian face being the main driver of their decision making. “What will it look like?” versus “where will I create more value in the long term?”
Watkins claims that people are obsessed with relaxation due to a misunderstanding of how our physiology really works. Positive relaxation characterized by feelings of contentment, curiosity, and peacefulness are different from negative relaxation — apathy, boredom, and detachment. The latter interferes with our health, our ability to think clearly, and ultimately, our performance. You are not all right because you are relaxed. On the top right of the quadrant are people who feel angry, resentful or frustrated. They can learn to be detached from these feelings and feel relaxed but they are not in a good place because they still run on higher levels of the wrong hormone, in this case, cortisol and other catabolic hormones that will interfere with our health, our ability to think clearly, and ultimately our performance.
The answer to performance is coherence. It is not relaxation nor is it motivation. It is the ability to get over to the left-hand side of the performance grid above. Conceptually, coherence is a state of stable variability; a predictable pattern of stable variability is a vibrant, healthy living system. A lack of variability indicates a lack of health: brittleness, rigidity and an inability to adapt to changing conditions. It is so for tall buildings, for engines, and for businesses. If a leader refuses to change strategy despite evidence of changes in market conditions, then the business will eventually die out.
When our judgment is not clouded by low-batt, reactive, negative or suppressed emotions and fuzzy thinking, we are more productive. And when we are more productive, we are more influential mastering the leadership of people. Is it effective to treat everyone the same? People are people and we need to adapt our interaction and approach — relationship variability. I am not suggesting fairness should vary.
VUCA WORLD – VOLATILE, UNCERTAIN, COMPLEX & AMBIGUOUS
THE PRINCIPLE OF COHERENCE IS THEREFORE A HEALTHY AMOUNT OF
PREDICTABLE AND STABLE VARIABILITY.
I will leave you with this as you need to decide whether you want to invest some time in studying Dr. Alan Watkins’ book called Coherence. You can take the lazy way out and watch some of his videos on Youtube, which is how I started. Now, if you are really interested in your future, then you will study the book. In this quest for life-long learning, without which you will live a very average existence, one has to invest time in engaging life more to enrich his or her experience. This has become more and more possible with the internet, Kindle, low-cost travel, and Airbnb.
The power of compounding is changing this world at a rate that very, very few will be able to keep up with. It is going to disrupt everything. Even women of pleasure are under threat from robotic dolls. Priests will have to reinvent themselves to keep people coming to listen to their homilies, which are based on stories that are debunked daily by science and education. So, if they are under threat, just think of our businesses: digital banks, digital printers, solar panels on roofs and driverless cars. That will create many many opportunities. Low-cost power will mean low-cost water, which will mean food for many where it is impossible today, a larger middle class, more tourists, etc. It is not about being at the cusp of change, it will be about riding cusp after cusp after cusp of changes. How many will be able to stay on those cusps? Only those that get things done, not those with high scores in tests.
MERITOCRACY IS ABOUT THOSE WHO GET THINGS DONE…GETTING THINGS THAT MATTER MOST AT THAT POINT IN TIME DONE!
WATKINS REMINDS US THAT NO ONE CAN OFFEND YOU.
NO ONE CAN MAKE YOU FEEL BAD ABOUT SOMETHING.
NO ONE CAN DEMOTIVATE YOU.
UNLESS YOU LET THEM.
IN YOUR WORKPLACE AND DAILY LIFE, GETTING OFFENDED OR LETTING ANYTHING MOVE YOU TO THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE QUADRANT – THE NEGATIVE SIDE – IS YOUR DECISION.
I HAVE RECEIVED SOME FEEDBACK ABOUT MY CRITICISM ABOUT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. THOSE THAT GET OFFENDED MUST HAVE SERIOUS DOUBTS ABOUT THEIR FAITH IN WHAT IS PROBABLY THE GREATEST HOAX IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND. A HOAX, IF I MAY ADD, BACKED UP BY ORGANIZATIONAL GENIUS.
DOES THIS OFFEND YOU?
IF IT DOES, THEN STOP READING ANYTHING I WRITE.
IF IT DOES THEN SOMEHOW YOUR PHYSIOLOGY IS AFFECTING YOUR THINKING AND YOUR PERFORMANCE AS IT IS VERY, VERY POSSIBLE THAT JESUS CHRIST WAS A ROMAN INVENTION HAVING SAID THAT I AM NOT SUGGESTING YOU STOP BELIEVING.
JUST DO NOT LET ME OFFEND YOU. HOW CAN I WHEN I DO NOT EVEN KNOW YOU? HOW CAN YOU ALLOW SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT EVEN KNOW WHO IS READING THIS OFFEND YOU?
YOU SHOULD FEEL SORRY FOR ME IF YOU REALLY BELIEVE AS I MAY GO TO HELL.