Business Leaders Must Know Where to Seek Advice

Executives are often criticized for not being amenable to receiving advice. Indeed, everyone has his blind spots. A great executive is one who turns to someone who can challenge his assumptions and help him avoid falling prey to his blind spots.

The Talmud defines a true scholar as one who can learn from anyone. If you are trapped in the window seat on a plane sitting next to a verbally incontinent idiot, you should make the most of it and try to learn something from him. However, you don’t have to seek out these kinds of people for advice about your business. (To paraphrase William F. Buckley, “Too often intelligence is measured by what an individual produces. Perhaps individual intelligence should be measured by what one puts up with from others.”)

You should be more selective about who you turn to for crucial advice. Your friends are not always the best people to share your inner business confidences with. They may have feelings of schadenfreude—your friends don’t want you to be too successful. If their advice is not well thought-out, it is often worthless. Many people blurt out suggestions without really knowing what they are talking about. In this vein, I have repeatedly realized that people laugh a few milliseconds before the punch line of a joke is delivered. You don’t want to turn to someone like the guy at your book club who is extremely vocal and opinionated but never reads the books that are under discussion.

The best people to turn to for business advice are those that are highly intelligent in business matters, have traversed a terrain similar to the one that lies in front of you and who are somewhat remote from the situation. Also, be careful about seeking advice from someone you intend to do business with once you implement your idea. No matter how close you think you are to your business associates, approaching them with a tentative business idea will shake their confidence in you and may cost you their existing business.

Regardless from whom you seek advice, you must be able to differentiate between substantive criticism and baseless attacks. The most successful executives are malleable enough to know when to acknowledge their blind spots and when to defend their positions.

Albert Einstein was intelligent enough to admit when he was wrong and to change his position. He did this throughout his career as a physicist and as an outspoken acolyte. (He once said that Adolf Hitler represented no threat to Germany or Europe. He told a group of 3,000 Zionists in New York that he believed that the Jewish people did not need their own homeland. He changed his stance on both of these issues.)

Fortunately, Alexander Graham Bell persisted to commercialize the telephone when Western Union’s president, William Orton, asked, “What use could this company make of an electrical toy.” Purveyors of electricity were not discouraged when Erasmus Wilson, a professor at Oxford University, commented, “When the Paris Exhibition closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.” Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Ted Waitt (founder of Gateway Computer), Rod Canion (co-founder of Compaq Computer), Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were unmoved when Kenneth Olson, president and founder of Digital Equipment Corporation said, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”
You must also be aware that your seeking advice can be an entree for opportunists to promote their own agendas. Effective leaders must be perceptive enough to recognize hidden agendas. You must determine the motivations that could lie behind recommendations and the potential rewards that your advisors stand to reap should their recommendations be implemented. You must gauge how these agendas may conflict with one another, and anticipate the probable effects and likely unintended consequences of a chosen course of action. You must understand how those involved will likely react, and they weigh this information appropriately in their response.

Finally, you should subject your passions and the advice you receive to some, at least informal, numerical scrutiny. While you can quickly develop a sketch of a financial model with Excel, even a literal back of the envelop calculation will suffice. Thinking about numbers tends to slow down some of the least rational parts of our brains. It forces us to look at the matter from a less emotional perspective. Similarly, when you have an idea for an advertising campaign, you can quickly set up a Google AdWords campaign. AdWords will tell you which verbiage will resonate better with potential customer.

 

The above is an except from David Wanetick’s new book, The Power of Incremental Advantage: How Incremental Improvements Produce Dramatically Disproportionate Results. For more information, please visit www.incrementaladvantage.com.