Do I Challenge myself?

An imaginative story that I read somewhere - A businessman once had so much failure in his business, he went to a beach in the evening. He sat there lamenting his errors and how rich he used to be all night. All along, he was throwing the small stones that were spread near him. Just when the sun rose, he had the last stone in his hand. Much to his surprise, he realized it was a diamond stone. He had been throwing diamond stones that were left behind by some theives. Imaginative story alright, but most of our lives are like this.

Instead of thinking about what needs to be done, we care much about how good we were and how we could replicate those again. In this ever-changing world, is this sustainable? We often lack the will to learn and adapt changes that happen around us.

Talk about learning, Tom Peters talks about "forgetting organizations". He writes, "Peter Senge's brilliant insight 10 years ago was that companies need to be learning organizations. My campaign: Companies need to be forgetting organizations to be innovative." Peters' idea presents a challenge to many business leaders - particularly those seasoned ones who've been around some - who are usually completely "wedded" to what they know - what they've done before that got them great results. He also indicates that this phenomenon is most found in many newly graduated MBAs. Would we have the guts to forget? and not be "wedded" to our knowledge?

Certainly, this does not mean that we forget our core competencies (now, Hamel and Prahalad won't be happy). But, being attached to what we know and how we've done things in the past can be a huge barrier to staying flexible, spontaneous and agile in this dynamic world.

VJ is a renowned Strategy prof at Tuck. He talks about three boxes (See video below) with respect to strategy - Thinking of past, Concerned of present and plannig for future; he suggests only planning for future relates to strategy. I beleive the same can be applied to professionals as well.


I have seen this phenomenon in many of my friends (myself included) - both before MBA and in my MBA class. We often tend to dwelve in our warm area - where we know how things are done, where we know how to excel, and where we are praised. Rather, we should challenge ourselves by raising the bar. Now, if you hear someone say that you are the best in what you do, think again, it may be time to "challenge yourselves".