Now, you're getting out of your comfort zone, or at least you're feeling a bit more ready or confident. I hope I've begun to convince you that it's a good idea that the pay off is really, really big. It gets us to a core theme in this module, which is the importance of open-mindedness, as I already mentioned, but also agility and adaptability. I want to talk about these ideas in several different contexts and give you a few examples of how it pays off and how it actually insinuates itself into many situations that you're likely to face. So agility and adaptability are really, they're always key leadership capabilities. They're key skill sets for pretty much anyone in an organization and in life. The things that we see, the things that happen, it's not that you can predict exactly what's going to happen every single day. Some people say, you know, everything is like Groundhog Day. You remember that movie with Bill Murray every day is identical and he sees the same people, he interacts the same way, and then every day, the next day he wakes up the alarm and exactly the same thing happens and you just wondering about that means, a great movie, but life actually, it's actually not like that. When we allow it to be like that, then we are not putting ourselves out of our comfort zone. But when we accept it to be that way, then we're not demonstrating any adaptability or agility. This is all relevant, by the way, for very senior executives as well. No matter who's hired as a CEO, whatever her or his skill sets, there's no way a board of directors can predict everything that will happen. In other words, we can never get a perfect match of background and skills to a work situation that will stay perfect forever. So the ability to think fresh and differently really become a differentiator. In other words, the ability to adapt and to adjust becomes a differentiator. This is really interesting because when you hire people for a job, what do you do? You look at their background, their experience, and you try to get a match. Of course you do and for CEOs, you do it even more. What they do? What they run? What big jobs that they have? You should do that. But the higher up you go in an organization, the more likely it's going to be that the situations that you face are things that haven't happened to you before. Not only that, but they could be situations. In fact, they're more likely than not to be situations that you could not have predicted. There is a classic old story that I wanted to share with the other units. It goes way back, but it's such a classic. It's when man by the name of Reginald Jones was the CEO of General Electric. This is in the early 1980s. Reg Jones was the most famous CEO in America in that era. GE was flying high, was doing great. When he retired, he went through a long process to try to identify the right successor. He's the guy that decided to choose as his successor, Jack Welch, the legendary CEO GE for a long period of time, Jack Welch. One of the things that Reg Jones said at the time was, after all this analysis and all this thinking, we're about to, after a period of technological change and the economy changing. This what he said, we're about to enter an era of stability and maturity. Here's what he says in the early 1980s. I mean, he didn't have a sense whatsoever of the coming onslaught from the Microsofts and he entails, let alone later from companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon. Yet he was the CEO of one of the most powerful and resource rich companies on the globe. He had access to the best advisors and experts that money could buy and he got it wrong, utterly wrong. So if we can't predict the future, then how can we figure out who's got the right stuff to lead us into that future? We've all seen people who are stuck in the past who can't do anything different and don't want to even consider thinking about things differently. Not only are they more likely to fail, there are less likely to move up in an organization when adaptability becomes a truly prize skill set and a mindset. What's more, it's much less fun. Yeah, we only live once. Why would we want to keep on punching the same card day after day if we can help it?
