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Lewis Pugh knows how to raise the temperature on the issue of climate change. His swims in freezing oceans around the world have earned him the title of the Human Polar Bear.
He also knows how to raise publicity on the causes he cares about. In a 2006 swim down the river Thames (325km in 21 days) to raise awareness of the severe drought in England (he was forced to start with a 42km run as the river had stopped flowing as a result of the drought), the British environmental campaigner dropped in on Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street to talk about global warming. The Prime Minister introduced the Climate Change Bill to Parliament shortly afterwards.
In 2007 he did his most talked about adventure, swimming across the North Pole with just his speedo, his cap and his goggles to raise awareness about climate change in the polar regions. Between 2005 and 2007, 23 percent of the regions sea ice cover had melted away. “It was the hardest swim by a long way,” he says. “It was a very graphic swim as I wanted to raise awareness of the melting ice and I swam across an open path of sea.”
I got a sense of his drive and the urgency around his adventures from his description of the latest adventure he is undertaking later this month.
“In May, I will be attempting a 1km swim under the summit of Mount Everest to draw attention to the impact of climate change on the Himalayan region. I will undertake the swim, at an altitude of 5,300 metres, across the waters of a lake next to the Khumbu Glacier.
These glaciers are not just ice. They are a lifeline – they provide water to a fifth of the world’s population. The Himalayas Region has warmed on average by approximately 1 degree C and glaciers in the region are melting rapidly. Lake Imja, where I will undertake a number of training swims, has formed due to the melting of the Imja Glacier. We must do all we can to raise awareness of the effects of climate change here.
We are living in a global environment. What happens in one part of the world will directly impact other parts. We must stop arguing about whether China, the USA or the EU should act first. Given the urgency every country needs to put in place every solution at its disposal.
There is no time for delay.” – Lewis Pugh
More info
Michael Burry has one eye removed from a childhood tumour and Aspergers Syndrome which has prevented him from forming good relationships with people.
He used these “strengths” to be the biggest winner in the 2008 financial meltdown by betting against the dodgy mortgage loans that caused all the trouble for the rest of …the world.
A great example of playing to strengths no matter how unusual they are…
The Vanity Fair article previews Michael Lewis’ new book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.
Muhammad Yunus has shown himself to be a leader who has managed to translate visions into practical action for the benefit of millions of people, not only in Bangladesh, but also in many other countries. Loans to poor people without any financial security had appeared to be an impossible idea. From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty. Grameen Bank has been a source of ideas and models for the many institutions in the field of micro-credit that have sprung up around the world.
Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life. Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.
Micro-credit has proved to be an important liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions. Economic growth and political democracy can not achieve their full potential unless the female half of humanity participates on an equal footing with the male.
Yunus’s long-term vision is to eliminate poverty in the world. That vision can not be realised by means of micro-credit alone. But Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that, in the continuing efforts to achieve it, micro-credit must play a major part.”
I’m interested in people who have strategies to change the world? Often these people go unnoticed for many years. I’d like to notice them. Who do you know who is changing the world?
Source: press release for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize
Read more about the Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus.
Google this week moved their servers from mainland China to Hong Kong. It signals their best possible response to the dilemma of balancing their mantra of “do no evil” against a Chinese government intent on censoring and limiting the way the search company tries to organize the world’s information.
Caught up in mud-slinging between the US and Chinese governments and a Chinese cyber attack on some of its senior engineers, Google is also facing some serious strategic issues.
Against the backdrop of their significant success these latest issues may seem trivial. They are however as a result of their successful strategy to date and indicate some of the challenges that only arise when an organization gets to the size of Google.
Over the next years they are going to need to completely re-think the strategic approach on which founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built the company.
‘The bigger they are the harder they fall’ is a reminder to Google that it cannot step as nimbly and unobtrusively as it did in its early years where it boldly took on a number of markets which it quickly dominated. Now every move has bigger consequences.
One such play is the Apple / Microsoft / Google showdown. Apple is thinking of replacing it’s default search on its iPhone with Microsoft’s Bing while Google’s Android is competing head on with the iPhone. What sounded like a great idea, launch a phone, is now looking like a long hard battle for market share against a formidable foe in Apple. On another front, Google is squaring off against the European community where there are growing problems on the antitrust front with either lawsuits or threatened lawsuits by Italy, France and Germany.
Building relationships with governments and co-existing with some seriously ambitious competitors and partners is going to become more and more important to their strategic thinking.
At 12 years old, Google heads into its teenage years facing many of the confusing dilemmas teenagers discover, often to their horror. Suddenly not everyone loves them and each decision seems to have ever more far reaching consequences. Without a clear view of the future the complexity can be bewildering.
With everyone wanting to take a bite out of them, often in markets that they have themselves created, the balance between creating new success and holding on to success is likely to even out. Their strategy will need to address this.
All the while “do no evil” is starting to sound a little quaint.
Strategy is no good without getting people to follow it. If you have cleared up your strategic direction then you could look to Aristotle on how to persuade people to follow you.
My friend and colleague Liz shared Aristotle’s wisdom on modes of persuasion at a leadership development programme that we co-facilitated earlier this week.
Aristotle proposed that there were three modes of persuasion; Logos, Pathos & Ethos.
Logos – persuading people with logic
Pathos – persuading people through emotion or a passionate appeal
Ethos – persuading people through your character
What’s your dominant approach and how could you be more persuasive?
Ueli Gegenschatz
Incredible visuals and demonstrating how to achieve a personal strategy in an incremental way.
Sadly, after a BASE jumping accident on Nov. 11 2009, Ueli died in a Swiss hospital.
This post is in memory of a visionary athletic pioneer.
You can watch his fascinating talk at ted.com and the video is included below.
Gary Gold
I really enjoyed the advice he had for rugby coaches wanting to make a career professionally.
The video is in two parts.
Part 1:
Part 2
Steve Jobs
By admission I am a bit of an Apple fan. From when I first worked on a Macintosh when I was in college in 1987, they have always stood out as unique and special. I remember the great fonts and graphical user interface all those years before Windows was even conceived.
If you have never taken 15 minutes to watch Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement address, and you are interested in the strategies used by one of the most successful people in the world, then now is the time to grab a cup of coffee, listen and learn.
In a refreshingly candid look at his own life and some of the successes and failures he has experienced, Jobs debunks some of the myths about living your life with set goals and objectives. He also shows how goals would have limited his success.
Fortune named him CEO of the decade for his work in significantly shifting four industries; computers, music, mobile and movies. Many people would advocate that to achieve on the level of Jobs would require focused goals worked at over many years. While this may be a strategy for some people, this approach is a million miles from the success story of Steve Jobs.
In the speech, Jobs tells three stories from his life:
Joining the dots backwards
Jobs dropped out of college after concluding that the financial strain on his middle class parents was too much. He spent a further 18 months on campus just taking the courses he loved rather than the ones he was previously required to take for his course.
One was on calligraphy where he learned about type faces and what makes great typography. At the time he couldn’t see any hope of this knowledge being applied practically.
However 10 years later, that calligraphy course deeply influenced the first Apple computers and those very fonts that impressed me in college would never have been there were if not for the calligraphy course he took after dropping out of college.
It was impossible for him to join the dots looking forward. In retrospect he could join them backwards and see the importance of that seemingly random decision to take that course.
His message, you have to trust (rather than plan) that the dots will connect down the road because that gives you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-known path. That will make all the difference.
Love and loss
When Jobs was fired from Apple, the company he founded, he was initially devastated and felt very publicly humiliated. Although rejected, Jobs still loved what he did and he decided to start over.
The heaviness of being successful was replaced with the lightness of being a beginner as he explored other business ventures and entered the most creative period of his life where he founded two companies, Pixar and Next.
Pixar became the most successful animation company and in a strange turn of events Apple bought Next and Jobs returned to be CEO of Apple. The technology that Next had produced became the backbone for the resurgence of Apple computers and is at the core of the success the company has achieved in the past decade.
His message, love what you do. You have to find what you love and trust (not plan) that the details will take care of themselves.
Death
Having heard the quote, “If you live each day as if it were your last, someday you will most certainly be right, Jobs was faced with his own mortality when he was diagnosed with pancreas cancer.
Faced with death he concluded that he needed to live every day as if it was the last day of his life. Waking up each morning he evaluates what he is doing and questions whether he would do the same thing if it were the last day of his life. If not for two many days, then he knows he needs to change something.
This removes all pride and embarrassment of failure. He says, “We are already naked and remembering that we are going to die is the best way of avoiding the trap of thinking that you have something to lose.”
This, rather than a carefully mapped out plan, is what Job’s uses to decide his priorities and what he is working on.
In conclusion
- Don’t live other peoples lives
- Don’t be trapped by dogma
- Follow your heart and intuition
And from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue, Jobs quotes:
- Stay hungry
- Stay foolish
Watch the video (15 mins).
Jim Goodnight on the SAS campus
Fortune released their 100 best companies to work for survey last month and the winner was a company that not everybody would have heard of, SAS. Not the airline which is better known but the privately owned software company in North Carolina.
If thinking about cool tech companies to work for, most people would think of high-profile Google but SAS beats Google by 3 places and in fact Google modeled their people policies on the older SAS (founded 1976).
Besides being privately held, there are a couple of other peculiarities about SAS such as the founder CEO who has been the CEO since he founded the company and still enjoys huge respect in the industry.
106,000 pieces of art, a hotel on campus (equivalent to a Four Seasons) hotel, masseurs and a day hospital for day-to-day medical visits all make up the uniqueness the company. Another peculiarity is the average weekly work hours which are 35, well below the minimum 60 hour work weeks in Silicon Value. Jim Goodnight, a programmer himself, understands that after 7 or 8 hours it’s hard to stay productive.
The company has always had a no layoff policy although people can get fired for poor performance. Talking about GE and Jack Welch, Goodnight disputes Welch’s claim that he fired the lowest 10% of GE staff each year. “He said that in his book but I don’t believe he ever did it… you would end up with a hugely unmotivated staff and it would cost a fortune to fire that many people every year”, says Goodnight.
You can view a detailed interview with Dr. Jim Goodnight and Rich Karlgaard the Publisher of Forbes Magazine recorded in November 2009. The Fortune article announcing the 100 best companies gives more details and lists the other companies.
