During my first year of business school at Stanford, I went to one of those panel sessions that are common at business schools where alumni show up and talk about the “real world” of work. I still remember one particular panel, not for anything exceptional that was said, but rather for something mundane.
The panelist was named Gary, he was then running a small company in Palo Alto, and he had the nerve to utter the following piece of advice to the students attending, “If you want to get ahead in your career, the best way to do that is to do the job that is right in front of you.” You’ve never seen an audience quite so deflated. It was not what a bunch of eager MBA students wanted to hear. We were looking for some clever short cut to wealth and success; or, at least, a story of some small company taking off and rocketing to the moon. Doing the job right in front of us? That sounded so boring. I don’t think Gary got very high speaker ratings that day.
Gary, of course, was right – as unfortunate as that might be. Sure, there are the occasional Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerbergs amongst us; but they are the rare exceptions and, for that matter, you usually don’t find them in business school. For the rest of us, doing the job in front of us well is actually great advice, even though it doesn’t always make for a great story. There is a whole lot to be said for hard work and persistence. Especially if you find yourself working with people you can learn from in an organization that is going someplace.
But, in retrospect, Gary was only partially right. He was advising us to Think Small, to do the things that we were expected to do and being asked to do. As important as that is, there is another part to the story; especially in today’s economy where lifetime job security is a relic of the past. In today’s economy; the most promising careers are built from being able to Think Small and Think Big at the same time.
Let me explain.
Thinking Small
Most organizations are full of people who are able to get the job that is right in front of them done, but they aren’t really interested in anything beyond that. These folks often work incredibly hard to get their job done, but they expect to be told what to do. It’s pretty easy to spot these people – they are the ones who, if they work for you, are always asking you to clarify their job description or saying “that’s above my pay grade.”
Here is the problem with that. In a business where markets are changing fast and technology is disrupting operations, in other words nearly every business these days, HR can’t sign off on new job descriptions fast enough to keep pace with the changing demands. You need people who are willing to work beyond their job descriptions, thinking at least “one level up” if not thinking as if they were the CEO, in order to meet the demands of your changing markets and your customers. Or, more bluntly stated, if you could write the precise job description for this person you probably wouldn’t need to hire them in the first place! These folks are Thinking Small, but they aren’t Thinking Big.
This isn’t, of course, meant to diminish the importance of thinking small. Great organizations must be great at translating vision into action, and there are times when nothing is more important than incremental progress.
Thinking Big
It is also pretty easy to find people who are Thinking Big, especially in knowledge-intensive growth business, like software companies. These are the folks tell the CEO “what’s wrong with the business.” They are book-smart and usually well-credentialed. They may even have a fancy job title, like Chief Strategy Officer or something like that. Everything that they have to say sounds very smart, right up until the point where you realize that the part of the business they are complaining about is never the part that they are actually working in or responsible for.
These are the people who need to be the smartest people in the room and will drag out any meeting to prove it. (And if one of them happens to have the CEO title, watch out.) The challenge is that, in reality, they cannot get anything done. They may very well have tremendous ideas, but they cannot figure out what to do on Monday morning to get these ideas implemented.
To be clear, you may very well need these people in your business, especially if they have critical domain knowledge about a subject matter important to the enterprise. Every business like this needs some rock stars. But the more they understand their own limitations, the more valuable they will be. Because asking them to implement their own ideas will not go well. I know; I’ve tried that.
Think Big and Think Small
What businesses really need are people who can Think Big and Think Small at the same time.
Because in today’s world, the line between strategy and tactics is blurring. The best strategies aren’t conceptualized in boardrooms and by consulting firms, but rather by the people who have to execute them. The most you can reasonably expect from the boardroom is broad direction for where you should be heading, the financial resources to get there and, if you are really lucky, a decent acquisition every few years. The rest is likely up to you.
People who can Think Big and Think Small at the same time may be few and far between but they are easily recognizable. They can conceptualize a strategy, a big innovation idea, an acquisition, a large customer sales process – and then they can answer the question of what do on Monday morning with some rigor. In other words, they can dream and they can be part of bringing the dream to life.
It’s especially easy to recognize people who can both Think Big and Think Small if you are a CEO. These are the people who show up in your office, but not primarily to whine about some other department or function in the business. Instead, they have an idea they are passionate about, they just need a small number of things from you to support the idea, and they are back in your office within a week or two with a progress report on how the execution of their idea is going.
If you are running a business or on a senior management team, you desperately need people who can Think Big and Think Small at the same time. Which is why you are always better off building a business that promotes from within if you have the time and bench strength to pull that off. Because the people who move up the organization can go into any meeting and know what they are talking about; so, they can Think Small; if they can also learn to Think Big they are incredibly valuable. By contrast, the person you just hired from the outside may be more inclined to only Think Big, and they are often limited by not understanding how the business really delivers value to customers on the ground.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, is a fascinating example of thinking big and thinking small. He was famous for conceptualizing products that no one understood they needed. He didn’t believe in market research, because the kinds of products he created weren’t ones that customers knew enough to ask for. But, also, there was no product design detail, or customer experience nuance, that fell below his radar screen. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
F Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Thinking Big and Thinking Small at the same time can be a bit like that. But if you can pull that off, really amazing things can happen.
Leave a Reply