Leadership: The Underappreciated Quality of Supreme Ignorance
And How Being a Big Dummy Can Help You Outsmart Your Competition
I could barely hear the blunted notes of a microphone in the distance, paired with the every-so-often flash of light that would whip through the hallway in some shade of theatrical glow. It was surprisingly quiet in the guts of a New York City theater near Broadway—remarkable, given the hustle onstage just one flight up and the bustle of the city beyond.
It was Advertising Week New York, and I had been waiting for a good half hour before I heard a rumbling down the hall. Within seconds, a parade of people streamed in—makeup artist, stylist, assistant, event personnel, and more. Chief among them, Bethenny Frankel.
She barely paused to say hello to the writer in the corner who was there to do a story for his online column in Inc., but I confidently strode forward and introduced myself. She lingered just long enough for an affirming handshake and a hurried smile before she was promptly whisked to a chair in front of a wall of mirrors, where her team descended on her to conduct the transition from on-the-road Bethenny to onstage Bethenny.
She had recently come off the set of Shark Tank, an unlikely place for someone who made a name for herself on reality television as a Real Housewife of New York. And yet, as she shared the ups and downs of her career with me, it became clear that her place among today’s best business gurus was almost predestined from the start, and for the most honest of reasons; in fact, Bethenny is known for her brutal honesty and unapologetic authenticity, on air and off. I’m wholly confident that those characteristics were highly valuable to reality television producers hungry for conflict. But those traits in and of themselves weren’t what struck me most about Bethenny, nor can they fully describe how a person with no prior business experience could start the Skinnygirl Cocktails brand, grow it, and exit for a reported $100 million, ending up on the cover of Forbes magazine.
In fact, Bethenny was quite honest with me that few of her career moves were strategic, or even planned at all. Instead, she seemed to rely on an effective cocktail of gut instinct, belief in self, and perseverance.1 Oh, and one other inescapable truth she holds most dear, which I sum up thusly: Ignorance is power; knowledge is bliss.
Bethenny lives by one simple rule: if you don’t know what something means, ask—immediately. “I’m just really honest about those things,” she admitted freely and without any glint of ego. “When I don’t know something, I don’t pretend.”
Sure enough, twenty minutes after we spoke, she went onstage near Times Square and blatantly interrupted one of her peers—disrupting the entire rhythm of the panel—to grill him about a marketing term she didn’t know. Hers is a humble and simple method that has allowed her to capitalize on her strengths while minimizing her gaps in knowledge.
THE NO. 1 TRAIT OF TODAY’S MOST SUCCESSFUL LEADERS: KNOWING NOTHING
Coincidentally, hers is the same honest leadership trait that we’ve seen in many of the other leaders written about here. “Whatever success I’ve had in life,” Ray Dalio wrote on the first page of Principles, “has had more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know.”2 Perhaps the self-admission of befuddlement is highly correlated with financial gains. To wit, I often think of Nate Silver’s quote in The Signal and the Noise: “One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age is that, even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.”3
Do me a favor and read that one twice, ’cuz that’s some eye-poppin’ truth right there.
If we can’t parse opinion from fact and agree on objective reality, we can’t possibly transform into the evolved, innovative, industry-dominating leaders we know we can be.
Even Russell Weiner of Domino’s Pizza aptly noted, “Too many people think, ‘I’m right and my CEO’s opinion is wrong.’ You’re each dealing with facts and forming different opinions.” And that’s just it: if we can’t parse opinion from fact and agree on objective reality, we can’t possibly transform into the evolved, innovative, industry-dominating leaders we know we can be.
As I shamefully recounted earlier, whereas I used to assume that a lack of intellectual processing power was the culprit behind many a leader’s shortcomings, I now posit it was simply a lack of honesty. More accurately, it was the extension of a lack of honesty, which, when it comes to leadership, is better described as a lack of self-awareness. I’ve seen it in clients large and small, rearing its head whenever we help them confront an uncomfortable truth about their customers, their teams, their products, or their business models. One of the best (or worst) examples was one former client who looked at a report we pulled from Google Analytics and said the results were so inconsistent with what he “knew” to be true that we must have forged them! Trust me, if I had that much power with Google, I’d likely have a very different (and higher-paying) job.
There’s plenty of living proof that dishonest people can, and do, succeed in building profitable businesses. However, I implore you to consider that it takes something more—much more—to become an industry dominator, a magnet for innovation, a respected leader. That difference is the honest art of self-awareness, otherwise known as being brutally honest with yourself.
Many don’t realize that Warren Buffett’s self-proclaimed greatest mistake was the acquisition of Berkshire Hathaway itself—the textile operation he purchased in 1965 that would serve as the bedrock of his empire. Buffett considers it a misstep because he clung to the downward-spiraling textile industry, which showed inexorable signs of never returning to its former glory, despite knowing the objective truth. “A recent Business Week article stated that 250 textile mills have closed since 1980,” Buffett wrote in his shareholder letter in 1985. “Their owners were not privy to any information that was unknown to me; they simply processed it more objectively. I ignored Comte’s advice—‘the intellect should be the servant of the heart, but not its slave’—and believed what I preferred to believe.”4
Of all the advice I give my coaching clients, my favorite is this quote (my own, of course) about leading a business: entrepreneurship is 10 percent about business, 100 percent about people, and 1,000 percent about the self.
No, I wasn’t a math major, but I assure you the math in that quote checks out. That’s why many leadership organizations like the Entrepreneurs’ Organization and Young Presidents’ Organization focus on personal development as well as business development. No group can advance faster than its leader, which makes personal development simply essential.
THE JOHARI WINDOW: THE BEST FRAMEWORK FOR EXPLORING YOUR INNER LEADER
When I joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization and became part of its more than twelve thousand members worldwide, I learned about a framework called the Johari window. The Johari window is a simple technique that helps us become aware of our blind spots and come to know what we don’t know. The psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham created it in 1955 (combine the “Jo” in Joseph with the “Harri” in Harrington and you get “Johari”). The framework comprises four quadrants or panes that look like a window.5
The Johari Window
The panes, or quadrants, offer four combinations that describe the state of any characteristic you possess, depending on who recognizes it.6 The combinations are as follows:
1.Known to others and known to self. This quadrant, called the “arena,” describes everything that is known by everyone. For instance, you might know you are dependable, and others might know you are dependable. You recognize your ability, and so do others. Most of the elements that make up our personalities fit into this quadrant.
2.Not known to others but known to self. This quadrant, the “facade,” describes things that are essentially your secrets. For instance, others might not see that you are fearful, but you might know you are fearful. In this case, fear is a trait you don’t share with others, for some reason or another. All of us have elements in this quadrant, whether we want to admit it or not—things we fear, things we’re ashamed to admit or share, and so forth.
3.Not known to others and not known to self. This quadrant, uncreatively called the “unknown,” contains elements of ourselves that we haven’t yet recognized. However, no one else has recognized them, either, making them simply unknown to everyone. These are characteristics that may come out over time as we mature, for instance, but in the meantime they aren’t obvious to others, and therefore aren’t necessarily helpful or detrimental to us as leaders.
4.Known to others but not known to self. The “blind spot” is the most enlightening quadrant of the Johari window. This quadrant contains elements that others know about us but we are not yet able to see, admit to, or otherwise recognize. For instance, you might truly believe that you are not afraid, while everyone else can see that you obviously are. All of us have elements in this quadrant to some degree or another, and it is this quadrant that we should focus on most as leaders in a constant state of personal development.
Beware the Blind Spot
What lies in the blind spot is what can hurt you the most, so that’s the quadrant we must particularly focus on if we want to improve as leaders. Characteristics that live in the blind spot prevent you from success because they aren’t in alignment with the truth. For instance, if everyone widely recognizes that you are unreliable, they will most likely respect you if you admit you are unreliable and take steps to correct that characteristic. If, however, you absolutely refuse to accept that you’re unreliable, that delusion creates distrust between you and everyone else, because everyone else already recognizes the truth of your situation. These types of tensions arise within leaders who are not self-aware and wreak havoc on an organization’s ability to make progress. For instance, the leader who believes she is giving, when everyone else disagrees, will always resent her people for not being grateful, when in fact they are trying to help her be more fair. The leader who believes he is strategic, when everyone else knows him to be reckless, will always criticize his people for being too risk averse, when in fact they are trying to save him from making mistakes. The leader who believes she knows better, when everyone else knows she doesn’t have the necessary knowledge or skill, will try to tightly control her people, when in fact her people would perform far better if they were simply allowed to do their jobs without interruption.
The trick is to first recognize that you even have a blind spot (hint: we all do). Then you must honestly identify which of your characteristics reside in that blind spot.
These unfortunate scenarios play out all across the business world every day. All of them are fully avoidable, and they all stem from the honest truths living in our blind spots. The trick is to first recognize that you even have a blind spot (hint: we all do). Then you must honestly identify which of your characteristics reside in that blind spot. Only by first recognizing these elements can you even begin to honestly address and improve upon them, which puts you back in a trustworthy position with those around you.
Self-Reflection Forms the Foundation of Effective Leadership
Since I learned about the Johari window, I think about it all the time—often second-guessing myself on what truly lives in that quadrant and what doesn’t. But although that has led to some very uncomfortable truths about myself, I know all that self-reflection is necessary if I want to improve my life. As Socrates said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”
Many of the executives I’ve coached have ended up making drastic changes to their businesses and lives after realizing that they weren’t quite aligned with their passion, or their target market, or the product or service they were selling. And once those Tetris blocks clicked in to complete the business puzzle, it was like opening up the dam on their top and bottom lines.
After years of coaching leaders, I’ve seen firsthand that while Socrates’s assertion yields truly game-changing amounts of business value, those personal insights can get locked up in the biases to which we so inexplicably cling. Many of the executives I’ve coached have ended up making drastic changes to their businesses and lives after realizing they weren’t quite aligned with their passion, or their target market, or the product or service they were selling. And once those Tetris blocks clicked together to complete the business puzzle, it was like opening up the dam on their top and bottom lines.
I once had a client who was struggling to open a specialized manufacturing company, but everywhere she turned she hit a roadblock. Faced with difficulty at every turn, she was about to give up when she came to me. After we dove deeply into her experiences and her passions, she told me about how much joy it brought her to improve manufacturing processes and help up-and-running manufacturing companies make their people and machines more efficient. When we fleshed out what a manufacturing process improvement business might look like, she realized that that kind of business was in complete alignment with her abilities and the customers’ needs, and she opened that business the very next day.
After identifying the need for change, my clients inevitably express relief, because on some honest level, they knew something was out of alignment in their business or life all along and they just didn’t have the right tools or enough motivation to take a bold new tack. A leader’s instincts are often strong (that’s how they became the leader in the first place), so you can often begin to illuminate what’s lurking in your blind spot simply by stopping to listen to your own gut feelings. Just make sure you check those feelings against the perspectives of those around you so you come to an objective realization instead of a subjective one. Just as it is impossible to be your own psychologist, deep self-reflection isn’t nearly as effective when done alone. For me, it took joining the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, learning about the Johari window, and being placed in a Forum of other entrepreneurs to even begin to illuminate my many, many blind spots. There are eight of us entrepreneurs in my Forum, and we meet once a month to vulnerably and honestly share what’s really going on in our lives and businesses so we can help each other see the invisible blocks that might be holding us back. The process requires a type of honesty and a form of direct feedback that’s not for everyone, as Ray Dalio’s culture shows.
If you want to become a better leader, you must master the art of realizing you’re a no-good dirty liar. Most importantly, you must come to terms with the fact that you’re mainly lying to yourself, and in a shocking number of ways. As Martin Whittaker, CEO of JUST Capital pointed out, “I think honesty with oneself is crucial . . . it starts out with an honest assessment of yourself and an awareness of one’s own strengths, weaknesses, how you learn, what your natural risks and derailers are. All of that feeds into the way you act and what kinds of relationships you have with those around you . . . [and] that’s what drives performance.”
HOW PERSONAL BIASES AFFECT A LEADER’S PERFORMANCE
What do a leader’s blind spots and biases have to do with the performance of their business? Well, consider what I’ve observed over the past dozen years helping clients grow. When we created marketing campaigns for clients of our agency, the clients who were confident about their who and open to their how enjoyed results more like Domino’s, because they remained open about what was honestly going on in the world around them, what their others were saying, and how they needed to adapt. When clients had little to no preconceived notions about how they wanted their marketing to look and feel, we were able to dig into their insights with fresh eyes and employ every available relevant growth strategy on their behalf. Over time, the process of open exploration yielded increasingly more knowledge, insights, and effectiveness. As a result, those open-minded clients got a fantastic return on their investments; they hired us to do a job and then gave us the freedom to do it with their partnership. Meanwhile, other clients saw a drastically reduced return on their investments because they already had all the answers to their growth challenges. They were either convinced of their superior marketing abilities, or they knew exactly what their target markets wanted (because they firmly believed they, themselves, were the target market), or they wanted to micromanage every piece of the process, right down to the very last shade of chartreuse in their ads.
Sadder still were the few clients who received what we would consider to be clear indications of, let’s say, “unfavorable” market responses to their products or services but who were thoroughly unable to accept the market’s wisdom in favor of their own. What do you mean people think my baby’s ugly? Those people must be visually impaired. A few, unwilling to make strategic changes, eventually became one of those ugly business-failure statistics.
As Warren Buffett says about communicating to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders: “We will be candid in our reporting to you . . . the business facts that we would want to know if our positions were reversed. We owe you no less. Moreover . . . we also believe candor benefits us as managers: The CEO who misleads others in public may eventually mislead himself in private.”7 Unsurprisingly, I agree with Buffett: lying to yourself as a leader is even more egregious than lying to others. I should know . . . I’ve been lying to myself ever since I can remember, but I’ll take solace in the fact that at least I’m working on it.
I can only suspect that the firm, confident leaders who insist they know it all also get up on top of their homes to tell the roofer how to lay down their shingles and get under the kitchen sink with the plumber to instruct him or her on how to fix the leak.
Sarcasm notwithstanding, cognitive biases prevent organizations of all sizes from evolving, growing, thriving, and profiting. Sadly, some of the largest (and least innovative) organizations we’ve worked with are often the most dysfunctional, led by a leader who either hasn’t heard of the Johari window or, even worse, couldn’t care less what’s in it. Unfortunately for these leaders, they need to embrace the truth if they want to emerge from their sales plateaus and begin claiming unprecedented industry growth and profitability once more.
“The CEO who misleads others in public may eventually mislead himself in private.” —Warren Buffett
THINKING OUTSIDE IN CAN PREVENT YOU FROM MAKING CATASTROPHIC MISTAKES
Some of the best thinking on biases in leadership has come from South African–born Willie Pietersen, who served as CEO for brands such as Seagram USA, Tropicana, Lever Brothers Foods, and others. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Pietersen a few years ago and listened in nodding approval (more like emphatic head-banging) as he explained poor business leadership as a lack of what he calls “outside-in thinking.” According to Pietersen, thinking outside in is all about thinking of your business from the customer’s point of view instead of looking at your business from your own, internal point of view.8 Yes, you’re right: this is pure, unadulterated logic at its best, “and yet,” Pietersen points out, “most organizations lament that they are not good at it.” What makes it so difficult?
He identifies four reasons to explain the gap between who organizations aspire to be and who they are in reality: human psychology, misleading advice, organizational barriers, and confusion between strategy and planning. As you no doubt know by now, “human psychology” lies at the heart of our struggle with honesty and is also at the heart of why organizations stall and sometimes drift downward into oblivion. Pietersen’s analysis is this: even though organizations know that their customers’ opinions are paramount, as Domino’s Pizza proves, many organizations still attempt to understand their customers from the inside out—through the lenses of their own personal biases instead of objectively, through the customer’s eyes.
“Really, it is a process error,” Pietersen submits, “compounded by human nature, which [in this case] is the tendency to discuss or gossip about internal issues” instead of coming to honest terms about an organization’s external, customer-centric issues. Instead, the important data, wrapped up inside the heads of the customers and recognized most clearly by the frontline team, takes effort to obtain and humility to seek, and therefore remains in the blind spot.
Pietersen has seen throughout his career that the typical “inside-out mind-set is pervasive . . . it is the natural default condition. This is where we find comfort and security in a world we know and enjoy [but] the truth of the matter is that outside-in thinking is an unnatural act. Without a forcing mechanism, it hardly ever happens.” Think about how wrong Ray Dalio could have continued to be if he hadn’t created a culture around him that would force the most objective truths to the surface to guide Bridgewater’s financial decision-making. Think about what would have happened if Domino’s Pizza had never thought to truly ask its customers what they thought about the pizza—and ensured that the execs believed what they heard. Instead of asking customers, leaders usually inflict themselves with Pietersen’s second sin, “misleading advice,” by adopting their own thinking as gospel and only accepting information and guidance that fits within what they already know is true.
Pietersen’s third outside-in miscue is with “organizational barriers”—essentially, good old-fashioned silos in which one department has no idea what the others are doing. Silos pervade organizations everywhere—and they’ll directly block any organization’s ability to honestly assess the customers’ needs and address them as a unified team. Think about what would happen if The Ritz’s teams performed differently depending on which location you walked into because they had no way of sharing best practices? All their cultural efforts would go up in proverbial flames. Across the companies with high-performing cultures we’ve examined so far, the leader of each has worked tirelessly to ensure that their teams work cohesively under one honest set of cultural guidelines instead of acting disparately.
Finally, Pietersen notes, it’s far easier for us to check boxes than think outside them, which is why many leaders commit his fourth offense, “confuse strategy and planning.” Many an organization heralds their strategic planning process, but the truth is, strategy and planning are two very different pursuits. “Strategy,” Pietersen describes, “is about doing the right things. It harnesses insight about the external environment to make the most intelligent choices about where to compete and how to win the competition for value creation. It is quintessentially outside in.”
Many an organization heralds their strategic planning process, but the truth is, strategy and planning are two very different pursuits.
Meanwhile, planning, by contrast, is about “doing things right. It flows from the choices made in the strategy process and provides orderliness, discipline, and logistical rigor. Its purpose is not to create breakthrough thinking, but to produce predictability through forecasts, blueprints, and budgets. Its orientation is largely internal.”
Planning is simple; it does not disrupt the status quo. It does not challenge who you are as a leader, who your organization is, and what painful truths might be lurking in your blind spot. Our natural inclination as humans is to avoid truth and embrace comfort; to that end, Pietersen notes there is evidence suggesting that strategic planning initiatives “produce 90 percent planning and only 10 percent strategy. Planning then becomes a substitute for strategy, and over time such companies will lose the ability to think and act strategically.” This is exactly why we transitioned our agency from providing “marketing” to providing “strategic communications for growth.” And it’s also why we created a new tech company to put our agency entirely out of business. In both pivots, we realized that executing on the status quo might simply not have been enough to create sustainable growth for the long term, especially if the organization honestly needed an overhaul to its business model.
IGNORANCE IS POWER; KNOWLEDGE IS BLISS
Whether you’re the leader of a Fortune 500 company, a start-up entrepreneur, or a middle manager in Nebraska, ask yourself what you could gain by admitting what you don’t know.
And if you think that’s too basic or too obvious a strategy for self- or organizational improvement, consider this: admitting what you don’t know is exactly the strategy Toyota used to kick the American automakers’ collective behinds in the 1980s and ’90s. The car company uprooted a massive American industry using a little piece of string called an andon cord.
The andon cord, replaced in 2014 by more technologically-savvy buttons, was the physical system of ropes that Toyota rigged along its legendary Toyota Production System (TPS) assembly line. The concept was simple: if you found a defect in your part of the production line, or if you encountered some systemic problem that you thought needed fixing, you’d pull the string to stop the line and help would come. Toyota’s executives figured that if someone found a defect along the production line, then the defect most likely came from somewhere upstream of that spot. When an employee pulled the cord, it stopped the line until the problem was found. Once the root of the problem was found and cured, and the line was restarted, the root cause of the issue was no longer a problem going forward.
Any organization that wants to consistently improve the quality and speed of its production would logically want to adopt such a system. And the system has been around for decades now, in one form or another. Yet many organizations react with horror at the mere thought of stopping the production line, whether that means literally stopping an assembly line at Toyota or pausing to fix an aging infrastructure at Sprint. Many cultures encourage short-term productivity at all costs, even if allowing errors actually costs the organization more in the long run.
Case in point: I once heard an operations professor at Columbia Business School talk about his trip to Tesla’s factory in the company’s early days. There, he saw an excessive number of cars waiting in the finish area to have assembly line defects repaired before sale. When he asked about the extra cost he knew such a sizeable waiting line would incur (naturally, given his role as a professor of operations), the Tesla representative brushed away his concern, saying, “Don’t worry! We have the best defect repair people in the business!”
If that doesn’t make you cringe, it should. Elon Musk is literally a rocket scientist, yet he had built a factory full of managers who didn’t want to admit they had blind spots all over the place that were costing Tesla time and money.
What about you? What’s in your blind spot? What do others know about you that you aren’t willing to admit to yourself? How might those discrepancies be holding you back?
Think about your most recent work meeting. Do you have an andon cord? Maybe not a literal one, but a figurative way for you to raise your hand and say, Hey, we have a problem here and we honestly need to address it?
Bethenny Frankel walks around with an andon cord in her mind. Every time she hears something she doesn’t know, she pulls that cord and opens her blind spot just a little bit more every time. Winding down our time together, I asked her to reflect back on her life and think of some advice for the next up-and-coming entrepreneur out there—in her thirties, living in a tiny apartment, wondering how she’ll survive and thrive and make a name for herself, just like Bethenny years ago. She didn’t skip a beat in answering, “I’m not some genius or anything. It’s simplicity. Simplicity of the idea. Simply being passionate, determined, and honest are so important. You can get so far with that.”
As she was leaving for her panel, she gifted me with one last defiant quip: “You can never assume that someone is smarter than you. Your doctor, your lawyer—they’re only as good as what you give them.”
It’s possible she was right about me, if only because I know how dumb I truly am.
QUESTIONS FOR HONEST REFLECTION
1.What do others know about you that you aren’t willing to admit to yourself? How might those blind spots be holding you back?
2.Who in your peer group or family can help you illuminate your blind spots so they don’t get in your way?
3.What does your organization believe about itself, its customers, and its industry, that may not be true? How can you create an andon cord for your organization to ensure that problems get addressed and fixed?