Chapter 5 Ignore the Context at Your Peril 81

area. 8) She has found that people tend to either have fixed mindsets or growth mindsets, and those worldviews are radically different from each other.

The fixed mindset is “a fixed ability that needs to be proven” and a growth mindset is one “that can be developed through learning.”9 She suggests that Enron, as a corporation, had a fixed mindset. It hired very bright people and paid them well. So far, so good. But Dweck writes that Enron worshiped talent “thereby forcing its employees to look and act extraordinarily talented . . . it forced them into fixed mindsets. . . . We know from our studies that people with the fixed mindset do not admit and correct their deficiencies.”10 She suggests that Ken Lay, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Enron, looked down on those below him, treating them like serfs, including the company president who seemed to be one of the few (if not the only person) to wonder if they were headed down the wrong road.

People with fixed mindsets need to be the star.

A growth mindset is quite different, it thrives on challenges. It believes in learning— picking yourself up after a fall, figuring out what went wrong, and trying again. If Enron had been built on the beliefs behind a growth mindset, it still might have hired bright and talented people and paid them well, but then it would have found ways for those same superstars to get even better. And that comes from practicing and learning from experience. To paraphrase the columnist Herb Caen, we begin to cut our wisdom teeth the first time that we bite off more than we can chew.11

Dweck points out that in every instance, the leaders that Jim Collins and crew studied in their profile of great companies12 exemplified a growth mindset. In her words, “They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers— that is, to look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.”13

I think it is easy for us to see ourselves as being the models of a growth mindset when we may be nothing of the sort. Dweck writes that Ken Lay wanted to be seen as “a kind and thoughtful man.” Even as his company destroyed the lives of many, he wrote to his staff, “Ruthlessness, callous- ness, and arrogance don’t belong here . . . we work with customers and prospects openly, honestly, and sincerely.”14

We want to believe that we encourage people to learn, grow, and be the best they can be. We want to be able to say that “ruthlessness, callous- ness, and arrogance don’t belong” in our organizations. We may want to