Mark C. Thompson
Mark C. Thompson is a New York Times bestselling author, coach, investor, and advisor to leaders who are transforming their companies – from Virgin’s Richard Branson and Apple’s Steve Jobs, to Pinterest founder Evan Sharp, LYFT founder Logan Green, author Tony Robbins, and World Bank President Jim Kim. At Schwab, Mark reported to founder Charles “Chuck” Schwab as senior vice president/executive producer of Schwab.com, and later global retail and enterprise chief customer experience officer for The Charles Schwab Corporation.
Mark is founding patron and leadership advisor to Richard Branson’s Entrepreneurship Centers – more than 400 companies operate under the Virgin brand. He was founding advisor to the Stanford University Realtime Venture Design Lab. He is adjunct faculty at Harvard McLean’s Institute of Coaching and the Institute for Contemporary Leadership with Google’s David Peterson. Mark has served as faculty at the World Economic Forum, World Business Forum, and Drucker/Hesselbein Leader to Leader Institute. He is a chancellor for Junior Achievement’s Success University and member of the board of trustees for the International Coaching Federation Foundation.
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As Virgin America announced plans for its long-awaited IPO, Sir Richard Branson confided to me over a late-night beer1 just how maddening it can be to launch any high-flying business, even for a serial entrepreneur with more than 350 other companies under the Virgin brand. Back when the Silicon Valley-based airline was getting started, Virgin America’s competitors viciously contested the newcomer’s arrival for what seemed like an eternity. Price wars, lawsuits, and regulatory battles all soaked up precious resources.
“The knee-jerk reaction you feel as a leader when you’re under attack is to assume a siege mentality,” Branson said. But your fight-or-flight instincts are “a self-indulgent waste of time and money.” Instead, he and his partners focused on reinventing the customer experience for domestic air travel, eventually winning share in the insanely competitive airline industry. The strategy worked. While his foes fought each other, Virgin America was recently acquired at a nice profit for the legendary entrepreneur.
Branson said that rather than ever feel threatened or even sorry for himself, he’s always comforted by five principles that guided his mentor, Nelson Mandela, whose circumstances were obviously far more desperate than any of us will ever experience.
“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies,” Mandela once said. Vengefulness and victimhood would not erase the crimes done to him in the past, nor would they help him build a better future. Mandela could have emerged from decades of jail “still imprisoned by bitterness,” Branson said. “Instead he devoted every ounce of creativity to building a lasting legacy.”
When Branson’s house burst into flames during a hurricane a few years ago, actress Kate Winslet and her family, along with Branson’s 90-year-old mom, Eve, fled to safety. Branson himself had been sleeping down near the beach in a guest cottage when he heard lightning strike his hilltop home. He sprinted out the door buck naked and straight into a cactus. “No one felt sorry for me,” he joked, “as everyone had more important issues to contend with.” Nobody was hurt, but Branson felt a deep moment of loss. He’d raised his family in that house, and the setback gave him insight into how to weigh what’s important.
The biggest heartbreak about the blaze for Branson was losing his prized notebooks. He’s scribbled ideas and to-do’s in a set of bound blank books in almost every meeting I’ve ever attended with him. He’s been doing that for decades, and it has two important benefits that make him one of the happiest and most humble people you’ll ever meet. Taking notes keeps him present in the conversation and able to gather knowledge rather than drifting away or indulging in holding court with celebrity-crazed admirers. “You need to have some way to stay focused on what matters, what you’re learning, and what you might find important later, so track your insights in every step of your adventure,” Branson says.
Sir Richard’s home tragedy yielded another unique insight about how to harvest failure and innovate at the same time. Here’s the key idea: If you lost everything tomorrow, would you
The good news is that none of this has happened today, but if you take these questions seriously for a moment, you will unleash a flood of fresh ideas about what you might consider doing, along with both regrets and gratitude about the way things are. It’s a powerful way to reconnect with what and who matters to you before a crisis requires that sort of innovation.
“I’d not wish it on anyone,” Branson told me, “but sometimes the best way to get clear about what has meaning to you is to imagine starting over from scratch!”
Perhaps it’s time to throw a few things out that don’t really work for you, or take more time to appreciate who and what you’d miss if you lost them. There can be many benefits: Branson’s new home is bolder and more beautiful in ways that better reflect who he is today and what he wants to accomplish in the next chapter of his life.
When Charles (Chuck) Schwab flunked English and was nearly thrown out of college, he said he was “humiliated because I had always thought I was a reasonably smart guy and I didn’t realize how pathetic I was at the skill of reading and writing.”2 Schwab recruited friends and family to help him deliver the goods in school. His reading and writing troubles, he would later discover, were the result of dyslexia. “It might seem odd,” said Schwab, “but what felt like a deficit was a real benefit.” His reading disability taught him how to recruit a talented, trustworthy team and forced him to become a skilled delegator.
When it comes to building an organization, nobody does it alone. Like the blind person who develops acute senses of hearing and smell, an intelligent person with learning disabilities who is ambitious like entrepreneur Charles Schwab won’t hesitate to seek help to get things done rather than assume that he can or must do it all on his own. If you’re a decent reader, you might not get help. Chuck Schwab could not read well enough to stay in college, so rather than be thrown out of Stanford, he recruited study groups. Marshall Goldsmith often talks about how even the most brilliant people eventually must learn that they are expert at very few things, so the faster you learn that, the better off you will be as a leader.
Ultimately, those recruitment and delegation skills enabled Chuck to scale a business much sooner than most of his classmates at Stanford Business School. “Brilliant entrepreneurs think they can do everything, and they don’t spend enough time finding the right people to grow the business,” he shrugged.
None of us is an expert at everything. “When you don’t know something, just say so; it will shock the hell out of everyone and help you build a team to help you,” Schwab smiled.
It’s perhaps the most provocative phrase anyone can say in public: I don’t know. In fact, the Dalai Lama, the global spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, who has spent his lifetime trying to build understanding among faiths around the world, has been caught unabashedly using the phrase every time I’ve interviewed him. The guru says, with a grin and without apology, “I don’t know!” Nervous laughter usually creeps over the audience; then they sit in stunned silence as he smiles on stage like a bald leprechaun in orange robes and sneakers. What a shockingly simple revelation in a world where so-called experts speculate on national television far beyond their training or expertise – shouting at each other about things they do not know. Although it may not initially sound reassuring, I don’t know is a sort of a code or catch phrase you can use to identify honest people and enduringly high achievers all over the world. It’s kind of the secret handshake of integrity. When asked a question for which you do not have an answer, spend a moment looking earnest, then as folks lean forward breathlessly to await your wisdom, say, “I don’t know, let’s ask someone who does.” It works wonders and creates a space in which learning is possible.
Rather than getting sucked into a protracted, bitter feud with anyone, it’s much better to let your adversaries waste their energy fighting each other. Mandela didn’t go to war or terrorize his former captors. “He didn’t take the bait,” Branson said, “and you shouldn’t, either.” Virgin America, for example, didn’t get distracted by turf battles and name calling, and instead focused on building a community of customers who loved its fresh, edgy vibe.
“We’re too easily driven by instant gratification, both good and bad,” famed educator and author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Steve Covey told me during a long dinner at his home outside Salt Lake City.3 Our primal brains are hardwired by fight-or-flight urges, which means that we’re easily seduced by anything that feels remotely urgent rather those less-exciting things that have longer-term strategic impact. “It’s tempting to behave like Pavlov’s dog, leaping at anything that shows immediate threats or rewards,” Covey cautioned. Be wary of urgent things that steal your time from long-term commitments.
“Do not judge me by my successes,” Mandela admonished. “Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” When you’re suffering a setback in your startup, imagine how much worse Mandela had it – and just how creative he had to be in a cramped cell every night. From dawn to dusk, he dragged stones in the blinding heat. You can’t steel yourself year after year dreaming that hopeless circumstances will change, he said. You have to change the way you deal with them. Being flexible in finding a new door every time the last one slams shut is the difference between those who find their way and those who self-destruct.
I will never forget Nelson Mandela’s warm embrace as he almost collapsed in my arms after midnight during his last visit to the World Economic Forum (WEF),4 the invitation-only summit in the Swiss Alps where CEOs, presidents of nations, artists, educators, and entrepreneur billionaires convene every winter. I was executive producer of Schwab.com, and I was participating in panels at the WEF and interviewing hundreds of leaders in Davos for a reprise to the business classic, Built to Last,5 by Jim Collins and legendary Stanford professor Jerry Porras. The bestselling sequel, Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters6 (with Porras and Stewart Emery) feels like Dale Carnegie’s epic adventure How to Win Friends and Influence People7 updated for the new millennium.
Almost every thought leader I met for face-to-face interviews pointed to Mandela as a perfect role model for leadership. In our conversation, the Nobel Laureate smirked and told me that perfection was never a part of his plan and that he “never achieved it.” In the years before Mandela, an activist lawyer, had been sent to a death camp, he was rarely without zealous overconfidence about his mission to end apartheid. Although he initially advocated a peaceful solution, Mandela eventually took up arms when the path of peace appeared to be a dead-end. The fact that he didn’t start out as a complete saint with perfect grace or humility before his long walk to freedom makes his journey even more useful to the rest of us.
“You have enduring impact not because you are perfect or lucky,” Sir Richard sighed as he finished a beer, “but because you have the courage to stay focused on building a better future rather than dwell in the past.”
Leaders find love in their work and life when they find the courage to turn their wounds into wisdom and their passions into purpose.