the approach and results of this experience. • The team I led was a collaboration and mix of people within the company across every functional area and consultants from outside the organization, which was new and bold. • This “new thinking approach” was unheard of at the time within our organization. It was also not aligned with our culture to bring in outsiders to develop solutions to solve our internal/external problems because the mindset of, “the only way to understand our business is to come up in our business” ways of thinking was culturally pervasive. • However, we bucked the system and gain approval to try out this new approach and brought a fresh point of view to help us “frame” the problem from several perspectives. • We also actively sought nontraditional (cross-functionally) inputs from every business area, including best practices and benchmarking other companies within and outside of our industry. • We also created an inclusive information-sharing process to include representatives from the second team to view, share, and exchange our learnings. • The second team, comprised of internal company members was well qualified with deep industry knowledge and more industry experience than my team. • Team two led their processes with the traditional tried and true problem-solving methods from the past with limited participation for other business functions, kept their strategy development close to their vest, didn’t openly share or actively participate with my team. • Lastly, Team two was also unwary, and questioned our approach, as we were quickly branded as the “inexperienced” team on a quick path to failure. Summary: • My team’s recommendations led to several new ground-breaking and innovative growth strategies. This happened despite constant questioning and doubt - our team turned around our product line, by producing record sales growth, market share, revenues, and profit increases. • Our team also delivered a new reconstructed groundbreaking product portfolio strategy that continues to perform well in the market. • The second team experienced some success, but not at the unprecedented levels my team delivered, and their product line suffered from declines in customer satisfaction. As stated earlier, experience is a collection of information acquired over a lifetime. It has tremendous value but contains a repository of expertise, past knowledge we can tap into - from a rearview mirror point of view. It can inform or limit our approach, as point out in my above example. It is when we balance experience with new thinking, we get the best of both worlds. Leaders who seek out new inputs, actively solicit varied perspectives, and diverse points of view to influence their decisions build and draw their solutions for the collective - as they look at the world with an open mind of not how things were, but how they can be, and avoid going it alone. This is why I love teaching MBAs at the University of Houston, Marilyn Davies Schoool of Business with my colleague Professor Scott Davis. Our class is filled with Millennials and Gen-Zs - our next generations of leaders, who are unabashed and not afraid to challenge how things have been done in the past, while eagerly seeking how to approach problems differently, resulting in future possibilities unimagined by their older generations. But, they are also interested in my years of expertise, which makes me marvel and root for this well-capable next generation. The more I spend time teaching, the more I learn from my students, who teach me in return, which keeps me in check, and more importantly - allows me to embrace the beginner’s mindset, balance my past expertise and keep an open mind to new ways of doing things. “If you lead with a beginner’s mind, you are not hampered by the predisposition of what has happened before. Instead, you are guided and focused on the unlimited possibilities of what could be - that is unknown to experiences of the past.” 23
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