Taking Smart Risks: How Sharp Leaders Win When Stakes are High: How Sharp Leaders Win When Stakes are High (EBOOK) - Hardcover

Sundheim, Doug

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071778195 ISBN 13: 9780071778190

Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education Ltd, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In today's market, playing it safe is not an option Lead your company to sustainable success by taking the RIGHT RISKS The business world is in flux, and you have to think and act quickly in order to stay competitive. But the last thing you want to do is make reckless business decisions. You have to find the middle ground. You have to take SMART RISKS. In this groundbreaking book, leadership expert Doug Sundheim explains how to find that precise point between comfort and danger for generating the sustained ability to work at the highest level of performance. Taking Smart Risks reveals the secrets to discovering, planning for, and acting upon the kind of risks that will move your company forward and ahead of the competition. Learn how to: Find Something Worth Fighting For-What do you care enough about to risk time, energy, and money to try to make happen? Determining this is half the battle. See the Future Now-Clarify your big idea in terms of real objectives, plans, and intended results. Act Fast, Learn Fast-Make your move quickly, but be sure you don't squander valuable resources in the process. Communicate Powerfully-Assume communication will break down at points, plan accordingly-and don't shy away from the tough conversations. Create a Smart Risk Culture- Build teams that share the same mindsets and values about expected smart risk behavior. Applying Sundheim's advice will help you let go of old assumptions, explore new possibilities, move your organization out of its comfort zone, and experience long-term success. When you take smart risks, you will create. You will innovate. You will grow. And you will WIN. "From Sherwin Williams to Moo.com, Doug Sundheim is onto something here: your work is worth fighting for. A worthy read for everyone in your organization." -Seth Godin, Author, The Icarus Deception "The risk-taking concepts in this book lie at the heart of effective leadership. Using case studies and stories from executives who have 'been there, done that,' Doug Sundheim teaches us that sometimes the most dangerous thing to do-in business and life-is to play it safe." -Marshall Goldsmith, million-selling author of the New York Times bestsellers MOJO and What Got You Here Won't Get You There "Sundheim delivers a message that every business needs to hear right now: excessive risk will kill you, but so will complacency. . . . If you're charged with driving growth in your organization, buy this book-but more importantly, use it." -Jed Hartman, Group Publisher, Fortune & CNNMoney.com "A spectacular book! The stories were powerful, the advice was crystal clear, and every few pages called me to action. I have bookmarked more pages in Taking Smart Risks than I have in any book since reading Peter Drucker's classics." -Michael Hejtmanek, President & CEO, Hasselblad Bron Inc. "Doug Sundheim does an excellent job of demonstrating not only how to take smart risks, but also how to lead the process of risk-taking-a critical skill set for leaders today." -Cindy Zollinger, President & CEO, Cornerstone Research "A compelling case for why smart risk taking is so important in today's fast-paced, uncertain world." -Willie Pietersen, Professor, Columbia Business School; former CEO, Tropicana and Seagram USA

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Doug Sundheim is a leadership and organizational consultant with over 20 years of experience in growing businesses and helping others do the same. He works with leaders and teams of Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial firms to help them maximize their effectiveness. His clients include Morgan Stanley, Harvard Management Company, The Chubb Corporation, Citigroup, University of Chicago, and Procter & Gamble, among others. Prior to his work in leadership and organizational consulting, he spent several years in the Internet strategy field. You can learn about Doug and his services at www.dougsundheim.com.

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TAKING SMART RISKS

How Sharp Leaders WIN When Stakes are HighBy DOUG SUNDHEIM

McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Doug Sundheim
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-177819-0

Contents

Chapter One

The Dangers of Playing It Safe

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.

—HElEN KEllER

When you think of someone who's playing it safe, you rarely think of a guy like Vivek Shah. By 2008, when he was 36 years old, Shah was group president, digital publishing at Time Inc. He was responsible for all online news, business, and sports properties, including Time.com, Life.com, SI.com, and CNNMoney.com. A creative thinker and change agent, Shah was promoted to group president because he had a knack for reinventing old magazine brands so that they could succeed in the new digital world. His biggest success was creating CNNMoney.com, a single consumer-friendly destination for all of Time's financial information that is now among the company's most valuable assets. He was named to Grain's New York Business's prestigious 40 under 40 list in 2006 (top 40 business-people in New York under age 40), and many in the industry felt that Shah was on a fast track to becoming CEO of Time.

However, Shah felt he needed a change.

In early 2010, with a stellar track record and despite a bright future in front of him, Shah walked away from Time to buy Ziff Davis, an ailing computer magazine publisher that was saddled with debt and just out of bankruptcy. He's the first to admit that it seemed like a crazy decision. But he had done his homework, and he had a vision for how to revive the once-storied brand. Finding backers, Shah crossed his fingers and jumped in. Two years later, having shed all print titles, rebuilt online brands, and launched a promising new data product, he's in full growth mode, and his prospects for the future look good.

When I asked Shah why he took the enormous career and financial risk of trying to bring Ziff Davis back from the dead, he said that beyond thinking it was a smart deal, he needed to prove something to himself.

"I had come to a point in my career where I wanted to know what I was made of," he said. "Staying at Time would have been the safe thing to do. But I wanted to know if I could build a business on my own. Could I take a risk outside of a large corporation and succeed? That question really bothered me. And I knew it would keep bothering me until I tried to answer it. The emotional cost of not risking and having to live with that regret was much greater in my mind than any career or financial costs I would incur."

In my work as a leadership and strategy consultant, this is a theme I hear often. Money is important, but a sense of accomplishment, growth, and self-knowledge is what really drives leaders, teams, and organizations to take risks.

When you play it safe, staying in the comfort zone for too long, you don't feel these things. You stagnate. And that puts everything at risk.

What It Means to Play It Safe

Playing it safe means that you've disengaged from meaningful challenges, aren't pushing yourself or your organization to grow, and aren't creating your future, but rather being passively dragged into it.

Shah's story illustrates how personal the definition of playing it safe is. Others in his situation might have considered the path to CEO to be all the challenge they needed. But that didn't matter to Shah because he didn't see it that way. Knowing himself and the questions he wanted to answer, he felt that he would be playing it safe if he stayed at Time and knew that he had to make the leap.

Over the past 60 years, professionals from the fields of psychology, philosophy, and adult development have recognized the need to engage in meaningful challenges as a primary driving force in living a satisfying life. Whether you're rich or poor, young or old, you need to get out of your comfort zone regularly if you want to enjoy life. That's because the real reward for leaving your comfort zone never lies in what you achieve by doing it; it lies in the process of doing it. You become engaged and energized, clear and confident—in a word, alive.

Leaving your comfort zone fuels growth and development throughout life. It pushes you past perceived boundaries, allowing you to realize your potential. On one level, everyone knows this. We've all faced challenges, taken risks, and learned profound things about what we're capable of doing. We've felt invigorated. And we've inspired ourselves and others in the process.

Yet on another level, it's easy to forget these moments. Fooled into thinking that it's the end results, not the process of risk taking itself, that hold the primary value, we pull back and coast. We find comfort, and we don't want to lose it. We start playing it safe, ignoring the warning signs that this is a bad idea. We seem to forget that comfort is never permanent.

Shah spotted this pitfall and avoided it. Many people don't.

How We Miss the Warning Signs

The dangers of taking too much risk are very clear. We're reminded of them in the news every day. Businesses, families, and individuals are ruined in shocking fashion—"150-year-old bank and pillar of Wall Street is gone in the blink of an eye"; "Major oil company loses $90 billion in market value in three months"; "Kite surfer tries his luck in a hurricane and slams into a building." Astounding lapses in judgment are everywhere. The warnings of overambitious risks are clear—watch yourself and don't do anything stupid.

Unfortunately, we rarely hear any warnings about playing it safe. We don't see news headlines that say, "Low-risk approach forces local business to file for bankruptcy," or, "Stunningly conservative move pushes global pharmaceutical company to the brink of failure," or "Man retires after a mediocre career and feels painful remorse for never having laid anything on the line."

The dangers of playing it safe aren't sudden, obvious, and dramatic. They don't make headlines. They develop slowly over time and are almost impossible to pinpoint. This fact often makes them more dangerous than the high-profile missteps we see and hear about in the news because, like a slow leak in a tire, you don't see or feel these dangers on a daily basis. You become aware of them only when you realize that you're stuck and you're not really sure how it happened.

The dangers of playing it safe are hidden, silent killers. You miss a job opportunity, lose a sale, get beaten to market by a competitor, lose a star employee, or hurt a relationship. None of these signals that you might not be taking important risks is enough to set off alarms. Your defense mechanisms quickly step in to do damage control. You convince yourself and others that it wasn't right for me anyway, or I didn't really want it, or the timing was bad, or I was busy with other things. Then you go about your business as if nothing unusual has happened.

But somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that something is off. You're slipping a little. You're a step behind. You feel insecure. The walls you need to climb look higher and higher each day than they did the day before. You know you should be getting out there, taking action, and making changes. But you don't. You feel trapped.

You don't want to feel the regret of doing...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0071778195
• ISBN 13: 9780071778190
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 274
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: McGraw-Hill Education; https://www.mheducation.co.in/; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; 20090; Italien