Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability

By Faisal Hoque and Drake Baer

Leadership. Creativity. Innovation.
When you put it all together, EVERYTHING CONNECTS.

The constant cascade of new technologies and social changes is creating a more empowered population. Workforces are increasingly dispersed, demanding of self-expression, and quite possibly disengaged. Within this topsy-turvy context, leaders must spark creativity, drive innovation, and ensure sustainability.

What are the remedies? The newest problems of the world find solutions in the oldest and time-less practices such as mindfulness, authenticity, and perseverance—because Everything Connects.

Everything Connects is a kaleidoscopic view of the way humans—by being able to think out of the box—have been able to achieve greatness for themselves, their organizations, and the world at large. It is your step-by-step guide for working with yourself and others—for meaningful success.

Using real-life practical experiences, serial entrepreneur and thought leader Faisal Hoque teams up with journalist Drake Baer to provide a personal and professional playbook that shows how to:

• Holistically connect the “when” and “what” with who you are
• Inspire and lead inside and outside of your organization
• Generate ideas, grounded decisions, and long-term value

Part philosophy, part business, and part history, Everything Connects offers the wisdom of 2,500-year-old Eastern philosophies and the interconnected insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Couple that with Fortune 100 corporate cross pollination for creativity and startup thinking for how to adapt with ease, and you’ll quickly discover that Everything Connects.

This isn’t just a quick fix for your next financial quarter; this is how you succeed in the long run. It is a systemization of the best practices of spirituality and entrepreneurship—loaded with knowledge, humor, and humanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Feb 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9780071831369

Faisal Hoque

FAISAL HOQUE, a former senior executive at General Electric and other multinational corporations, is the Founder and CEO of BTM (Business Technology Management) Corporation.

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To our readers, the dreamers of dreams

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can’t make it through one door, I’ll go through another door—or I’ll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.

—Rabindranath Tagore

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION: RENAMING ROLES

PART I

WHEN, WHO, AND HOW ARE YOU?

CHAPTER 1

UNDERSTANDING WHEN, WHAT, AND WHO WE ARE

CHAPTER 2

MINDFUL EXPERIENCE, AUTHENTIC SELF

CHAPTER 3

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT WORKING TOGETHER

CHAPTER 4

LONG-TERM PLANS, DYNAMIC PRESENT

PART II

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES, SHARED CULTURES, AND OTHER RHYTHMS

CHAPTER 5

STRUCTURES OF INNOVATION

CHAPTER 6

PERFORMING INNOVATION

CHAPTER 7

LEADING, SUSTAINING, AND OTHER WAYS TO GROW

PART III

FLOWING IDEAS, GROUNDED DECISIONS, AND LONG-BURNING VALUE

CHAPTER 8

CREATING CONSTANT CREATION

CHAPTER 9

BLUEPRINTING DECISIONS

CHAPTER 10

WHEN VALUE BECOMES LONG TERM

EPILOGUE

NOTES

RECOMMENDED READING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

FOREWORD

INNOVATION IS A HUMAN ENDEAVOR

By Marshall Goldsmith

As the world has become more globally connected, our personal interconnections have grown exponentially. The speed and pace of our days has greatly increased. In this busier, more connected world, it can be difficult to take the time needed to reflect on our careers and our lives. While our opportunities and challenges seem to be growing, the time available to reflect on these opportunities and challenges seems to be shrinking.

My professional mission is to help successful leaders achieve positive, lasting change in behavior. Over the years I have seen how the leadership behaviors that have led to one level of success might not be the same behaviors needed to achieve a higher level of success. In my coaching, all my clients receive confidential 360-degree feedback. This feedback comes from managers, peers, colleagues, and direct reports. In many cases my clients also receive feedback from family members and friends. This type of comprehensive feedback may enable us to see the blind spots that inhibit our growth. When leaders have a complete perspective, they can move forward with clarity. Buddha noted that right understanding leads to right action. One word for such a comprehensive view of life is holistic.

In problem analysis, the holistic approach takes into account the whole system of causes and effects that have an impact on the problem. If the problem were a knot, the holistic problem solver would review each thread’s direction and how they all fit together—how the many parts created the puzzling whole. After seeing how the tangling happened, it can be easy to untie the knot; the solution practically suggests itself.

Holistic problem solving helps us systematically review the messy knots in our lives and then create clear, ready-to-implement solutions.

This book helps us find holistic solutions to problems in our organizations and in our lives. To do this it combines different disciplines.

While there are many books about understanding business and many books about understanding ourselves, there are few books that address both issues at once. In addressing both of these issues, Faisal Hoque and Drake Baer have drawn upon knowledge from many sources, including organizational theory, neuroscience, and management theory, as well as psychology, spirituality, and self-improvement. Their holistic approach illustrates how these different views of the world can be connected.

The holistic approach described in the book was shaped by the backgrounds of the authors. Faisal, the entrepreneur, innovator, and elder of the duo, was born in Bangladesh (near the birthplace of Buddha) and found himself in the boardrooms of Fortune 100 companies by the time he was 27. Drake, the journalist, traveler, and younger of the two, was born in Illinois and found himself in Himalayan meditation retreats by the time he was 24. There’s something disparate, united, and exciting about that combo, and their creative tension is found throughout the argument and adventure of the text. Together, they’ve created a book that’s as much about business as it is about life or as much about life as it is about business.

In today’s rapidly changing world, leaders are constantly challenged with questions such as these: How can we keep improving? What can we do that is new and better? How can we innovate?

Innovation does not happen on a spreadsheet, slide show, or product line. Innovation occurs in the interaction between people. Innovation is a human process. Faisal and Drake believe that the more we can humanize the way we work, the more innovative we become. I agree with their view that the more we understand the mental and emotional causes of innovation and creativity, the more we can untie the knots that stop our progress.

The human process of innovation is not just something that happens between people; it also happens inside people. Part of innovation is self-discovery. Over my years of coaching I have learned that we cannot have an effective conversation with others if we do not have an effective conversation inside ourselves. By learning how we can better frame conversations within ourselves, we can have more grounded conversations with our teams and our world.

To me the discussion of work-life balance often misses the point. The very phrasing implies that work and life are somehow disconnected. I don’t feel this way about my work and my life, and neither do most of the mega-successful people I coach. Faisal and Drake have done a wonderful job of showing that the change we want to see in the world needs to be consistent with the change we see in ourselves.

Progress is something we are all trying to achieve. As we learn in the following pages, progress feeds our engagement, which leads to our best work. What’s exciting is that progress isn’t something that only exists out there as some feathery ideal but is something we can arrange in our days, starting today. If we understand all the threads that are knotted together in this thing called a job, this thing called a company, this thing called a nonprofit, then with a little luck, a little reorientation, we can make that progress an integrated part of this thing called life.

Maybe that’s why there’s a bicycle chain on the cover: if you love cycling, you know that it’s challenging, it’s self-powered, and it’s sustainable—in the sense that it’s good for the environment and in the sense that you can do it every day, joyfully. Through that sustained, sustainable effort, you get better at the cycling itself. It can get you here and it can get you there, literally. That’s the same kind of journey that readers of this book are going to go on: a journey in learning how to move our work in a self-powered, sustainable, and maybe even joyful direction. And by cycling around the whole big, beautiful mess of this unpredictable, innovation-hungry world of ours, we can start to untie the knots both inside and outside ourselves.

Marshall Goldsmith is a New York Times bestselling author and the Number One Leadership Thinker in the World (according to the Thinker’s 50 Conference sponsored by Harvard Business Review).

PROLOGUE

If you were to poke around the shops of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, or a Russian neighborhood in your nearest city, you may find a gorgeously carved little metaphor waiting for you on a shelf: the matryoshka doll, what might more commonly be called a nesting doll.

These dolls nest in this sense: on first taking it in, you’ll find a peasant girl or woman in traditional garb, typically wearing a long, flowing dress called a sarafan. But that charming figure is more than meets the eye; should you meet her with your hands, you’ll find that she opens up and another doll is inside. And then that doll opens up into another doll, and that one into another, on and on until you reach the smallest doll, carved from a single piece of wood—usually a baby. What appeared to be one figure was in fact many, layered inside one another like an onion, with each outer layer containing a smaller doll and each smaller doll supporting the outer layer. What appeared to be one was actually several but also, in a way, one.

Organizations are matryoshka dolls: what appears to be one solid thing is actually several. One appearance is brought about by many. In the case of for-profit business, the outermost layer— that charming peasant girl—is the long-term health of the organization. Then, the revenue over time. But there is another layer: the way that society, the customers, users, and other humans interact with the organization and perhaps buy its products. But there’s another layer within that: the product. And another layer again: the team that built the product. And another layer within that: the culture that brought together the team. And another layer within that: the psychology, the inner life, of the founders or leaders of the organization. Their mental lives inform the culture, which informs the hires, which informs the product, which informs people’s interactions with the company, which shapes the brand, which brings in revenue, which allows the company to thrive—or not.

Somewhere along that causality is a movement from the quantitative to the qualitative. The profits the company makes are, of course, tangible: they show up in a spreadsheet. But the causes that created those profits are not: there are no analytics, at least that we know of, that totally capture the inner lives of the people who made the profits. That subtle, private life is not something that translates into spreadsheets very well, but it does predict bottom lines, as we’ll discover in just a moment.

Why is this the case? Because, we think, it has something to do with the era that we are currently in. Disruption is a word that is popular in the business world: it’s used to describe the action of one company being able to provide a value—say, a product or service—much cheaper or at a much greater level of quality than the company currently in that space, which is usually called an incumbent. Often that is thought to be the result of a jump in technology—for example, the Internet, which catalyzed the rise of Netflix and the fall of Blockbuster in the United States—though we’ll later explore how it’s really the fault of the organization’s fixed, unadaptive structure.

To put it dramatically, this evidences a shift in the priorities of the world. We previously lived in an era in which optimization and its implied rigidity was the only game in town, but we now live in a time of creativity, innovation, and sustainability—for these are the skills organizations need to be continually adaptive. The question hidden within that need for continued adaptability, in the same way the matryoshka baby is hidden within the peasant girl, is what kind of psychological practices predict creativity, which social behaviors predict innovation, and which organizational structures lead to the sustainability of all these things.

The mission of this book is to find out.

INTRODUCTION

RENAMING ROLES

An entrepreneur is a person who takes responsibility for his or her economic well-being; a leader is a person who takes responsibility for the impact he or she makes on the world. However, that impact, whatever it may be, is in fact made up of myriad causes and conditions. The wise leader, then, is forever a student of the causality that makes up her endeavor. It’s about knowing all those layers of the matryoshka doll: If you’re trying to create an app that will change peoples’ lives, what are the elements of that change? And which people? And how will you test that? And who could build such a thing? And what mental state would that person have to have to build at his best ability?

The questions will keep unspooling; the matryoshka seems like it’s infinite. (Maybe it is!) The role of the leader, as we’ll discuss at length throughout this book, is to provide alignment. Why? Because alignment allows people to make decisions and act faster, which propels the velocity of an organization, allowing it to get feedback and grow more quickly. But what is alignment, and where does it come from? It’s about context.

Why were ancient mariners able to sail without modern equipment? They, of course, were able to read the stars—without all our modern light pollution. What the stars gave them was context, a signal from which to plan and act. And a clear night, of course, would provide greater resolution for the stars, making the signal stronger and the decision more clear. The leader is also searching for richer and richer constellations, examining the intersections of the enterprise in question. As we will emphasize throughout this book, this is not merely a matter of analysis but also of understanding—if we are trying to get humans to do something together, we need to understand our and their humanity. Such is the nature of holistic business.

THE JOURNEY TO COME

To borrow a line from Phil Libin, the highly quotable CEO of Evernote, we find that humanizing our working lives is a sufficiently epic quest to dedicate our lives to.¹ As we’ll discuss in a minute, that humanization will yield more positive experiences of work, more creativity and innovation within our organizations, greater interpersonal bonds between the people we work with, and, as the research plays out, the best shot we can give ourselves at creating value for the long term—resulting in initial public offerings for start-ups and diversified financial rewards for mature companies. Over three sections, we will show how being prosocial— that is, oriented toward others rather than yourself—is one of the most probusiness things you can do. How being holistic and humanistic is key to doing great work.

As these things tend to arrange themselves, this endless (and endlessly rewarding) journey will take place over three acts. In the first, we will address our own mental experiences, our social interactions, and the mindset we can take to orient ourselves to this holistic, long-term view. Then, in the middle section, we will explore the structures that lead to long-term innovation, the way to act in a manner that promotes mutual flourishing, and how, crucially, a leader can urge us along this process. In the third section we’ll see how to arrange our lives and our organizations in a way that leads to long-term value creation: surveying the subtle and not so subtle arts of idea generation, decision making, and creating continuous value.

We recognize that this might be a lot of new vocabulary. But don’t take our word for it: the things we’re about to describe will be familiar to you, though recontextualized; we’ve made a concerted effort to show how our individual, interpersonal, and organizational working lives all interconnect. By examining these connections, we’ll learn new ways to create, innovate, adapt, and lead. That said, we invite you onto this path of meeting work—again.

PART I

WHEN, WHO, AND HOW ARE YOU?

Although efficiency is not the opposite of innovation, the structures and behaviors that create them may be opposed.

If you want people to crank out as many widgets as possible in the shortest time, you can probably disregard their well-being—until they die of exhaustion—in favor of getting more and more done. However, if you are trying to bring something new into the world, you need a whole different set of behaviors. By its nature, creativity is an internal process within people, and so we must take into account the processes that happen inside them if we want to allow a group of people to

Reviews for Everything Connects

[hjvanderklis_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Everything Connects connects a myriad of ideas on innovation, organization, leadership, creative destruction, motivation and sustainability. Faisal Hoque & Drake Baer throw in examples from history (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci), modern businesses (Yammer, Amazon, UPS), while mixing it with mindfulness, the book’s common denominator. Combined with a loose, somehow not that structured approach can keep you puzzled or distract at times. The avid reader of modern business and management books will come across the ideas of Daniel Pink (motivation), Adam Grant (give & take), Schumpeter (creative destruction) once again. The authors push to embed Buddhism’s mindfulness and other spiritual themes into your business practice to invoke more creativity in this connected world, and find some peace of mind in this fast paced society full of disengagement and dispersed work teams. The book’s core message can be summarized in: Think of your origins, lead & inspire, add value to society.