The Road to Audacity: Being Adventurous in Life and Work

172 Pages·2003·22.728 MB·English

by  Stephen Carter, Jeremy Kourdi (auth.)

The Road to Audacity
AUDACITY
Being Adventurous in Life and Work
Stephen Carter
jeremy Kourdi
* © Stephen Carter and jeremy Kourdi 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-1-4309-0617-5
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First published 2003 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 978-1-349-51004-7 ISBN 978-0-230-50879-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230508798
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carter, Stephen.
The road to audacity : being adventurous in life and work I by Stephen
Carter and jeremy Kourdi.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Organizational behavior. 2. Psychology, Industrial 3. Risk-taking
(Psychology) I. Kourdi, jeremy. II. Title.
HD58.7 .C354 2003
650.1-dc22
2003055267
Editing and origination by Aardvark Editorial, Mendham, Suffolk
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 OS 04 03
Transferred to Digital Printing 20 11
List of Figures and Tables viii
Preface ix
Prelude What is Audacity?
Journeys and destinations 2
This happy band 3
Note 5
Chapter I The Road to Audacity 6
Living in a clockwork world? 6
Why risk it? The value of risk-taking and audacity 8
Driven to audacity - the case of Chrysler II
The inevitability of risk 12
Handling uncertainty 13
An unreasonable art 18
Travelling the road to audacity 20
Notes 21
Chapter 2 Why? The Audacity Factor 22
Why be audacious? 22
The search for excitement 23
The puzzle of why 24
Born audacious? 26
The promise of inconsistency 28
What uncertainty offers 30
Notes 31
Chapter 3 The Eight Ways of Being 32
Consistently inconsistent how we deal with arousal 33
Experiencing the world 36
Intention: goals versus means 37
Inclusion: fitting in versus falling out 40
Interaction: transactions versus relationships 43
Identification: me versus you 45
Connecting to audacity 48
50
Notes
v
Contents
vi
Chapter 4 The Meaning of Mountains 52
The 'real 'dangerous edge 52
Mountains and reversal theory 53
Learning from the journey 54
A motivationally rich promise 56
Note 56
Chapter 5 Walking the Dangerous Edge 57
How can we be audacious? 57
Stepping up to the dangerous edge 57
The confidence frame and the England middle order
batting collapse 61
But confidence in what? 62
Switching between states: fracturing the protective frame 65
Establishing protective frames 66
Awareness 70
Are you with me? 72
How organisations can be aware of an uncertain future 73
The audacity factor 75
Notes 76
Chapter 6 Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Employee? 77
Organisations need audacity 77
Employee-phobia 79
Malice, laziness and downright corruption 81
The paradox of audacity and the squandering of talent 83
Can the paradox be resolved? 84
What do you get when you trust people to be audacious? 85
The people you want, want to be audacious 86
The war for talent 87
Audacity delivers 88
... and is innovative 90
What does it take for an organisation to be audacious? 92
The very big picture 92
Notes 94
Chapter 7 Leadership Matters 95
The need for leadership 97
Led astray: why traditional leadership ideas are failing 98
Leadership is what matters, not simply leaders 98
Developing audacity through leadership 99
Building microclimates 100
What's it like being around you? The eight microclimate conditions 101
A role model for climate-building? lOS
Mandel a 107
The demon seen 109
Captain Mainwaring and Private Fraser 110
Leadership communities 112
Contents
vii
Developing a performance climate through a leadership
community I 13
The formula 116
Notes 116
Chapter 8 OfWildebeest, Buffalo and Bison 117
About SABMiller 118
About HSBC 119
Interesting and exceptional organisations 119
Notes 12.4
Chapter 9 Dancing with Customers 125
Desperately conforming incorporated 125
Treating customers as real people: the final frontier 130
But love is ... the safest thing 133
Notes 136
Chapter 10 Building a New Eden -Audacity at Work 137
About The Eden Project 138
The dream of Eden 139
Creating Eden 141
The motivation to build Eden 145
The importance of Eden 148
Notes ISO
Chapter II The Road from Morocco 151
lmlil 152
The Kasbah Du Toukbahl 152
Audacity - dreaming with your eyes open 155
Index 158
Figures
1.1 Management control and market volatility 12
1.2 Managing the impact of risk 15
3.1 Hebb's optimal arousal curve 33
3.2 Arousal-seeking and arousal-avoiding 34
3.3 The four domains of experience 37
3.4 Goals and means in the intention domain 38
3.5 Fitting in and falling out in the inclusion domain 41
3.6 Transaction and relationship in the interaction domain 43
3.7 'Me' and 'you' in the identification domain 46
5.1 The dangerous edge 58
5.2 Protective frames 61
5.3 Nideffer's model of attentional focus 71
5.4 The three pillars of audacity 75
6.1 Differences in time spent in serious vs. playful motivational states among
managers completing the Apter Motivational Style Profile 78
6.2 Differences in time spent in conforming vs. rebellious motivational states
among managers completing the Apter Motivational Style Profile 79
6.3 Differences in time spent in self-mastery vs. other-mastery motivational states
among managers completing the Apter Motivational Style Profile 79
Tables
1.1 Areas of organisational risk 14
3.1 Summary of motivational states and their implications for audacity 47
9.1 Harley-Davidson's financial performance 128
viii
It all started when the senior manager of a very large business decided he
wanted his company to be more audacious and someone thought we might
be able to help.
My first impulse on seeking to help was to round up the usual suspects -
the great and good of corporate life regularly eulogised in print - and then
I hesitated. What exactly was audacity and why would the leader of a
successful business want more of it? And, short of offering a list of distin
guished and not so distinguished role models, exactly how was someone or
some corporation to develop it?
The more I delved the more it seemed I was asking a question where the
answers were not going to come from the standard sources. And so it
became a puzzle and, I suppose, a bit of a quest. Trying to answer these
questions became an adventure undertaken for itself, although since then
all sorts of results and outcomes have been achieved.
To search for the road to audacity meant starting in and travelling
through some novel places. On this quest some people have provided
some very useful signposts and bearings. Foremost among these has been
the work and friendship of Michael J. Apter, creator of reversal theory and
in my opinion one of the great psychologists of the past few decades.
Reversal theory is quite simply the most powerful account of what it is to
be human that I have come across and one that particularly talks the spirit
of audacity. I have really wanted to capture the insights it has given me
and hopefully communicate them to a wider audience. Mike's enthusiasm
for this project and his willingness to consider new dimensions to the
implications and expansion of the theory are an example of the generosity
of a great mind.
Spending time over an eighteen-month period working and drinking a
few beers occasionally with Steve Venables, the British mountaineer and
writer, raised my curiosity about the spark that makes some of us climb
out of the valley and pastures and up into the peaks. His ability to articu
late and communicate the compulsion of this was an inspiration and led
me into areas of human experience of which, as a lesser motal, I had been
ix
Preface
X
ignorant. In this vein the energy and friendship of Barry Roberts has also
been superb, together with his rather quixotic attempts to render me fitter
and more able to survive in the great outdoors.
On the route to a finished book, a travelling companion can be a boon.
The last book I had written - Renaissance Management - had taken me
over two years to write and I really couldn't conceive of committing to a
similar lengthy project. What I needed was a colleague to help keep the
speed up and contribute in lots of ways. Jeremy Kourdi I knew would be
the perfect foil and so it proved. He is a most generous writing partner,
always positive and enthusiastic, supportive of new ideas, patient in
dealing with my somewhat erratic typing, grammar and sentence construc
tion, full of good examples, case studies and intelligent insight and he has
a great sense of readability. To spare his blushes, most of the anecdotes in
the first person singular are mine and were retained as it was felt that they
helped to make some of the ideas in the book more immediate. To not
spare his blushes, the particular story about being harassed by a penis
extension electronic salesman is most definitely his.
Many other people have contributed to this book, both directly and indi
rectly. My colleagues Marie Shelton and Mitzi Desselles are a constant
source of criticism, support, challenge, friendship and unbelievable toler
ance. My debt to them is great, as it is to Andrew Kerry of the Boots
Company. It was his audacious determination that enabled the leadership
programme in the Alps, described later in the book, to happen instead of
remaining a pipe dream. As a result this meant that we could explore how
to make many of the ideas in this book real and practical.
In trying to create a new way of looking at the challenge of audacity,
Jeremy and I are also grateful to those who helped us go into what was, for
us, undiscovered territory. In particular we should mention Phillip White
head MEP who always makes time to help and advise, Graham Mackay
CEO of SABMiller, Steve Barrow and his colleagues at HSBC and Dr
Gene Crozier of the Chartered Management Institute. Richard Davies, also
of SABMiller, has been a tremendous support and help, as was his
colleague Mandy Roussouw.
Without wishing to sound trite, if making this book was a journey, thank
you and love to Sharon, Sara, Samantha, Lucy-Jane and Jack, for being at
home to come back to.
Finally, some of the ideas in this book are not the responsibility of any of
the above, even Jeremy. For all that is muddled, wrong-headed or simply
mistaken, please blame me.
STEVE CARTER