Fail to Succeed
Success and failure go hand-in-hand; the more you practice the luckier you seem to get - It takes practice to be able to successfully tackle the big waves: you start on the nursery beaches and work your way up to the really challenging waves. The big waves are not for the faint-of-heart; big excitement also means big danger!Good surfers make it look so easy - Kelly Slater makes surfing through the rolling barrels of Tenerife and Hawaii look so very easy. Do not kid yourself - years of practice, hard work and learning from your mistakes are required before you can make it look so easy.
Spurts and fallbacks - The environment is not smooth. There are huge oscillations and short-lived surges for the surfer to conquer - the skill is to be able to spot trends, and harness your own strength to capitalise on often short-term movements - invest your energy to live to fight another day!
Relative Power - Like most growing business the surfer lacks power relative to the market (waves) - surfers are often pushed and buffeted and seem to be as likely to go backwards as forwards - energy must be used to effectively leverage your own power. Use the power of the current and the wave to your own advantage.
Exploiting the environment - The skill is in recognising the surges and not to be thrown by them. The good surfer exploits the wave, no matter how temporary the advantage may appear to be - watch a surfer as they paddle out to sea against the waves - no unnecessary energy is expended.
Flexibility and responsiveness - The surfer is able to tap hidden depths of physical and mental flexibility and responsiveness. The sea is unpredictable. You need to be able to react to whatever the elements might throw at you.
Holy trinity
Research into high growth businesses has consistently reported that such businesses have an obsessive pre-occupation on the trinity of marketing, strategy and teams. The surfing analogy bears this out.Excellent surfers are preoccupied with finding the ultimate wave; they are pre-occupied with planning to get to their endpoint while being obsessed with the surrounding environment; they are aware of how the constituent parts (surfer, board, wax and suit) must work together to achieve the 'whole'.
The findings of the Ten Percenters report has contributed to how we look at how the 'team' works. Previous work made the implicit assumption that any references to teamwork referred to civilised, liberal, Human Resource management practices. This assumption is being proven to be flawed - many of the Ten Percenters demonstrated less than contemporary approaches to the management of the team.
You only need to look at teams under stress e.g. in the armed forces to realise that the business school version of teamwork (consensus and agreement) is not effective in crisis. Liberal HR management may be appropriate for managers, but not for leaders; and, high growth businesses are certainly led rather than managed!
Strong, decisive, judgmental 'control and command'-type leadership is what is required in turbulent weather (by the surfer and many growing businesses). There is still a place for those managers I call the TUBS (Total and Utter Bastards) - I'd hate to have one baby-sit my children but they know how to get things done in times of crisis. How they fare in the long-run is another matter!