|
Have you been watching the Olympics Games? Awesome! Records of all
standards—world, Commonwealth, Asian, country, personal and
others—are being broken wholesale. Athletes are more
prepared, intense, focused and motivated than ever. Champions
overrun their competition by eight over 100th of second, for
example, in the 4 x 100m men freestyle. As the sports annotator
reports, “out-touched in the end by a fingertip.” Awesome!
What makes them do that? What lessons could
entrepreneurs take home from watching these games, aside from being
awed?
In The Daily Drucker, Peter Drucker astutely
wrote: The great majority of executives tend to focus downward. They
are preoccupied with efforts rather than with results. They
worry over what the organization and their superiors “owe” them
and should do for them. And they are conscious above all of the
authority they “should have.” As a result, they render
themselves ineffectual. The effective executive focuses on
contribution. He looks up from his work and outward toward
goals. His stress is on responsibility. The focus on
contribution is the key to effectiveness in a person’s own
work—its content, its level, its standards, and its impacts; in
his relations with others—his superiors, his associates, his
subordinates; in his use of the tools of the executive such as
meetings or reports. The focus on contribution turns the
executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow
skills, his own department, and toward the performance of the whole.
It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there
are results.
After winning the gold for the 400-m relay, his
teammates described Michael Phelps exactly as Mr. Drucker described
an effective executive. He said that Phelps was concerned only
with the gold and the performance of the team as a whole and he
wasn’t even articulating his personal need to amass all those gold
to be the winningest athlete of all time.
How do you achieve perfection? What do you do
with perfection? Where will Phelps go from here?
The revered Peter Drucker shares his own
insights on pursuing excellence: The greatest sculptor of Ancient
Greece, Phidias, around 440 B.C. made the statues that to this day,
2,400 years later, still stand on the roof of the Parthenon in Athens. When
Phidias submitted his bill, the city accountant of Athens refused to
pay it. “These statues stand on the roof of the temple and on
the highest hills in Athens. Nobody can see anything but their
fronts. Yet, you have charged us for sculpturing them in the round,
that is, for doing their backsides, which nobody can see.” Phidias
retorted, “You are wrong. The Gods can see them.” Whenever
people ask me which of my books I consider the best, I smile and
say, “The next.” I do not, however, meant it as a joke. I
mean it the way Verdi meant it when he talked of writing an opera at
eighty in the pursuit of a perfection that had always eluded him. Though
I am older now than Verdi was when he wrote Falstaff, I am still
thinking and working on two additional books, each of which, I hope
will be better than any of my earlier ones, will be more important,
and will come a little closer to excellence.
Expect Phelps and all Beijing Olympics medalists
and also runs to be there in the next Olympics and exceed themselves
and the world’s standards. These nuggets of wisdom from Mr.
Drucker also give hope that Filipino athletes will achieve
excellence and eventually win gold medals. Not a farfetched idea. We
can do it.
One sour note though. 1.3 billion Chinese
and they have to fake it. At the impressive opening ceremonies,
there was this cute little girl who sang the first song and we were
all mesmerized. It turns out that she was just lip-synching
what another girl was actually singing while hidden in the
background. She was not aloud to sing in front of the
world-wide audience because, as Matt Lauer of Today Show reports,
“she was not cute enough.” Only in China.
___
www.learningandinnovation.com, innovationcamp@yahoo.com
|
