Two recent articles on the news site Quartz caught my attention, as they both had to do with the importance of knowing your skill set, and the value of transferable knowledge.
The first was an assessment of Phil Jackson’s disastrous three-year tenure as president of the New York Knicks basketball operation, and his abrupt termination in late June 2017. Jackson won two championships as a player with the Knicks, and went on to win eleven as coach of the Bulls and the Lakers. He nurtured some of the brightest stars in NBA history, and turned the triangle offense into a dangerous strategic weapon. Nothing but success… until he came to Madison Square Garden.
Sports Illustrated blamed Jackson for not evolving. New Jersey sports columnist Tara Sullivan suggested Jackson was marked from the start, sucked into the vortex of doom that is the Knicks under James Dolan. But Oliver Staley of Quartz puts it down to hubris. “Jackson,” he wrote, “made a critical mistake that has haunted other great leaders throughout history: Assuming success in one domain translates into success in another. Coaching players is not the same as scouting them, and Jackson’s genius for motivating great players was of little use when it came to assembling a roster.”
The hubris was certainly there, and one way to look at it is that we witnessed Jackson’s late-career slide (and it is impressive that he held it off as long as he did) into what is called the second-system syndrome in technology and business, the sophomore slump in arts and entertainment, and second year blues in higher education. It is a phenomenon in which an initial success is, remarkably often, followed by a much less successful effort, sometimes an outright failure.
This is surprising at first, since you might imagine that after having one success, the people responsible would build on what they’ve learned and make the second effort even better. Or at least repeat the good parts well enough to stay level.
And that is the rub, right there — “what they’ve learned.” Because if there is anything I got out of my years in start-ups during the dot-com boom is that people often (1) have no idea what lessons to take away from an early success, and (2) have no idea what they do well, and what not so well. Too often, the ones in charge imagine it had all to do with them, that of course it was their leadership style and decisive management that led to success, and they vow to do even more of the same in their next project.
But as I witnessed first-hand, the initial success of a project often happened because of completely different reasons than the leaders assumed. (Actually, in the dot-com world, companies were often successful in spite of their leaders, not because of them.) And as they made the second effort more about them, and all of their characteristics, they often failed to bring forward the people, processes and cultural components that were actually the drivers of success.
These leaders didn’t understand what their best skills really were (the most egocentric of them imagined all of their skills were the best!). They may have thought they were good at strategic vision, when in reality it was their knack for hiring smart people who knew how to make vague direction into something productively actionable. They may have thought they were innovative entrepreneurs, when in reality they were counter-punchers, very good at reacting to an opportunity. They thought being cheap was always the right tactic, but their frugality just happened to be the right approach for exploiting a weakness in the competition at that moment.
These people, had they been aware of their actual skills, would have put effort into hiring and retaining the right people, working with them to identify market opportunities, and doing the right cost/return analysis. Instead, they shed key people as they chased poorly conceived strategies, talked about “innovation” while letting windows of opportunity open and shut all around them, and failed to make smart investments that would have paid off big.
This is what happened to Jackson. He didn’t understand what he was good at, and what he wasn’t. As Staley said, “There’s a long line of managers who discovered their skill set was more limited than they realized.”
In comparison, elsewhere in Quartz, is an article by Michael Simmons about the remarkable success Elon Musk has had across multiple disciplines. Musk co-developed PayPal, founded SpaceX in 2002, co-founded Teslain 2003 (their first Tesla Model 3 is about to roll out of production later this month), and conceived of the current Hyperloop initiative. Simmons suggests that the key for all this success in a wide range of activities is Musk’s ability to understand the essential value of what he learns along the way, and then is able to apply that to any arena he wants.
Simmons calls people like Musk “expert-generalists who study widely in many fields, understand deeper principles that connect those fields, and then apply the principles to their core speciality.”
Simmons points out that what Musk is doing has a name: learning transfer. “Learning transfer is taking what we learn in one context and applying it to another. It can be taking a kernel of what we learn in school or in a book and applying it to the ‘real world.’ It can also be taking what we learn in one industry and applying it to another. This is where Musk shines.”
The transfer of learning from one endeavor to another is a powerful tool for people as they manage their careers, especially heading into the future where worklife will be much more fluid and evolving than it is even now. (By the way, learning transfer is also becoming an important part of machine learning and artificial intelligence.)
Simmons writes, “I’m convinced that we should all learn across multiple fields in order to increase our odds of breakthrough success.”
You don’t have to be a successful business magnate to make this approach work for you. All of us can apply this insight against our own experiences, asking ourselves: What are my best core skills, regardless of the industry in which I learned them? What do I like doing the most? What do I hate doing, whether because I’m not good at it, or even if I have a skill I’d rather not use it because I don’t enjoy it?
I’ve been working at Deloitte for about three years, and Ernst & Young for a dozen years before that. They are both big, complex global organizations with an astonishingly flat structure. I came to that world late in life, yet I took to it immediately. These are not cultures that everyone easily embraces, or thrives within. As an EY colleague and friend, Jim Sperling, explained to me early on, there’s a hundred ways for a great idea or an innovative project to become derailed, delayed, and diluted, but if you develop a reputation as the kind of person who can somehow, nonetheless, shepherd projects through and get things done, despite all those pitfalls, then you are gold.
And I could get things done. But how could a guy who spent most of his professional life as a media maker, journalist, and PR consultant jump into the staid world of Big Four business services and thrive? Well…
- Being a filmmaker taught me all kinds of skills related to project management, nurturing ideas over time, as well as leading (and delegating to, and thus trusting) a large team of various abilities and experience.
- Handling business development and marketing for dot-com start-ups taught me how to propose and close mutually beneficial deals where no money may actually change hands, but everyone gets a piece of success, necessary for “intrapreneurial” projects.
- Being a tennis teaching pro and college professor prepared me for developing and mentoring junior staffers.
- Being a journalist taught me attention to detail and owning the consequences of my work, since writing for a morning daily with a circulation of 600,000 means I better be both accurate and clear, or I sure as hell will hear about it later.
- And finally, owning a business communications consultancy in San Francisco with major corporations and cultural institutions as clients taught me about business, and how to handle demanding executives.
These are all skills I learned in one field or another, and they all helped me when I landed, late in the game, in the heavily matrixed, projectized, and geographically distributed culture of the Big Four. Of particular value was that I knew I had those skills, and I knew I could trust my instincts. (It also helped that most of the other people in my immediate department at EY had backgrounds nearly as eclectic as my own, so nobody judged.)
The bottom line is that knowing your skill set, and being able to transfer what you’ve learned from one environment, one job, one career to another, will be vital skills as the employment landscape changes.
As it says in the recent Deloitte white paper Transitioning to the Future of Work and the Workplace, “At its core, work in future will be more networked, more devolved, more mobile, more team-based, more project-based, more collaborative, more real-time, and more fluid. The challenge will be to make sure it is not more complicated, confusing, or overwhelming. This will require better and different ways to communicate, collaborate, and network.”
Originally published on LinkedIn on 4 July 2017.