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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

The Secret is a popular, and therefore self-contradictory book: If you can buy it on Amazon.com, how secret can it be?

Someone who read The Secret let me in on it. It resembles the movie What the Bleep do We Know? — a new age spin on quantum physics.

It starts with what by now is well worn. A quantum event, such as the radioactive decay of an atomic nucleus, is intrinsically random. Until an observer sees the outcome, the universe simultaneously exists in two “superposed” states — in one the nucleus has decayed, in the other it has not. The act of observation collapses the two states back into a single reality in which the nucleus either did or did not decay.

That’s when it all goes wrong. The Secret is that through concentration you can take advantage of this principle to make random events come out your way.

Which leads to the question: If two people both know The Secret and concentrate in opposite directions, then what?

It also leads to the more important question, Weren’t you paying attention when you read the phrase, “intrinsically random?” If an observer can choose the outcome of an event it isn’t intrinsically random anymore.

It’s a nice theory, though. It stands up to the two tests most Americans and far too many business leaders apply to such ideas: It (1) is more convenient than the way the world really works, and (2) fits their preconceived notions.

It sure would be handy if The Secret worked as advertised. If it did, instead of my typical stock picks’ habit of plummeting like poisoned pigeons, they would soar like celestial seraphim.

Want to know a real secret? It’s that there is no secret. The best way to forecast the future is to make it happen. You won’t achieve this by concentrating your will to influence quantum events. You’ll achieve it by concentrating your efforts and the efforts of those working for you to make them happen.

Here’s a handy-dandy formula that can help: 3, 1, 3, 4. By the numbers:

3-year vision: This is what you want your organization to be and to accomplish. You should be able to explain it in clear, direct terms. This isn’t the place for nuance.

And if you’re a loophole sort of person, sorry, run-on sentences are cheating.

An example, if you’re looking for one: “In three years, IT will be the company’s partner in designing change and a leader in making it happen.”

1-year strategy: This is the one-year down payment on your three-year vision. As is the case for your vision, you should also be able to express your strategy in one or two simple declarative sentences:

“This year, our goal is to achieve a ‘culture of discipline’ — a shared way of thinking and acting that means every employee makes good decisions instead of managers having to enforce them through oversight.”

3-month goals: Here’s where it starts to become real. Anyone can look out three years, or even one year, and articulate brilliant outcomes. Three months is another matter. Three months is urgent. It’s immediate. It’s hard to escape.

Developing goals for the next three months isn’t particularly challenging. What’s difficult is figuring out a list that moves you toward your one-year strategy. My best advice: Don’t worry about it at first. Getting in the habit of putting down any list of three-month goals is an interesting enough challenge. Once you’ve started you can refine it.

4 -week plan: This is where the rubber meets the road. It’s what you intend to achieve each week for the next month to make sure your three-month goals turn into accomplishments at a steady pace.

I’ve said “your vision, your strategy, your goals and your plan.” If that’s all they are, you’ll fail. Your management team has to embrace the vision and strategy — it has to be theirs. The goals have to be their goals even more than they are your goals, and the plan isn’t a plan at all — it’s the composite of their individual plans, shared so that everyone knows what anyone knows.

What’s left is checking off the details as you complete them. That and all the hard work of making it happen.

Don’t make the mistake of minimizing the hard work, just because other people have to do it. Compared to it, all of your planning is pretty easy.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

The story of the Brooklyn Bridge — in the late 19th century the longest and largest suspension bridge ever attempted — is as dramatic as any fiction. As chronicled in David McCullough’s phenomenal The Great Bridge (1972) it has heroes, villains, excitement, setbacks, and ultimately triumph.

Engineers were the heroes, starting with John Roebling, the greatest bridge-builder of his time, who conceived the bridge, served as architect, and organized the effort to charter a bridge company.

Also his son, Washington Roebling, a Civil War hero who in his mid-twenties took over as Chief Engineer on his father’s untimely death. It was Washington Roebling who worked out every last engineering detail, and who recruited a fine engineering team to oversee the work — a team that, with only one resignation, remained in place for the fourteen years required to build the bridge.

A third Roebling was as important: Emily, Washington Roebling’s wife. When a severe case of the bends ruined her husband’s health (brought from too many hours breathing compressed air under the river, overseeing installation of the caissons on which the bridge rests), it was Emily who turned his dictated instructions into detailed written specifications, worked personally with the engineering team, reported progress and challenges back to her husband, and in general acted as second-in-command throughout most of the project.

The politicians of the day were the villains. Boss Tweed and his New York political machine were the most publicly detestable. The most vile, though, were board members who awarded the cable manufacturing contract to a crony who then delivered, quite deliberately, defective steel wire to the construction site.

No summary can do the book justice. Read it. When you’ve finished, you’ll understand that today’s politicians are nothing new. That doesn’t mean their lack of public courage is any more acceptable. It simply reinforces what we already know: Engineers create things that are new; politicians repeat the same old patterns, century after century, ad nauseum.

In the 1970s and preceding decades, the United States invested 3 percent of GDP on infrastructure. Since 1980 we’ve spent one third less and our infrastructure is deteriorating. It’s a pattern that is, by now, familiar: Politicians sell taxpayers on the idea that tax cuts are free. We just need to eliminate waste and be smarter about priorities.

Here’s another pattern: Bad logic about risk.

According to the Star Tribune’s investigative reporting, the engineers who last inspected the 35W bridge in Minneapolis prior to its collapse identified 52 steel beams at risk of cracking. They were sufficiently concerned to consider condemning the bridge, and recommended emergency measures to reinforce it.

Shortly before the project began, though, the same engineers reviewed their emergency measures and decided they carried too much risk of their own. The non-engineers who set policy in cases like this decided this meant doing nothing (ManagementSpeak: Developing “a more cost effective approach”) was a fine course of action.

One more pattern: Bad math when it comes to risk.

Imagine the risk of the 35W bridge’s collapse was 0.001%. That’s sufficiently remote that few would worry.

We know, though, that about 100,000 bridges have been rated the same or worse than the 35W bridge before its collapse. That would mean we have a 10% chance, every year, of another catastrophic bridge failure.

We don’t know the actual risks. If anyone does turn bridge ratings into probabilities of failure, it’s well hidden. One wonders why.

What does this have to do with keeping the joint running? Everything. You deal with the exact same challenges every day:

  • Do more with less: Most CIOs have been handed budget cuts, then told there’s plenty of money — they just have to eliminate waste and set more effective priorities.
  • Bad logic: Bridge engineers aren’t the only ones who find flaws in proposed solutions, only to be told that if that’s the case there’s no problem to solve.
  • Bad math: An easy-to-handle example illustrates: If the risk of one server failing is 0.01% on any given day, the situation sounds manageable. Unless you have 1,000 servers in your data center.

Here’s why it’s relevant. Your job isn’t to be right about all of this, then to say I-told-you-so when something goes wrong.

It’s to establish strong enough working relationships throughout the business to be persuasive, to communicate risk and its consequences accurately enough to prevent its turning into reality.

Much harder.

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