Necessary Endings (11 page)

But remember, to get there, you have to get honest with yourself and be ready to see hopelessness as if it is staring you in the face. You have to come to that moment with 20/20 vision in order to see it, by doing the work of the previous chapters. To have clear vision, the steps we have already discussed must be in place. Here is a brief review:

1.
Do a gut check to see how you feel about pruning in general and identify any potential intellectual or emotional resistance.
You wil not embrace a pruning reality if you have an internal conflict with the idea. Shimer had no conflict with this at al . As she reports, she had asked for it at Motorola and did not get it. But it was wel within her comfort level to get rid of what needs to be gotten rid of.

2.
Make the concept of endings a normal occurrence and a normal part of business and life,
so you expect and look for them
instead of seeing them as a problem.
If you real y believe that pruning, seasons, and life cycles are as real as gravity, you wil not have to be talked into them; you wil always be looking for them.

Just as a good real estate developer does not expect an up cycle to last forever, Shimer did not believe that sustained market share could go on forever in a tech company that was not ending the old ways of technology and not morphing to the new way of the world: platforms. Trains versus airplanes al over again. Wires versus wireless. The dead or dying has to be moved out, and that is a normal process. Her worldview expected both seasons and life cycles. Just as a person plans for retirement, she knew she had to plan for product obsolescence. Her vision in that regard was corrected to 20/20 by the Motorola experience before she got to Welch Al yn, enabling her to see it. Do not be surprised by obsolescence:
expect it and plan for it.

3. Identify the internal maps that keep you from executing necessary endings.
In chapter 4, we listed many of the personalized maps that get in our way. As I talked to Shimer about these, she said that hers were mostly cleared out by twenty-five years of leadership experience. She was over the squishy thinking that would prevent her from executing an ending, having seen too many instances where not executing an ending caused more pain than it solved. Ironical y, the one thinking pattern she had to clear up, she said, was in the opposite direction. The shift she had to make was in her thinking that it was going to be easier to get everyone on board than it was. She learned that getting movement around such a monumental change would take more steps than she had foreseen. She thought everyone would instantly see reality and jump on board. But fortunately, she did not have a lot of internal interference with her own wish to pul the trigger.
That is the
biggest hurdle for a leader
. The rest is strategy and implementation.

So at this point, do a little self-questioning about your eyesight. Is it 20/20 with regard to being ready to see an ending? Are you walking into the possibility for a pruning moment with clear eyes? Remember, your brain wil shape reality to fit the maps in your head, so make sure your eyes are clear, not blurred by the kinds of maps we have said can get in the way of seeing when an ending is necessary. If they are, let’s get to the other ingredients that get us to the point of seeing reality as it real y is.

The stakes are huge. If you can see reality and realize that the lights you see in the distance are a train headed straight for you, you wil get motivated and make the changes that wil lead to success. But, if you don’t and you keep having false hope, you might be signing up for failure or worse. Getting to 20/20 vision so you can see reality is a must.

The Big Change Motivator: Get Hopeless

Hope is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. With hope, we can endure almost anything, and certainly more than if we lose it or don’t have it to begin with. In short, hope keeps us going.
And that is the problem.

When it comes to seeing reality, almost nothing gets in the way like a hope distortion, in either direction. First, if we are the kind to lose hope just because something looks difficult or bleak, we wil accomplish little. Almost anything of value is only accomplished because someone kept going past the moment of thinking “al is lost.” That is the nature of heroic leadership and heroic life. As Admiral James Stockdale saw in his POW

experience in Vietnam, hope is a requirement for survival and winning. Stockdale’s experience reminds leaders that you must recognize and own the brutal facts while at the same time never letting go of the determination that you are going to win, no matter how long it takes. In our discussion of getting to reality, notice how the time and hope dimension quickly enter into it, as Stockdale mentions.

He says to recognize how bad it is and at the same time keep hope going, no matter how long it takes.
Hope is always about holding on when it
looks bad and being able to hold on sometimes for a long time.
The time dimension is a key component, because if it did not require time, we would have no use for hope. We would already have everything we want, right now, today. But many times we do not have what we want right now and have to hold on to hope for quite some time, and then as we persevere, we succeed.

Amazon, founded in 1994, did not make a profit until 2001. Investors and the markets were losing hope and giving Jeff Bezos a very hard time, as he continued to have hope and try to convince others to have hope as wel . Time would help and was built into his business model. He maintained hope as others lost it, and now Amazon is stil around and thriving. He was right, and the ones without hope were wrong. So hope is good and requires time as part of its equation. But . . . that is also
the
problem: Hope buys time, and spends it.

Hope is designed to give us more time, so that whatever we are hoping for can come to pass. But because that is what hope does for us—buys more time and spends it—it sometimes creates problems if we are not in touch with reality.
In that case
,
it is hope that keeps us going down a
road that has no realistic chance of being the right road or making what we want come to pass
. In a false reality, hope is the worst quality you can have!

Yet sometimes, people keep hoping, in spite of a clear reality staring them in the face.

As Shimer tel s it, reality was right there for al at Motorola to see. Digital was coming. But their profits gave them the false hope that they could ride that wave forever. Their market share fueled the happiness of that hope and led them right into Nokia’s shadow. Just as hope can conquer al ,
false hope can ruin everything
, as wel . What Motorola needed was to see what a hopeless future analog real y had and that if they continued to hope that it would sustain them, they were going to be in trouble
.
That kind of hope was a problem.

False hope buys us more time to spend on something that is not going to work and keeps us from seeing the reality that is at once our biggest problem
and
our greatest opportunity. It is our biggest problem because not seeing the reality that needs to be dealt with is what is in between us and what we desire. And it is always our biggest opportunity because if we see it and grasp it, that reality, we can find a
real way that will work
, one rooted in things as they real y are, to get what we desire.

Shimer saw the false hope of thinking that Welch Al yn could continue to have the same success without a platform once a platform world had emerged. She grasped the hopelessness of that plan, put her arms firmly around it, and changed the entire company to get in line with the reality of where the future growth wil be. Her hopelessness led her to the strategic planning session that gave rise to the platform. The hopelessness of the reality problem they had led her to possibly the greatest opportunity in the history of the company. This is why it is vital to “get hopeless.” It can lead you to everything you want.

And this is not only true for business. I met with a woman who had gotten to the pruning moment in her marriage. She final y realized that her attempts to get her addict husband to dry out, her efforts to talk to him about his drinking, were not working. At last, she was “done.” In her mind, the situation was final y hopeless, and it was time to divorce. That was a breakthrough. She was giving up hope that what she had been doing was going to help.

But what she did not realize was that her hopelessness was also a great opportunity to get a new and different plan, one that had a chance of reaching her goal: a sober husband. Just as Shimer did not have to get out of the device business and sel the company when she realized that the old way would not work, I reminded this woman that she did not necessarily have to divorce her husband. The good news she needed to hear was that she was final y in a place to do something that might actual y help.

Once she saw that her own strategies were hopeless, she could final y get a new plan that might sober him up. We put a plan together that included a professional intervention, using the leverage of his other significant relationships, professional treatment, and enacting consequences.

She implemented it, and it worked. He went to rehab, is sober now, has been for a long time, and there is realistic hope for the future.
But it only
came about because she got to the hopeless moment of her former way of operating.
So sometimes hopeless can be about just getting rid of the way that we were going about something, not about the something itself. But we can’t get to the new hope of the new plan if we don’t face the reality that what we have been doing is not working.

So if hope is good but false hope is not, how do we know the difference between the two? How do we know when to hang on to hope and when to grasp the hopelessness that we need to grasp to do something different?
We need a good diagnostic.

Wishing Versus Hoping

It is imperative that you give up hope if your hope is not hope at al but just an empty wish. But how do we know the difference between wishing and hoping?

When most people talk about tomorrow and wanting something in their lives to be different or to get better, they use the word
hope
. Dictionary definitions of
hope
contain two elements. The first is a “desire or expectation” for something in the future to occur. “I hope this thing turns around.”

The second is usual y “grounds for believing” that something in the future wil occur. “She sees some hope because of next year’s product line.” The real problem is when we have one without the other:
a desire without any grounds.
That is hope based not on reality but on our desires, our wishes.

You wouldn’t go to a lender and say, “Our business is in a financial mess, but we hope next year everything is going to turn around. So please lend me some money today.” There is no realistic, objective reason for Mr. Banker to do that, now that the credit market has made it more difficult to pass the pain on to someone else. Your hope for turning your business around is “hope defined by the desire”—just because you want something to be true, you hope it wil be. It is the same reason that people continue to buy time with false hope and spend it waiting for a dysfunctional person to change, believing that it might happen and hoping that their love wil somehow turn this person around. There is no real reason for them to have hope at al , for love by itself has never caused a resistant person to change (see chapter 6 on how to know when this is happening). But year after year, they continue to have hope that it wil somehow get better if they just keep on loving. Parents with their adult children, continuously helping them out, spouses hoping that it wil get better, and business leaders and bosses wanting something or someone to work out so much that they

“keep hope alive” can al fal prey to this pattern, in which “desire defines hope.”

On the other hand, you might say to a lender, “Our business is in a financial mess, but we just got the rights to operate in twelve new regions that we did not have before, we hired a seasoned sales manager who replaced the boss’s dropout nephew, we got a contract to be one of the suppliers to the NFL, and Yahoo! has agreed to put us on their home page. So we have real hope that by this time next year, we wil have turned it around, and we just need some capital to bridge the gap.” Then the banker does not have to be an idiot to continue talking to you. There are real, objective reasons for the bank to have hope with you, give you the financing, and hope to make a return on their money as wel . Hope is based not only on desire, but also on real, objective reasons to believe that more time wil help. That is way different from mere desire. Here is the principle:
In the absence of real, objective reasons to think that more time is going to help, it is probably time for some type of necessary ending.

That is the moment when the hopelessness requirement gets fulfil ed: You get it that
other than your desire
,
there is no real reason to have
hope.
There are no real, objective reasons to continue to think that tomorrow is going to be good. Does that mean that your dream is hopeless?

Not necessarily. It simply means that you have looked down the corridor of time and realized that there is no real reason to believe that your current strategy is going to bring about anything different than it already has or is going to work in the face of the harshest real facts. As the saying goes,

“Hope is not a strategy.” This kind of hope is not worth spending more time and resources on. It is only buying you the time to continue to make more mistakes. If you are in a hole, rule number one is to stop digging. The last thing you need is more of this kind of hope.

But if you can get to the wonderful virtue of hopelessness by seeing that there is no reason to believe that tomorrow is going to be any different from today, then you final y have gotten to reality. It is hopeless to continue to do what you are doing, expecting different results. That kind of hopelessness is great. It is the doorway to getting on the right track.