1: The Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman did an experiment
“Half the participants were randomly assigned a numbered lottery ticket,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vik Malhotra write in CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.
“The remaining half were given a blank ticket and a pen and asked to choose their own lottery number.”
What was the twist?
“Just before drawing the winning number,” Carolyn, Scott, and Vik write, “the researchers offered to buy back all the tickets.”
Daniel wanted to answer the question: Would the people who wrote down their own number demand more money to sell their tickets than those who were handed a random number?
“The rational expectation would be that there should be no difference in how much the researchers have to pay people,” the authors write. “After all, a lottery is pure chance. Every number, whether chosen or assigned, should have the same value because it has the same probability of being the winner.
The answer? Yes. “Regardless of nationality, demographic group, or the size of the prize, people who write down their own lottery ticket number always demand at least five times more.”
Repeat: Five times more.
2: In prior RiseWithDrews, we’ve outlined how the best CEOs create a game-changing vision [here, here, here, and here] for their company.
Yet, “when it comes to sharing it with the organization,” the authors write, “they rarely dictate their views.”
Why? Because they understand an essential truth about human nature: “People support what they help create,” says former Medtronic CEO Bill George.
As human beings, our survival instinct gives us a deep-seated desire for control.
According to Carolyn, Scott, and Vik, “this ‘lottery ticket effect’ was tapped into by virtually every excellent CEO we spoke to.”
3: One powerful example is Maurice Lévy, who, in 1987, became CEO of Publicis, which was considered to be a French “also ran” advertising company.
In time, Maurice would transform Publicis into one of the world’s top three agencies.
His initial strategy was to leverage mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to expand the group’s reach to over a hundred countries.
“The rallying cry of the company,” the authors write, “was ‘Viva la difference,’ which emphasized providing clients with services culturally attuned to local environments.”
By 2015, however, the M&A strategy had played itself out. Maurice understood it was time to change the game.
He saw two issues: First, the company “was operating as a collection of individual entities—a separate agency for each solution and market,” Carolyn, Scott, and Vik note.
Second, he saw consulting firms like Accenture were having a significant impact on the advertising industry by using data and technology strategies to build brands.
Now 73, he “engaged his executive team and the next level of management—roughly three hundred leaders plus fifty recently promoted managers under the age of thirty—in a multi-month-long process,” the authors write.
He brought breakthrough business thinkers like Google’s Eric Schmidt, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, and Harvard leadership professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
“Inspired by what they heard,” Carolyn, Scott, and Vik write, “the executives worked in subgroups where ideas for the future of Publicis were debated, combined, and prioritized.
“Ultimately, what emerged was a new vision called ‘the Power of One.'”
The new vision was a radical break from Publicis’s past. Customers would now be served by cross-functional teams rather than the firm’s large number of traditional silos.
“The ultimate benefit of ‘the Power of One,’ however, was that [Maurice] created a deep sense of ownership that led to a broad leadership coalition.”
Looking back, Maurice says, the process “gave us incredible energy and great solutions.”
Two years later, he retired. “The little French ‘also ran’ company he’d taken over thirty years earlier,” the authors write, “had grown to $18 billion market cap, and become a global powerhouse.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How can I tap into the power and wisdom of my team to create a vision that transforms my organization?
Action: Do it.
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