The 6 Types of Working Genius, Automate CEOs, GameStop, Pfizer’s home-cure pill, Lyft & Apple iOS blocks ad tracking
“Managing the economy without economists is like managing a war without stamp collectors.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hope you’re Thriving!
I’ve had a busy week with a full-day strategy workshop and 3 global learning events. The week’s highlight was Pat Lencioni, who reviewed his past books, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and the Ideal Team Player. His latest tool was fascinating, called the six types of working genius. Pat explained how once you have a team without dysfunction, you need to ensure that the team is capable of creating the right results once you are hiring the ideal team players. This happens through three stages: first of all, ideation, then activation, and then implementation.
The 6 Types of Working Genius
Pat Lencioni’s 6 types of working genius are listed below.
The Genius of Wonder (W) — People with this genius can’t help but question whether things could be better in the world around them. They are troubled whenever they see unmet potential, and they are constantly curious and on the lookout for the need to change something.
The Genius of Invention (I) — This type of genius is all about creativity. People who have it love to generate new ideas and solutions to problems and are even comfortable coming up with something out of nothing.
The Genius of Discernment (D) — People with this type of genius have a natural ability when it comes to evaluating or assessing a given idea or situation and providing guidance. They have good instincts, gut feel and judgment about the subtleties of making decisions that integrate logic, common sense and human needs.
The Genius of Galvanizing (G) — This type of genius is about bringing energy and movement to an idea or decision. People who have it like to initiate activity by rallying people to act and inspiring them to get involved.
The Genius of Enablement (E) — People with this type of genius are quick to respond to the needs of others by offering their cooperation and assistance with a project, program or effort. They naturally provide the human assistance that is required in any endeavour and not on their own terms.
The Genius of Tenacity (T) — This type is about ensuring that a given project, program or effort is taken to completion and achieves the desired result. People who have this genius push for required standards of excellence and live to see the impact of their work.
Pat explained how there are things in teams that are sometimes missing. For example, Pat worked with a team when COVID hit who needed a new sales strategy, the existing sales strategy wouldn’t work in a pandemic environment, and they couldn’t execute a new one to succeed. They ran the working genius assessment, and the sales manager was an E for enablement and a T for tenacity. They were awesome at executing but couldn’t be creative or invent new ideas. They had no Wonder or Invention capability in their sales team.
Pat discussed other examples where teams were missing one of the six types of working genius on their team and how that created great frustration throughout in both the team and the results the team were creating. Then by adding a person who had that working genius, who loved doing that type of work, they could get real results from the team.
So think about your team and consider whether there might be something that you’re missing using this model. Are you missing creativity, ideation — new ideas? Are you missing activation, discernment of ideas to only let the good ones through or maybe you’re missing the galvanising of ideas? Or finally, are you missing the execution side? The implementation happens through the enablement and tenacity working genius.
It’s a fascinating model. I’ve used the test twice, and I feel that the results were pretty accurate. I’m looking forward to running the test with teams that I work with to help identify the working geniuses that are missing and how we could consider hiring someone who could complement the overall team with their own working genius.
Check out the Working Genius assessment here
PS — if you attended the same event I did, Karen has sent you a free assessment voucher.
Why Not Automate CEOs
I try hard not to be critical. But occasionally, I can’t help myself.
The end of the article linked below asks, “company owners and investors should be asking if their top management could be done well by a machine — and if so, why is it so expensive?”
Because leadership is tough, and very few people can create real results. How many people would genuinely qualify for and be able to add significant shareholder value at Microsoft, for example, in the way that Satya Nadella has taken it from $37 to $262 since he became CEO in 2014?
Could an automated CEO do that?
The article explains that automating roles can be difficult — “Automating jobs can be risky, especially in public-facing roles. After Microsoft sacked a large team of journalists last year in order to replace them with AI, it almost immediately had to contend with the PR disaster of the software’s failure to distinguish between two women of colour. Amazon had to abandon its AI recruitment tool after it learned to discriminate against women. And when GPT-3, one of the most advanced AI language models, was used as a medical chatbot last year, it responded to a (simulated) patient presenting with suicidal ideation by telling them to kill themselves.”
The article goes on…
“What links these examples is that they were all attempts to automate the kind of work that happens without being scrutinised by lots of other people in a company. Top-level strategic decisions are different.”
And therein lies the issue. Top-level strategic decisions are not all a CEO does.
I contend that CEOs have 5 roles to perform to create enduring results from my book Made to Thrive.
Accountability — There is accountability for all employees and suppliers.
Ambassador — The CEO performs a strategic role as an ambassador.
Culture — A positive culture unites the team and attracts the right people.
Strategy — The company’s strategy delivers a unique and valuable position in the marketplace that is different from competitors’.
Succession Planning — Key risks to the business are reduced through succession planning.
I only raise it because the article was syndicated to Australia’s leading business newspaper, which caught my attention. And it’s interesting to see where people miss the real roles of CEOs.(I don’t even know if you would want to) read the article here.
QUICK CLIPS
GameStop CEO departs to a windfall
Speaking of high paid CEOs, GameStop CEO George Sherman joined on April 15 2019, when the stock was $8.94 and announced he was leaving this week when the stock closed at $164.37. That’s a 1,739% return over his two-year term or about 325% annualized. (The S&P 500 index was up 43%, or about 20% a year, over those two years.) Is he the greatest public CEO of all time? GameStop’s market capitalization went from about $900 million to about $11.5 billion; Sherman added about $10.5 billion of shareholder value in two years. But how much should he have received for that? $1 Billion? $2 Billion? He is likely to receive around $169 million in shares. GameStop shareholders got a bargain.
GameStop’s CEO Goes Out on Top
Pfizer’s home-cure pill for COVID-19
By the end of the year, people who test positive for COVID-19 could simply swallow a pill at home to treat their symptoms, according to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
Pfizer testing a home-cure pill for COVID-19 that could be ready by end of year
Uber competitor Lyft sells self-driving arm to Toyota
Lyft, the Uber competitor who has been spending $100m per year on self-driving software, has decided to sell its self-driving Level 5 division to Toyota, who will house the self-driving team in the new employee city at the base of Mount Fuji.
Lyft sells self-driving unit to Toyota’s Woven Planer for $550M
Apple iOS blocks ad tracking, then ramps Apple ads
This week new iOS iPhone software launched where developers and advertisers now need explicit permission to collect and share a user’s information, which caused major issues through Facebook and the advertising industry. Hot on the heels of that, Apple has boosted its own advertising, with the ability to gain better insights and targeted advertising.
Apple Is Expanding Its Ad Business On The Cusp Of ATT Enforcement (Yep, You Read That Right)
New search engine’s competitor is you buying a new computer
In an interesting strategic move, Google’s newest web browser competitor Mighty has identified your slow computer as their competitor. Their logic is that you go out and buy a new computer every few years, but, nowadays, most work is done within the browser, and many people have 20 plus tabs open, slowing down the experience. The catch is they are charging $30-$50 per month to use the Mighty web browser, of which Google has 86% market share. The challenge, of course, is that almost all other web browsers are free.
Mighty’s master plan to reignite the future of desktop computing
This week on The Growth Whisperers podcast
One of the most important things necessary, if you want to build an enduring great company, is a process that draws people in like a magnet so that the best people really want to work for you.
We do this well in the marketing side of our businesses, bringing in customers, yet we don’t do the same when it comes to attracting the right people.
This second week talking about the People Magnet Machine, Kevin and Brad answer a range of questions about the People Magnet Machine and how to attract and retain the best people, like a magnet!
The People Magnet Machine
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Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles
