The Grayness of Persistence!

How often have you needed to push yourself – to persist – through tough times or in order to complete a difficult project? Effective leaders know that it’s impossible to accomplish great things without overcoming great obstacles. Commanding leaders persist because they know where there’s a WALL there’s a way.  They fill their hearts and souls with quotes such as…

“Never, never, never give up.”
Winston Churchill

After leaving my position as chief administrative officer of the Institute at UCLA, I started my own company and developed our first product — an interactive CD-ROM called Strategy. My conservative goal was to realize $100,000 in profit after the first year.

Unfortunately, the product did not sell well. (I’m still convinced it would have been a bestseller… if more people had bought it!) At the end of one year, I was $50,000 in debt. But I persisted. Two years later, I had doubled my debt and come within a whisker of losing my home. I quit, never knowing I had stumbled into the grayness of persistence.

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman suggests in his astounding book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, that I made the right choice, but too late. In his book, Kahneman reviews the research conducted on 411 inventions that were evaluated by experts using 37 objective criteria. Only 5 of the 411 that were given a “failure” rating reached commercialization. None of these five was successful.

Here’s where things get gray. About half of the inventors quit when they received the unequivocal failure rating. However, 47% of the inventors persisted despite their failure rating. About a year later, they had doubled their losses without any successes (Just like I did!). Their persistence became obstinacy. Does this ever happen to you?

My experience and this research tells us that wise leaders do not believe in the omnipotence of persistence. They embrace its gray ambiguity by managing the tension between their creative leadership style (the possibilities) and their pragmatic style (the probabilities).

I encourage you to do the same by asking this powerful question on your strategic endeavors:  What criteria shall we use to decide if and when to quit?

Dave Jensen helps leaders manage ambiguity, gain buy-in to any change, improve decision-making, and achieve difficult goals in today’s complex, competitive, and conflicting environment. For a FREE Chapter of his forthcoming book, The Executive’s Paradox – How to Stretch When You’re Pulled by Opposing Demands, visit http://davejensenonleadership.com/