Adam Markel on Resilience - Professional Network Group

Here's the statistics. Fifty years ago, the average lifespan of one of those Fortune 500 companies we talked about earlier was how many years? This is where the world has changed. Now, what's the lifespan of a Fortune 500 company? How many? 18 years. That's with technological advances and communication advances and everything you imagine. And the lifespan of those companies has shrunk. And it's because most of those companies are not pivoting. They're committed to the status quo. They're trying to play the game of business on defense. You cannot play the game of business on defense alone. So, team, this is the reality, right? We have our plans. Is this true for everybody? Yes. Right? We have our plans and then this is the world we live in. Now, that can be daunting. That can take us out, that can feel like, I can't get up and do this another day. I don't know how to make this work. How do I rally the troops around this new vision? I mean, they're cynical or they've been with us so long and it's just the flavor of the day or whatever it is. You're going to deal with some stuff for sure, but that's where you have to become, as Ram Dass says, friendly to change. I say it a little bit differently, I think. Not only do you have to become friends with change, you've got to make change your what? Best friend? Because, listen, folks, it ain't going away anytime soon, is it? In fact, the pace of change, the disruption, as it's called, is exponentially greater almost every single day. And we feel it, don't we? How many of you feel some pressure in your business? How about in your personal life? Yes. Me too. Yep. This is what it feels like sometimes, doesn't it? Ouch. Yeah. So what do we do about it? That's the question. Well, we become resilient. This is the second piece we learn, the art of being resilient. It's not something I was taught, so I don't know if you guys got taught this when you were a kid or not, but I don't remember being curriculum in school, not any level of schooling I ever attended. How it is that you bounce back. In other words, how it is you spring back stronger, better than before. The Making of a Corporate Athlete. It's a Harvard Business Review article. Basically, they studied the top performing athletes in the world, Olympians, Olympic champions, gold medalists, as well as the top performing professionals, tennis players, golfers, every sport imaginable. And what they found was one thing was in common with all those people who won at the highest levels, they were the quickest to recover. Michael, in between points in a tennis match, Roger Federer, his heart rate would go down to almost resting in between Those crazy points, 30 seconds between points, his heart rate would go to resting his competitor, not so much in between games, in between seasons. How quickly do you recover? Then they said, well, this is incredible, of course, for athletes, but what about executives? What about owners of companies? What about operators, managers, etc. Where do they fit? And they looked at the same folks and they said, because we're not playing in business, we don't play for an hour or two at a time. We don't play for a day or two or season or two. We play almost seven days a week these days. Isn't that true? Right? Feels like it. There's almost no boundaries. Resilience is that much more important now. It's more important now than ever before for that reason. So how is it that we recover is the question. And rituals for recovery is what we're talking about. That's what they studied. They call them rituals for recovery. We're talking about physical, emotional, mental and spiritual as well. How quickly can you recover? So we have three key ingredients to create.