A short talk arguing that optimism and idealism are essential for innovation. The speaker criticizes short-term incentive structures and shareholder-focused leadership for discouraging risk-taking, praises cultures that reward initiative over outcomes, and laments a broader societal loss of visionary leadership in business and national politics.
Chapters
You have to have optimism for innovation. You have to have an infinite mindset for innovation. Otherwise it's features and benefits, the risk tolerances become smaller in companies. The incentive structures no longer reward risk taking, they reward success. Right. I remember when I was young in my career, I'll spare you the whole story, but basically I took part in something that failed and I got a huge promotion and they promoted me for my initiative. They rewarded the behavior that not the outcome. And great cultures will recognize the behaviors that they want repeated, not just the outcomes. Because if it's only outcome based, we're going to play it safe because we're more likely to get an outcome right. So I think optimism plays a huge role and that's where cause comes in, which is we're trying to advance something way bigger than ourselves and the company and the leaders can easily describe the vision, the idealistic vision of the world we're trying to build. I have a dream. All men are created equal. Like these are visions of worlds that don't exist and never will, but they are strivings. And the joy and the sense of progress that we make every time we accomplish something that makes us feel like we're getting closer to that idealistic state. But idealism.
And the optimism that idealism breeds is essential. And I fear that it's been lost in our country. It's been lost from our national leaders. And by the way, it's not a political thing. It's been probably since the fall of the Berlin Wall. No Democrat or Republican has effectively articulated a vision for America that inspires all Americans. And I think we've lost it in business. If we look at our business leaders today in our biggest companies, they're more obsessed with their shareholder value than they are with the visions that they founded the companies with. They're more obsessed with short term incentive structures than they are with long term bets, even if they fail a bunch of times. And it's all of these things, we keep replacing visionary CEOs with operators to run our companies. The number of CEOs that were the COO or CFO. I just think over the past 40 years, the way that capitalism has gone and the rise of Miltonian and Jack Welchian capitalism, we've seen one of the side effects is an eroding of optimism and idealism.
