How Others' Own Perceptions Pre-Determined Their Success

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	• The Power of Impossible Thinking: Transform the Business of Your Life and the Life of Your Business (Wharton ... Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Colin Cook Wharton School Publishing, 2006 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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How Others' Own Perceptions Pre-Determined Their Success

An effective synthesis of the Steven Covey's self-help euphemisms (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and Malcolm Gladwell's real-world illustrations of psychological insights (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference), this is a smartly written, often fascinating book that delves into the power and limits of mental models in order to transform one's world. It is not so much valuable as a treatise for defining one's own personal success as it is of illustrating how key individuals recognized "strategic inflection points" to change the way the rest of us think and consequently yield a handsome profit from building unprecedented business models to support their individualism. There are many examples cited, predictable ones actually - Howard Schultz's reinvention of coffee consumerism with the creation of Starbucks, Oprah Winfrey's transformation of the talk show, Apple Computer's evolutionary push toward the iPod and away from the traditional CD. But chronicling the reasons behind their success makes for interesting reading. What becomes clear is that it's not about the product but about the way people make sense of the way they do things in their lives. The product as it exists now is almost incidental. This inversion on common thought is what makes this book particularly insightful.

Co-authors Yoram (Jerry) Wind and Colin Crook of the Wharton School define their concept of "impossible thinking" as a four-step transformation initiative:

(1) Becoming much more explicitly aware of why we see the world the way we do and what that implies in terms of opportunities and threats.
(2) Testing the relevance and compatibility of our current mental models against the changing environment.
(3) Overcoming change inhibitors by reshaping the infrastructure that supports the old models and changing the thinking of others.
(4) Generating and acting upon new models by experimenting, using intuition and continuing to assess and strengthen our models.

It all sounds easy in theory, but Wind and Crook are quick to recognize that we are living in a world of information overload and that isolating our perceptions can be daunting when competition for our attention can overwhelm us. One of the ways they feel we can deal with this is through a process of zooming in and zooming out. If one can alternate your focus between the detail and a broader view, one can see the detail and the context, the separation of the forest from the trees. By zooming in and out, there is an opportunity to benefit from the information that is out there but also put it into a broader context. It's a matter of using the information to test our own hypotheses.

The book's most intriguing sections have to do with the dot-com bubble and bust. The co-authors astutely point out that many companies (Amazon and Schwab among them) transformed themselves in fundamental ways by harnessing the power of the Internet. On the other hand, the companies that got into the worst trouble during the bust were the ones that saw this as an either/or proposition. First, they were resistant to the Internet being a key part of their business model, and upon seeing the success of others and recognizing the pressures of their customer base all too late, they jumped in completely and often disastrously. The attitude of conducting small experiments and creating a portfolio of models can help to minimize the risks of switching models, especially if one tests the models before investing too much in them. It is not a great revolution but rather a series of small experiments that leads to larger investments. The co-authors emphasize the need to create a portfolio of models and selecting one that works best for a particular situation.

At the end of the book, I have to admit I did not feel particularly empowered to change the world, but I do feel far more informed about the processes others have taken - perhaps unintentionally - to garner their transformative power. Truth be told, neither Wind nor Crook exhibit Gladwell's particularly shrewd observational skills, but Crook does provide the best line - "We think we see the real world, but we actually see what's already in our own minds." I wholeheartedly agree that I am the one most responsible for limiting my potential for success and that I need to reevaluate my mental models. As with most of their books, Wharton School Publishing includes an audio CD that summarizes the main points of the book and an interview with the co-authors.

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