"If everyone is thinking alike, somebody isn't thinking."-General George Patton, Jr.
Genghis Kahn was always trying new ways to capture new ground.
This is one reason he created an empire on a scale never seen before, or since.
He would try something new and unexpected, and this would throw off his enemy. After
all, it was new!
But, like any manager that is pushing the envelope, he knew there
would be some failures. He would make mistakes. The key was that he encouraged discourse
about them. He was not so wrapped up in his own superiority that he wouldn’t listen.
Like any great general, or CEO, Khan actively removed impediments to the truth reaching
him. Great leaders know they don’t know it all. Their greatness comes, in part,
from creating open, sharing environments. They know it takes more than best practices—everybody
wants to talk about those. A true leader ensures he knows about the organization's
“worst practices” as well. Why? Because they know if you can’t see it…you can’t
fix it.
So you have to ask yourself: “If I am aware of a mistake, what
do I do? If one of my team makes a mistake what will they expect my reaction will
be when I find out? And, typically, how do I find out?” Genghis Khan and his chief
orloks, Subedei and Jebe (an orlok was a marshal) would sit around the smoky yurt
(not much wood on the steppes so they burned dung) and talk about what tactics worked
that day and what didn’t (although appearing chaotic, Mongol tactics were precisely
engineered in advance). Occasional failure was an accepted cost of moving forward.
Not admitting that a mistake had occurred meant someone in the vast organization
might make the mistake again and they knew that was counterproductive; an unnecessary
expense. So admitting to a mistake was the important, group oriented thing to do.
Mistakes are always costly in some way—but you get a rebate by learning from them.
And sometimes a big bonus…
One advantage of scrutinizing seemingly minor mistakes is because
they can be precursors to disasters. Big organizational disasters, and Khan had
only a few, almost always have weak inflection points somewhere in the event stream
leading to the catastrophe. It doesn’t take much to imagine Khan and his orloks
sitting around studying each mistake so it didn’t lead to a bigger one, which would
in turn cause another, etc. Soon you have Enron or New Coke or Bear Stearns when
somebody could easily have broken the chain. Corporate warriors never forget, big,
sprawling mistakes don’t just happen. They evolve.
You can’t have your people hiding problems. You need to ask yourself:
Do people around you in your organization hide the bad news from you? If so, why?
What are they afraid of? Is it you personally, or the corporate culture? If either,
you have repairs to make.
Finally, Khan knew that, as the leader (and this applies to any
manager), it was imperative that he admit when he possibly made a mistake. If he
didn’t, who would? Khan knew a fish smells from the head first.
Think about it…
