4

Battle Entitlement, the Innovation Killer

You will achieve the greatest results in business and career if you drop the word “achievement” from your vocabulary and replace it with “contribution.”

—Peter Drucker

Entitlement, the belief that something is owed to you by life, comes in many guises, and it is on the rise.1 It is likely to be a psychological crutch, at least to a small degree, in all of us. Believe me, I see it in myself all the time, even though I recognize that my sense of entitlement can and does slow movement along the curve toward the competent, capable person I yearn to be. As we move into the growth phase of our learning curve and gain more confidence, entitlement is a risk we all face. This chapter explores how different types of entitlement—cultural, emotional, intellectual—stifle innovation at all levels, organizationally and individually, and how to resist its siren song.

Cultural Entitlement

A sense of belonging is an emotional imperative. Much of our self-definition relies on building relationships and on institutions that reaffirm our values. But if that sense of belonging becomes so cliquish that we refuse to look beyond our borders and think poorly of other cultures or ideas, then instead of an upward climb, we’re on a downward slide. Being culturally entitled prevents us from looking at the world outside our culture.2 In seeing the world through this single lens, we believe we’ve got it all figured out. Acting without thinking is easy. Just do what we’ve always done.

This myopia extends to companies and industries, from automobiles to education to investing to retailing. In one of my early readings of Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, there was a section that jumped off the page: “It is striking that Sears received accolades such as extraordinary powerhouse of a company at exactly the same time that it was blind to the basic changes taking place in the marketplace, including the rise of discount retailing and home centers.”3 Because revenue was growing and margins were expanding, and the company likely believed the adulatory press clippings, Sears was blissfully, even willfully, ignorant of the disruption afoot and competitors nipping at its heels.

As we begin to see the fruits of taking the right risks, playing to our strengths, and embracing our constraints, we can start believing this is the way it should and will always be. It’s easy to become dulled to danger when everything is working.

Antidote: Transplant Yourself to New Cultures

When my husband and I were in New York, he was doing postgraduate work at Memorial Sloan Kettering in molecular biology. In order to conduct his research, he would grow cells in beautiful pink-colored media. But the cell culture never stayed pink for long. In three or four days that beautiful media would change to a dingy light brown. As the cells used nutrients, they produced by-products, some of which are toxic or inhibitory to growth. When the color changed, it was time to wash and replate the cells, putting them in a new petri dish at a lower cell density. We may be very fond of our current cultural petri dish, but if we want to avoid stagnation, we’ll occasionally need to change our environment.

A practical and low-cost means of changing your environment is opening up your network.4 The more closed your network, the more you hear the same ideas over and again, reaffirming what you already believe, while the more open your network, the more exposed you are to new ideas. It can be painful to be part of an open network because you may feel like an outsider, surrounded by people who don’t understand how you think. It also requires you to assimilate and manage conflicting viewpoints. But if you resist your tendency to stick with like-minded people, you will have a more accurate view of the world.

You’ll also be more likely to have breakthrough ideas. Brian Uzzi and Benjamin F. Jones, professors at the Kellogg School of Management, reviewed ten years of academic research—17.9 million research articles—published from 1990 to 2000 across a span of disciplines and institutions, categorizing the papers as high or low impact based on the number of citations in other works.5 It turns out that the highest-impact papers were those that included a mix of highly conventional knowledge and novelty, novelty being defined as the references cited in the bibliography that go beyond the usual suspects. If a paper had a combination of highly conventional sources (85 to 95 percent) with a small subset of highly novel ones (5 to 15 percent), the paper was twice as likely to be a high-impact or groundbreaking paper.

A higher-cost but extremely effective way of keeping cultural entitlement at bay is immersion in other cultures. Shortly after my twenty-first birthday, I went on hiatus from university and lived in Uruguay for a year as a missionary. I came to have a genuine fondness for the people, country, and culture, so much so that when I graduated from college, I wanted my career to involve Latin America; I have now traveled to Latin America nearly one hundred times.

Janssen, the pharmaceuticals arm of Johnson & Johnson, offers a corporate example of overcoming cultural entitlement with its launch of an initiative aptly called Immersion.6 The idea started with two Janssen employees, Annick Daems and Enrique Esteban, who were spearheading an initiative to increase the company’s diversity of thought and experience. As part of this effort, they discovered that the majority of employees who were advising Janssen on emerging markets had never set foot in those countries.

They approached Adrian Thomas, head of Global Market Access and Global Public Health, about providing employees with in-country experiences. Under Thomas’s leadership, Immersion has become a global health program with a simple mandate: identify specific problems in specific locations, like hepatitis C in Romania or aging in Poland. Then assemble small, cross-silo teams and get them in-country to find ways to better deliver health-care access in that emerging market.

When you are first trying something, you will likely want and need to surround yourself with trusted colleagues and confidants. Creating something new, especially when you are dealing with huge uncertainties, tight deadlines, and financial constraints, is emotionally exhausting—thus the necessity of having people on board who feel familiar and safe. But once you start to get a grip on the future, impose the constraint of seeking new cultures. Just as novelty is important in academic research, new cultural settings are valuable to innovation; the immigrant population in the United States is a terrific example of how the combination of embracing constraints and being surrounded by a new culture can lead to an explosion of creativity. Immigrants are more than twice as likely to start a business as native-born Americans, and 52 percent of Silicon Valley start-ups include an immigrant. Forty percent of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by first-generation immigrants or their children.7

Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal, makes this powerful statement about the importance of avoiding cultural entitlement: “Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n. But, when we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. Unless companies invest in the difficult task of creating new things, they will fail in the future no matter how big their profits are.” If you want to keep innovation alive, look for ways to combine something old with something new.

Emotional Entitlement

Not too long ago, my doctor informed me that I was prediabetic. The mature response would have been: “Well, then I will stop eating so much processed and refined sugar.” I’m not very mature, so I threw a tantrum. “Sugar is literally my only vice! I deserve a cookie.” My doctor’s response: “Surely you can find something that will make you happy besides sugar.” Ouch. My story is the perfect example of emotional entitlement, the sense that our feelings must be protected at all costs.

It’s easy to think our feelings take priority at home and at work. Perhaps one of your colleagues gets a well-deserved opportunity. And you are genuinely happy for her. But a piece of you snivels, “How come I didn’t get that opportunity? Why do I even bother trying?” I know I’ve felt this way. Failure to acknowledge and see the abundance in another person’s success is a form of entitlement.

Or, maybe you are a boss or a director of a board and you don’t want to hold your people accountable because you’d rather be liked. That’s its own guise of entitlement without obligation. But in failing to hold our charges accountable, allowing employees to experience consequences, we slip the noose of entitlement around their necks and, ultimately, ours.

A shorthand means of gauging emotional entitlement is to observe how we feel about money. If we have lots of money, we think we did something to deserve it. If we don’t, then life isn’t fair. A few years ago, I wrote a blog post blithely sharing how much money I had made one year. I had worked hard, but in retrospect, there was something in my tone that smacked of entitlement. I got pounded in the comments, and deservedly so. Entitlement poses more of a pitfall for people who have been financially successful in the past. A higher net worth leads to the assumption, “I have it, therefore I deserve it.”8

In a bit of cosmic payback, I have also been the person hurt by someone else’s entitlement. In one of the start-ups I backed as an investor, we had budgeted $90,000 for a particular expenditure. At the last moment, one of the senior decision makers unilaterally made changes, none of which was critical, just to throw her weight around. This decision led to a crippling overage of $30,000, a factor in the company’s demise. Because of this person’s entitlement, the business, jobs, a company, and money (a lot) were lost.9

The stock market provides an interesting examination of emotional entitlement. On November 10, 2010, Cisco’s stock price dropped 16 percent, erasing roughly $20 billion of market value in a matter of hours. Had something catastrophic happened? No. In fact, this stock market bellwether had just beat earnings estimates by 6 percent. The company reported earnings of $0.43 per share for the quarter, just barely clearing the market expectation of $0.40. Those who follow the market are familiar with the earnings game: deliver an unexpected stellar quarter, and a stock can gain hundreds of millions, if not billions, of market value. But match, or barely beat expectations, and the market yawns, or worse, dumps the stock, as it did with Cisco. Investors had gotten used to the assumption that the stock would outperform.

This doesn’t mean emotional needs shouldn’t be met, lest we experience the emotional tax, but when we believe we are owed something by life, deserving more than the person to our right or left, we get caught in a vortex of narcissism that makes personal disruption impossible.

Antidote: Be Grateful

To rid yourself of selfishness and entitlement, try keeping a gratitude journal, a list of three things you are thankful for each day and why.10 In addition to noting what you are grateful for, make it a point to say “thank you” to those around you. Because expressing gratitude requires self-reflection—the ability to admit that you depend on others and the humility to recognize your limitations—it is an explicit acknowledgment that the world isn’t all about you.11

Each of us has at least one dream that has been deferred, derailed, or died. Eric Hoffer, a Depression-era migratory worker, wrote, “The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.” It is sometimes terribly difficult to be grateful in bad circumstances, but the alternative is bitterness.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of a group of teenagers on an excursion in the desert: a rattlesnake bites one of the kids. Instead of immediately extracting the venom, the friends go in search of the rattlesnake. They kill it. But when their focus turns back toward their friend, the venom has spread throughout her bloodstream, and her leg must be amputated.

When we are bitter about unfulfilled dreams, harboring a grudge about not getting the life we wanted or even deserved, aren’t we letting venom move through our system? Being grateful for the dreams that have (and have not) come true is an antidote to emotional entitlement. When dreams don’t work, we can be mad, or sad, or both, for a time, but then we must choose. Said the beloved author Charles Dickens in A Christmas Carol, “Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”

Intellectual Entitlement

Another kind of entitlement, more difficult to detect, is intellectual entitlement, a resistance to ideas from sources we deem beneath us. The “other” in this case isn’t necessarily less educated; a person who is street smart might dismiss book smarts (or vice versa), the CFO might ignore the union worker (or vice versa), or digital natives could refuse to listen to their analog counterparts.

Or it may be that you just won’t listen because you don’t want to hear what “they” have to say. Take Brooksley Born, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), who waged an unsuccessful campaign to regulate the multitrillion-dollar derivatives market. Soon after the Clinton administration asked her to take the reins of the CFTC, a regulatory backwater, she became aware of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market, a rapidly expanding and opaque market, which she attempted to regulate.

According to a PBS Frontline special: “Her attempts to regulate derivatives ran into fierce resistance from then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, then-Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who prevailed upon Congress to stop Born and limit future regulation.” Put more directly by New York Times reporter Timothy O’Brien, “they . . . shut her up and shut her down.” Mind you, Born was no dummy. She was the first female president of the Stanford Law Review, the first woman to finish at the top of the class, and an expert in commodities and futures. But because a trio of people who were literally entitled decided they knew what was best for the market, they dismissed her call for regulation, a dismissal that triggered the financial collapse of 2008.

To be fair to Greenspan et al., their resistance was not surprising. According to psychologists Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth, “we [as human beings] are prone to search only for confirming evidence, and ignore disconfirming evidence.” In the case of Born, it was the ’90s, the markets were doing well, and the country was prospering; it’s easy to see why the powerful troika rejected her disconfirming views. Throw in the fact that the disconcerting evidence was coming from a “disconfirming” person (i.e., a woman), and they were even more likely to disregard the data. In the aftermath, Arthur Levitt, former chairman of the SEC, said, “If she just would have gotten to know us . . . maybe it would have gone a different way.”12 Born quotes Michael Greenberg, the director of the CFTC under her, as saying, “They say you weren’t a team player, but I never saw them issue you a uniform.”

We like ideas and people that fit into our worldview, but there is tremendous value in finding room for those that don’t. According to Paul Carlile and Clayton Christensen, “It is only when an anomaly is identified—an outcome for which a theory can’t account that an opportunity to improve theory occurs.”13 One of the ways you’ll know you are coming up against an anomaly is if you find yourself annoyed, defensive, even dismissive, of a person, or his idea.

Antidote: Practice Hearing Dissenting Voices

Listening to dissenting voices doesn’t happen automatically. It must be practiced. For instance, how often do you write inexperienced people off as not knowing what they’re talking about? Instead, try giving a neophyte the benefit of the doubt. According to management thinker Liz Wiseman, author of Rookie Smarts, “inexperienced people, whether recent university graduates or experienced professionals coming from other organizations or functions, are surprisingly strong performers. Because they have significant knowledge gaps, they are alert, move fast, and work smart.”14 Remember Athelia Woolley LeSueur, the founder of Shabby Apple? She didn’t know how to sew, nor was she aware of the typical business model for a clothing label; these both worked to her benefit. To move up the curve, you need “highly conventional knowledge,” or pay-to-play skills, but to avoid getting pushed off the top of the curve you also need to get your rookie on.

Another tactic is to try reframing dissenting voices as important allies. Literature on innovation tends to frame the relationship between spry innovators and the staid status quo as a David-versus-Goliath battle, but the challenge for organizations and individuals is to acknowledge that David and Goliath must work together rather than fight each another. If you are slinging around words like bureaucratic, rigid, upstarts, too big for their britches, you will stall along the curve of innovation.

In her book Writing to Change the World, Mary Pipher asserts that “when we are in trouble with pronouns, we are struggling with us/them issues. Pronoun choices indicate who we stand with and who we stand against, and who we choose to call ‘us.’15 To gain momentum along the curve, cultivate a “we are them” mentality, believing that David and Goliath, constraints and resources, weaknesses and strengths—or, if you like basketball, the five-foot-six-inch Muggsy Bogues and six-foot-ten-inch Alonzo Mourning—are all on the same team.

Finally, you can practice being that outside voice. One of the best ways to combat intellectual entitlement, or the notion that people should buy in to your ideas simply because they are yours, is to do the work of translating and selling them to your stakeholders. Work to build consensus around your ideas, whether your customer is your manager, your direct reports, your children, or the CEO. No matter how powerful you may be, when you have the humility to do the work of getting others on board, you will be able to repeatedly jump to and successfully mount your own learning curves—and help others do the same.

Scott McNeal is currently the chief information officer in GE’s Distributed Power Services. Earlier in his career at GE, McNeal was a production engineer at GE Plastics. His mandate was to build capacity and production through automation. This, however, meant the eventual reduction of hours, and therefore earnings potential, of employees on the manufacturing floor. Because rational data, the data that CFOs like, is a lousy way to get cooperation critical to improvements, McNeal factored employee concerns into the mix, allocating a portion of his budget to addressing their concerns. This approach paid off disproportionately in cooperation. Because McNeal did the hard work of listening and responding to his colleagues, they, in turn, were more favorably disposed toward the needed improvements.

Disrupt Yourself Before Disrupting Others

In Shakespeare’s Henry V, there is a nighttime scene in the camp of the English soldiers just before their battle with the French. In disguise, King Henry wanders among the soldiers trying to gauge their morale. Because they don’t know who he is, their comments are unguarded. A conversation ensues about who bears the responsibility for what happens to the men in battle, the king or each soldier. One soldier says, “If [the King’s] cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.” Not surprisingly, King Henry, still in disguise responds, “Every subject’s duty is the king’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.” This strikes at the heart of what it means to battle entitlement. We can natter all day about being agents of disruption, but to effect real change, we need to be the subject of disruption. Innovation starts as an inside game.

There will always be variables outside our control, but to experience the hypergrowth of personal disruption, we acknowledge that certain rules always apply—the importance of embracing constraints, even imposing them on occasion, and leveraging our distinctive strengths while colonizing the right risks.

Most of us are brimming with the confidence, even competence, to change the world. It is vital that we are also equipped with the humility to understand that changing the world and keeping innovation alive require that we change ourselves. Let’s not risk losing a lofty dream because we think we deserve it.

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