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Chapter Thirteen

The Third Principle:
Igniting Latent Energy

You’ve created latent energy by behaving in a cooperative way and by jumping across worlds; now the scene is set for ignition. Without these sparks of ignition, you are consigning yourself to a Country Club, a place where you feel comfortable and at ease but in which you will never, ever Glow.

This is the third principle of Glowing. First you will hear one man’s story of how he created enormous energy and innovation throughout a whole community of people and became a superb catalyst to help everyone Glow. Then you will complete the Glow Profile to identify your specific profile type before looking at the three actions that can ignite you:

Action 7 Asking the questions that spark energy and also have the capacity to ignite and excite others.

Action 8 Creating a vision that compels others and demonstrates your beliefs and passion.

Action 9 Crafting meaningful and exciting work that provides you and your colleagues with an opportunity to stretch your capabilities, develop new skills, and ultimately Glow.

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When I asked people who Glow what it mean to ignite the energy around them, this is how they described their experiences:

Think about your own experiences of Glowing. Have there been times when you also felt this level of excitement and involvement?

Contrast this with how people described being in a situation when their energy had not been ignited:

Country Clubs come in different shapes and sizes, but what they have in common is that they dislocate you from your work. This means that you never really get an opportunity to put your true self into your work. The challenge is that when you lose your true self at work, you no longer Glow. All of us one time or another have found ourselves in a place where there is little energy. But if you want to Glow, you have to reconnect with your imagination, your passion, and your energy.

In this chapter you will learn how to find your true self and express your energy and excitement through the questions you ask, the vision for the future you create, and the jobs that you do. Let me illustrate this with the story of a man who Glows brightly and through his beliefs and passions created Hot Spots throughout a community.

When Sparks Fly: The One-Lakh Car

I had arrived in India in time for a great celebration in the business community. Just that week, one of India’s preeminent car manufacturers, the Tata Group, had launched a new car called the Nano at the New Delhi Motor Show. Many new models from American, European, and Asian car manufacturers had been launched at the show, but it was the Nano that captured the imagination of the crowd and the press. The papers were full of pictures and stories about the car, and in every party I went to (all part of the role of a flâneur), it had been the center of conversation. It was quite literally the talk of the town. Why all the fuss about a car?

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This is how company chairman Ratan Tata had introduced the car at the New Delhi show. Against a hologram of a typical Indian family of four wobbling on a motorbike, in a quiet, dignified voice, Tata had this to say:

Anyone who has been to India cannot help but be struck by the ingenuity with which people and goods are transported on two wheels. Whole families on scooters are commonplace—I have also seen small calves transported in this way. The case for the Nano is clear. What Tata had created was a Hot Spot in which excitement, passion, and creativity poured into the design of a car and provided everyone involved in its creation with a marvelous opportunity to Glow.

What sparked all this energy was the passion and belief of one man, Ratan Tata. Now in his seventies, Tata is one of the most revered India business leaders of his time. He leads a fifth-generation business that has grown to become one of the world’s most admired philanthropic companies, joining other dynasties such as the Mellon family as recipients of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy. The Tatas are devout Parsis, and the company is a strong proponent of corporate social responsibility, giving between 8 and 14 percent of its net profits to literacy, microfinancing, and water conservation projects across India.

What Tata did—and I have seen others who Glow do the same—was reach inside of himself to an issue or a theme that he feels passionate about. Of course, to do so he needs to really understand himself, know what he is passionate about, and have the courage to speak out—themes you will be returning to in Action 7, asking questions that spark energy, in Chapter Fourteen. What Ratan Tata did was not only inspire himself to Glow but also ignite the passion of thousands of employees in the Tata Group. The question Tata had the courage to ask himself and everyone else in the company was deceptively simple: “Why can’t we build a one-lakh car?”

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A lakh is 100,000 rupees, equivalent to about $2,000. So asking for a car that sells for only $2,000 seems like a pretty sparky question by any account. Action 7 provides a number of tools and techniques that will help you develop questions that could have the same sparky resonance as this one.

Ratan Tata knew he was asking a lot when he raised the question about a car that retails for such a low price. But he also knew that in a country of over a billion people, many of whom have limited access to personal transport beyond a bicycle or a scooter, it was a vital question. He had seen and heard of too many people killed on India’s treacherous roads to let the question go unanswered.

The courageous question he asked sparked energy throughout the company, and in early 2008, Tata was able to unveil the one-lakh car. Imagine how it felt for the people who engineered the car—you can imagine they were positively Glowing. When I spoke to the engineers about their feat, their sense of pride was palpable. As one of the engineers told me:

Sure, what they produced was simple engineering, and as one correspondent ruefully observed at the time, “The average wristwatch has more instrumentation.” Nevertheless, the engineering and production feat was extraordinary.

Clearly, if you want to Glow, you have to find something in your daily work that excites and intrigues you and has the possibility of sparking the energy of others.

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How are you going to do this? I have found that there are three ways that you can ignite the energy inside of you and others.

Questions That Spark Energy

You can ignite your own energy and that of others by asking a question that really sets the place on fire. That’s what Ratan Tata did when he asked the question “Why can’t we make a one-lakh car?” What was audacious and courageous about this question was that he did not raise the question of simply shaving 20 percent off the cost of a car. His question focused on the very basis of what a car costs.

Asking this sort of audacious question can be crucial to feeling truly alive—to Glowing. In our discussion of Action 7 in Chapter Fourteen, you will hear about how Johanna created enormous energy by asking a string of audacious questions and also discover the four ways you can become skilled at developing and asking questions that ignite.

Visions That Compel

Questions are a marvelous way of generating the sparks that make you Glow. Sometimes the basis of these questions is an idea or a vision you have about something or yourself. This was certainly the case for Ratan Tata, the latest member of a family with a long history of participating in the wider Indian community and a vision of alleviating poverty in Indian society. So when Tata asked the “one-lakh” question, he was envisioning a way his company could contribute to society. Visions typically begin with the words “Imagine a world where . . . . ” Tata’s vision was this: “Imagine a world where rural communities can access the transport infrastructure so crucial for their development.” He understood that getting their produce to market as quickly as possible would transform the lives of the farming community in rural India. Too often in his trips around the country he had seen fruit and vegetables rotting in the fields because villagers did not have speedy transportation to local and regional markets. Imagine how life would change if the rural population of India had access to local, regional, and world markets!

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To truly Glow, you need to access your innermost passions and beliefs about the world and about how you and others can work together. In our discussion of Action 8, creating visions that compel, in Chapter Fifteen, you will discover how you can craft a vision for yourself and others that feels truly inspiring and helps you Glow.

Work That Is Meaningful and Exciting

You Glow when there is something in your life that excites and interests you. It could be the possibility of answering a question that fills you with interest or pursuing a vision that engages and excites you. But what of your day-today work? How are you going to Glow on your job every day?

You can find an answer in the Nano story. Beyond the questions and the vision is the day-to-day reality of working on a series of igniting tasks. These tasks could be as specific as rewriting the owner’s manual or working with suppliers to reengineer a particular part or redesigning the interior. The creation of the Nano car was the result of countless smaller igniting tasks.

In our discussion of Action 9, crafting meaningful and exciting work, in Chapter Sixteen, you get to take a close look at your current job and decide what you might do to create opportunities to become engaged in more exciting and more stimulating work.

Beware the Country Club

It was the combination of a vision (bringing commerce to rural India), an audacious question (“Why can’t we create the one-lakh car?”), and a complex task (reconceptualizing a vehicle in its entirety) that together ignited a Hot Spot of energy and innovation that burned bright at Tata for more than four years and caused everyone who worked on the project to Glow.

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Igniting latent energy unleashes the engagement and excitement of Glowing and the marvelous experience of being in a Hot Spot. Without that igniting spark, what you get instead is a Country Club. If people are cooperating nicely, you have the satisfaction of being surrounded by well-wishers. But if there is no spark to ignite the latent energy in yourself and others, you fail to Glow, and high-energy Hot Spots fail to develop. The potential energy remains untapped, fading away in a mundane environment.

Places matter. The Big Freeze—the antithesis of working cooperatively together—is easy to spot. It’s clear that people don’t get along. The atmosphere crackles with politics and ill will. The same is true where people fail to jump across worlds—in the resulting Fortress, the walls people and teams are building around themselves are almost palpable. Country Clubs are more difficult to spot, even though they can snuff out the possibility of Glowing with as much force as the Big Freeze. They just arise in a more insidious and less transparent manner.

Chances are that you have been in a Country Club at some time in your working life. It’s a place where everyone seems content and even happy, and you might infer that these are places where you are likely to Glow. But they are not. In the Country Club, underperformance is the norm, energy rarely sizzles, and the mundane is venerated. In the Country Club, the big questions are stifled, visions are uninspired, and tasks are overspecified and homogenized.

So beware the trap of the Country Club. Here are the five telltale signs of a Country Club:

• Conflict seems remarkably low; everyone seems to agree with everyone else. There are none of the sparks of conflict that can ignite energy. “Never is heard a discouraging word.”
• Complacency is the norm—there is an unquestioning belief in the status quo and an assumption that everything will continue as it has in the past.
• People are busy; but be aware that busyness can mask a lack of focus and avoidance of the big questions.
• You sense that there are important matters that are being ignored. But if you question why things are done in a certain way, you are made to feel that you don’t really understand or that you are somehow naïve.
• You notice that everyone is rather similar. They look about the same, they act the same, and they have the same point of view. Conformity is the norm. It is the corporate equivalent of the Stepford Wives.

These are rather subtle signs—you may have to behave a little like a social anthropologist to pick up on them. But you can. Just observe carefully, look for hidden signs, listen quietly, and take account of underlying trends. If you spot these signs, now is the time to take action, before you abandon any hope of Glowing.

The Glow Profile

Figure 13.1, together with the actions discussed in Chapters Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen, will give you concrete and useful ways to tackle the Country Club problem. You must recognize that the Country Club is a trap; you have to make sure you don’t fall into one, or if by chance you do, make sure you get out as quickly as possible before you forfeit your chance to Glow.

Profiling the Third Principle: Igniting Latent Energy

Do you, your immediate team, and your wider community, business, or organization promote the igniting of latent energy? The rating scales in Figure 13.1 will help you find out.

Respond to each statement by circling your reaction on the 5-point scale, as follows:

5 = agree completely

4 = agree somewhat

3 = neither agree nor disagree

2 = disagree somewhat

1 = disagree completely

Do I naturally ignite latent energy?

I am always asking questions and am curious about how things are done.	5	4	3	2	1
People describe me as naturally interested in what’s happening around me.	5	4	3	2	1
I have ideas about my work that I think are really important.	5	4	3	2	1
I try to read as widely as possible to see what is going on outside my job.	5	4	3	2	1
There are disciplines outside of my job that I find really fascinating.	5	4	3	2	1
It is important to me to know that my ideas are fresh and exciting.	5	4	3	2	1
I seem to have a natural skill for exciting others about ideas.	5	4	3	2	1
It is important to me to leave time aside each week to think and talk about ideas unrelated to my work.	5	4	3	2	1
I really enjoy creating work that is exciting and interesting for others.		4	3	2	1

Does my team naturally ignite latent energy?

On this team, we often question each other about what we are doing.	5	4	3	2	1
It is not unusual for people on this team to come up with ideas that others find exciting and interesting.	5	4	3	2	1
We take time to talk to each other about ideas that excite us.	5	4	3	2	1
We often invite different types of people to come in and talk with us.	5	4	3	2	1
It is accepted that that we talk about the future and what we believe will be happening in the future.	5	4	3	2	1
I feel that the tasks we do on this team are very exciting.	5	4	3	2	1
I feel that the tasks we do on this team are personally meaningful.	5	4	3	2	1
I believe our work makes a real difference in the lives of other people.	5	4	3	2	1
Our team sets aside time every week to create ideas for the future.	5	4	3	2	1

Is my wider community, business, or organization a natural igniter of latent energy?

Our executives ask questions that others find intriguing.	5	4	3	2	1
Employees are given time to work on projects that excite them.	5	4	3	2	1
I find the vision of this organization exciting and energizing.	5	4	3	2	1
This organization encourages employees to come up with innovative ideas and suggestions.	5	4	3	2	1
I believe that senior executives listen carefully to the ideas we have.	5	4	3	2	1
It is the norm to arrange workshops and “away days” where the agenda encourages innovation.	5	4	3	2	1
Employees are encouraged to read widely and to meet with different types of people.	5	4	3	2	1
Internal networks include people who are really interesting.	5	4	3	2	1
The tasks I work on resonate with my own values.	5	4	3	2	1

FIGURE 13.1 Igniting Latent Energy in the Three Areas of Your Work Life

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The Glow Profile

FIGURE 13.2 Your Igniting Latent Energy Profile

Once you have responded to all the statements in Figure 13.1, add up your ratings in each section; they will range from 9 to 45.

36 to 45 = high

26 to 35 = moderate

9 to 27 = low

Now move to the Glow Profile in Figure 13.2. In the “igniting latent energy” segment of the figure, use different colors or a coding scheme such as the one shown to indicate the extent to which latent energy is ignited in the three areas of your work life.

Profile Type	Your Score	Team or Community Score	Wider Community Score
A	High	High	High
B	Moderate or High	Moderate	Moderate
C	Moderate or High	Low	Low
D	Low	Moderate or High	Moderate or High
E	Low	Low	Low

Interpreting the Igniting Latent Energy Profile

Take a look at your igniting latent energy profile, and select the type that is closest to yours:

Profile Type A: Your scores for igniting latent energy are high, and so are the scores for the team and the community

You are a natural igniter; you have a questioning way of looking at the world; you are curious and prepared to ask the big questions and to imagine how the world could be. So you are well positioned to ignite Hot Spots and have the ideas and excitement to draw people toward you and help them Glow.

Your igniting capabilities are reflected in your team or community, which has a naturally open and exciting way of looking at the world. You are on a team and in a community that are naturally igniters and are probably already buzzing with ideas and insights.

You may already be taking many of the recommended actions, but take a look at them to determine whether there is more you could be achieving.

Actions to Take You are in a great situation and have a wonderful opportunity to Glow and to find and flourish in Hot Spots. Review Actions 7, 8, and 9 (Chapters Fourteen, Fifteen, and Sixteen) to ensure there is not more you could be doing. Your main actions are to look at your analysis of cooperative mindset to ensure that you have sufficient cooperation to make the most of this tendency toward ignition, and at your analysis of jumping across worlds to be sure that you are involving a broad and creative group of people.

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Profile Type B: Your score for igniting latent energy is moderate or high, and the team and community scores are moderate

If your score is moderate, your skill at igniting latent energy could be more developed, but you have the potential to be an igniter of energy, and taking action can develop this potential. If your score is high, you already have well-developed capabilities in this area. You are on a team or in a community that may not have the same strengths. Remember, though, that the team or community does have potential, and this potential can be developed.

Actions to Take You have the great advantage of being a natural igniter of latent energy and now need to engage with others to encourage them to become more stimulating and sparky. Your first action is to engage them with these concepts—join with your colleagues as a learning group and discuss how to ask more igniting questions, create more compelling visions, and take a closer look at the tasks you are engaged in to find out if there is more you can do to create a meaningful and exciting environment.

Profile Type C: Your score for igniting latent energy is moderate or high, and the team and community scores are low

You are a natural igniter and have an instinctive way of asking questions and thinking about the future. You have the potential to find and flourish in Hot Spots. However, you have landed in a Country Club where the people around you are content to do the routine work rather than to Glow.

Actions to Take You can support the team by sharing these diagnostics and engaging in a conversation about how to make your work more exciting. Action 9, crafting meaningful and exciting work, is a good place to start (see Chapter Sixteen). Then take a look at Actions 7 and 8 (Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen) to determine how you can start a conversation about asking the igniting questions and engaging with others in visualizing the future.

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Profile Type D: Your score for igniting latent energy is low, and the team and community scores are moderate or high

Until now, you have not valued igniting latent energy and have been content to operate in a Country Club. But by remaining like this, you face the possibility of narrowing your options and reducing your capacity to be innovative and ultimately to Glow.

However, you now find yourself in a place where the people around you are prepared and willing to ask the igniting questions and create visions of the future. This represents a wonderful opportunity for you to engage with your colleagues to ensure that you leave the Country Club behind and start to Glow.

Actions to Take You are in a great position to build your igniting skills and habits because you have around you people who are engaged in igniting questions and visions. Take a look at Action 9 (Chapter Sixteen) to see what you can do about creating a more exciting job; then move to Action 7 (Chapter Fourteen) to take a closer look at the questions you could be asking of yourself and others. Finally, Action 8 (Chapter Fifteen) will help you think about opening your eyes to a longer-term vision.

Profile Type E: Your score for igniting latent energy is low, and so are the scores for the team and the community

You are in a classic Country Club, and you and your colleagues may even be enjoying the lack of excitement and energy. But my guess is that this is already frustrating you, and you are certainly not Glowing. So what are you going to do?

Action to Take Igniting latent energy is most effective as a team activity, so the best way to start would be to share this discussion with your teammates and also ask them to complete the diagnostics; their perspective may differ from yours. If you all agree that you are in a place that needs ignition, now is the time to start reenergizing. As a team, look first at the jobs you do and the tasks you engage in to identify what you might do to reenergize and ignite your work. Then move on to Actions 7 and 8 (Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen) to begin work on a broader agenda for change.

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Key Points in Chapter Thirteen
The Third Principle: Igniting Latent Energy

You Glow by engaging with what’s important and meaningful to you. Without this connection, your energy rapidly dissipates. This sort of spark of an idea was behind Ratan Tata’s dream of a one-lakh car. Latent energy is ignited by asking questions that spark energy, by creating visions that compel, and by crafting meaningful and exciting work. A place where no one is igniting latent energy is a Country Club, where everyone seems to be happy but no one is Glowing.

In this chapter the Glow Profile helped you see where you stand with regard to your own attitudes and skills, your team’s attitudes and competence, and the extent to which your company or community encourages you to ignite latent energy. From the profile you are able to determine which profile type is nearest to your own:

Profile Type A You, the team you work with, and the wider community are very adept at igniting latent energy, which creates wonderful opportunities for you to Glow.

Profile Type B You, your team, and the wider community are skilled in some aspects of igniting latent energy, so the emphasis is on increasing the level of ignition in our team.

Profile Type C You are fairly adept at igniting latent energy, but you find yourself in a Country Club, where ignition is limited or nonexistent. Actions 7, 8, and 9 can all help awaken your colleagues from their torpor.

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Profile Type D You are not a natural igniter of energy but find yourself surrounded by a relatively energized team or community, which presents a terrific opportunity for you to learn from others.

Profile Type E Neither you, your team, nor the larger community values igniting latent energy, which places you in a Country Club with low energy and little opportunity to Glow. Think about the effect this is having, particularly on innovation, and together work on Action 7, asking questions that spark energy, and Action 8, creating a visions that compel.