Welcome to dial P four procurement a show focused on today's biggest spin supplier and contract management related business opportunities. Dial P investigates the nuanced and constantly evolving boundary of the procurement supply chain divide with a broadcast of engaged executives, providers, and thought leaders give us an hour and we'll provide you with a new perspective on supply chain value. And now it's time to dial P for procurement.
Hi there, and thanks for joining me for dial P for procurement. Part of the supply chain. Now family of shows, I'm Kelly Barner, a career procurement practitioner with a love for news and most of all good ideas, no matter where they come from. In addition to video interviews and live streams, I'll join you each Thursday to share my point of view on a current news story that presents an interesting twist for business leaders or a new way of looking at a common challenge. Before I dig into this week's topic, we're building out dial piece independent following. So no matter where you encountered this podcast, I'd ask you to subscribe and even give us a review. Thank you in advance for being an active part of our listening community. Now last week I focused on current events comparing the various roles that corporations are being called to play in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, especially given the recent emphasis in the business community has placed on social activism and ESG.
This week. I wanna offer you a few different perspectives on a topic that we meaning humans never seem to be able to overcome are natural aversion to change. Now I'm not talking about quitting a bad half or adjusting to a new commute to and from work. I'm talking about paradigm shift level change, mindset, change the kind of thing we talk about in business all the time, but truly struggle to bring about. I'm always on the lookout for topics that seem to appear in multiple places. I take that as a sign that I'm supposed to think about the topic in more detail. Call me crazy if you like, but that's how my brain works. The idea I'll share in this podcast started about as far away from my work life, as you can get, I am in a small faith-based book group that meets every Thursday morning, shout out to faith, Mary and Michelle.
They are three incredibly unique well-read intellectual ladies. I am blown away by what they know and how they approach complex ideas. As a writer, I find it incredibly helpful to consume content that has nothing whatsoever to do with procurement supply chain or even business. And this group hits the spot. They bring their political a game every week and I have to do the same right now. We are reading a book called the power of parable by John Dominic. Crossen a few weeks ago in a chapter titled the kingdom of God. The challenge of collaboration. I hit an idea that started a new thought process. I was reading along taking notes. Of course, these ladies keep me on my toes. And I came to a paragraph that started bells ringing in my head. So here it is in discussing how a normal or standard paradigm is finally displaced by a new or revolutionary one.
Thomas co author of the structure of scientific revolutions concludes that the transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced. He quotes both Charles Darwin and max plank in his support, Darwin in his, on the origin of species confessed. I, by no means, expect to convince experience naturalists. I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists plank in his scientific autobiography admits that a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the love, right, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Even if a revolutionary shift commences with an older generation, it is often consummated only with the following one. So I'm reading this and thinking seriously, it takes a generation to affect paradigm change, but we need change. Now in a way though, this information is also strangely comforting because it means that even science doesn't expect any of us to change in our own lifetime.
We're subject to nature. And Thomas co is the originator of the phrase paradigm change. So he ought to know the challenge that we're up against my mind started chewing on that idea. And then I had an unrelated interview with my friend and colleague, Jennifer Alrich from my LinkedIn accelerator project on supplier diversity. She said, it's change management. It's all change management. The more I spend time with organizations, this is the biggest problem across everything as inherently. We don't like to change as human beings. So it's the biggest problem. Then Jennifer went on to make the distinction between change that we resist despite wanting to embrace a different way and change that we are forced to accept by something else. Whether circumstances, a boss, a regulation that connects directly to the idea from. I quoted earlier that paradigm shifts require a conversion experience in his words, and you can't force a conversion experience.
Jennifer and her team certainly don't plan to wait for the children of today's chief procurement officers to take their places. So we have to find a way to acknowledge people's role resistance, to major change, and find a way to introduce new mindsets and behaviors without force. So I incorporated this new twist into my thought process and continued on. Then I had a regular week of work and procurement full of calls and meetings. We keep talking about the same things all the time, over and over. I've been in procurement, just shy of 20 years. We've been talking about the same things the whole time. And most of those things center around how much change we need to lead, but we keep talking about the same things. Now here's a bright spot in that I thought of that creates a kind of friction that we should acknowledge.
The more you talk about things, the better you get at talking about them. That is the source of expertise. Maybe you've read Malcolm Gladwell's book outliers in it. He explains the rule of 10,000 hours. That's amount of time that has to be spent doing something before you can be considered good. In reality, that equates to about 10 years in practice, the Beatles and bill gates are examples that he offers up in his book. So at 20 years I should easily have satisfy my 10,000 hours in theory. That means by now I'm good at talking to people about procurement, which may or may not be a skill. Believe me, I get that. Regardless. Once you've done something for 10,000 plus hours, you're definitely at risk of getting set in your ways they become comfortable. At that point, a paradigm shift feels contrary, like an inconvenience or worse, like a threat to the expertise you have worked so hard to build you almost resisted because it clouds your thoughts.
You might tell yourself no that's how other people feel. I have my own unique point of view. You can tell yourself that resisting change is actually building or defending your value proposition. Here's where I think we come to the tough point doing the same thing over and over for 10,000 hours, develops expertise, society, rewards, expertise, but can people with expertise be agile? Can they embrace change of the paradigm shift sort? And what happens to them if they don't? One of my favorite business books of all time is the end of competitive advantage by Rita Gunther McGrath. The digested message of her book is that as small agile companies try to achieve efficiencies in economies of scale so they can grow over time. Their focus somewhat unintentionally turns from innovation to defense. They have something to guard, so they trade agility for stability, but the smaller companies just keep coming.
How can large established firms fend off competition from upstart companies that have almost nothing to defend, but are so nimble that they're hard to fight against. It's like putting companies that are change in carnet up against companies that are trying to use their vast resources to prevent the desire for change from reaching consumers and markets. After all that might erode their market share early in the book, McGrath writes about companies that have become so large. They usually defend and rarely innovate quote. The most profitable point in the evolution of an advantage was also its most fragile. And a chapter later, she goes on to add the fundamental problem is that deeply ingrained structures systems designed to extract maximum value from a competitive advantage, become a liability when the environment requires instead the capacity to surf through waves of short lived opportunities. So in some ways, as she points out embracing change or the ability to embrace change is a short versus long term point of view.
How far out is your visibility horizon? Can you separate your big picture vision or your way of doing things from your short term feelings in your position on incremental change? It, isn't easy to separate these things and think about them both in parallel, but it's important. That's what makes it a competitive advantage. If we extend this idea back to my thought process and the tension between wanting paradigm change, but also wanting to establish expertise, we learn that you're making the most money in the moment before you become irrelevant. Your success actually sets you up for why should you question your rightness? If all these people are willing to pay you so much money to keep spouting it, you never see the end coming like a train at the end of the tunnel as a person who makes her living on ideas and content creation. This is terrifying.
So what it tells me is the better I get it. What I do the closer I am to the end a road. No thank you. I will take any step. I have to ward off that danger even if, or maybe I should say, especially if it's uncomfortable, each of us is rewarded for building up expertise, but we need to condition ourselves to embrace change. At the same time, we can't get to set in our ways or our thoughts that a sustained tension that we all have to learn to deal with and create in our own minds. Well, if we wanna be successful anyway, especially now, again, thank you to faith, Mary and Michelle. We are living in working in times that are unprecedentedly chaotic and unpredictable. In stable times, we reject Thomas paradigm shift concept at our own peril today. Our inability to embrace systemic change could lead a company down the wrong path or an independent thought leader to fail.
I have some advice to offer all based on my experience of trying to create this friction in my own mind. First things first, you have embrace failure. Part of the fear of being open to a paradigm shift. In other words, making decisions beyond your expertise is the very real chance that you will fail or be wrong. And you're probably going to do it publicly. If you work for an organization that does not tolerate or even reward failure, Ugh, that is such a shame. The best, most valuable most freeing thing about entrepreneurship is the reality that you will fail. It is guaranteed. You're gonna fail time and time. Again, nothing opens you to change like the possibility you'll work your heart out and not make a dollar paradigm shifts. Definitely don't respect your ego. And if your ego prevents you from being open to new ideas, it's a liability thought.
Leadership is not about you. It's about your consumers. Once the thought leadership becomes about you, you are officially on the edge of failure year at the point of highest profitability. And you're about to get hit by that train. You have to find new ideas and ways of thinking and throw yourself in head first. So to answer the most obvious question, no, you cannot join my Thursday book group. Those girls are mine, but there are so many opportunities. Join your own local book or a club focused on something beyond your area of expertise. If you aren't a joiner pick up a book that challenges you're thinking, listen to a podcaster that you know, will disagree with you or who has an expertise in an area, nowhere near your own. It is amazing how transferable great ideas are. You can pick up a unique way of thinking while watching the history channel or participating in a team sport, and then you can apply it to your work life.
And it has a far better chance of being unique than an idea that you lift or borrow from another thought leader in your space. Make sure you are always actively learning something. Not only does that keep your learning muscle active, it keeps you humble. You may have seen the super bowl commercial this year featuring Larry David. He travels through time being wrong about a whole series of new inventions that modern viewers know changed the course of history. Don't be like Larry, as the commercial says, assume that you are wrong about things, especially things that beyond your instinct tells you to reject. That is your expertise trying to build walls around itself. You have to knock those walls down. If you want to be open to a paradigm shift and that learning muscle, it isn't easy to intellectually contain good ideas. I think new thoughts in my book group that spill over to my interviews with executives or dial P.
I also learn things from podcasts, newspapers, and books that roll around in my head until they pop out in interviews and white papers. And sometimes they surprise even me. You can't contain advantages and benefits. If you are learning to cook or play piano or skateboard, there's a process surround that learning learning is an excellent thing to be good at just like failing. There is one other thing you can do to help yourself deal with paradigm shifts function in the moment, since the pandemic, many events have gone virtual, that means podcasts, video interviews, webinars, et cetera. If you find that you can't function off script, that is the first thing you need to work on. I will admit it is absolutely terrifying, at least at first. But if you know what you are talking about, you'll be infinitely more authentic and interesting to listen to learning to think fast is another one of those skills like dealing with failure or learning something new that contributes to your adaptability.
If you require a script all the time, that is just another wall you've built up around your expertise or your ego, a last thought change. Doesn't have to feel good for us to go along with a it, the major upside to a paradigm shift is that it is huge. Paradigm shifts have a life and energy, a momentum all their own. Let me draw one more bit of inspiration from a book that has absolutely nothing to do with business Barbara King solvers, poison wood Bible. One of the characters, Rachel has this funny little book called how to survive. That outlines a lot of bad situations. You might find yourself in, and then it tells you how to get through them throughout the entire book. She's constantly studying this. How am I gonna survive? What am, what kind of situation am I gonna find myself in? So she's always prepared for self-preservation.
Now. One of the situations it gives her advice about is what to do when being trampled by a crowd. So what the book tells us, stick out your elbows, pick up your feet and float along with the crowd. Because the last thing you wanna do is get trampled to death and the crowd will sweep you along with it. That is an option with paradigm shifts and it it's certainly more likely to work than fighting the tide. That's my point of view. Anyway, thank you for listening to this audio episode of dial P for procurement, but please don't just listen, join the conversation and let me know what you think on this topic or others. I can take it. Let's figure out the best solution together until next time is Kelly Barner for dial P for procurement on supply chain. Now have a great rest of your day.
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