I was at a conference this summer and attended a session that was about life lessons applied to business. I was intrigued by what I would hear. I couldn’t have expected to end up with a WTF lesson.
I spare the details of the entire jacked up way this speaker lined up this lesson and just cut to his key point that he learned: It is more important to be different than better.
Now, my first reaction was WTF. Advising people (in life and in business) that being better (their description: quality, ethics, etc) doesn’t matter as much as different (their description: shock value, disruptive, etc). That survival and success doesn’t get impacted even if you cause horrible impacts in your path. This is the equivalent of a leadership definition of only whether a person has followers with no part of the definition indicating if that person is abusing the situation. By “have followers” definition, cult leaders are leaders (they have followers) but I wouldn’t be signing up for any leadership lessons from cult leaders. One of his points was as long as you have followers, you are a survivor. Ugh. This is anti to everything I highlight, promote and support. I sat in that room surprised that only one person out of the 10 people in the room walked out. I stayed – maybe he was going to take this somewhere my brain could understand. He didn’t.
Yet, I’ve let it soak with me a for a bit. Now I’m still not saying I agree at the core but what if you adjust the descriptions and didn’t approach this as mutually exclusive options. What if different wasn’t about shock value and trolling but about disruptive value and challenging the status quo in respectful ways. I mean I do get behind experimentation which means trying different things. What if you could be better AND different (my definition)…I could get behind this.
But that original lesson, NOPE, still WTF. So much so, that I’m feeling the need to double down on the #beBetter aspects of our lives.
How can you be better?
