Hitting Curveballs: Today’s most important business skill

You may be an inspiring leader able to rally and unite dispirited and divided individuals. You could be a brilliant visionary able to invent innovative products and services. Or you might be a compelling communicator able to charm investors and captivate customers. Possessing any one of these talents would make you a business all-star in the past. But today, it will only mark you as a phenom: someone with potential. To become a business hall of famer – a proven long term winner – you need to show that you know how to hit a curveball: how to confront and regularly overcome the unexpected.

How to Hit a Curveball: Confront and Overcome the Unexpected in Business by Scott R. Singer   When I first started interviewing and studying the world’s best curveball hitters in every walk of life, I thought I’d discover a set of secrets I could adopt and pass along; specific actions that enabled them to repeatedly confront and overcome the unexpected in business and life. What I discovered, however, was that it’s not specific actions but an approach that accounts for their success. There isn’t one secret, or even a series of secrets to hitting a curveball; instead it requires following a process. It starts with stepping up to the plate. While it’s human nature to feel ashamed or embarrassed by being caught flat footed and to want to conceal what’s happening from those closest to us, at work and at home, procrastination and avoidance do nothing but extend pain and problems. Revealing you’ve been blind-sided removes the burden of shame and enables those close to you to provide support, advice, and comfort. Next, you need to overcome natural pessimism; to set aside the nightmarish fears that accompany curveballs. Don’t let your imagination get the best of you. It’s important to find ways to fight off the worst case scenarios we so often paint and deal with the situation realistically. You need to be the batter, not the ball. The reality is that you cannot do everything. There are some things that are beyond your power to effect. It’s vital to let go of those things beyond your control and focus on what you can do. You need to keep your eye on the ball and concentrate on that which you can control. Reach out for help. No one can win a game by themselves, so don’t even try. Instead, you should pack your lineup and bench with savvy professionals who can help you and your organization overcome the unexpected, and then listen to your coach. You need to take a moment and step outside the batter’s box to look at the situation from a fresh perspective. In developing a plan to deal with unexpected events it’s often essential to embrace non linear thinking that’s equally unexpected. Curveballs, by their very nature, are rarely solvable through conventional thinking. No matter how eager you are to get over a curveball, you need to be patient. The incredible speed of change encourages speedy action. Instead, you need to make sure you wait for a pitch you can hit. Persistence beats resistance. It’s vital you give yourself and your plan the time needed for it to be successful. Curveballs, like all crises, offer opportunities. Individuals and organizations must shift from the defensive to the offensive. It’s time for you to take advantage of the curveball and hit it out of the park, to become a home run hitter. The truly great business leaders are those who are able to institutionalize their ability to hit curveballs. By filling out your organization’s lineup with other curveball hitters, you can create an organization that fosters innovative thinking to insure your company’s long term success. Finally, the most successful individuals are those who are able to apply their skills outside the ballpark. They realize that the ability to hit curveballs can be applied, not just to business, but to personal life as well. The ultimate winner is someone who learns to succeed in both ends of life’s double header.

Hitting curveballs has become the indispensable skill for long term business survival, not just success, in the current economic environment. If you want to make the majors and have a future either in a corporate structure, as an entrepreneur, or as an independent professional, you need to be able to deal with unanticipated events and scenarios. The unexpected has always occurred, and business leaders have always had to deal with it. However, things really are different today because of four distinct but interconnected trends.

First, we’re in the middle of a transitional period, politically, economically, culturally, and technologically. Politically, we could be in a unipolar world with the United States as the sole superpower, or we could be entering a multi-polar time with the European Union, China, India, and Russia all vying with the United States for dominance. Economically, we’re in an information age in which business is becoming increasingly global in both structure and operations. Culturally, the United States Census suggests that America is on its way to becoming a “minority majority” nation in which whites are outnumbered by the combination of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans, creating a more diverse and potentially less predictable culture. And technologically…well, that’s an area where everything is happening too fast for us to even be able to make generalizations.

Second, the pace of change is constantly accelerating. The phenomenon known as Moore’s Law (that the number of transistors that could be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling every two years) has been applied to processor speeds, memory capacity, and every other element of technology. It is now an accepted belief that information technology in general grows exponentially. There’s no argument that these advances in technology have led to greater efficiencies in business. But, this pace of change has placed a greater strain on all of us. We have to think and do everything faster. Opportunities appear and disappear with such blinding speed that the word fad has lost all meaning. The line between work and life has blurred into nonexistence. The only certainty today is that everything changes. Quickly.

Third, it isn’t just the pace of change that’s problematic; it’s that the changes are coming in areas and in ways that can’t be predicted as accurately as before; every purposeful action produces unintended consequences that cannot be avoided. The unstable nature of this time in world history, and the unpredictability of unforeseen consequences become even more problematic when you throw the accelerating pace of change into the mix. The world is in a state of flux. Things are changing faster than ever before, resulting in unpredictable things happening more often, with less and less time between each of these surprises. That would be a recipe for a collective nervous breakdown…even if you didn’t consider the fourth trend contributing to our current difficulty.

We’re less resilient than ever. The quality of America’s infrastructure and technology has spoiled us. We know that hospitals will have the drugs and medical care we need in an emergency, that the supermarket will have the ingredients we need to make tonight’s dinner, that the fire department or police department or ambulance will come when we call. The problem, however, is that when things don’t turn out as we planned, when we’re thrown a curveball, we tend to freak out and not know how to deal with it. We’ve lost what psychologists call resilience, defined as the capacity to withstand stressors and not manifest some form of dysfunction, whether it’s clinical depression or just a flash of anger. Resilience is largely a learned trait. The more often we face unexpected or stressful situations and overcome them, the more confidence we gain and the more resilient we become for future crises. Confronting and overcoming little hurdles throughout life prepares us for the big obstacles. It’s wonderful that we now have to face so few minor hurdles in the course of our daily lives. However, that has left us particularly vulnerable to the major curveballs when they are thrown our way.

These four trends – the transitory nature of our current epoch, ever accelerating change, increasingly unforeseen consequences, and the decline in the psychological resilience of the average American – mean that learning how to hit a curveball is today’s single most important skill for success in business, and life.

Scott R. Singer has spent the past 20 years advising companies on how to adapt to change, to embrace technological advances, and to put the best strategy in place to deal with the next big thing – essentially, teaching them how to hit curveballs. A noted media industry expert, investment banker, and strategy consultant, Scott serves as Managing Director and Head of Media & Entertainment at The Bank Street Group, a boutique investment banking firm focused on providing sophisticated advice regarding mergers & acquisitions; fairness opinions; private debt, equity, and venture capital raising; as well as bankruptcies, restructurings, and turnarounds to telecommunications, media, technology, aerospace & defense, and healthcare companies. Scott is regularly called on by Bloomberg, CNBC, FOX Business, Reuters and numerous publications such as, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, CNNMoney.com, Crain’s New York Business, and Forbes.com in addition to many other industry publications as a media expert to address various domestic and global topics. To read Scott’s complete biography, click here.

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