In many ways, there is nothing more dangerous than “making progress.”

In many ways it is a failure that wears the camouflage of success. We become hypnotized, sometimes intoxicated, by the fact that we are moving forward but the goal is NOT to achieve momentum, it is to win.

Isn’t “making progress” a pathway to victory? Not necessarily. To gauge that, we must measure a set of additional factors often omitted from the success equation:

• What is the velocity of the progress? If it is not fast enough, if it is incremental as opposed to exponential, it may not come in time to win.
• Related to this, what is the competition doing? If your adversaries are making progress at a greater rate of speed than you, in all likelihood they will win. Game over for you. Your progress did little more than cost time, money and talent.

Case in point: when the US recognized the need to develop an atomic bomb, Roosevelt could not be satisfied with assurances that the physicists were “making progress.” If the competition worked faster and smarter, all of our “progress” would go up in a mushroom cloud.

Similarly, Page and Brin were hardly the only smart guys working on the development of a killer app search engine. But they were the first with the best and the result is that Google is both a noun and a verb.

Recently, General Stanley McChrystal noted that when great organizations plan to do something, they don’t look at a calendar to set the date, they look at their watch. Wherever it is that we compete–in a marketplace or a theater of military war–we must guard against the satisfaction that comes from “making progress” as it can so easily lull us into a false sense of security.

The problem for managers, for leaders, is that most people are not truly wired to win. They are content to work, to make progress, to hope they are on a winning team, but they are not at all driven to race across the finish line first. That requires a level of commitment that is rare and exceptional. It is in this “content with making progress” environment that the those who want to do more than stroll down the street, must demonstrate their unique qualities and make the impossible, possible.

Before anyone else takes the prize.

Mark Stevens
CEO

When my sons were young, I hated Open School week. The parents would be marched in to talk with teachers about all manner of bureaucratic gobbledygook pertaining to grading systems and course requirements and I felt like I was being held hostage once again by the teachers at P.S. 186 in Queens, NY, who forced me to memorize a thousand useless facts about the date of the Boxer Rebellion and the inventor of the x-ray.

But each year at Open School Week, I would go through the motions, listen to the leaden monologues, dream of the glass of Pinot Noir I would have once I escaped this form of institutional torture, and put the obligation behind me until the calendar whizzed by and I was back in the classroom again.

But one year, I found myself suddenly entranced. Captivated.

I took a seat in an advanced mathematics class one of my sons was taking–the kind of limited edition classes reserved for the hand-picked math elite– and the teacher (the model of a 1950’s school marm wearing what appeared to be a house dress and who had horn rimmed eyeglasses attached to a pearl necklace draped in front of her) entered the room.

Her first words whipped me to attention:

“I am your children’s math teacher, but I am not in the business of teaching them math.”

What? Then why the hell was she there? What was she talking about?

I was lost in a fog. She was right on target. And she continued without skipping a beat:

“All of your children are math aces. They are gifted in mathematics. That’s why they are in this class.

“Wonderful, you are thinking. And it is very nice. But there is a trap.”

Now I was even more befuddled. But she wasn’t in the slightest.

“Your children are standouts at this school. All super achievers. One of the reasons they are viewed as exceptional, is that they are in a population of students of all levels of academic performance. Once they arrive at the elite colleges they are all destined for, that will change.

“Everyone will be exceptional. And they will have to run with the pack. Teaching them to do that…..well, that’s my job. That’s why I am really here.”

I thought that was magnificent. First, a teacher who could get paid, secure tenure and accrue all of the benefits of her position simply by following standard teaching practice, decided to reach far above that cookie-cutter role. Second, and more important, she had the wisdom of the world and was going to impart it on kids at a time in their lives when they had the chance to absorb the non-math she would teach them, the life lessons she would bestow on them, so that they could become the leaders, the inventors, the creators, the game changers of their generation.

That quiet little giant of a woman understood that smart is hardly enough. That to succeed, to achieve significance in a sea of mediocrity and half-baked careers and lives, you need to be tenacious, relentless, innovative, restless, driven, visionary. You have to learn to run with the pack.

One of my friends, who went to Harvard, told me the best thing about the place is that on your first day, you feel big and small at the same time. The kids in the rooms on your hall, had already written novels, worked for NASA, started companies, beat grand masters. You felt important being there but also challenged to grow into the honor. The priviledge.

Who we spend our days with, who we talk to, who we collaborate with: these are the people who set our high water mark. We can spend our time in sandboxes of also-rans who never challenge us, never really raise the bar, or we can run with the pack.

Last October I had dinner with a one-time world chess champion. He taught me a lesson about competition. For years, I played tennis with Carl Ichan. He taught me about the fusion of philosophy and business. Years ago, I spent a day with Bill Gates. He opened my eyes to the raw power of vision. For some time, my firm served former Treasury Secretary William Simon. He taught me about money.

And that beautiful school teacher, that Darwinian seer, taught me about the pack. And my sons have run with it. And I am still trying.

As Teddy Roosevelt said, I always want to be in the arena. Where it is so tough, so challenging, so deliciously beautiful and demanding, you grow every
day.

Just think of the opposite.

Mark Stevens
CEO