The Challenge Dividend: Guest Post: Refugees Win

(Today features a guest column by my Dad, Robert Gilbreath. If you like this, be sure to buy his new book, Compel).

I saw them swept overboard, saw them drown on their way to their new world. They were Hungarian Refugees, the time was 1956 and I was just a kid, watching all this from the bridge where the ship's captain struggled to keep our overcrowded craft afloat.

Fleeing their soviet captors, thousands ran across the Iron curtain then. My father was assigned the task of escorting them across the English Channel. A huge storm, boiling out of the North sea overtook our ferry as soon as it departed Calais, France for Dover, England. These men and women, jammed onto a small craft, held tightly to their possessions and their tools. They'd just left their towns, farms and universities in panic. They'd left behind friends, neighbors, positions, known environments, and roles that gave them respect and dignity. Now they were humble refugees, restricted to one hand bag, on a threatening sea. Everything was in chaos, everything was changing for them. Inside those single bags, most brought tools of their trade, to ply their uncertain futures. They held them tightly, abandoning all else.

Three Essential Tools

In his classic rock anthem Refugee, Tom Petty sings "Somehow, somewhere somebody must've kicked you around some." Most executives can relate to the sentiment, having been buffeted by downsizing, mergers, razor-sharp cost cutting and overwhelming technological change. I've found the ones who survive, who take their organizations into new worlds with confidence and competence cling tightly to three essential tools. They are not as tactile as traditional tools, but they are quite real, and just as valuable.

* A Map. They begin with a fixed destination in mind, usually expressed through a vision of some kind. An aspirational, achievable picture of the future. Something that compels them and their followers, pulling them into the new. But after the vision is achieved, three more landscapes must be charted: the decisions needed to carry it out, the actions that result in real change, and the reinforcing, sustaining extension of change lessons that make a company not only adapted to new circumstances, but adaptive--ready for continuous change, flexible, adjustable, fit for the future.

* A Memory. When the pain of transformation is being felt, when the goal seems to recede into abstraction, leaders need to remember why they began the journey. They need to remind the group of the inadequacies of the past, and the high cost of doing nothing. A good memory helps fight the sag in the middle of most change efforts, when the price of changing is real and the payoff is not. Reminding each other that the good old days were not so good overcomes the allure of the past. Leaders make the future alluring.

* A Moral Compass. Not all changes can be foreseen, nor their consequences planned or anticipated. Judgment is constantly required, along with course corrections and tough decisions like: Should we abandon the quest? Should we sacrifice some aspect of the vision? Should we slow down, consolidate, or forge ahead with renewed vigor? The consequences are often immeasurable, they don't fit on spread sheets or lend themselves to cost-benefit quantification. Decisions along the path of change are subjective, ethical, moral. Without a moral compass we can easily go astray, doing what's easy or economical, but what's wrong.

You Don't Have to Live Like a Refugee

That's the refrain from the Tom Petty song. It's a call for dignity and self-esteem, but when facing change it's the wrong advice. Sometimes it pays to live, and think, like a refugee. To remember those huddled masses embarking from the port of Calais, into the swirling sea of another time. And to remember their prizes: the tools they chose to take with them.

Their value and their necessity came to a small boy, squinting through the streaming glass of a ship caught in a tempest. They are gifts of sorts, handed down through time and circumstance by a group of courageous change masters--people moving from the comfortable into the uncertain; facing the future with trepidation, but also with hope and confidence in their ability to confront, and conquer change; and clinging to the future they would build with their liberty, and with their tools.

We should follow them, learn of change, and master the tools it requires: a map to chart the course, a memory to know why the journey is vital, and a moral compass to guide us through the storm.

Postscript:

In a recent survey of immigrant communities in the United Kingdom, the Hungarians topped the list as most prosperous. One of these young men went on the United States, and to found a company. His name is Andrew Grove, former Chairman of Intel. In his autobiography, Swimming Across, he details this trip, and thanks those who helped him make it. I was there.

Robert D. Gilbreath