Well I was sitting here watching 60 Minutes last night, they did a piece on Bank of America (which is based in Charlotte, not NYC, just FYI) and how and why it has not fallen apart like so many other financial institutions, and in fact is doing better than ever. A most interesting item came to light, one that did not get anywhere near enough emphasis: seven years ago, in 2001, when every other big bank was selling sub-prime mortgages right and left, Bank of America decided to go against this collective land rush mentality and they just got out of that kind of lending. They gave up seven years of what must have looked like an awful lot of profitable business. But unlike every other big NYC bank, they looked at it and said "this stinks" and walked away. And now they are buying up all of their wasted competitors, and are getting bigger than ever.
With 20/20 hindsight, this of course looks ever more brilliant, but what is truly noteworthy and admirable is that BEFORE the disaster, they had the vision and the guts to de-conform, and go against what everyone else was doing.
If they could see it was a bad business strategy, surely other people at other banks must have been able to see that as well. But they just went along.
Conformity of thinking and action– the kind that led so many banks to climb onto the exact same about-to-lose-a-wheel bandwagon– is a little bit like cloning sheep. On the one hand, consistency is nice– but if all the sheep are the same, then if one dies of a disease, they will all die. If you maintain biodiversity, a new virus may kill some of them, but genetic variations mean some sheep will have greater resistance, and the herd will survive.
It’s the same way with consistency of thinking. Conformity is similar to inbreeding or cloning . . . there is always an argument for the advantages of consistency, but there is always a good reason to maintain diversity, in sheep and in the way we think.
Real leadership is not always just doing the same, only bigger– sometimes it's as simple as having the guts to do the obviously right thing, when everyone else isn't.
©Justin Locke
www.justinlocke.com
