THE HAMMER AND THE NAIL
When I was growing up, one of my favorite songs was Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer….” Who knew that, as an adult, I would be playing this song to corporate groups as I opened their mind to the idea of how Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs can be applied to our business relationships? You’ve probably heard the following quote before, but you had no idea that it came from Abraham Maslow: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see everything as a nail.” Abe Maslow coined this wise phrase when he was talking to his fellow psychologists in the mid-20th century suggesting that the psychology profession had a tendency to focus on the “worst practices” in human behavior as opposed to the “best practices” because the kind of people shrinks see in their line of work are those who are in a challenged place in life (this is one of the reasons I tell young people to choose their profession thoughtfully as, over the course of time, this occupation will color your perception of the world). Maslow’s breakthrough came from his study of 1,000 fully-functioning humans (from Socrates to Eleanor Roosevelt) to understand the best practices in humankind with his eye on how we can create conditions for these best practices to prevail. Maslow chose to have much more than a hammer in his toolbox.
In what way are you looking at the world in a myopic fashion? With your employees, do you think the only tool for creating loyalty is money? Have you thought broadly about the kinds of products or services that your valued customers would love to have but hadn’t even imagined? With your investors, do you think that all of them are purely focused on Return on Investment? Conventional wisdom is often wrong, partly because traditional thinking tends to be linear and myopic. One of the key messages I developed in my book PEAK is that the greatest value (and certainly the most differentiation in business) comes from imagining people’s intangible needs, not just their obvious tangible needs. MasterCard has proclaimed in their award-winning commercials, what’s most “Priceless” in life isn’t the tangible stuff. What’s truly priceless are the peak experiences we find when we’re in a self-actualized state, whether in our role as an employee, a customer, an investor, or, for that matter, a mother, a political activist, an artist, or an athlete.
Certainly, Southwest Founder and former CEO Herb Kelleher didn’t look myopically when he realized that his secretary Colleen Barrett was a talented and smart professional with great potential. Thirty-five years later, Colleen is the President of America’s most successful airline. Steve Jobs has far more than a hammer in his toolbox when he’s considering what new products Apple will unleash on their evangelists. While Maslow’s legacy was derided as “hot tub psychology” in the 1970’s after he passed away, the fact is that his message of “being all you can be” and understand the potential in humans is certainly a relevant concept for business.
So, how do you move beyond myopia? Ask Hank Paulson, our U.S. Treasury Secretary, and formerly the CEO of Goldman-Sachs. This is a very savvy and experienced guy. He’s also quite a competitor and coincidentally was named “The Hammer” in the Ivy League when he played football for Dartmouth. But, I have to say The Hammer got hammered last week because his myopic pair of $700 billion glasses (the “bailout”) was a narrowly-defined solution to an unwieldy problem. The nail Paulson was trying to hammer was the evaporating credit markets and the financial industry’s confidence in the fundamentals of the economy. Yet, Hammerhead Hank forgot that the American people and the 535 members of Congress had a stake in this game also and, while the U.S. Treasury Secretary tried his darnedest (and you truly have to give him credit for how much work this was), he quickly realized that his myopia led to the House of Reps reprimanding him. In the end, a deal was done but it certainly took a few more tools than The Hammer.
So, in sum, one of my favorite Harvard Business School case studies of all time was Theodore Levitt’s groundbreaking “Marketing Myopia” published two months before I was born. Levitt told the story of how the American train industry had lost the transportation game because they thought of their business way too myopically, and, hence, buses, cars, trucks, and airlines pecked away at their market share over the course of a few decades until trains were just the cute things you gave your kids for Christmas. Beware of thinking too narrowly and make sure your toolbox is equipped with more than just a hammer.
Add comment October 8th, 2008
