Each semester, the University Wisconsin-Platteville’s chapter of the National Society of Leadership and Success recruits students who have taken leadership classes or have a GPA of 3.5 or higher to be inducted at the end of the current semester. New members must attend an orientation, a leadership training day, three speaker broadcasts and meetings in order to be inducted.
The first speaker live broadcast was held Tuesday Feb. 18, featuring Charlene Li, author of five books, and an expert on leadership. Li discussed her book, “The Disruption Mindset,” about how to find opportunities in the disruption through strategy, leadership and culture.
The first subtopic of disruption she talked about was strategy. Li said people are successful because they are highly disruptive and focused on their future customer needs instead of their own.
She said she knows just in the first few minutes of talking to someone if they will become successful or not because successful people will talk about how they serve and how they will serve.
She explained that you need to find something that serves you by serving others first: “don’t ask ‘what am I going to do,’ ask ‘how am I going to serve?’” By creating a disruption in the mindset, you are growing and taking opportunities that were not visible before. Li explained where to cause disruption by showing how to create an empathy map to connect with others, creating an advisory board to oversee what is being done and finally, doing research on your customer’s needs.
She used Adobe software as example of a disruption that grew. Adobe moved into the cloud and discovered no one wanted it and that people were happy with how the system was. Adobe transitioned anyway because they knew it was right for their future customer needs.
As Adobe was transitioning, their income plummeted, but their stock increased. In the end, Adobe made their money back because the future customers liked the cloud and the people who did not like it before adapted to the new system.
The second subtopic Li talked about was leadership. She explained that leaders make change and inspire others to create movements which drive exponential change, but the hardest part is having courage to follow through.
The final section discussed was culture. Li said, “culture is beliefs and behaviors … and they contain openness, agency and a bias for action.” She explained that people make 35,000 conscious decisions in a day and 99 percent of those decisions are reversible. She advised people to identify the beliefs that hold you back and find ways to change it by adopting and adapting new beliefs.
She emphasized that it takes grit and integrity to carry through with adopting new beliefs and behaviors because great ideas are not enough. She wrapped up the talk by saying “life really starts when you step outside your comfort zone.”