Hunt For Greatness
Milton Kamwendo
What would you do if you were not afraid? What frightens you more: trying something new or discovering, too late, that you have spent years protecting a life you have outgrown?
For any entrepreneur, the uncomfortable question may be whether yesterday’s customers will still choose tomorrow’s offering.
For a professional, it may be whether familiar skills will remain useful. Do not dismiss these concerns. Examine them. Fear enough to move.
Greatness is movement. Fear can stop that movement, but it can also prompt preparation and action. The challenge is to make fear your alarm, not your address.
Mr Andy Grove, Intel’s former chief executive officer, explored this tension in his book “Only the Paranoid Survive”. He argued that fear of competition and losing could motivate action rather than complacency.
The lesson is not to distrust everyone or manufacture emergencies. Stop thinking that the sky is falling. Remain alert without surrendering your judgement and sobriety.
Move from comfort to vigilance
Mr Grove warned that success could contain the beginnings of its own destruction. Achievement attracts competition. Leaders must watch for changes that threaten the business today and tomorrow. Do not allow your last victory to become permission to be complacent and stop learning. A full order book today is not a promise that customers will never leave.
Ask uncomfortable questions while there is still time to respond. What are customers finding difficult? What can competitors do better? Which assumption have we stopped testing because it once served us well?
Listen beyond praise. Read the complaint. Examine the delayed delivery. Ask why a capable colleague is disengaged. Do not turn every concern into a catastrophe. Investigate it. A warning deserves examination, not automatic belief or casual dismissal.
Let the possibility of losing something valuable sharpen your attention to protecting and improving it.
Move from worry to preparation
Grove called a fundamental shift in a business’ competitive conditions a “strategic inflection point”. Such a change can threaten an established business, but it can also create opportunities.
The practical question is not simply, “What could go wrong?” Ask, “What can we do about it?”
Suppose a local manufacturer fears becoming dependent on one major customer. Repeating that fear at every meeting achieves little.
Investigating other customer segments, testing an offer and assigning responsibility creates a response.
Concerned that your skills are becoming outdated? Identify the missing competence, arrange training and practise. Worried that a project will fail? Test its most uncertain assumption before making a larger commitment.
Separate evidence from imagination. Write down the concern, what supports it, what remains unknown and the next useful action.
Fear is not a forecast. Do not treat every anxious thought as tomorrow’s headline. Give concern a practical job. Identify a risk, improve preparation or trigger a decision.
Move from attachment to adaptation
Grove helped redirect Intel’s focus from memory chips towards microprocessors. This was not merely a call to work harder. The call involved changing the company’s strategic direction and investment priorities.
That distinction matters. Sometimes the answer is not greater effort within an exhausted approach. It is a radically different approach. Ask yourself: Am I protecting the mission, or defending a method because it was my idea?
Do not let fear of admitting a mistake become more powerful than your responsibility to correct it. There is no honour in continuing waste merely to appear consistent.
Equally, do not abandon sound work because discomfort has appeared. Examine the evidence, seek informed challenge and distinguish a temporary setback from a fundamental change.
Do not just fear failure and become immobilised. Consider the cost of never trying anything. Then decide. Start the experiment. Revise the service. Stop the unproductive activity. Have the difficult conversation.
Courage does not require pretending the outcome is guaranteed. It requires taking a considered step without demanding impossible certainty.
Move without frightening your team
Mr Grove also distinguished useful fear from the damaging fear that prevents employees from speaking honestly or bringing bad news.
Do not misread his book as permission to intimidate people.
A team should be alert to disappointing customers, not terrified of telling the manager that a customer is already disappointed. Ask for facts. Thank people for raising concerns. Challenge weak assumptions without humiliating their owners. Hold people accountable while making it possible to admit mistakes early.
Examine your own reactions. When someone brings uncomfortable information, do you investigate or attack? Demanding honest reports while punishing honesty is a contradiction.
Create urgency around the work, not insecurity around people’s dignity. Let the team confront reality together rather than spend its energy managing your temper.
Keep moving
Choose one fear you have been avoiding. Name it accurately. Test it against evidence. Identify one proportionate action and put it in your calendar. Do not wait to feel invincible. But do not confuse panic with courage either. Let concern become preparation. Let preparation become responsible movement. Fear may ring the alarm. Purpose must choose the direction. Move through fear, not under its command.
Milton Kamwendo is a leading international transformational and motivational speaker, and author of more than 15 books. He can be reached at: [email protected], WhatsApp: +263772422634.
