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We should care about the future of healthcare

The secret to growth? Putting customers first

Making Noise

I thought this TED talk was a fun listen.Endurance, the story of Ernest Shackleton and his crew’s disastrous expedition to Antarctica is one of my favorite books; good enough that I’m currently reading it to my kids. In the golden age of exploration, Shackleton and his crew sail to the Weddell Sea where their ship is crushed by ice. Through long, improbable, wild conditions, the entire crew escapes safely back to civilization. Gutmann points out that Shackleton unfairly gets all of the attention for his poorly planned expeditions when compared to one of his much more successful peers of the day, Roald Amundsen. He then compares this to modern business leadership. I’ve noticed in my own career that the people who make the most noise are often the ones seen as leaders. The noise doesn’t even have to be accurate. People tend to look to noise makers as leaders because they normally don’t know the difference between accurate and faulty information. In this video, he advocates for leaders to try to cut through this phenomenon and identify real contributors. But I think there’s a pragmatic lesson here for everyone. If you want to be noticed, you’re probably going to have to be noisy, even if you’re not entirely sure the information is accurate. This isn’t to say people should be deceptive; it’s just to say that if people want to be noticed, they’ll need to speak up with the best information they have.