We all know our worth, don’t we? After all, someone has told us at some point in our lives that “you are worth your weight in gold”. Well, that means that at today’s prices, the average person is worth £6.8 million. Congratulations.
However, the Tesla board has decided that Elon Musk is worth $1 trillion. That means he must weigh around 11m tonnes. I know he’s a big lad, but honestly…! Also, you have to ask if the board is really thinking straight. The company has only been making profits in the past five years and has a total net income over that period of about $41 billion. That means it will take 24 years for the company to earn the money it is promising to Elon Musk himself, before you even consider all the other costs and expenses. That looks like he’d be able to get his payment when he is 78 years old.
According to the Chair of Tesla, Robyn Denholm, “Retaining and incentivising Elon is fundamental to Tesla achieving these goals and becoming the most valuable company in history.” In other words, the company appears to believe that putting all its eggs in the Musk basket is the solution to its problems.
Here’s the problem with that. Evidence shows that the more we become established as an expert in an area, the less flexibly we behave. It is a concept known as “cognitive entrenchment”. Essentially, because we are “experts”, we believe in our own PR and become fixed in our ways. Our brains do not help because doing things in our own way, sticking to old methods and routines, provides a sense of “normality” and “comfort”, giving us stability, which our subconscious constantly craves.
Like me, I expect you have also been employed in organisations where you mutter that someone has been in their job too long. There is no flexibility or vision for change. That’s a sign of cognitive entrenchment, where the leader has become fixed. You can see this in recent studies that look at the “blind spots” of CEOs. The data show that CEOs tend to contribute most in their fifth year and then decline. Those who stay on provide further growth in their seventh year, but then their contribution starts to wane again.
Many of us stay in our roles too long. We want to contribute, but after five to seven years, we become stuck in our ways. We are too comfortable with what we do. That’s not good for change or for flexibility and responding to changing markets. Plus, we do not want the hassle of changing jobs and all the complications that come with it. It is much more comfortable for the board of Tesla to “incentivise” Elon Musk than to go through the hassle of getting rid of him and finding a successor. And in case you were wondering, he has been CEO for 17 years.
We often opt for the easy way out of a situation. Otherwise, we increase our cognitive discomfort. The problem is that this leads to organisations being unable to respond adequately to the changing world or to grow as much as they could. It also hampers our own individual career and personal development because we do not like the discomfort of avoiding cognitive entrenchment.
However, an article in the latest Harvard Business Review points the way out of this situation. It suggests we should try to be an “amateur” at something. The authors suggest we should find things to do that have no direct relevance to our jobs. In other words, just have a go at something new.
My office has several posters on the walls with motivational messages, which I hope will stimulate the thinking of students who pop in to see me. One of those posters says, “Every expert was a beginner once”. Whatever your expertise might be, you didn’t know a thing about it on the first day.
So, why can’t you start something new or do something different? You might feel like an amateur now, but you’ll soon learn new things which could help you in your current role.
One exercise I have used in corporate training is to ask delegates to bring along a copy of their favourite magazine. Someone will have brought a car magazine with them, another might have a fishing magazine, and another might even bring along a copy of “Hello”. Then I get them to swap magazines. They all end up with a publication that is not interesting to them. Plus, I also hand out other magazines, such as those on knitting, computer coding or train spotting. Then I would ask the participants to flick through the magazines and find something that looked interesting. Once they had selected something, they had to work out how they could connect what they were reading to their daily work. Every time I did this, people realised that there was interesting and relevant information outside their immediate area of work.
People might not be worth a trillion dollars or even their weight in gold. But individuals who extend their thinking, go out of their comfort zone of cognitive entrenchment, change their ideas and ways of doing things. And that means their value can go beyond the typical five to seven years before their contribution wanes. So, what are you going to do today that takes you outside your comfort zone and for which you will be a complete amateur? And if I were on the board of Tesla, I’d ask the same question of my CEO…!
