The challenge of high performers

Grant Leboff: Brian, in the book, one of the characteristics you talk about is ambition and the importance of ambition. You use a lovely phrase, I think, about being unreasonable- Brian MacNeice: Yeah. Grant Leboff: In challenging the paradigm. Brian MacNeice: Yeah. Grant Leboff: Which sounds even more than just ambitious, it's almost like ruthlessly ambitious. I wonder if you could sort of widen that out for us, and explain what you mean by that. Brian MacNeice: Yeah, so we talk about a concept that we've labelled "unreasonable ambition." Which some people really struggle with. Essentially what we're looking to do, and it's a kind of almost like a constant narrative in high performing organizations, they're always challenging the existing paradigms. They're always trying to see, "How can we do more and how can we challenge our people to think in different ways?" By articulating that in, as we call it an "unreasonable ambition," that's the thing that really forces people within the organization to explore different ways of doing things. It's a real source of innovation and organization, and innovative thinking in organizations. The example that we use in the book itself, is the Grameen Bank, which is the only corporate entity to have ever won the Nobel Peace Prize, which was one of the things that attracted us to it. But if you look at the history of the Grameen Bank, what they have done is really challenged the paradigm of banking and lending. They lend money to people that are asset-less, the poor of society, almost exclusively women, and yet have a 98% loan recovery rate and have literally transformed the lives of tens of millions of people in Bangladesh. All started with this notion of ambition as a driving force to get it kick started in the first place. Grant Leboff: And they make a profit. Brian MacNeice: And that's the other really interesting thing. When I talk about the Grameen Bank to people, they always assume that it's a charity. It's not a charity. It's a profitable entity. It has made profits every year bar two, when there was a natural disaster in Bangladesh. It's a really well run kind of commercial entity, but yet transforming the lives of people. Grant Leboff: Yeah, so I understand with, the Grameen Bank's a really example that you use in the book, when it was started there was this ambition to change things, to change peoples' lives, to change the way banking was done. How does a business continually challenges that paradigm? Because I think there's one thing having a new idea, isn't there, in being sort of invigorated about that idea. There's another thing by being continually being able to challenge the paradigm in a constructive way. Brian MacNeice: Yeah. That's a key challenge for leaders in any organization. You can't get complacent. You've got to be constantly challenging yourself. Having achieved whatever it is that we've achieved up to now, how do we continue to break the mold? How do we continue to maintain our status as a high-performing organization? What you find, is the leaders in real enduring high-performing organizations are constantly asking those questions of their people. "What if we did this?" Or, "What if we challenged ourselves to climb this next mountain?", and very good at articulating that in a way that's meaningful for people, and that really gets people inspired and engaged around that challenge. There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.