Today, Oct 7, is the date in 1885 when Neils Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Business Leadership Lessons From Non-Business Leaders
I have always found great inspiration in my business leadership positions from people outside of business, especially those for whom profit was not a motive. One of them was Neils Bohr.
Bohr was one of history’s great scientific thinkers and profound philosophers, and his work in Quantum Theory earned him the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics, one year after that prize was awarded to Albert Einstein, not for his work on Relativity as one might expect, but for the Photoelectric Effect (not central to this story but always of interest, even tangentially).
Bohr’s Quantum Theory and Einstein’s Relativity don’t fit well together but they don’t directly clash, either; they just look at the universe differently. Thus, the relationship between Bohr and Einstein was friendly but strained at times. Be that as it may, let’s proceed with Bohr. We’ll get back to Einstein later.
The story goes that Bohr, attending a major conference (not sure if it was any of the Solvang conferences), began running out of patience during an energetic debate with a colleague – not Einstein in this case – and, at his tipping point, blurted out his now famous line: “No, no, no. You’re not thinking. You’re just being logical.”
It’s a century later and it’s apparent that many opportunities to learn that lesson have been lost.
For instance, in Bohr’s model of the atom, he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another.
Building Effective Teams
Now, if we stop trying to think in scientific terms (in a discussion of Bohr and Einstein, that takes a lot of nerve) and start asking what that might look like in, oh, organizational design, let’s say, we might find ourselves on the way to re-imagining the way we build teams, not purely on a skills and experience basis, but more interestingly on intangible factors like energy, optimism, creativity, sphere of influence, and fit. It worked for me twice in my corporate years.
Doubled our business. Tripled our business.
In one, bolstering the part of the team that dealt with the front end of the sales cycle wound up moving more qualified leads to the client relations people and, ultimately, the closers. Business doubled in a year. In the other, rearranging and consolidating some key sales and operations activities of a business that was spiraling downward led to an immediate turnaround and an ultimate tripling of revenues within seven months.
Imagination
Bohr, I’d like to think, would have considered that thinking, not being logical. Or we might turn to Einstein, who always insisted that “Imagination is more important than knowledge” and never feared letting go of the known in favor of the unknown. Einstein’s favorite question, then, was “What if?” and he made an awful lot of discoveries that way.
We doubled and tripled business that way.