rotmanmagazine.ca / 59quest for change: goalkeepers and gatekeepers. Goalkeepers
help you accomplish your goals, while gatekeepers try to keep
you from reaching them. We’ve all worked with these people.
Gatekeepers are guardians of the status quo. They reflectively
say No to anything new or imaginative. The truth is, these peo-
ple often feel threatened by imaginative thinking. Fear is some-
thing we don’t talk about enough at work, but it brings up a lot
of very bad behaviour.
With Ecomagination, we faced many gatekeepers. People
were afraid that we were going to embarrass ourselves. I heard
from so many customers and salespeople, ‘We’re going to lose
customers if you get too far ahead of them’. Customers can be
used as a powerful excuse for not doing something in a com-
pany. But the fact is, most of them want you to keep up with the
pace of change — and help them keep pace.
One key principle that I learned early in my career is this:
‘No’ means ‘not yet’. Having worked for way too many gatekeep-
ers, I arrived at a work around. Whenever someone said, ‘No’,
I would shift my mindset and say to myself, ‘Ah, this is an invita-
tion’. With Ecomagination, it took us almost a year to map out
the best approach. I can’t tell you how many times people called
me and my colleagues idiots or worse, because they didn’t want
any of this to happen.
Earlier in my career, at NBC, I had what I thought was a bril-
liant idea to launch what we called ‘The NBC Experience Store’. I
went to see my boss, Bob Wright, who was then the head of NBC,
and the first time he said No. The second time, he said No again.
But the third time, he said Yes. He told me later, ‘You made it so
darn hard to say No — and I really tried’. That taught me a very
important lesson. It occurred to me that Bob was testing me to see
how resilient and passionate I was about the idea. Frankly, in the
early days, my idea wasn’t as good as it was the third time around,
and that set us on our course. The point is, we all have to learn to
be resilient. As a manger, you should always be testing people to
make sure they have the passion and ability to go the distance.- EMBRACE DISCOVERY. This is my favourite pillar. To me, it repre-
sents the joy of living, and in particular, the joy of working. Dis-
covery is about making the world your classroom. If you follow
your curiosity, it will take you almost anywhere where change is
happening and where the future is revealing itself.
When I was a marketer, I took my job incredibly seriously.
To me, marketing was about living in the market, and when you
live in the market, you see trends and patterns start to emerge.
You have to get out there and challenge yourself to go where
things are new and are actually in conflict with what you think is
happening. They challenge your point of view.
Here is another thought exercise: Think back about 10
years to things that were just emerging that are now kind of
mainstream. What do you come up with? Here are a couple to
get you started. Craft Beer was not a ‘thing’ 10 years ago. I was
with a brewing company recently and they were completely
flummoxed as to how they missed out on it. It was as if all these
little brewers just emerged one day. But of course, they were out
there. There were patterns to be seen. Other examples include
organic farming and tattoos.
Yet another exercise is ‘focusing on threes’. This is not a sci-
entific approach, but I swear by it: When you’re out in the world,
the first time you see something interesting, make note of it.
The second time you see it, ask yourself, ‘Is this a coincidence?
Why am I seeing this twice?’ The third time, declare to yourself,
this is a trend. What can I learn from it? How can I translate it
into my work? When change is part of your job, discovery has to
become part of what you do.
You might say, ‘I don’t have time for any of this’; but in
today’s environment, you have to make the time. Personally, I