178 THE CREATIVE INVESTMENT TEAM
gy and the NP magician or court jester energy. However, this bal-
ance would have required acceptance and skillful management of
creative conflict. Lions and jesters typically butt heads, so lions are
more comfortable when they are surrounded by other lions, who
see the world in the same way. This is exactly what this CIO did:
He surrounded himself with other lions. This strategy may be costly,
if the premise of this book is correct: namely, that investors will
need a balanced approach to succeed in the future. The notion of
the Prudent Man must be balanced with that of the Maverick
Woman.
Another example of lions and risk aversion comes from my
experience in consulting about creativity and change. A major
insurance company was redefining its relationship to the customer.
They were asking questions like, “Should we just try to sell, sell,
sell? Or should we diagnose and prescribe, more like doctors and
patients?” The senior management made a wholehearted commit-
ment to examining and shifting paradigms. (Oops, sorry. I used the
“P” word. I meant “mental models.”) They called in consultants
and involved the top officers, nearly 100 of them. Hundreds of
hours were spent discussing and debating the current sales and
marketing effort and how it could be changed. Specifically, the senior
leaders asked for “big ideas.” They didn’t want tweaks around the
edges, they wanted the breakthrough concepts. They even passed
out crystal paperweights to all those involved that said, “Big ideas
can change the world.”
Months later, when the initiative had ended, I asked one of the
worker bees who had helped facilitate the process whether any
significant changes had occurred. The response? No. Very little had
really changed. Why? Because this organization was heavy with
lions at the top. The brainstorming ceased and guess what contin-
ued? Cost cutting. The knee-jerk response of lions to adversity is
to prune the organization.
Note that sometimes cost cutting is exactly the right action. In
fact, when the lions first took over this company, they initiated14-25 ware 178 1/19/01, 1:15 PM