Learning to Lose Powerfully | Don Schmincke | 527

What happens when the tools we use to analyze and take control of our environments become the cause of our destruction? Is your company using the tools they have at their disposal? Or are the tools using you? Our guest today is Don Schmincke an explorer, researcher, and partner with The Pacific Institute. He is also the author of Winners and Losers: Entrepreneurial Lessons from 30,000 CEOs on How to Come Out on Top, which teaches entrepreneurs how to win powerfully! Our conversation begins with Don telling us how he went from almost dropping out of high school, to learning technology and ultimately strategy and leadership. While working at Johns Hopkins he began to find an astonishingly high failure rate in management theory – and he knew he could help. Don goes on to explain the seduction of tools. Why we believe they can save us, allowing us to analyze and control our environments. And how we can easily fall to letting the tools use us because without altering human decision making through true transition, the tools won't change the choices we make. With such a high failure rate many might think diving into the entrepreneurial pool would be foolhardy. However, Don gives us hope by telling us about losing powerfully – taking the loss and learning from it, picking ourselves up and becoming stronger from it. Three Key Takeaways: · It doesn't matter how good your theory is if it doesn't have a measurable impact. · We get seduced by our tools because we think they will save us. But without changing how we think the tools won't change the outcome. · Formulation without execution is just a good idea on a shelf.