Читать книгу The Red Pill Executive - Tony Gruebl - Страница 15

“It’s a new day, people. Destiny Calls. The world expects only one thing from us. That we will win.”

~Master Sergeant Farell in Edge of Tomorrow²⁴

Edge of Tomorrow²⁵

Starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt Warner Bros Pictures (2014)

When attacked by an alien force, the best military units in the world working together can’t seem to beat them. Tom Cruise plays Major William Cage, a Public Relations officer with no combat experience who finds himself on a suicide mission.

The enemy came in the form of black shape-shifting Mimics that hide under the sand, an octopus-type thing that rolls like a tumbleweed. It had claws on each of its many legs and a gaping dragon mouth. These Mimics had two forms: the orange warrior and the powerful blue Alpha. The blue Alpha monitored battlefield events to learn the opponent’s strategy, then reset time while preserving memory. This gave the aliens an unstoppable advantage.

Within minutes of landing on a beach battlefront resembling WWII’s Normandy invasion, Cage blows up a blue Alpha as it attacks him. Covered with Alpha blood, Cage dies. He then enters a time loop, living out the same brutal day, fighting and dying again and again.

This time loop gives Cage the chance to improve his combat skills and his understanding of the enemy. He soon teams up with Special Forces warrior Sergeant Rita Vrtaski (Emily Blunt). Working together, they learn what it means to win at something that seems unbeatable.

Watching patterns of human behavior, we often see the human response of “doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”²⁶ This is so common it has become a cliché in folklore, music, books, and movies—essentially anything that embodies culture. Managing this response and creating a new outcome is at the core of almost every business book and methodology ever developed.

Edge of Tomorrow is a marvelous example of this repetition-response situation very similar to the 70% project failure rate. Many before us have tried to win using cool tools and new plans. They’ve spent millions on developing highly specialized software and intensive training. Yet the failure rate continues to creep upward. What was a 68% fail rate in 2015, has now climbed to 70%.

In the movie, after hundreds of attempts Cage always had the same result. He died, and the armies of Earth went down in defeat. According to McKinsey.com, “17% of IT projects go so bad that they can threaten the very existence of the company.”

“17% of IT projects go so bad that they can threaten the very existence of the company.¹⁰¹”

In our own quest, we refused to sit back with the blue-pill attitude of “that’s just the way things are.” Bit by bit, over time, we tried various tactics and strategies, found what worked, and pressed ahead to the next challenge eager to learn more.

Some of our clients welcomed our new approach with open arms. They allowed us to test our mettle in the field. Others resisted. Their pushback shocked us into reality when we were inadvertently drinking our own Kool-Aid^®.