Rob Yeung - The Extra One Per Cent: How Small Changes Make Exceptional People

Contents

W HAT HELPS CERTAIN PEOPLE to become successful? What helps one person to soar and lift themselves from mediocrity, to become an exceptional leader, doctor, parent, entrepreneur, pop star, actor, teacher, or anything else?

To answer the question, lets think for a moment about the successful people you know and what makes them so accomplished. Consider your circle of friends, family, and acquaintances and single out the top handful of people you know. Now ask them about their secrets of success. Try it. Ask: In your opinion, what do you think you do that makes you so successful?

Theyll talk about the need for hard work, grit and determination, a need to stay focused even when things go wrong. But they may add that they must be willing to change course, be adaptable, or even quit when something isnt working.

They may talk about vision, confidence, passion, creativity, taking risks, and the need to trust their instincts at times. Dig a little deeper and theyll mention the importance of surrounding themselves with good people. They may even acknowledge an element of luck of being in the right time and place too.

But interview enough brilliantly successful people and youll discover that they all start to sound the same. They end up covering the same ground, making nearly identical assertions.

Read a business biography or hear any celebrity speak and they make the same generalisations too. Business moguls Richard Branson and Bill Gates sound remarkably like celebrities such as Madonna or Tom Cruise and even sporting luminaries such as Tiger Woods and Venus Williams.

In a way, they are all correct. They have the right ideas. But so, too, do many people who arent very accomplished. Im sure you know people who think they are visionary, creative, determined, adaptable, and all that. But they dont get the same results as the people theyd like to emulate. Because superstar performers can rarely articulate what they do in enough detail to help other people follow in their footsteps. So heres the question: how do we go about figuring out what really makes certain people so successful?

Defining success

Lets turn the focus on you for a moment. How successful would you say you are on a scale of 1 to 10? This book is about the science of success, on how academics and consultants have tried to identify what helps some people to succeed and reach the top end of the scale. In this book I shall share stories and scientific studies about exceptional people with the aim of understanding what they do differently that helps them to succeed. But this will also help you to understand how researchers go about investigating success. So bear with me for now and give yourself a number.

Most people give themselves a score of between 5 and 8. Hardly anyone ever says theyre a 10 or even a 9 that implies theyve achieved everything there is to strive for in life. Plus it smacks of more than a little arrogance, right?

Very few people give themselves scores of 1 or 2 and you dont get many scores of 3 or 4 either. And when people do give themselves lower scores, they often say that theyve gone through a rough patch but are on their way back up again.

Of course you may be thinking that its an unfair question. You may rightly reason that the answer depends on the definition of success were using, on the criteria we employ to measure accomplishment. You probably think of success as a combination of factors, including how much you earn, how much you enjoy your work, the extent to which you have loving relationships in your life, how much sex you get, the pleasure you get from time with friends, how healthy you are, how much leisure time you enjoy, and so on. If we take all of those factors into consideration then our scale of 1 to 10 looks terribly crude.

Sometimes simplicity helps us to make a point though. So, just as many researchers like to do, let me temporarily do away with all of those complex factors and look only at a narrow financial definition of success, at how much a person earns. Of course, Im not saying that a rich investment banker is a better person than, say, a nurse. And I will come back to a fuller, more rounded definition of success. But for now, lets say that I dont care how much people enjoy their job or the extent to which theyre good parents or anything else. All I care about is how much cash they take home.

What constitutes the extra 1 per cent?

Let me introduce you to William Chalk and Jasper Ahlquist, two men who score at opposite ends of the scale. They are both key account managers working for a European information technology company. Key account manager is the in-vogue job title in lots of organisations, but essentially they are salespeople. They take the companys computer products and computer-related services and sell them to corporate clients.

I can say that Chalk and Ahlquist score at opposite ends of the scale because thats where their employer puts them. Last year, one of these men was in the top 10 per cent of the sales force, by virtue of selling more hardware, software and services than 90 per cent of the other key account managers. The other man was in the bottom 10 per cent of the sales team, unfortunately being outsold by 9 in 10 of his colleagues.

They have both been working for the firm for over four years. Not every year has been equally good or bad for them. However, year after year, one of them was always in the top 40 per cent of the sales team; the other was never out of the bottom 50 per cent.

Last year, one of them earned 482,520 in salary and bonuses, putting him in the top 10 per cent of the company. The other earned 107,950, putting him in the bottom 10 per cent.

So who was the high achiever? Was it Chalk or Ahlquist?

Actually, the answer to Who? isnt really the interesting bit. To me, the interesting answer is to the question Why?

Both men have degrees from good universities and track records of career progression. Both passed a gruelling selection process that involved multiple rounds of interviews with senior managers from across the organisation. Both are well liked too. But one is vibrantly more successful than the other. One of them clearly contributes that extra 1 per cent and that makes all the difference.

Harnessing the winning formula

Why are some people so much more successful than others? was the question that I was asked to answer by Margaret Taylor, the head of human resources at the technology firm who had hired Chalk and Ahlquist. She explained that the technology sector was booming. Demand was high. The company was growing explosively. But fast as the business was expanding, some of their competitors were growing even more quickly. A major problem, a real constraint to their growth, was hiring enough good key account managers to keep up with demand.

Taylor admitted that the business had a patchy record when it came to hiring great salespeople. Sometimes they had hired new faces, occasionally announcing with pride that they had poached a top salesperson from a rival, only for those alleged stars to crash and burn.

The company was investing significant time and money in training their fresh recruits, but it typically took new salespeople over a year to get to grips with the companys specific products and ways of working. So it was generally only after 12 to 18 months that the company could figure out who was a hit and who was a dud.

Of course, Taylor knew who their top salespeople were she just didnt know