When George de Mestral returned from a walk one day to find his clothes and his dog all covered in burrs, he didn’t just remove them: he looked more closely to find out what was making them cling so tightly. And then he invented Velcro.
When Japanese engineers, building a railway through a mountain, found water flooding into their tunnel they didn’t simply plug the leaks: they bottled the water and sold it as mineral water, building a brand worth more than $50m/year.
When Travis Kalanick and a friend couldn’t get a taxi in Paris one day they didn’t just complain about it: they founded Uber. The rest, as we know, is history.
We’ve all been in situations like this. But we probably didn’t respond in the ways these people did. And although these three examples all seem very different, they all share one thing in common: the attitude of the people involved, the attitude to look for ways to turn ‘problems’ into ‘opportunities’.
This is the key attitude that defines leadership. And in this time of change which is bringing us so many ‘problems’, this attitude is more important than ever: an essential step in learning to using change to become stronger and more inspired.
Do you currently have any ‘problems’? What would happen if you changed your attitude to find the opportunities they contain?
Adapted from The Churning, Inner Leadership: a framework and a set of tools for building inspiration in a time of change.
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