Marc Le Menestrel

Fear – Failure - Fortitude

Marc Le Menestrel — 2012-11-26T10:56:00Z

When I stepped down as a professional athlete and started a more "normal" professional life, one of my biggest surprises was people's attitude towards failure. As if “others” were trying to never fail. I had my successes as a rock-climber, but I was very aware of many more failures. In climbing, as soon as I was completing a route, I was trying something harder, and failed. Until success is reached, climbing is like a succession of failures. It does not mean that I looked for failures, but the idea was to fully accept their necessary existence, and to manage the bitter, unwanted feeling that comes with our defeat.

I was therefore especially interested when I was proposed by the Lisbon MBA to design and run a workshop on failure. Its pioneering session on November 23rd, 2012 worked well and was praised by the participants. As an experiential session, most of the content was coming out of them as actors of the learning process. For instance, one of the first sharing from a student was to formulate that

"the opposite of success is not failure, it is not trying".

Indeed, an important key for turning failure into fortitude is to realize that it is part of a learning process.

The central experience of the class is an epic journey, built around the archetypal myth of the hero and its quest. Besides a few words for the guided visualization, we used a musical composition due to Jean-Michel Robert. After having experienced the journey, Jean-Michel composed a 6-part piece using Chinese cymbals, Thailand gongs, electronic music, guitar, oak and other artifacts. I was glad to combine such a beautiful piece of musical art with our work, in the spirit of a deep yet playful endeavor.

At the end of their MBA, and in the difficult economic context of Portugal, the session was timely, allowing students to work on the fear of not finding a job, one of their most important goals for the forthcoming weeks. In the afternoon, another guided visualization exercise helped them to formulate the goal beyond the goal, and thus to reinforce their capacity to confront their actual challenges with full potential.

Description of the session

In this experiential session, participants learn about failures, fears and their role for future successes.

We use the art of conversation, with others and within ourselves, to explore the surprising world of our shadows, and to eventually embrace our experiences beyond the imperative of being always successful in everything.

We give a special emphasis to the distinctions between objectives and dreams, between professional success and self-accomplishment, and between individual and collective failures.

Targeted outcomes

• Increase awareness about failures and fears

• Develop participants power to manage fears and learn from failure

• Increase participants future resilience

Illustration

Beowulf and the Dragon – H.E. Marshall 1908

To go further

Leaflet used by students for their personal learning.

The International Day for Failure, an inspiring initiative of Finish young entrepreneurs, to be celebrated on October 13!

Fail & Learn: Tuuti Piipo, who collaborates to the International Day for failure, has gathered a series of resources and references (articles, videos, books...) around Failure on this Kippt bookmarking service.

Values – Ethics - Decisions

Marc Le Menestrel — 2012-03-12T11:54:35Z

Description

We embark participants in a series of questions, situations and phenomena which make salient their values, their decision-making processes and their leadership attitudes.
A series of conceptual tools and frameworks helps participants to structure their understanding of values, leadership and decisions and prepare them to express their full potential when making decisions.
We give a special emphasis to ethical values and the trade-offs they may entail in business decisions, with the intention of empowering participants to strive in the grey zone of (un)ethical business.

Targeted outcomes

• Increase awareness of the role of values in business decisions

• Develop framework and conceptual tools for facing conflicts of values

• Prepare to become inspirational leaders by your values

Instructions for students

Read in advance of class two short case-studies: “Peter Green” and “The Talking Blanket” and reflect on your answers to the questions raised.

How can Business Schools continue to make people dream?

Marc Le Menestrel — 2009-06-22T11:21:00Z

Money as a primary goal of business organizations falls short of liberating the full potential of business executives and business students. Business leaders dream of a more inclusive business life where the values of the company they work for would be more aligned with their personal values and the values of stakeholders. Accompanying the changing role of business, business schools can contribute to the rising consciousness that money is a fantastic means to achieve the world we dream of, but can be a poor end in itself.

I like money. You probably like money too. Overall, most people like money. However, for me, and I guess for most of you, money would not be the main goal of your career. Empirically, it appears that for most people, money is not an end in itself but a means to achieve our goals and satisfy our needs. Few of us would organize our life in order to make as much money as possible, without consideration of what you can do with it, how you earn it and so forth. For most of us, we wouldn't like to waste our life earning it.

For business organizations, things are different and money takes a very predominant role. The institutional context, the social culture, the legal framework, the ideological discourses, the theoretical models, the practical teaching of business school, etc. seem to reflect the idea that the role of business organizations is to maximize the creation of economic and financial value.

Why would business organization make money an end in itself if individuals do not share that hierarchy of values? Why business organizations could not have an end beyond money, attempting to achieve some super-ordinate goal for which money would be a means?

To avoid misunderstanding, let me share that I believe that the primacy of money in the structuring of business organizations is not without reasons: for instance, money is the most powerful invented concept of mankind that allows us to share the valuation of things and exchange them in a manner that reflect our mutual interest. It is not without ethics too. With its universal character, money is somehow neutral. To some extent, having business organizations endorsing another end than money would mean to promote a politically-valued goal. And business organizations, which are not democratic, do not naturally have the legitimacy for this. Hence, there is an ethical risk in attributing a role beyond money to business organizations.

Alas, we need to be realist. My experience is that business leaders, senior executives, middle managers or talented business students dream of something else in their business life.

In the past 12 months, I have had the chance to animate “dreaming sessions” with students or executives and listen to hundreds of stories about what would enthusiasm business individuals. We use “dreaming techniques” in order to go beyond the cognitive level and, while also drawing from our emotional intelligence, clarify our deepest source of motivations. Don't make me wrong: I didn't switch from being a decision scientist to a sort of pseudo-guru offering a nice massage to the brain of participants. No, the idea is to better integrate the unexpected in our decision-making. The combination of a thorough analytical approach to our most important decisions with a deep anchorage in the values that would make our life, or our organization, a success and a true accomplishment, helps to manage the grey zone of the ethical relation between business and society and strive on the stormy waters of a hardly predictable business environment. In my experience, no senior executives attending my sessions has ever alluded to a money dream. To the contrary, most dreams are non-monetary, and this calls for more alignment of business values with personal values.

My impression is that senior executives would prefer if business organization could be like they are: a project at the service of values for which money would be a powerful, efficient and demanding engine.

Also, through the Foundation for a New Ethical Business, I set up a website, called wedreambusiness.org, that is a gallery of existing companies that make people students dream. In this website, you can find many companies that reinvent business and shaken our paradigm of business organization as sole profit maximizers. All these companies share the common trait that they are at the service of human values, social justice or environmental sustainability.

I believe this is also the reflect of a profound transformation of the business world that business school could accompany and even lead. Business has gained much power in this world. For the best and for the worse. There is a demand from our public to go beyond the view that the role of business organizations is to maximize economic or financial value.

If business schools want to keep making people dreams, they could embrace this transformation by developing a thorough reflection at the theoretical, methodological and practical level. This could be done in a scientific spirit, which in social sciences mean taking distances with ideologies, whatever they are, and also a bit of skepticism, if not humor, towards established dominant power.

Prepared for the 20th Anniversary of INSEAD PhD Program. Download the INSEAD PhD Anniversary Brochure