The Campbell Academy Blog | Colin Campbell (54)

The big shift

In preparation for last week's Dental Entrepreneurial Bootcamp, where we had our business delegates here for a week and kicked the sh*t out of them morning till night to try and get them to a three-year plan by the Friday, I revisited Simon Sinek's Infinite Game book, which is definitely one of the most important books in informing how to lead or run my business I have ever come across.

I revisit this book from time to time (his audio version) just to remind myself that the stories I tell myself about it are still true.

However, one of the most important things I came across again this time was the 'existential shift'.

Much of Sinek's book on the Infinite Game centres around businesses or individuals or groups who believe they have a just cause; a just cause is your vision; it's why you're here and why you want to do things. It's never quantitative, it's qualitative.

It's the thing that you return to when things are hard and difficult, but you say, "Do you know I'm going in the right way? I'm going to the right place?".

There is a beautiful story which centres around Walt Disney and his just cause, and why he set up Walt Disney Studios off the back of the success of Steamboat Willie, which then allowed him to re-mortgage his house and cash in his life assurance policies to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which catapulted Walt Disney Studios to where it went.

The thing about your just cause, though, is that the vehicle that you take to propel you towards it (you'll never finish a just cause, by the way) changes. That happens for almost anyone who has a just cause (earning money isn't really a just cause), and so it is fascinating to watch different people who change tack and direction to continue to pursue that which they hope to achieve.

What happened to Walt Disney was that Walt Disney Studios became super successful. Against his better judgment, his brother Ralph encouraged him to bring in external investment to grow the business.

It reached the point where Walt Disney was quite convinced that it was absolutely not heading towards achieving his just cause, so he left, selling all his shares back and having no commercial interest in Walt Disney Studios, despite the fact that his name was above the door.

What Walt Disney did was he went on to start to build something physical that people could go to, to make their lives a little bit better and to take them away from the day to day horrors that they were seeing (his just caused) and so he set about designing Disney World in California.

The wonderful end to this story is the fact that when Disney World opened, Walt Disney had died approximately six months before and so it was his son who faced the cameras and the media when the gates were finally unlocked.
Allegedly, a journalist said to his son, "Wouldn't it have been great if your father was here to see this day?" His son replied, "My father saw this day 25 years ago."

What Walt Disney managed to achieve was an existential shift.

He moved from being a moviemaker to being a theme park designer, something entirely different in those days, something completely out of the box.

He did this to jump vehicle to achieve his just cause.

For all of us, we can take a lesson from this both in our day-to-day lives, in our business, or whatever it is we do.

If you know where you want to go or why you want to go there, you don't always have to take the same route or the same vehicle to get there; in fact, it's often essential that you don't.