around 11, I saw a girl fall off the 10-foot diving board at our community pool. I just happened to be looking as she slipped and grabbed the right side of the handrail with her right hand, which made her body swing under the board as she lost her footing and landed on her back with her feet facing the pool. I remember those details like it was yesterday, in part because I was alone in recalling them. I listened to at least a dozen other people explain what happened, and none of them saw it the same way. One witness said she slid through the steps, which seemed physically impossible. Another remembered her falling to the ground and then rolling in pain underneath the diving board. Everyone was talking over each other to explain what had happened, and none of it sounded like what I’d seen, or even possible. You can’t slide through the steps of a diving board. She couldn’t have hit her head from the angle that she fell. When I turned to my dad to complain that everyone else had it wrong, he said I was probably right because I was in a good spot to see everything and wasn’t caught up in the emotion of the moment. “That’s why you’ve got to stay calm in a crisis.”
It’s also why you want to seek multiple perspectives, especially from customers, and cross-reference them as new facts come in. The best filter for judging is to look at the source. I always put a premium on data that I get from customers because they’re on the front lines and are critical partners in deciding where to place our bets. Of the 180 acquisitions we did at Cisco and the dozen startups and young CEOs that I’m investing in and mentoring now, I can tell you what one or two customers said that convinced me to make the decisions I made.
That’s why the second component of thinking like a dyslexic is to be curious. That sounds easy, doesn’t it? A lot of leaders would say they’re curious. I can tell you from personal experience that most leaders are not. They don’t ask a lot of questions, rarely challenge conventional wisdom, stick with what they know, and often turn to sources that reinforce their existing point of view. Maybe that’s why I notice the people who are genuinely curious about the world around them. This isn’t some rare trait that you either possess or you don’t. Everyone is capable of cultivating their curiosity. We all used to be curious. As kids, we’re brimming with curiosity. We explore new places, get lost, try new things, climb trees, fall down, accept dares. It never stops. We ask questions and we don’t always care who gives us the answer. We just want to know it, then we file it away, and go off to do something else.
As we get older, though, curiosity starts to diminish. All of a sudden, we’re the ones who are supposed to have the answers. We worry about looking dumb or ill-informed. We don’t want to offend people or step on any toes. We seek expertise in a form that feels familiar to us and are taught to impress each other rather than learn from each other. Sometimes, we don’t even want to know what someone else thinks in case we don’t like what they’ll say. We’re not seeking feedback. We’re looking for reinforcement. You don’t become enlightened that way, and you miss most new opportunities.
I encourage all types of leaders—CEOs of multinational corporations, young entrepreneurs starting their first company, or global government leaders—to ask customers and citizens how they feel about their products or platform but also to go one step further. Get to know customers as people and find out what’s on their minds. What are they keeping an eye on? Where are they investing their time and resources? Who’s on their radar and why? What keeps them up at night? Talk to colleagues and friends and even people you meet on the street. Listen. If you can’t think of a follow-up question, then there’s a good chance that you weren’t listening. Have an agenda. When I’m in other countries, I’m often curious to see how people are using technology and what kinds of businesses they’re starting. I constantly ask people for advice on what I can be doing better. One question I ask of the leaders I meet is what’s the most important lesson they’ve learned during their career. For Shimon Peres, who was one of the most optimistic and social leaders I’ve ever met, it was realizing that leadership is lonely, especially in tough times. You have to have the courage to stand alone.
Look at the data. While customers are usually your best sources for understanding what’s happening, don’t just rely on your gut or go with what everyone is telling you to do. Analyze the data. We collect and analyze data across different markets and industries to look for patterns and aberrations that might suggest something is going on. The more you can standardize the process, the more you can cross-reference what you find and make accurate comparisons. Data might not tell you why something is happening, but it does tell you what’s going on. When Cisco was knocked flat by the dot-com crash, the first warning signal came from the data. Within days, orders suddenly dried up. At the same time, though, the data had been telling us that everything was okay just weeks before. The reason was that our customers had been acting like everything was okay, placing orders and making projections that were at odds with the reality of what was going on.
That’s why you can never use data alone in making decisions. You need to run it by the experts who see this stuff and live it every day. They use the equipment. They know what’s normal and what’s not. If you want a broad view on what it all means, bring in people with broader cross-functional roles, perspectives, and networks. While they might not have specific subject expertise, they often have an edge in finding insights because it’s their job to look at the big picture. If you want a reality check on what you’re seeing, though, go with the experts: your customers.
Let me give you two examples that have nothing to do with business. The first comes from Paul Guzzi, a former colleague at Wang Laboratories and a strong Democrat who’d spent the first part of his career in Massachusetts state politics, including four years as Secretary of the Commonwealth. During the 1988 presidential election, Paul and I were at a customer meeting in Chicago and started talking with a hotel doorman about the various candidates. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis had a double-digit lead in the polls at that point, but the doorman told the two of us that he planned to vote for George Bush. As we were leaving, Paul turned to me and said, “Bush is going to win.” It seemed like a bold prediction to make off a sample size of one. But Paul viewed this man as what I’d consider to be a subject expert: a lifelong Democrat who clearly cared about the issues that were the foundation of Dukakis’s campaign. The doorman was also African American, and black voters traditionally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. If he felt that the governor was not effective on those policies, the odds were high that many of his peers felt the same way. For Paul, who had probably talked to thousands of voters over his career, the doorman’s comments were telling and signaled a profound shift in the big picture. He’d been seeing other data that suggested a pattern of vulnerability for Dukakis and this clinched it. While the early polls may have considered Dukakis a shoo-in, Bush won. While the doorman might or might not have predicted Bush’s win, Paul did. He connected the dots and knew what to look for.
Many years later, Elaine and I were in a limousine and started talking politics with our driver, who was African American. Donald Trump had recently become the Republican candidate and I was curious to know what the driver thought of him. It turned out he was planning to vote for Trump. He knew about Trump’s record on race relations and wasn’t sure if Trump’s policies were as likely to hurt him as help, but he was fed up with the establishment in Washington and was willing to take a risk. Much like the doorman in Massachusetts, his support was a powerful data point that conventional wisdom might turn out to be wrong. As I talked to more people on my travels, it became clear to me that Trump was winning support across party lines, which was not yet showing up in the polls. So when former Bloomberg TV anchor Cory Johnson asked me to pick the likely winner at a summit in May 2016, I said, “If you had to bet on momentum right now, candidly it’s going to be Trump.” Hillary Clinton was leading in most polls and I ended up breaking my own record as a Republican to vote for her on election night, but I could see that the pattern pointed to a victory for Trump. Whether that would be good for the country was beside the point. This was the reality of what was going on, and many people didn’t see it coming.
You might think that it’s easier to spot data and connect the patterns today. After all, we have a world of information and artificial intelligence at our fingertips. I think it’s actually becoming much more difficult. Greater access to content has made it easier for people to seek out news that reinforces their existing point of view. Instead of using technology to connect with other cultures, we increasingly connect with people