You may be a brilliant visionary, an amazing communicator, or a stellar leader. But if you really want to be a business all-star, you’d better know how to hit a curveball – metaphorically speaking, author Scott Singer says.
In his new book How to Hit a Curveball, Mr. Singer offers advice on how to deal with the unexpected, a skill that he says is crucial for survival in the modern business environment.
After receiving a few major curveballs himself, including losing his job as an investment banker at Bear Stearns before the financial crisis and dealing with a divorce, Mr. Singer, who divides his time between New York and Connecticut, says he realized he needed to be more resilient in times of uncertainty. He needed to take more control. He needed to be more …like New York Yankees star Derek Jeter.
You say learning how to deal with the unexpected isn’t just an important skill, it’s the most essential one. Why?
If you’re running a business today, the fact is that you need to be nimble. You need to surround yourself with people who know how to deal with that change pretty quickly. And if you’re a CEO [who]’s unable to do that, you’re going to get passed by really fast by your competitors.
What was your epiphany watching Derek Jeter at a Yankee game?
I’m sitting there and I’m looking at this guy who’s known to be one of the best baseball players out there. And I had just dealt with this series of curveballs myself.
I realized this guy got faked out a couple times. Because he’s so good at what he does, he was able to not get distraught that he had swung a couple times and missed. He was able to say, “Okay, every time’s an opportunity and if they try and throw me another one, I’m gonna be ready for it. I’m gonna expect that unexpected.”
And what [did he do]? He knocked it out of the park.
I just realized that was just a perfect metaphor for what we all do every day. Some of us don’t do it all that well. I hadn’t done it well. [So] I looked around at a handful of people handling what seemed to be even bigger problems better than I, and I wondered, what was it? What were they doing?
What you found was that Derek Jeter and Mikhail Gorbachev have something in common. Not only them, but Michael J. Fox and Buzz Aldrin too.
What I thought was that there was some kind of secret sauce that most successful people had and I wanted to know what was in that secret sauce.
What I learned was they’re people just like us. They’ve had successes. They’ve had failures, and they’ve overcome them. The reason why they’re successful is, for the most part, they’ve learned how to approach curveballs, those unexpected events, and deal with them in stride better than the rest with us.
I found that commonality was their attitude. It was a whole process…. It was [their] skill sets – not some magic thing that they were born with, which should give the rest of us some hope.
What were your biggest mistakes in handling the curveballs you were given?
[When losing my job at Bear Stearns] I undermined and sabotaged my own thinking because I thought, “Hey, I was a failure. How could I have not succeeded here? What will people think of me?” And as a result, I didn’t reach out to everyone in my network. I didn’t reach out to all the people who could provide psychological support or job leads, for that matter.
I hid. I didn’t step up to the plate.
It ended up lengthening the time I was unemployed. And [as] that time got longer, I continued to sabotage myself and become more anxious about every interview.
