Ep 138: How Extraordinary Leaders Think Differently - Adrian Gore

Michael Avery (0:00)

What separates ordinary impact from extraordinary impact? Discovery founder Adrian Gore argues, it's less about raw talent than for learnable behavior, disciplined optimism, focused urgency, declared goals, and recognizing the few decisions that matter disproportionately. In this episode of The Monocle Banking Podcast, as always curated by Monocle Solutions, we test those ideas against business, leadership, and South Africa's economic reality.

Today, we're tackling some questions that every business leader, in fact, any leader for that matter grapples with. Can leaders systematically increase their odds of extraordinary outcomes by changing what they notice, how quickly they act, what they commit to, and where they concentrate their attention? It's the spine of the founder of Discovery, Adrian Gore's new book, The Four Principles, which I have to say is probably one of the most consequential business leadership books I've read in years. And Adrian, it's great to have you on the show. Even though I've interviewed you a number of times over the years, I know the Discovery story quite well.

Still found the insights fresh and compelling for the world that we live in, where the AI is creating so much uncertainty. I also learned of you having to give up your love of motocross. So there's a really honest and vulnerable moments and moments in the book too that I think we can learn from. Just before we dive into it, what did writing this book reveal to you about your own journey, when you stop and reflect that perhaps you hadn't quite appreciated before you started out?

Adrian Gore (1:44)

Writing the book actually was a combination of decades of learning with our team.

It wasn't just me sitting down and reflecting on my own journey. It really has been three decades of learning, of research, of data gathering, etc. So the book really is a, how can I say, a well thought through research piece of work. I mean, my own experience of reflecting on it as I've gone through it is, I've always had deep convictions directionally on those principles. I think just understanding the power and being more deliberate now that I've kind of done the research to get the book down. But these are things that I think at Discovery we've lived and have seen. And that's why I think it's both research and it's anecdotal, which hopefully makes the book interesting.

Michael Avery (2:26)

Yeah. And that's exactly the way you've approached it, deeply quantitatively based as any good actually will do in data and research. Lots of behavioral economics, Kahneman and Tversky.

I've read The Undoing Project and clearly that's influenced the approach at Discovery. But I think the highest praise is imitation or flattery in the market. And I see so many other life insurers, medical schemes following the approach that Discovery really pioneered all those years ago. Underneath it, let's start at the beginning. You know, The Four Principles, you're making quite a provocative claim that the difference between ordinary outcome and an extraordinary one may have less to do. Let's start with the beginning with raw talent than a handful of learnable behaviors. How we see opportunity, our disciplined optimism, as you call it, how urgently we act, what we commit ourselves to publicly, and whether we recognize those few decisions that matter disproportionately in what you call the Pareto tale. Let's just start with talent versus behavior, because you argue that talent can be overrated, or at least that talent alone explains far less than we think. What convinced you of that?

Adrian Gore (3:34)

Talent and privilege and education and all of that are, if you've got that, that's great. And those are multipliers for sure. You know, relative to someone who doesn't. That's a given. But I've been obsessed with seeing some people that just have dramatically greater impact, multiples of impact to others. And what is it that does that? It's not just talent. But the real epiphany for me is the miscoding.

The fact that when you do the research, we are operating in a world that a complex network world, a world where we're navigating complex systems, that is completely different to how we evolved.

And so that miscoding and that change in the world only took place 12,000 years ago. Agricultural revolution. So we're operating a world now with abundance, system threats, complex networks you navigate in terms of businesses, markets, globalization. So leadership is about a completely different context to how it was 12,000 years ago. And that's our coding. So that explains why our natural inclinations are often completely wrong. And the four areas that they're wrong is attitudinal, you've raised it, how we see time, how we motivate it, and how we take actions and decisions and the impact of those. So in those four kind of, almost kind of pillars of leadership, our natural inclination is miscoded. So whether you're smart, you're an IQ of 5,000, you're educated hard, but that's great, but you still make those errors. And in our research, the effect of kind of remedying the coding creates a greater multiplier than IQ does. And that's the answer to why people that seem fairly mediocre do great things, unbelievable things, and these are learnable things. So the principles are an attempt. You can't re-code, we are what we are, but you can certainly remedy those hankers. And they're actually quite easy. They're things that you know, but you don't believe are correct because you miscode it, right? That's a circularity.