(2019-10-11) Ching Lesson One Churchill Evaporating Cloud

Clarke Ching: Lesson One - Winston Churchill. Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty (in 1911) and instructed to prepare the navy to win a war against Germany.

However, did you know that he also used Integrative Thinking - the obscure yet straightforward thinking style you’ll learn over the next few days - to win World War I?

Churchill immediately found himself presented with a particularly gnarly dilemma: should Britain stick with coal-powered warships or should they switch to oil?

clever little integrative thinking tool called the Evaporating Cloud

Roger Martin - who is as of this writing ranked as the world’s #1 living management thinker - discovered and named this form of reasoning while studying successful leaders in the 2000s.

Take a look at our first Evaporating Cloud below.

If they switched to oil, it would mean the navy could no longer rely on safe, secure Welsh coal. Instead, they would have to depend on distant and insecure oil supplies from Persia, as Iran was known back then.

Roger Martin came up with the name Integrative Thinking while studying highly successful CEOs and business leaders and trying to - in my own words - figure out what made them tick. Over time, he realized there was one thing - just ONE THING - that separates the world’s most successful leaders - the crème de la crème - from all the others. They thought their way out of tricky situations differently.

how could he get the best of both worlds?

Can we use oil — giving us the most powerful warships - AND also have a safe, secure supply of fuel?

All he needed to do was convince the House of Commons to authorize the government purchase of a 51 percent share in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company - the same company that would go on to become BP, British Petroleum.


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