Introduction: Don't Doubt Waze!

The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

- Amelia Earhart, American aviation pioneer

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated how woefully underprepared we are. Attempting to predict the future is often futile. The future of work is a different game, predominately, because many variables can dramatically impact our world. If I had told you back in January 2020 that a wet market in Wuhan, China, would shut down a roaring global economy and cause major industry sectors to fall into an economic crater, cause over a million deaths worldwide, and leave tens of millions unemployed, all in a matter of few months, you'd be highly suspicious.

No matter where you are in your personal or professional journey, you must be growing. This is your journey from now to next. It must become a journey of inquiry, exploration, and experimentation. If you're privileged to manage a team or lead an organization, inspiring others on their personal growth journey will pay significant dividends on your human capital investments.

It is critical to understand that growth is made up of significant moments. Like relationships, the most memorable growth moments are fostered strongest and fastest between individuals. On this journey, collaborative relationships are an essential part of gaining new knowledge. The best version of you will often come from fundamental changes in how you engage and influence others. These are the most difficult behaviors to internalize and master.

And make no mistake about it, there is a Grand Canyon-sized gap between intent and action. For example, if you want to get in shape, unfortunately, you must do more than just read about it. Your fitness goal is a tightly integrated ecosystem of the right education, a healthy diet, and appropriate exercises, performed consistently for months. Losing weight is seldom an event. It's a lifestyle change that incentivizes you to not only get to your optimal weight but also to keep the pounds off. It's a commitment to real and lasting change. It doesn't happen overnight, and there are no shortcuts. The same goes for staying relevant in your work.

You have to get off your ass and own your personal and professional growth journey: no one is going to pull you up off the couch. Only your legs can push you up. You must become the chief architect of a blueprint for your future.

If you think about any journey, you need a roadmap to get to your destination. For a physical journey, GPS has supplanted the roadmap. Career and personal journeys have no such guidance system. It's good to have a copilot to help you stick to the time frame, avoid hitting squirrels, and remember why you are going in the first place. You'll need resources (time, effort, and capital) and perhaps even a new skill or two to enhance the experience, if not create greater efficiency.

I've lived in Atlanta since I immigrated from Iran back in 1981. I've grown up and worked in various parts of town. Uncle Ken, with whom I lived as a teenager, had a business designing and deploying air pumps at gas stations all around town. We'd drive out to hundreds of locations each week to service these machines, occasionally getting lost and relying on the fold-up, keep-in-the-glovebox maps to get around. After living in the same city for almost 40 years, I began using Waze.

Waze's network effect differentiates it from Google Maps. Over 100 million active monthly users provide critical insights, ranging from potholes and other road hazards to police locations. With this pool of information, it is up to the minute on information about traffic congestions, accidents, construction, and roadblocks. With this abundance of input, many algorithms instantaneously recalculate my path and keep me on the fastest track. So, although I know Atlanta intimately, Waze has made my commutes less time-consuming. Even if it takes me through an odd neighborhood (which it does), Waze knows the most efficient route. My family has committed to not doubting Waze! Waze has been transformational. And, as we'll learn later, transformational encounters always beat transactional ones.

Your personal and professional growth journey will be a similar experience. You know your core competencies today, and you are inclined toward your future aspirations. You can't possibly know all the structural, political, and behavioral obstacles in your path. Beyond your professional background, your single biggest asset in that growth journey is the insights from your portfolio of authentic relationships.

That's what this book is about. Curve Benders are strategic relationships that will power your non-linear personal and professional growth in the future of work. Great bosses, mentors, or coaches can and do incrementally improve your performance. But Curve Benders do so much more. They profoundly impact both your direction and destination in life. Not everyone will have the same Curve Bender. Yours will be unique to your growth needs. Most business relationships offer incremental improvements in our careers, not exponential changes in our lives. Curve Benders are profound relationships. They create the greatest change in you in the shortest time. They are scarce. People have impacted my career, but I can say confidentially that only a handful have provided more value than I could have anticipated for my personal and professional growth.

For profit and loss (P&L) leaders, Curve Benders dramatically accelerate your path to outcomes. If you're concise in your strategic vision, and prioritized pursuits, surround yourself with exceptional talent that's aligned with your value agenda, Curve Benders become that X factor that will set you apart from your peers. Regardless of how you're measured, they create more than a spark; they harvest hope, amplify aspirations, and deliver multiples in your efforts to create enterprise value.

Curve Benders are rare. They could be a coach or a mentor, or perhaps someone unexpected. Marilyn Monroe was a Curve Bender. In the 1950s, Ella Fitzgerald was a rising star, but racial prejudice kept her out of the biggest clubs. By happenstance, Marilyn Monroe wanted to improve her singing, and a music coach gave her one of Ella's records. Lying on her floor, Marilyn would spend hours listening to Ella's records. Marilyn went to see Ella perform in Los Angeles and reached out to her. The two quickly bonded over being orphans and their career limitations of their appearance and gender. Ella complained about being barred from bigger stages. So, Marilyn used her status. She called the managers of the Mocambo, the most prominent jazz club of the time, and told them she would be front row if and when Ella played there. Marilyn did come and brought other celebrities every night Ella performed. Ella never played at a small jazz club again.

Ella was a seeker, looking for someone to help transform her path, and Marilyn was her solver. Curve Benders help you achieve far greater heights than you ever imagined possible because they see the best version of you. They inspire you to push yourself beyond your perceived limitations. They encourage you to become the leader, spouse, or parent you want to become. With Curve Bender relationships, you can create the impact you want in all facets of your life and leave the legacy you want for your team and your loved ones.

This example doesn't show all this. Marilyn didn't inspire Ella to push - and her limitations were real, not perceived. MM pushed for EF. I doubt that MM made EF a better leader, spouse, or parent. She "made" her a more successful singer.

Don Peppers, the founding partner of Peppers & Rogers Group, exemplifies a Curve Bender relationship with his long-time collaborator and coauthor, Martha Rogers, PhD. "I was out giving speeches when I met Martha back in 1992," he shared in our interview. "She came up to me and asked if I was planning to write a book about the topic of my speech. If I wasn't already doing so, she said, then she wanted to write it with me," he added. They agreed, spending three years writing what became The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time (Currency Doubleday, 1993).

The book came out and, for six months, did well but not spectacular. Then two things happened:

1. Tom Peters called it the "Book of the Year," and George Gendron of Inc. magazine wrote, "Peters was wrong. This is not the book of the year. It's not even the book of the decade. It's one of the two or three most important business books ever written."
2. The web became more prevalent, and with it, conferences that attracted innovators and entrepreneurs. The One to One Future became a must-read among this group, and Don and Martha became in-demand speakers. They founded Peppers & Rogers Group to offer consulting and training services, growing the company from 10 to 150 employees in the first three years. It partnered with VC-backed tech companies and served as a Who's Who of leading firms around the world, all of which wanted to get closer to their customers and serve them better.

Since 1993, Don and Martha have coauthored 10 books and three editions of a graduate school textbook on customer-centric competition. These books have sold over a million copies in 18 languages....