Extract from Jae Um’s article “Huge, If True: How Microsoft’s Big Ideas Could Transform Legal Buy (069)”
Trying something new is 😨 scary. Doing so in public ramps up the 😱 fear factor. Some of that is due to the evolutionary survival instinct hard-wired into our brains. We are social animals, and for millennia our very existence depended on our ability to gain and sustain acceptance by a tribe who would share the arduous work of evading both starvation and predators.
Fast forward to 2018. Trying something new in front of an audience of one’s professional peers still carries real stakes — and so it takes a special kind of courage to do so. On September 20, I was lucky enough to be present for several acts of courage, at Microsoft’s Redmond Campus where over 150 people convened for the company’s Trusted Advisor Forum. See Post 068 (explaining the design of the Trusted Advisor Forum event and the broader Strategic Partner Program).
