Jamil Qureshi
“People always ask, what is success?” outlined Jamil Qureshi, one of the world’s most foremost practitioners of performance enhancing psychology.
Addressing more than 500 technology executives during the opening keynote of EDGE 2020 - an invite-only virtual experience housing partners, distributors and vendors - Qureshi defined success as the ability to make a connection between two things previously unconnected; “that’s what success is.”
“I help people cultivate a mindset for success,” he added. “For us to act differently, we need to think differently. It’s not just about creating different behaviours for ourselves or our team members, it’s about creating different thoughts and attitudes for performance.”
Based in London, Qureshi has helped six sports athletes reach world number one status, in addition to being appointed as the first-ever official golf psychologist to the European Ryder Cup team - influencing a record-breaking winning margin in 2006.
Qureshi has also worked with footballers from Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester City, alongside Formula 1 drivers David Coulthard and Eddie Irvine, plus the 2009 England Ashes winning cricketers.
Meanwhile in business, Qureshi has helped executive teams fulfil potential across 24 countries, developing and delivering leadership programs at board-level for Coca-Cola, Hewlett Packard and Emirates Airlines among others.
“I’ve worked with Hewlett Packard and they say, ‘if Hewlett Packard knew what Hewlett Packard knows, we’d be three times more successful’,” he said. “And that’s so true of any organisation.
“If we can take the wisdom, expertise, knowledge and contacts in your heads - we have more than 500 executives tuning in at EDGE 2020 for example - and place this all on one table with open access, how successful could we all become. This would be quite incredible, if knowledge could become a new asset class.”
For Qureshi - who has lectured to an audience which included two former US Presidents - companies no longer compete with other companies, a theory gaining widespread credibility since the outbreak of Covid-19.
“Networks compete against networks and you’re only as strong as your network,” he advised. “There’s an external narrative for your business in that statement but there’s also an internal narrative for you as an individual. You can only be as strong as the networks you forge.”
In short, Qureshi stated that “the future demands us to be different”, cautioning against trusting anyone who continues to “champion the past”.
“And part of that difference is to understand that community will always out-perform bureaucracy and hierarchy,” he said. “Therefore, what we need to do is think about bottom up, diverse and collaborative teams and how we can form more fluid organisations which allows us to be agile and open-minded in the way that we play into each other.”
According to Qureshi - one of a select group of external psychologists allowed to study astronauts on the 2008 NASA Space Program - communities are now out-performing hierarchies in relation to maximising human performance.
“Write down ‘Think, Feel and Act’ in a nice little linear way,” he guided. “That’s how you work by the way, how your colleagues work, your children, your partner - we think, we feel and then we act.
“Smart leaders trying to drive change in a team or even in themselves, don’t work on actions and behaviours but work on thoughts. There is a difference between commitment and compliance when looking to make change. Commitment works on thoughts whereas compliance simply tells people. We do it all the time - you should be more innovative. Does it work? No.”
Within this context, Qureshi also reinforced the belief that in the modern-day, “attitude is more important than intelligence or facts”.
“I’d rather have ‘I will’ rather than ‘IQ’,” he noted.
Qureshi delivered exclusive insights during EDGE 2020, an invite-only virtual experience which played host to the most influential business leaders in technology across Australia and New Zealand.
Underpinned by local research and insights, EDGE 2020 outlined customer investment plans, upcoming end-user projects and new partner requirements, leveraging unique analyst and CIO insights.
To watch on-demand EDGE 2020 sessions - click here.
