Reaching for moon, leap-frogging over steps 2-9 to get
to 10, ruling the world… it’s all so over-rated. My
encouragement to you this week is to do what’s NEXT. Every
great work began with something as simple as the first step.
Looking at a College course catalog. Scheduling time off a
year in advance for a self-development retreat. Committing to
a father-daughter date NEXT week. Talking to your boss
about the NEXT step in your career.
Every single one of us have had big, huge, god-size dreams and
most of us get stuck looking up at that first obstacle. Forget
the obstacle. Just take the NEXT step. Say it out loud…
“I want to…..” Say it to a friend, “I want to ……” Journal
it, sing it, dream it but don’t stop there. Take the NEXT step
towards whatever that is.
Today. Now. Take one step towards what’s NEXT.
August 26, 2010
It was a camel-back-breaking kind of week. Two stories surfaced so far illustrating that the stress-factor in the work place is super high right now. The first story I have to credit Daniel Pink for uncovering. (Even if it turns out that the story is a hoax its a great parable). No way you can appreciate it without taking a moment to actually see the pictures within the story so I have included the link.
The essence of the story is about a woman who overheard her boss refer to her as a *&%&(###. (You can read the story to get the exact spelling). She decided at that point that this was no longer the place where she wanted to be employed. So she tells her boss, and everyone else on company email, that she is quitting. And she uses a series of pics of messages on a dry-eraser white board in slide show fashion to totally bust her boss for not only the name calling but also all the wasteful ways the boss spends his time. Because she had the password to his computer as his assistant, she was able to track exactly how much time he was spending “playing” on Facebook. It is hysterical. I have a new level of understanding about passive-aggressive now.
And then there is Steven Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant. It’s stuff like this that serves as an incubator for new verbalizations. My guess is the term “Going Slater” will soon be up there with “Going Postal.” Rude passengers everywhere are now on their best behavior because they don’t want to get “Slaterized.”
The real tragedy in all this is how many people are vicariously living through these two individuals because of the amount of pent up anxiety and stress at work. The Labor Department just released a report indicating that productivity in non-farm related work fell by .9% in the second quarter. Yet, unemployment remains above 9% indicating that workers have finally reached that point of diminishing return. In other words, they were willing to do the work of two for a period of time but it is not sustainable for the long haul.
This is where being more motivated is really not going to he
lp. Paying people more money might make it more tolerable but again, meeting the demand is really not sustainable. So I’d like to offer some suggestions on dealing with the high stress factor at work and as always, welcome yours.
1. Pull the line of offense way back. Having grown up with two brothers, this was always a favorite game to see who was in control. Cross this line and…. We all have mental lines of offense we bring to work. In Slater’s case, the passenger owed him an apology for bumping him on the head with his luggage. I am not suggesting that you just let people “run all over you.” I am suggesting that we can all yield a little more than we do when it comes to being offended.
2. Play the role of a mediator. Explosive situations never start at the point of impact. When you see a conflict emerging, take the lead at diffusing it. In the case with Jenny who resigned via email and white board, the situation begs the question, why did not someone in the inner circle of leadership call this guy out? It’s almost like watching a group of high schoolers not wanting to be thought of as the dork for being the one to speak out in defense of this lady
3. Work is not your whole life! Please don’t miss this principle. Work is a very important part of our lives but it does not define us in our entirety. You are part of a much bigger canvas than you might think. Maybe it will be in the crucible of the pressure of where you are that prepares you for something bigger. Perhaps it will take this kind of stress to help you see that your family is more important than any job. Ask yourself, am I allowing the stress to make me a better person or just a grouchy, irritable person? How you see your life relative to the bigger picture will help you make the right decision at this point. If it’s all about “work” then the stress will no doubt suck the life out of you.
Practicing these principles will not lesson the demands of work. Practicing these principles makes you better at dealing with the demands of work.
August 11, 2010
One of my latest coaching encounters took me down an old familiar path. Unlike the path Robert Frost aspired to walk, this one had been traveled extensively by wanna-be’s and whinners. In the first 5 minutes of our conversation, we had unearthed no less than a dozen relationships that had gone bad. A couple of rotten employers, a disgruntled spouse or two, distant children, several back-stabbing friends, and then there is the relationship that squeezed him to call me… his new boss.
Once he took a breath, I asked the quintessential consulting/coaching question, “so, when we conclude our time together, how will you know that our time was well spent?” 
His response….”I just want to stay under the radar. I don’t want to attract a lot of attention and want my boss to leave me alone and let me do my job. Tell me how I can accomplish that.”
This guy’s story is anything but inspiring! But, I thought heck, if this in not a teachable moment then I don’t know one. My interpretation of what he was saying was “how can I make sure I have no influence?” So for all those who would aspire for more influence, do the opposite. Here we go:
1. Make sure you talk a lot about yourself when you first meet others.
2. Blame everyone else for the botched relationships in your life. One of my favorite authors Andy Stanley would ask, “what’s the common denominator here?”
3. Make sure you don’t volunteer for anything.
4. Hang around other people who feel the way you do.
5. Be critical of your boss.
6. Don’t let anyone hold you accountable for the things you say. It’s just words. And besides, it’s your true feelings.
7. Don’t participate in meetings. Heck, they are just a waste of your time.
Sometimes I take for granted that this path I walk everyday is full of people who are others-centric, committed to creating inspirational transactions every single day.
The powerful reality is, to depart from the path of no influence is just a choice away.
Stay the course. Raise the inspiration factor where you are and watch your influence grow.
August 4, 2010
I confess that I do not practice a lot of constraint when it comes to great coffee. I have Peete’s delivered to my door step to enhance my mornings. Then some time before lunch, I will go seek out a quad-breve-machiato with one raw sugar… any one of the three of these elements would be addicting but combine them all into a hot beverage and it’s just addicting.
There are some great boutique places around Roswell and Alpharetta, Georgia to explore, which provides a really nice alternative to my favorite S-Bux around the corner. So, this morning, I walk into the Element shop on Crabapple Street. Take my seat and wait for a good morning greeting or maybe just to be acknowledged by either one of the two baristas behind the counter. Instead they were busy writing on their mini-chalk boards all the specials for the day… I finally spoke up
"Maybe if I ignore this guy he will go away"
in gentle but admittedly quasi sarcastic tone, “would it be better if I came back later?” And she said, “no, why? Did you want something to drink?” I really wanted to respond by saying “no, I came in to watch you guys post your specials on those cute little chalk-boards.” But, they would have been anything but inspiring.
What a teachable moment this turned out to be.
As the two baristas were writing, I did some quick math. My particular drink cost $4.85 x 3 times/week x 52 = $756.60 annually plus the usual 20% gratuity, comes to 907.92. This is approximately the revenue they just lost from a single customer. I confess that maybe their mini-chalk boards will make this up in upsales, etc., but I doubt it.
So, what did I learn from this excursion?
1. A customer facing employee is a powerful force to make or break a brand. I have NO doubt that the proprietor would be horrified to think any customer would walk away with an experience like I just had. Yet, it is clear that the intrinsic values of their brand had not been assimilated in and through the lives of their customer-facing workers. So, they violated the first principle of inspiration… that of authenticity.
2. When we do not acknowledge and affirm people, we don’t just lose them as a customer, we enlist them as an adversary. In other words, to not affirm people in our lives is not consequence neutral. In this case it happens to be about employee to customer but the lesson could apply to other relationships as well. Supervisor to subordinate, parent to child, friend to friend, spouse to spouse.
July 23, 2010
Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career.
Read the Executive Summary
Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.
The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR.
Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”
I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.
When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is…,” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.
I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.
That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.
My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.
On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
Sidebar IconThe Class of 2010 (Located at the end of this article)
As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.
One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind’s eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteem—feeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if it’s practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. That’s unfortunate. Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.
I want students to leave my classroom knowing that.
Create a Strategy for Your Life
A theory that is helpful in answering the second question—How can I ensure that my relationship with my family proves to be an enduring source of happiness?—concerns how strategy is defined and implemented. Its primary insight is that a company’s strategy is determined by the types of initiatives that management invests in. If a company’s resource allocation process is not managed masterfully, what emerges from it can be very different from what management intended. Because companies’ decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns, companies shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.
Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
It’s quite startling that a significant fraction of the 900 students that HBS draws each year from the world’s best have given little thought to the purpose of their lives. I tell the students that HBS might be one of their last chances to reflect deeply on that question. If they think that they’ll have more time and energy to reflect later, they’re nuts, because life only gets more demanding: You take on a mortgage; you’re working 70 hours a week; you have a spouse and children.
For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it. When I was a Rhodes scholar, I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth. That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it—and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.
Had I instead spent that hour each day learning the latest techniques for mastering the problems of autocorrelation in regression analysis, I would have badly misspent my life. I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned. I promise my students that if they take the time to figure out their life purpose, they’ll look back on it as the most important thing they discovered at HBS. If they don’t figure it out, they will just sail off without a rudder and get buffeted in the very rough seas of life. Clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces.
My purpose grew out of my religious faith, but faith isn’t the only thing that gives people direction. For example, one of my former students decided that his purpose was to bring honesty and economic prosperity to his country and to raise children who were as capably committed to this cause, and to each other, as he was. His purpose is focused on family and others—as mine is.
The choice and successful pursuit of a profession is but one tool for achieving your purpose. But without a purpose, life can become hollow.
Allocate Your Resources
Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.
I have a bunch of “businesses” that compete for these resources: I’m trying to have a rewarding relationship with my wife, raise great kids, contribute to my community, succeed in my career, contribute to my church, and so on. And I have exactly the same problem that a corporation does. I have a limited amount of time and energy and talent. How much do I devote to each of these pursuits?
Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.
When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.
If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.
Create a Culture
There’s an important model in our class called the Tools of Cooperation, which basically says that being a visionary manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s one thing to see into the foggy future with acuity and chart the course corrections that the company must make. But it’s quite another to persuade employees who might not see the changes ahead to line up and work cooperatively to take the company in that new direction. Knowing what tools to wield to elicit the needed cooperation is a critical managerial skill.
The theory arrays these tools along two dimensions—the extent to which members of the organization agree on what they want from their participation in the enterprise, and the extent to which they agree on what actions will produce the desired results. When there is little agreement on both axes, you have to use “power tools”—coercion, threats, punishment, and so on—to secure cooperation. Many companies start in this quadrant, which is why the founding executive team must play such an assertive role in defining what must be done and how. If employees’ ways of working together to address those tasks succeed over and over, consensus begins to form. MIT’s Edgar Schein has described this process as the mechanism by which a culture is built. Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture. Culture, in compelling but unspoken ways, dictates the proven, acceptable methods by which members of the group address recurrent problems. And culture defines the priority given to different types of problems. It can be a powerful management tool.
In using this model to address the question, How can I be sure that my family becomes an enduring source of happiness?, my students quickly see that the simplest tools that parents can wield to elicit cooperation from children are power tools. But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.
If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.
Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake
We’re taught in finance and economics that in evaluating alternative investments, we should ignore sunk and fixed costs, and instead base decisions on the marginal costs and marginal revenues that each alternative entails. We learn in our course that this doctrine biases companies to leverage what they have put in place to succeed in the past, instead of guiding them to create the capabilities they’ll need in the future. If we knew the future would be exactly the same as the past, that approach would be fine. But if the future’s different—and it almost always is—then it’s the wrong thing to do.
This theory addresses the third question I discuss with my students—how to live a life of integrity (stay out of jail). Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails. Justification for infidelity and dishonesty in all their manifestations lies in the marginal cost economics of “just this once.”
I’d like to share a story about how I came to understand the potential damage of “just this once” in my own life. I played on the Oxford University varsity basketball team. We worked our tails off and finished the season undefeated. The guys on the team were the best friends I’ve ever had in my life. We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament—and made it to the final four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?”
I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game.
In many ways that was a small decision—involving one of several thousand Sundays in my life. In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again. But looking back on it, resisting the temptation whose logic was “In this extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK” has proven to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? My life has been one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over in the years that followed.
The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.
Remember the Importance of Humility
I got this insight when I was asked to teach a class on humility at Harvard College. I asked all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility. For example, you would never steal from someone, because you respect that person too much. You’d never lie to someone, either.
It’s crucial to take a sense of humility into the world. By the time you make it to a top graduate school, almost all your learning has come from people who are smarter and more experienced than you: parents, teachers, bosses. But once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too. When we see people acting in an abusive, arrogant, or demeaning manner toward others, their behavior almost always is a symptom of their lack of self-esteem. They need to put someone else down to feel good about themselves.
Choose the Right Yardstick
This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.
I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.
I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
July 21, 2010
The sonic boom is one of the phenomenon’s I never get tired of. The explosion in the air, the shaking of the ground, and the rattling of the windows, I love it. Just a slight refresher from sixth grade science, a sonic boom occurs when an object flies through the air traveling faster than the speed of sound. As it breaks through the sound barrier, shock waves are released, affecting everyone within its reach. Who has not turned to the person nearest them post a sonic boom and said out loud, “What was that!” The experience is difficult to ignore.
We need more sonic boom visionaries in business today________ Leaders who can break through the barriers of apathy, cynicism and criticism. I have really enjoyed reading and learning more about Tony Hsieh of Zappos. A true sonic boom kind of leader. He broke the traditional corporate sound barrier and has rattled the windows of business.
Be Authenic.
Zappos has forged an authentic brand by blurring the lines between personal values and corporate values. When dealing with customers or with fellow team members, there is never need for pause to make sure the right demeanor is being displayed. There is complete and total integrity between personal and business.
As a sonic boom visionary would have it, everyone within the eco-system of Zappos is affected. No matter what position one is hired for, everyone must go through the same four weeks of training with the emphasis being talking to customers on the phone. Here might be a good way to create some shock-waves for your place of business. Enlist the entire C-suite to sit in a cube and talk with customers/clients for a week. In the case with Zappos, this ensures that so called “customer-care” is more than just something that is bolted onto the brand, it is a sure way of embedding the values into the fabric of the culture, guaranteeing a truly authentic experience for customers, vendors, and yes… to and through employees. Another example would be Home Depot. I have met top executives from Home Depot on the floor of certain stores wearing an apron and serving customers, encouraging employees.
They were not just “spying” on employees. They had mad a conscience choice to set aside a certain amount of time to serve customers.
Vision Must be Memorable.
Sonic boom vision will make the vision memorable. Does “I have a dream” ring a bell? You bet. What about “Buy one pair of shoes and we will donate a pair to a needy children.” You bet. It’s from a company out of Santa Monica, California (number 23 on the Most Inspiring Company list). The fact is every brand has an opportunity to create some kind of message, story that is memorable. I will always remember the day I heard President John F. Kennedy state his vision of space travel beginning with putting a man on the moon. Memorable indeed. When I am involved in uncovering the essence of an organization or that of a person and it takes longer than a single phrase to describe what they do, it’s a clear indication they need to work on this principle in order to become a sonic boom visionary.
When I meet people, I find they are quick to tell “what they do” and are very much challenged to share “why they do what they do.”
Find the why of your life and the what will follow.
Become a sonic boom visionary. Lead your company to be a sonic boom brand. Watch people as they turn to one another and say, “Did you hear that!”
July 15, 2010
Have you ever had one of those restless nights? I recently had one of those where I was fast asleep at 9:00 p.m. and around 1:00, heard the crash of my I-pad falling from the nightstand to the floor. I blamed it on the dog but can’t for sure swear by that. It was alarming enough to keep me awake until the alarm went off at 4:00.
Interesting thing happened during those three hours of total silence. I started mapping my mind… you know, my thoughts. Took out my journal and frantically began writing down all the things that were coming to mind. I actually got entertained looking at all this stuff flowing onto paper. It was a great teachable moment! First some basic observations and then the lessons learned:
1. T.V. and infomercials really do suck between the hours of 1:00-4:00. (Maybe you could leave me a reco for next time if you think differently).
2. Dogs can snore.
3. The things I was worried about wanted to dominate the flow of thinking.
4. Once I got focused on a particular problem to solve or focused on an opportunity to develop, it was exhilarating.
And what did I learn?
1. I can control my mood based on what I choose to focus on and I can create focus by writing and/or mapping it out on paper.
2. I can control worry by getting to what might be the worst case scenario in my mind, and then, by faith, know that even if the worst happens, it is still O.K. We are a part of a bigger picture than just what we can personally see.
3. Getting congruency between who I am, what I believe, what I do, and how I live makes me a confident and persuasive and keeps my mind from going into unproductive places when things are quiet.
And for all those who are still gasping about my busted I-pad…. it’s O.K. My friends at Apple saw fit to replace it!
June 30, 2010
BP’s best course to recovery.
When you consider the key findings of what makes for a Most Inspiring Company, it would be fair to say that BP is the complete antithesis of those principles. So, I get this call from a radio station out of D.C. the other day asking me if I would be willing to comment on what it would take for BP to ever become a Most Inspiring Company.
Interested?
Here goes. And can you believe I am offering this up to BP for free if anyone reading can get this message to them… please let Tony know I will happily guide them down this path.
1. Become authentic! Hmmm, that would mean being able to somehow vicariously feel what the victims on the Gulf coast feel. Even if Tony is not available or capable for the task, what about deploying 1,000 BP employees and go serve the people on the Gulf Coast. Knock on doors, answer questions, clear out the bureaucracy and burdensome so called “due-diligence” for claims, mop up oil… don’t just pay hired guns… touch it, feel it, experience it first hand, on your hands.
2. Let America help! BP seems to think that they can fix the devastation by throwing lots of money at it. But, what they have missed is the opportunity to rally America, the most generous people on the globe to help. How? Donate 10 of that 20 Billion Dollars to the charities who are on the front line as a challenge grant. Meaning, if the charities will rally their donors from around the country to give towards the clean up and restoration of the coast, BP will match their gift dollar for dollar with no limits. Imagine the outpouring of support. And I have a feeling it would not be nearly as difficult for the victims to qualify for support with the charities as it does with BP. Speak of which brings me to number 3.
3. Remove the burden of accounting from these fishermen! True story… I am from south Louisiana. I know some of these fishermen. My friend, I will simply call Al, is a fourth generation shrimper out of Houma, Louisiana. He goes to the BP claims office and attempts to file a claim. BP claims officer says, “bring me 5 years of income statements and we will see if you qualify.” The next day he comes back to the claims office, waits in line, brings his box of records and the best he can come up with is three years worth of income statements. “Sorry, we need five, not three.” Al leaves.. truly destitute because of some pinhead type policy of BP’s.
Will BP ever have the makings of a Most Inspiring Company? It won’t happen through more spin, that’s for sure. But to even have the potential to be so, they have got to begin now to choose the path they have resisted to this point.
Funny how no matter what the “oil spill” in your life may be, there is a teachable moment here for us all. Be authentic and don’t mask our way out of it by casting blame or pretending to be someone we are not. Engage others to help us get beyond our own limitations. And don’t forget to serve others even in our greatest need.
June 23, 2010
Taken from the Greek, ology refers to the study of. Implied is that as an ologist of anything, we are always in the pursuit of knowing more about the subject. As much as we might know, as expert as others may think us to be, there is always more to know or a better way to apply what we know.
Meet my friend Harvey. I came to know Harvey on one of my frequent trips in and out of DFW airport. His office is in one of the Delta Crown Rooms. Just walking by his place of business, he called out to me about how “my pups could use some TLC.” I paused and acknowledged that it had been a few trips since the last time I took time for a good shoe shine. So, I approached his chair. As I did, Harvey had one of those grins that just draws you into conversation and without hesitation, he introduced himself as a “bootologist.”
At that point, I could care less what the price was going to be, I knew I was in for an inspiring experience. Twelve minutes later, I paid Harvey for more than just some TLC for my pups. I walked away with a sense of understanding that productivity would skyrocket if people would be an “ologist” at whatever it is that they do.
Here’s my observation concerning what exactly an “ologist” looks like in hopes that more of us would aspire to be one:
1. Recognize that no matter how menial the task at hand is, there is always an opportunity to either learn more about what we are doing or a way to perhaps do what we are doing better. The greatest ability of all is “teachability.” Love to learn. Ask for content. Share with others what you are reading. Ask for constructive criticism. Make a commitment to always be learning.
2. Love or leave what you are doing. Even if it means having to earn less or have a lesser title. I have never met a person any happier and prouder of what he does than Harvey. There is no way to be an “ologist” doing stuff you don’t like and doing it with people you don’t like working with. You may have to change your lifestyle, but being a joyful ologist would no doubt be worth it.
3. Evangelistic. Yes, when you are an ologist, you are evangelistic about what you are pursuing. Harvey did not long for customers and he was not reading the paper while waiting for someone else to come sit in his chair. He was getting converts as they walked by. You may think but, “my job is not to sell.” With all due respect, we should all be an evangelistic ambassador for the mission of the company we work for. If that is not happening, then as an organization, you need to change from the inside out. As an individual, my encouragement to you, get yourself involved in something at work that you can be evangelistic about. If that’s too challenging to do, face it, you probably either need to have a change of heart or a change of venues. It just a choice. Nothing more, nothing less. Just a choice.
What kind of “ologist” are you? The very next time you meet someone new, I dare you to introduce yourself to someone else as Harvey had introduced himself to me… with a huge smile, and a suffix that will be the envy of all you meet.
Now, go inspire someone!
June 16, 2010
I’d like to ask you to help me make a list of all the things we learn from dad. I have the wonderful privilege of being the son of a wonder dad. Funny how often he tells me how he wishes he had done more for me, been more available, etc. and I honestly just assure him that I could not have had a more positive, joyful, blessed environment. So much so, that I could only hope that my own kids will think of me as I think of him.
So, as a way to celebrate Father’s day, I thought I’d get an early start and get you to help by together making a list of all things we learned from dad and even the dad-type figures in our lives. So, here we go:
1. “Don’t worry about the mule, just load the wagon.” He taught a lot through these kinds of sayings. I actually googled this phrase to see if I could uncover the root of it and the only reference I could find was something related to square dancing. Go figure. But, when he spoke it to me, it meant, quite sweating about the little things and keep the main thing the main thing. The more complex life gets, the more I need to hear that voice saying, “son, don’t worry about the mule, just load the wagon.”
2. The love of “work”- Work was always a fun experience as a kid. I can honestly say it was a great day when at night I had blisters from post-hole digging. When I had paint in between my toes because I got more on me than I did the house I was supposed to be painting. When I was just dead tired from hard work. To this day, I still love hard work. Thank you dad for that lesson.
3. The love of books. I love the smell of books. I love scatter reading from as many as five and ten books in a single hour. I love the fact that my life is richer because my dad taught me to love to read.
4. To be a tither. To give no less than 10% of what I earn away to help make the world a better place, to help others in need. I saw his faithfulness in this for years and I saw how often it was returned to him many times over. Because of his example, I find real joy in giving.
Your turn… what have you learned from your dad?
June 7, 2010
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