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Archive for March, 2010

Passion Sustains Your Efforts

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

candle_flameIt’s Sunday night and I’ve been staring at the screen trying to find something to write for you, but my mind is totally blank. This doesn’t happen very often, but when it does I tend to look back at years of posts for inspiration.

When I did that I came across something I wrote in 2006 when the same thing happened.

Passion beats the blues

On low days (we all have them), as I sit here writing and sending these words into the ether, I wonder if the people who read my blog find it as useful as I mean it to be. I wonder how many people read MAPping Company Success, and, to be honest, I sometimes wonder if anybody would actually care if I stopped writing it.

Then, yesterday, I happened to read Brandstorming and was reminded that, when I get right down to it, I’m writing my own passion and, even without my clients’ comments, I know that it has value and works.

Now all I have to do on those odd blue days is remind myself that passion pays in many ways. (Hey! It rhymes—how ’bout that:)

What I wrote then is still true four years and more than a thousand posts later.

We all have days when we wonder why we do what we do; how we can keep going when we’re stale or find ourselves wondering if [whatever] really matters.

Now and then it’s good to take a step back and recognize that we’re going to have these days; that although our passion will sustain us in the long run it doesn’t always burn with uniform intensity. At times we may even feel like the flame has died, but if we keep going we’ll find it again and it will be stronger than ever.

In short, you need to trust your passion; if it’s real it will never desert you, but it might need a day off now and then.

Image credit: mooncross on sxc.hu

mY generation: 6 of 100 Ways to Get Fired

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

See all mY generation posts here.

6of100

Quotable Quotes: Bette Davis

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

Bette-DavisThe weather was perfect today, so I spent eight hours with no breaks working in my garden barley denting what needs to be done.

At about hour five Bette Davis’ comment “Old age ain’t no place for sissies” kept cycling through my brain and boy, is it accurate!

So I decided what other words of wisdom that great lady might have for us.

I like this thought, “Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.” I like it because it really works and you end up accomplishing stuff that is truly amazing.

Davis’ other work insight that really hits home is this, “Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.” You don’t have to be an actor to benefit from this; apply it to every facet of your life and you’ll find the sky is bluer, the sun warmer, people are more interesting and work is more like play.

Terminating relationships, whether an employee or friend, is very difficult and many times people do anything to avoid doing it and it’s hard to say which is worse, especially when we feel sorry for them. But before backing off, it is good to remember Davis’ comment about what they do to us.

“The weak are the most treacherous of us all. They come to the strong and drain them. They are bottomless. They are insatiable. They are always parched and always bitter. They are everyone’s concern and like vampires they suck our life’s blood.”

I’ve always gone my own way, sometimes it was easier, more often more difficult, but even so, I think I’d rather have Sinatra’s words on my tombstone than Davis’, “You know what I’m going to have on my gravestone?”She did it the hard way.””

The final thought I want to leave you with is one that applies more often in hindsight than at the time. “Life is a jest; and all things show it. I thought so once; but now I know it.”

Image credit: Aura983 on flickr

Expand Your Mind: Inclined to Innovation

Saturday, March 20th, 2010

expand-your-mind

Innovation and how to make it happen is the highest priority item on any company agenda—and if it isn’t it should be.

Just how do you make innovation flourish?

Collaboration ranks high on the list of required actions; as Saul Kaplan, founder and Chief Catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory, says, “It is humans and the organizations we live in that are both stubbornly resistant to experimentation and change.”

“What if” drives innovation according to Jeff Dyer, a professor at Brigham Young University, who started out thinking that creativity and innovation were hard-wired, but decided after six years of research that they aren’t, “One key characteristic among the visionaries? The tendency to ask questions — a lot of them — and to challenge the status quo — plenty.”

Bruce Nussbaum, who writes about design and innovation for Business Week, talks about Diego Rodriquez, who writes Metacool blog, and has developed his own set of 17 Innovation Principles; he illustrates number 12, cultivating innovation instead of managing it, using a conversation with Porsche’s head of design Michael Mauer, “One of my major goals is to give the team freedom in order to have a maximum of creativity,” to which Rodriquez says, “This feels very much to me like a “cultivation mindset”. … He is a curator, a director, a cultivator.  As you can see from the stunning new Porsche 918 Spyder pictured above, his approach speaks for itself.”

Next, Scott Anthony, Managing Director of Innosight Ventures, talks about what stops innovation. “You can almost always find compelling ideas and well-developed plans. … The hard part is in the doing, in taking the requisite steps to translate an idea that looks great on paper into profits.”

Now two looks at innovation in action at opposite ends of the spectrum.

According to Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president of strategic and emerging business development at Microsoft, “Innovation is overused as a word. We are at the juncture of where… it’s time to be thinking about how to accelerate, and accelerate using technology as an enabler not an automater.” This approach seems to involve investing in startups where innovation flourishes and buy the results.

Then there is true innovation, the kind based on real-world experience and need as exemplified by Michael Wielgat, a Chicago Fire Dept. lieutenant with 22 years of experience. He invented the “Hero Pipe” to help firefighters battle high-floor blazes. He’s been working on it since 2005, bootstrapping the effort. “Homeland Security has invited Wielgat to apply for a grant to continue development of his invention. He could use the money. He’s tried to get funding before from other sources, but has been turned down, he says, because they supported only fire departments or nonprofit organizations.”

Image credit: pedroCarvalho on flickr

Book Review: Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

Friday, March 19th, 2010

How many times have you heard it—focus on the customer blah, blah, blah?
How often does it prove to be true?

How many times have you said it— it’s about what the customer wants blah, blah, blah?
How often do you practice it?

For too many companies being customer-centric happens when it’s convenient—if it happens at all.

Reorganize-for-ResilienceEnter Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Ranjay Gulati, the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business at Harvard Business School, who offers a comprehensive, practical and inplementable guide to creating a customer-centric business.

Utilizing an outside-in approach means focusing on delivering something of value to customers, as opposed to focusing on products and sales.

Gulati discusses 5 key levers from both “why” and “how”:

  • Coordination: Connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses.
  • Cooperation: Align all employees around the shared goal of customer solutions.
  • Clout: Redistribute power to “bridge builders” and customer champions.
  • Capability: Develop employees’ skills at tackling changing customer needs.
  • Connection: Blend partners’ offerings with yours to provide unique customer solutions.

Gulati is blunt and his approach isn’t for those who prefer incremental change to revolutionary, but it is MAP that will stop many leaders from embracing Reorganize for Resilience—because you can’t implement that in which you don’t sincerely believe.

Since the advice to be customer-centric isn’t new, following it isn’t easy and may actually require difficult, even painful changes to your MAP, so why bother with Reorganize for Resilience?

Because it carries the biggest bottom-line payoff, both short and long-term, in any economy and for any company—from Fortune 50 to the neighborhood copy shop.

Image credit: Harvard Business Publishing

Leadership’s Future: To Hire and Hold (Millennials)

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

out_the_doorWho do kids follow?

For the last several decades study after study have shown that kids pay more attention to the opinions of their peers than their parents.

More and more they take information and process it on their own.

Sure, their opinions are colored by the MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) of those who raised them, but not necessarily to copy them—sometimes they take the exact opposite position.

When it comes to working there is a belief that Millennials are different from all previous generations.

It’s not so much that what they want in their workplace is different from Boomers and Gen X; it’s that Millennials are more articulate in explaining it, more demanding in receiving it and faster to move if they don’t get it.

Last year I coined a new term, aMillennial, referring to someone who was chronologically of that generation, but without the entitled mentality—it’s the entitlement that irks most people.

In a recent survey new grads talked about staying in their company for 8.9 years, but HR assumes they will leave.

Razor Suleman, the 35-year-old CEO and founder of I Love Rewards, notes that U.S. Department of Labor statistics say most millennials will have 10 jobs by the time they’re 38.

“HR managers turn that around and say. . . . ‘That’s what they’re like,’ ” as if the employees only planned to stay for that long, said Suleman. “They don’t sort of turn it around and say, ‘Hey, wait a second, they wanted to stay 8.9 years and I missed seven years of retention.’ “

Most people look for a job, but hope to find a home.

Think about what you want in your home—great siblings who are interested and willing to help you succeed; great parents who understand that you need to make mistakes to learn and grow, who openly share their knowledge, but don’t expect you to be a carbon copy; who offer ways to stretch yourself with challenging tasks that contribute to the family’s success; a warm, safe physical environment—fancy or not; a fair allowance.

Translated in to workplace terms that’s what all generations want; aMillennials are just more willing to leave home to find it.

“Because if I was in a job that I was paid well, I loved what I was doing, I was empowered to make decisions, I was advancing, why wouldn’t I stay at a company?” — Rob Bianchin, college senior

Image credit: shirleybnz on sxc.hu

Wordless Wednesday: Good Advice for Life

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

good-advice

Image credit: Torley on flickr

Ducks in a Row: Vision and Diversity

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Two questions. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, tell me

  1. If the thrown item represents vision how appealing is it to a diverse group?
  2. How diverse is the cast?

(Hey folks, I’d really appreciate your sharing your thoughts on this one.)

Click here for more thoughts on diversity.

Image credit: Svadilfari on flickr and jkvetchy on YouTube

Managing in Nonprofits

Monday, March 15th, 2010

managing-peopleI frequently hear from managers in nonprofits that it’s frustrating that so much of the management information available can’t really be implemented in their specialized environment.

I was dumbfounded the first time I heard that and asked why not; I’ve ask the same question every time since (a lot of times) and get similar answers.

These usually fall in one of two broad categories

  • they are focused on “doing good” unlike “business;” and/or
  • they are staffed by volunteers.

I have an accounting friend who hears similar reactions when he insists on good accounting practices and financial controls.

Many say that they are more comfortable with leadership advice, since communicating a vision is part of their job description, but setting standards, developing and implementing accountability and then holding people to them feels too “corporate.”

When this happens I usually refer them to take a look at the path blazed by the Robin Hood Foundation and, more recently, read the interview with Tachi Yamada, M.D., president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program

These five random comments from Yamada are no different than what you’ll hear from any manager skilled in driving innovation, productivity and finding solutions through his people.

  • I think the most difficult transition for anybody from being a worker bee to a manager is this issue of delegation. What do you give up? How can you have the team do what you would do yourself without you doing it?
  • That probably was the most important lesson I learned — that what’s out there is more important than what you already know, and that you’d better go out and learn what it is out there that you don’t know.
  • So what I learned from him is that when you actually are with somebody, you’ve got to make that person feel like nobody else in the world matters. (no cell no blackberry)
  • One of the things I’ve learned is that you can’t go into an organization, fire everybody and bring in everybody you want. You have to work with the people you have. … Everybody has their good points. Everybody has their bad points. If you can bring out the best in everybody, then you can have a great organization.

Read the interview and understand that what he talks about applies equally well to small, local non-profits as it does to the multibillion dollar organization he runs—not to mention for-profit businesses of any size.

Image credit: saschapohflepp on flickr

mY generation: Spring Break

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

See all mY generation posts here.

sbreak

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