Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
I’ve always found all the talk about how to learn to be a leader amusing. That’s because all the book learnin’ doesn’t mean squat unless it accurately translates to actions. Even studying real life leaders only takes you so far, since they approach situations based on who they are and their life experiences and you aren’t them and never will be.
That’s why no matter the expert or their success you still need to at least tweak their solutions to fit your situation and your MAP.
And be sure to read the comment’s at both Steve’s site and mine.
Today Steve Roesler wrote a terrific post briefly recapping a Peter Drucker article in the Harvard Business Review called “Managing Oneself” (Steve included a link to the full article).
A part of that article is The Act of Noticing and it really resonated with me.
“While everyone is blogging, Twittering or tweeting, linking in, booking their faces, and coming up with other digital ways to “connect”, it would be good to ask: “Am I too busy to notice?”
I bookmarked an article last week that included solid research about the bulk of the population preferring to buy goods and services through face-to-face contact. Now I can’t find it because I was so darned connected online I didn’t actually pay attention to the title or where I filed it.
This leads into the video below. I was reminded of Emotional Intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman’s TED talk a couple of years ago. If you want to know the connectedness between emotions, business, and “noticing”, this will be time very well spent. Close your door. Now. Tell you’re boss you are doing professional development. You are.”
I recently wrote that“No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.”
All I can add is that we better start noticing before all the lights are turned off for good.
Now go see your friends and tell them; have a ‘noticing’ contest together with a ‘doing’ contest.
It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.
This Golden Oldie dates to 2015, although many of the links are much earlier. Suffice it to say that two years later more companies have turned to technology and more people spend their days with screens than with each other. Simultaneously, engagement has plummeted, moral is in the basement, and toxic cultures are on the rise.
Join me tomorrow when we explore the connection between the two.
A growing body of neuroscience research has begun to reveal the exact ways in which information age technologies cut against the natural grain of the human mind. Our understanding of all kinds of information is shaped by our physical interaction with that information. Move from paper to screen, and your brain loses valuable “topographical” markers for memory and insight.
Although screens have their strengths in presenting information — they are, for example, good at encouraging browsing — they are lousy at helping us absorb, process, and retain information from a focused source. And good old handwriting, though far slower for most of us than typing, better deepens conceptual understanding versus taking notes on a computer — even when the computer user works without any internet or social media distractions.
In short, when you want to improve how well you remember, understand, and make sense of crucial information about your organization, sometimes it’s best to put down the tablet and pick up a pencil.
The work described was done by the Drucker Institute and is easy to try with your people.
The great news if you want to try unplugging is that the basic techniques are simple and free. Here’s an Un/Workshop-style exercise you can try on your own time, with your own team, in just a half-hour: Including yourself, get six or more of your colleagues together. Divide yourselves into two or more small groups. Give each group one piece of paper with a single question printed on it: Who is our customer?
Depending how young your team is you may incur some minor costs — like the need to shop for paper and pencils and possibly explain how to use them.
Wally Bock is one of the smartest guys I know on the subject of being a boss. I find his approaches on everything to be based in the kind of common sense that is easily recognized as being bang-on.
If I knew Wally better, and he didn’t live on the other coast, I would have kissed him for his post last Friday.
But, since that isn’t possible, I’m reposting it here — in total gratitude.
Did you know that there are almost 300 books that Amazon thinks contain “leadership secrets?” Do a Google search for the phrase and you’ll get more than nine million results in about half a second. That makes me crazy.
We’ve studied leaders and leadership for millennia. Is it really possible that there’s a secret out there that we haven’t uncovered? This sounds to me like those “medical breakthroughs” that are announced in infomercials.
Those thoughts started me thinking about other “leadership” things that make me crazy. Here they are in no particular order.
Anyone can lead
Really? In theory maybe, but in real life there are people who don’t want the accountability. Others are pathologically afraid of confrontation. And there are others who won’t make decisions. Anyone can have influence, but not everyone is willing to lead.
Don’t bring me a problem unless you bring a solution.
Oh right! If I see a problem and can’t find a solution you don’t want to know about it? Do you really think it’s better to go on in blissful ignorance until the problem blows up all over you? Besides, problems are often where progress starts.
That stupid bus!
Getting the right people on the bus and then deciding where to go sounds good, until you think about it. First off, most managers don’t get that luxury. They have to achieve the goals they’re given with the people they’ve got. But more fundamentally, how can you know the characteristics of “the right people” until you know where you’re going?
For the record, this might make sense for some start-ups. It did for Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.
Leaders versus Managers
Argh! I don’t care what Warren Bennis said. It’s not about people. It’s about different kinds of work. If you’re responsible for the performance of a group you have to lead and you have to manage and you have to supervise. You don’t get a choice.
For the record, Peter Drucker never talked about leaders and managers as separate kinds of people, but he did discuss leadership and management.
A growing body of neuroscience research has begun to reveal the exact ways in which information age technologies cut against the natural grain of the human mind. Our understanding of all kinds of information is shaped by our physical interaction with that information. Move from paper to screen, and your brain loses valuable “topographical” markers for memory and insight.
Although screens have their strengths in presenting information — they are, for example, good at encouraging browsing — they are lousy at helping us absorb, process, and retain information from a focused source. And good old handwriting, though far slower for most of us than typing, better deepens conceptual understanding versus taking notes on a computer — even when the computer user works without any internet or social media distractions.
In short, when you want to improve how well you remember, understand, and make sense of crucial information about your organization, sometimes it’s best to put down the tablet and pick up a pencil.
The work described was done by the Drucker Institute and is easy to try with your people.
The great news if you want to try unplugging is that the basic techniques are simple and free. Here’s an Un/Workshop-style exercise you can try on your own time, with your own team, in just a half-hour: Including yourself, get six or more of your colleagues together. Divide yourselves into two or more small groups. Give each group one piece of paper with a single question printed on it: Who is our customer?
Depending how young your team is you may incur some minor costs — like the need to shop for paper and pencils and possibly explain how to use them.
I’ve cited Lao Tzu multiple times over the years, but, unlike most management gurus, not Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
I never liked battle analogies; never understood the idea of “killing the competition.” In spite of what I was told was my naiveté, it seemed to me that loving the customer was more important.
While those battle terms are still around, it seems like I was on to something way back then.
According to Frank Cespedes, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of Aligning Strategy and Sales those fighting words get the focus wrong.
Strategy gurus constantly use analogies with battle plans for “competitive advantage” versus the enemy. But the metaphor is not suitable because business, unlike a war or battle, is not primarily about defeating an enemy. Business is primarily about customer value: targeting customer groups and tailoring products, sales and other activities to serve those groups better or differently than others. (…) Peter Drucker emphasized, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” That’s also the purpose of any business strategy: make customers, not war.
Winning customers is actually pretty simple, delight them, amaze them and provide them with something they either need or want.
Do all that and the competition will fade away in the eyes of your customers.
When most people think about Peter Drucker, if they think of him at all, remember his leadership quotes, because those are what their business professor focused on. But Drucker’s insights are far broader and of more use in almost any part of your life.
The need for clear communication is recognized as key, whether in your professional or personal life. As Drucker points out, “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”
Lifelong learning is the mantra of the Twenty-first Century, but it was Drucker who explained years ago why it was so important, “Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”
When working to solve a thorny problem most of us know it’s important to think it through and create a plan of action, but it is Drucker who reminds you of what to do after you act, “Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”
In yesterday’s post there was a link to an article about bosses who believe that position yields power, but, according to Drucker, it does just the opposite, “Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.”
Moreover, he offers a totally different view of successful management/leadership, “Accept the fact that we have to treat almost anybody as a volunteer.”
I found two statements about the future that Drucker made at separate times, but put together they sum up a great way to approach it. “The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different,” and “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
Finally, what really amazed me was finding that what I always considered my best asset and the one that did the most for my clients is the same one that Drucker claimed, “My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.”
Are you middle-aged? Or wonder what you will be like when you are? Then I have great news for you. Creativity and thinking skills—new brain studies show that middle-aged brains are excellent, making new connections and perking along at their prime in lots of areas.
Inductive reasoning and problem solving — the logical use of your brain and actually getting to solutions. We get the gist of an argument better. We’re better at sizing up a situation and reaching a creative solution.
Creativity is a subject that has always fascinated. Why could Rembrandt create magic with a brush while others produced nothing? Many people write, but how many Shakespears has the world produced? What is the difference between them? Perhaps new research will offer some insight.
“Creativity is kind of like pornography — you know it when you see it,” said Rex Jung, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. Dr. Jung, an assistant research professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, said his team was doing the first systematic research on the neurology of the creative process, including its relationship to personality and intelligence.
Creativity often leads to some kind of innovation, but it doesn’t lend itself to groupthink. As I’ve frequently written, creativity happens in those long, silent times when your mind is free to roam. New research shows that this is true.
To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone. …a hybrid process — in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers — resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process.
It was so-called financial innovation that brought down the global economy. Five years before it happened Warren Buffett called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction,” but four years before that Peter Drucker condemned that kind of financial innovation.
In a piece he penned in 1999, “Financial Services: Innovate or Die,” he frowned on the kind of transactions that have done such terrible damage to Goldman’s reputation and, more important, to the world economy. Since the 1970s, he wrote, “the only innovations” among banks “have been any number of allegedly ‘scientific’ derivatives.
“But these financial instruments are not designed to provide a service to customers,” Drucker continued. “They are designed to make the trader’s speculations more profitable and at the same time less risky—surely a violation of the basic laws of risk and unlikely to work. In fact, they are unlikely to work better than the inveterate gambler’s equally scientific system for beating the odds at Monte Carlo or Las Vegas.”
Finally, a public service announcement from me to you. No matter how openly you live your life in these days of social networking, I doubt you would post your tax returns of medical records online, let alone send them directly to the bad guys.
But that is exactly what happens when you use a public copier or return a leased one. A decade ago I learned that digital copiers are essentially computers, complete with hard drive, and every document copied is saved on that drive and readable with software that can be downloaded free on the Net. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe CBS News.
Monday Steve Roesler wrote a terrific post briefly recapping a Peter Drucker article in the Harvard Business Review called “Managing Oneself” (Steve included a link to the full article).
A part of that article is The Act of Noticing and it really resonated with me.
“While everyone is blogging, Twittering or tweeting, linking in, booking their faces, and coming up with other digital ways to “connect”, it would be good to ask: “Am I too busy to notice?”
I bookmarked an article last week that included solid research about the bulk of the population preferring to buy goods and services through face-to-face contact. Now I can’t find it because I was so darned connected online I didn’t actually pay attention to the title or where I filed it.
This leads into the video below. I was reminded of Emotional Intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman’s TED talk a couple of years ago. If you want to know the connectedness between emotions, business, and “noticing”, this will be time very well spent. Close your door. Now. Tell you’re boss you are doing professional development. You are.” x
I recently wrote that“No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.”
All I can add is that we better start noticing before all the lights are turned off for good.
Now go see your friends and tell them; have a ‘noticing’ contest together with a ‘doing’ contest.
Before you can practice random acts of kindness you need to notice.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote Leadership is All Hype (credit Peter Drucker for the title) and among the commenters was Bruce Lewin of Four Groups; as I told Bruce, his most recent comment deserved a full post response. (I hope you’ll take a moment to read the whole thread.)
This part of the conversation is focused directly on leadership as a business.
“Leadership is arguably a nascent industry.”
Leadership has been around for several thousand years, but it was only after WWII that it attracted practitioners who actually earned their living by teaching ‘leadership’ skills, in spite of “little consensus from suppliers, customers and even academics about what works. But that doesn’t stop either the selling or the buying.”
“I believe that there is a subconscious or unknown quantity to ‘leadership’ or self development, otherwise there would be more ‘if you do X you get Y’”
First, it seems to me that much of leadership marketing involves telling people that by learning X they will be able to do Y and the training involves teaching X.
If there is an unknown quantity it’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), which is know, but often ignored. I’ve never known or heard about anyone who was able to implement actions or ideas that weren’t at least synergistic with their MAP. So do X get Y works if, and only if, you can authentically do X.
“Self acceptance (and its derivative forms in language) are a lowest common denominator for human nature. People’s success/wellbeing/good stuff/bad stuff is a function of their self acceptance.”
I vehemently disagree with this and the proof of its invalidity is incarcerated across the country, found on welfare roles and in gangs and dropouts, as well as the C suite and Harvard.
Much of self-acceptance starts in infancy and stems from what we hear others say and their actions towards us.
Consider the thousands of kids every year who accept themselves as ‘slow’, when, in fact, they aren’t slow, but are bored or have a learning disability.
If enough people tell you something and eventually you believe it.
That’s as applicable to being told good things as being told bad—the input is internalized and you accept it as a truth about yourself.
Extending leadership throughout an organization makes perfect financial sense for the organization; obviously it makes sense for those in the leadership industry.
But I’m not at all sure that economies of scale will increase opportunities for all or a willingness to fund training for those who don’t jump forward—often because they’ve been told that they aren’t ‘leadership material’, which takes us back to that self-acceptance thing.
Sadly, I think the industry bears much of the responsibility for all the people who’ve missed their chance to be all they could be because the industry sold the idea to their management as well as themselves that leadership is only for the few, the special, the chosen.
Jim Stroup writes an amazing blog. He reads widely, thinks deeply and writes superbly—of course, it doesn’t hurt that we hold similar views on the subject of ‘leaders’.
Last Thursday Jim wrote Clarifying leadership and supplied me with my quotes for today.
“Leadership is all hype. We’ve had three great leaders in this century – Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.”
Jim considers this the most sensible thing Drucker ever said about leadership and I agree. Jim goes on to say,
“He was right. Those guys had it all: vision, oratorical ability, relationship building skills, charisma, relentless focus, outside the box thinking, follower-attracting magnetism…Moreover they had the unconstrained maneuver room to give their leadership the untrammeled free rein that the modern movement’s gurus also insist is vital.”
Hmmm, free rein. Isn’t that what deregulation gave our fearless ‘leaders’ on Wall Street and in corporate America?
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts 
When most people think about 
This part of the conversation is focused directly on leadership as a business.
