When I went looking for quotes from P. J. O’Rourke I expected a bonanza considering he is a political satirist, journalist, writer and author. I only found three worth sharing, but those three are excellent.

You certainly don’t have to be a Boomer to relate to the sentiment in this comment.

“I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a ”learning experience.” Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a ”learning experience.” It makes me feel less stupid.”

All you can say about O’Rourke’s view of blame and responsibility is ‘ain’t it the truth’.

“One of the annoying things about believing in free will and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it’s remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver’s license.”

Finally, O’Rourke does a spectacular job of identifying the real source of human travails throughout history.

“No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we’re looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn’t test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.”

As I said, quality is worth more than quantity.

Image credit: Wikimedia

Several years ago I read an article by Bill Buxton about risk; I think it’s worth reposting, because the article is as valuable today as it was then.

The Value of Risk

In an excellent post on risk, professor, researcher and author Bill Buxton says, “Entrepreneurs, like ice climbers, are often said to risk their necks. But there are ways to cut danger to sane levels—and some very good reasons to try.”

People often comment that both groups are, politely speaking, nuts.

After offering up a detailed explanation of ice climbing he comments, “…the four considerations employed by the ice climber are exactly the same as those used by the serial entrepreneur or the effective business person…”

They are training, tools, fitness and partners.

Buxton ends by saying,

“The most dangerous way of all to play it is so-called safe. Safe leads to atrophy and certain death—of spirit, culture, and enterprise. There is not a single institution of merit or worthy of respect in our society that was not created out of risk. Risk is not only not to be avoided, it is to be embraced—for survival.”

A quick and valuable read—whether you consider yourself a risk taker or not.

Training, tools, fitness and partners—those are the same considerations that make all parts of life not only successful, but worth living.

In a world moving ever faster, where 2008 is considered ancient history, it is worth recognizing that there is much wisdom to be found there.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/3000044567

I once read that potty training is the last time you can actually train human beings and from then on you must teach, which means presenting the information for them to learn.

You never hear the education establishment, politicians or the media talk about training students, they talk about what they need to learn—even though the focus is mainly on what they need to learn to score well on standardized tests as opposed to critical thinking.

Training means “to develop or form the habits, thoughts, or behavior of (a child or other person) by discipline and instruction.”

Try that on anyone over two and see how far that gets you.

Business focuses on critical thinking, yet business talks about training—training leaders, training managers, cross training skills.

I think the more conceptual the subject the more it resists training and the more it requires the kind of teaching that leads to learning, which requires an open mind and a willingness to change.

What do you think?

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Today’s selections started in one direction, veered towards another and then went off in a third. But that’s OK; I have great confidence in your ability to follow the sometimes torturous logic of my mind.

The first two present views of raising children. Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior is an essay describing the difference between “Chinese” parenting and “Western” parenting (although both terms are applied more widely); be sure to read some of the nearly 6000 comments. In direct contrast to the Chinese approach is the movement to restore playtime to kids in an effort to encourage imagination and creativity. They seem to be in direct conflict, but are they?

This HBR article brings up a related question: if not you, who? Who will push you to practice and grow as an adult? What happens if you stop working on yourself? How do you know when you need to improve?

Moving from what differentiates individuals to what differentiates organizations, especially organizations in a “dying” industry such as magazines. What allows the number two company to spend a billion dollars on acquisitions in less than a year while the number one company is closing title right and left?

And now a bit of levity to round out the day.

Most people scoff when others talk about their lucky shirt or special rock, but consider the beliefs harmless. Does superstition influence business? In a word, yes—everything from the stock market to productivity. Are you superstitious (you don’t have to answer out loud)?

Image credit:  MykReeve on flickr

Oh, to be a teenager again and know everything.

Or twenty-something in a first job with the sure knowledge that if we were the boss everything would run perfectly.

Or able to quit when bored or annoyed because there is no mortgage, kids, spouse-or-equivalent; no responsibility for anyone else and able to move back home if necessary.

We often look back and wonder why, why we changed, what went wrong.

We blame ourselves and forget that our world changed, too.

Sometimes those changes are bad, often they are good and more often they are a just a function of shifting priorities over time.

We forget that the world itself changed and too often we minimize the effect of those external changes if they don’t hit us directly.

We tend to forget that we are no longer the same person; that who we are today not only doesn’t do the same things as our past self, but, upon close inspection, doesn’t even want to do them.

Would you really give up who you are today? Because doing so means giving up all the experiences and relationships that shaped the current you.

It seems smarter to change the specifics with which you are dissatisfied and to do so with surgical precision, after all, if your finger were broken you wouldn’t amputate your arm.

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Today’s Expand Your Mind offers links to articles that not only inform, but may shake up your views and launch you in new directions.

Learning doesn’t stop when you leave school; it is a life-long process that often requires you to study. Study habits are usually formed early and carried throughout life, but what if the way you were taught to study and that you teach your kids isn’t the best way to learn? That is the intriguing idea coming from new research.

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. … The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget.

Discussions about corporate culture are everywhere these days. In this short interview Edgar H. Schein, Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus at MIT offers a new wrinkle on what corporate culture means theses days; he says to think in terms of cultural islands and the need for disparate groups to be synergistic, rather than homogenous. To all his examples of various cultural sources I would add the culture of individual managers, from CEO to team leader.

You are never going to integrate all of these cultures but you have got to get them aligned and get them working toward the same purpose.

Important as aligning sub cultures is, it can’t happen when the culture is as badly damaged as Home Depot’s after Bob Nardelli ran amok. Surprisingly, it is Frank Blake, another GE alum, recruited by Nardelli, who is successfully changing that.

Frank Blake’s mellow, it’s-not-about-me style helped him move Home Depot past the emotionally charged reign of predecessor Bob Nardelli and recapture some of the culture fostered by its founders. It also syncs with his push to get the company back to its service-oriented roots.

Finally, an exclusive, in-depth look at Foxconn, the ultra low-profile Chinese company that manufactures iPhones, PlayStations, and Dell computers, whose profile was raised in headlines of worker suicides.

Rather, [the celebration] was a joint production of employee unions and management at Hon Hai Precision Industry, the flagship of Foxconn Technology Group, as part of an effort to mend the collective psyche of a Chinese workforce that numbers more than 920,000 across more than 20 mainland factories. The need to do so became apparent after 11 Foxconn employees committed suicide earlier this year, most of them by leaping from company-owned high-rise dormitories. The publicity-averse Taipei-based company and its 59-year-old founder and chairman, Terry Gou, were thrown into the spotlight, subjected to unfamiliar scrutiny by customers, labor activists, reporters, academics, and the Chinese government.

Enjoy and have a great weekend.

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I saw an ad in Business Week for getAbstract, which seems to be Cliff Notes for business.

Each five-page summary is presented in a crisp magazine-page format. You can read it in less than 10 minutes – the perfect length to deliver the book’s key ideas. The no-fluff summaries are logically structured to get the maximum out of your reading time.

I agree that there’s too much fluff in many business books, but that fluff serves a purpose.

It’s often the fluff that helps people learn, because the differences are in the fluff and it’s the differences to which they relate. In other words, while someone may be deaf to one presentation another might resonate deeply leading to substantial change.

Think about it; how many times have the lessons you took away from a certain book been so different from a colleague as to make you wonder if you both read the same book.

So how valuable are the summaries? Probably about as valuable as online cheat sheets if that’s all that is read.

Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.

Granted, I haven’t read any of the abstracts, but my experience says that you will lose much of a books’ real value—especially the subtle ideas that play directly to your own MAP—by relying on just a five page summary.

But perhaps this is the future; a world where all ideas and learning come predigested, so they can be sucked up through a straw and thoroughly homogenize the workforce.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg/197325980/

Companies struggle not only to create great corporate cultures, but to describe them. Perhaps they should read more ads, because off and on I see ads that do a great job of describing various parts of corporate culture.

For instance, in 1998 Sun Microsystems ran an ad that said, “Information shall circulate as freely as office gossip.” A great attitude for any company or manager.

Today I saw another that embodies another great corporate culture action; it was run by IDA Ireland in Business Week.

“New thinking is not about the dollars you invest. It’s about the people you invest in.”

That attitude is even more important today, in a world of shrinking budgets, than it was before tough times hit.

It’s simple; if you want to keep your valuable assets, AKA, the people who keep your company/department/team running smoothly then they need to feel that staying is smarter than leaving.

They need to feel valued even when there’s no money for raises and bonuses.

You do that by investing in them and helping them grow.

And you can do it even when your training budget has been slashed to the bone.

Funnily, I wrote about exactly that way back in 2006.

Worked then, works now.

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There are many ways to consider leadership’s future and I often focus on schools and education (not the same thing) and kids—who are the leaders, actual and positional, tomorrow.

But there is another view of leadership’s future worth considering and that is of leadership as an industry, as opposed to an action or description.

Make no mistake, leadership, directly and indirectly, is definitely an industry.

Consider the standard definition of ‘industry’: A category used to describe a company’s primary business activity, usually determined by the largest source of a company’s revenues.

From individual coaches to major consultants and every size in-between, thousands of people earn their daily bread and pay their mortgages with money made through their activities in the leadership industry. Even those who aren’t paid in money are earning something, whether it’s enhanced reputation, a way to spread their opinions/beliefs, an ego boost or something still more esoteric.

I’m not saying that this is a bad thing or a good thing, but it is a thing worth noting.

In a previous post I warned of the need to digest and tweak expert information as opposed to swallowing it whole and this is even more important when it comes to leadership, considering the vast volume of it and the media’s constant focus and insistence that it is leadership that separates the winners and losers.

Even if you subscribe to that idea you need to develop a definition that is relevant to your world and stands the test of time, not some offered up by the industry.

Leadership terms are casually thrown around, applied by some to any and every action that a person does, may do or should do and by others only to the actions/words of those in positional leadership roles.

Perhaps these two points are worth accepting, although I’m sure many will disagree with me,

1. Leadership is an industry in which people, directly or indirectly, earn their living.
2. Leadership information comes in a multiplicity of forms and the quality varies widely.

Accepting these two ideas results in one conclusion: like investing information, leadership information should be digested, internalized and tweaked for your individual needs at both that point in your life and in your future.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/4582034468/

As someone once said, “Learning how to learn is life’s most important skill.”

Daniel J. Boorstin’s comment enlarges on that with his definition of education, “Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know,” and C.S. Lewis believes in learning the hard way,

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”

Douglas Adams tempers that idea, “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” Sadly true, otherwise history wouldn’t keep repeating itself.

There are as many way to learn as things to learn. Most people think of learning as finding answers, but Lloyd Alexander says, “We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.”

Book learning can never take the place of actually doing; an old Chinese proverb says it best, “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”

Mortimer Adler reminds us, “The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as long as we live.”

Very true, and Sarah Caldwell tells us how, “Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can – there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.”

I hope you’ll take today’s quotes to heart and remember that learning is impossible if you start with preconceived notions or a closed mind.

Finally, listen to Mahatma Gandhi; hold his advice close, share it with those you care about and with those you don’t and follow it for the rest of your days. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Image credit: srbichara on sxc.hu