What can we really learn from Steve Jobs?

Source: “This picture of Steve Jobs was taken by TMZ– two days after he resigned as the head honcho of Apple. In his resignation letter, Jobs said, the day finally came when he could no longer perform his duties.”

From Hogafish blog   Article

“I think the most important lessons we can learn from Jobs are not about computers or even about the logistics of managing a company, they are about having a mindset that gives rise to innovation. He said in a commencement address at Stanford University:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something you lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

What I find most interesting is the part about not having anything to lose because at one point, it seemed like his vision actually did cause him to lose everything – when he was fired from Apple in 1985. Getting the boot from the company he spent ten years building from scratch seems like a huge thing to lose – and it was for him at the time – but during his hiatus from Apple, he started Pixar and a company called Next, which ended up developing much of the foundational technology for Apple’s current systems.

Cliché statements like “follow your heart” and “live each day as if it is your last” are always floating around, but how often do people truly live by them? People tend to disavow their ideas because they’re afraid of what they could lose by following through with them. But if today really was your last day on earth would you rather be stuck doing something tolerable yet safe or would you rather be pursuing an idea you were excited about?”

 

Leadership and Blame

By Mike Myatt   Article

“In the world of leadership where the traits of accountability and personal responsibility are so highly regarded, I have one question? What’s with all the finger pointing? One of my pet peeves is coming across leaders who think they’re always right, and that any problem or challenge that arises must clearly be the fault of someone else. Here’s the thing – as a leader, anything that happens on your watch is your responsibility whether you like it or not. This level of responsibility just goes with the territory, and leaders who cannot accept this do not deserve to lead. Last I checked we all make mistakes – I know I do. Most of us don’t look for perfection in leaders, we look for leaders who see mistakes as a chance for opportunity, growth and improvement, not an opportunity to blame shift….

The truth of the matter is no victories are won by participating in the blame game. Blame doesn’t inspire, it breeds malcontent and discord. If trust is the cornerstone of leadership, then blame can only be viewed as the corrosive behavior that eats away at the foundation. … Real leaders won’t accept credit for success, but always claim responsibility for failure.”

Dilbert – An experiment

By Scott Adams    Source

10 myths that politicians want you to believe

From John DeFeo at TheStreet.com    Article

“10. Quantitative Easing Helps the Economy

Yes, quantitative easing is “printing” money. No, it won’t help the economy. Make no mistake, quantitative easing is a gift to bankers and nothing else. The Federal Reserve is giving bankers risk-free trading profits and causing food and gas prices to surge (making it even harder for Americans to get out of debt).

9. Republicans Are Fiscal Conservatives

From 1946-2010:

Democratic President
* Total Years: 29
* Average Inflation Adjusted Deficit: $150.73 billion

Republican President
* Total Years: 36
* Average Inflation Adjusted Deficit: $202.28 billion

8. President Obama Is an Enemy of Wall Street

* The two men who served as principal negotiators for banking deregulation: Gene Sperling and Larry Summers.

* The two men who President Obama appointed to become his top economic advisers: Gene Sperling and Larry Summers.

* Two guys who happen to be paid millions of dollars in consulting and speaking fees by “too big to fail” banks: Gene Sperling and Larry Summers.

7. The Financial System Is Safer Today Than in 2008

The majority of “too big to fail” banks are even bigger. Meanwhile, high-frequency trading is alive and well and the causes of the Flash Crash have not been addressed.

6. The ‘Bush Tax Cuts’ Increased Tax Revenue

Washington has always had a spending problem, but since the “Bush Tax Cuts,” we have a revenue problem as well. From 1990 to 2000, U.S. tax revenue had a period of exceptional growth. Following the 2001 tax cuts, revenue plummeted — then recovered — then plummeted again.

5. ‘No One’ Could Have Seen the Financial Crisis Coming

No one — except for everyone who did. TheStreet has interviewed numerous economists and money managers who have been pounding the table for years.

4. If You Support Capitalism, You Support Big Business

Can a corporation be socialist? Corporations and governments are very similar entities, and both can have capitalist or socialist leanings. If a politician praises big business while chastising big government, or the other way around, be skeptical.

3. Republicans Are a Bunch of Fat-Cat Millionaires

The average congressperson is a millionaire, and if you break down the 50 richest members of Congress by political party, here’s the split:

Republican: 22
Democrat: 28

2. The U.S. Has the Highest Standard of Living in the World

According to the United Nations’ most recent Human Poverty Index (from 2008), the U.S. standard of living ranks 17 of 19 among developed countries.  The ranking is a composite of life expectancy, literacy, long-term unemployment and income equality — while this data is over three years old, it’s not unthinkable that our situation has worsened in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

1. U.S. GDP Is Growing

U.S. GDP has increased by 4.26% from 2007 to 2010, according to data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the same period of time, the U.S. national debt has increased by 61.6%, according to the U.S. Treasury. Looking at these numbers, you don’t need to be an economist to see that something is very, very wrong.

We’ve lost our way, misled by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Go read the full article here.”

“Nice” make less than “disagreeable”

By wallace immen   Article

Nice guys make less than ‘highly disagreeable’ men

“Everyone says you’re the nicest person they know at work. You’re considerate, you value relationships and pitch in to be a good team player. But are you also being a sucker? New research has found that even if nice guys don’t always finish last, they’re very likely to have a lot less in their pay cheques than those who put their own needs ahead of others.

Men who score on personality tests as highly disagreeable tend to earn more than 18 per cent more – an average of $9,700 more a year – than men who were scored as most agreeable. Agreeableness made less of a difference in women, but it still meant an average 5-per-cent salary gap for nice gals. …

To find out why, they ran their own experiment with students in business management classes who were asked to role play as human resource managers for a fictional company. Each was presented with single-paragraph descriptions of eight entry-level candidates for a consultant position. Participants were randomly assigned descriptions of eight female or eight male candidates (to disguise the gender component of the study) and were asked which ones should be placed on a fast track to management.

All the candidates were described as conscientious, smart, and insightful, and all the descriptions ended with notes, such as “Observation: seems to be candid and trusting,” or, “Observation: his/her natural competitiveness was apparent.” In assessing the fast-track potential of candidates, the business students were somewhat more likely to favour men over women. But their aversion to agreeableness, particularly among men, was remarkably strong. …”

Two Headed Monster

By Barry Ritholtz   Source

Vitality: Collisions between stability & instability

By Dan Rockwell   Article

“Stabilizers apart from change agents are dangerous. They seek consistent processes and procedures that create sluggishness, inefficiencies, and comfortable irrelevance. Eventually the ultimate goal of their organizations eventually becomes self-preservation.

Change agents apart from stabilizers are dangerous. They destabilize processes and procedures in search of innovation and growth. They transform organizations into fast moving machines that create burn out, inefficiencies, and uncomfortable irrelevance. Eventually the ultimate goal of their organizations eventually becomes self-preservation. …

Tension:

Creative tension between stabilizers and change agents develops healthy, dynamic organizations that add value to their constituents, customers, and communities. The benefit of colliding perspectives is diversity and maturity.

How much:

Organizations always tend to stagnate without intentional destabilization. ….”

Leaders don’t need titles

By Dan Rockwell   Article

You Can Lead Your Way into Leadership

“Leaders don’t wait for titles; leaders don’t need titles. Lead today. Don’t wait for a “leadership” relationship or position to gradually develop; create it by humbly leading, now.

Don’t:

Don’t accept traditional definitions of leadership that include telling people what to do and standing in front of people talking.

Do:

Embrace the definition that leadership is influence. You always influence – believe it and own it.

Lead your way into a title:

Do what all leaders always do regardless of their official position. Kouzes and Posner summarize the five practices of exemplary leadership in The Leadership Challenge. You don’t need a leadership title to adopt these powerful practices.

1. Model the way.
2. Inspire a shared vision.
3. Challenge the process/status quo.
4. Enable others to act.
5. Encourage the heart.”

The Duel

Let’s reorganize!

By Todd Ordal   Article

“Do something! This is the feeling that all of us have had in leadership roles – at some point, you’re tempted to reorganize to get better results.

Unfortunately, restructuring the company is often seen as a panacea that will solve all current problems. It plays into our desire to control and fix without the heavy lifting (e.g., strategic thinking, identifying expectations, performance management, coaching, etc.). Oh sure, restructuring is painful, but it’s relatively quick and allows us a sense of control.

Restructuring is often a shortcut for leadership and a very poor proxy for developing sound strategy. Frequent casting about for a structure that will allow you to finally catch your competition, pump up revenue or stop losses is most often a signal of failed strategy and a leader who is action-oriented but perhaps a bit misguided. The question “How should we be organized to execute our strategy?” is preferable to the statement “We’re failing; let’s reorganize.” Strategy, not failed results, should drive structure.

This quote is often attributed to Petronius (210 B.C.), an arbiter in the court of Nero: “We trained hard … but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”"

Ford’s Mulally: It’s OK not to be OK

By Al Norval   Article

“Allan Mulally, Ford CEO, was talking about his experience at one of his first management meetings with the Executive Leadership team at Ford after he joined the company. Allan had enjoyed a successful career at Boeing and had recently joined Ford as CEO. Quoting Allan from the USA Today article,

“In one of the Thursday management meetings, where managers are supposed to show color-coded charts, red for serious problems, yellow for lesser issues, green for all OK, “all the charts were green and I know — we’re going to lose $17 billion. I stopped the meeting and I said, ‘Is there anything that isn’t going well? We’re losing $17 billion.’”

Imagine that, Ford was losing $17 Billion and not one Executive raised a problem – everything was OK in my area – it must be the other guys. The culture at Ford at the time was one where you didn’t surface problems. The underlying Mental Model was problems are to be hidden in closets or swept up under the carpet. Don’t admit you had problems. Mulally realized that it was perfectly natural for organizations to have problems and that the only way to get better was to surface the problems and engage people to work on resolving them.

He went on to say “The next week here comes Mark (Fields, now president of Ford’s North and South America operations) and his charts are all red. Everybody else’s were green. I started to clap, and I said ‘That’s great.’

As a Leader, Mulally was exhibiting the Mental Model of “Problems are Gold”. It’s OK to surface problems – everyone has them. He understood the way to improvement was to surface problems and get to root cause. Only then could countermeasures be put in place which strengthened their systems so the problems didn’t surface again and again.”

Quirky: The Solution to the Innovator’s Dilemma

By Jennifer Wang    Article

Ben Kaufman — with Pivot Power, Quirky’s new take on the outlet strip — calls his company “The oldest-school startup.”Photography by David Johnson

…

“Kaufman launched Quirky, an online consumer products company with a social development twist: products for the people, created and designed by the people. “We’re making invention accessible,” Kaufman says during a whirlwind tour of Quirky’s offices, which occupy the third floor of a building in SoHo, one of New York City’s busiest retail corridors. “Ninety-nine percent of people are armchair inventors. They have great product ideas, but most don’t have the time or money or expertise to make them happen.”

…

Quirky’s online community (65,000 members, and growing by 20 percent every month) is at the heart of Kaufman’s effort to democratize invention. Each week hundreds of inventor hopefuls, or “ideators,” submit their concepts online. … To simplify the development process, product ideas must retail for less than $150 and should not require integrated software. The community, composed mainly of hobby inventors, students, retirees and product-design enthusiasts, votes on the submissions. The two most popular ideas are sent to an in-house team of engineers and designers to research, render and prototype. At every stage–design, colors, naming, logo–the community chimes in. The best suggestions are incorporated, earning secondary “influencers” a portion of future sales revenue. Finally, if enough units of a product are pre-sold, Quirky will manufacture it.

…

Kaufman puts the upfront costs of building a company around a single product at about $200,000–just to get the paperwork done and the first prototype out. Combined with the risk, most people never get their product idea anywhere near retail shelves. However, one of the hopes is that being guided through the process the first time might also jump-start the creation cycle.”

Project-based funding: It’s a very bad model

Posted by marty cagan   Article

Project-based Funding

“There are three fatal problems with the project-based funding model:

1. You very likely have no real clue when you propose a project for funding if you should really even be pursuing the project.  Even though you might pretend otherwise with a cleverly crafted “business case” the truth is that you probably have no real evidence if your customers are going to like this, and you probably also have no real idea how much it will cost to build (because at the project proposal stage, you don’t even know what “it” is).  So you don’t know the revenue and you don’t know the required investment, so of course the ROI estimate is less than meaningful.
2. Creating strong products is not a series of projects that come in sporadic bursts of a few months each over several years.  Strong products result from getting your concept in front of customers and rapidly and continuously learning and improving.  Further, to make this progress, you need not just continuity of investment, but also continuity of the team.
3. Very often in good product work we find that our initial ideas are not quite right but if we change direction somewhat, which we call a “pivot,” we can often uncover major new sources of revenue.  These are the very sources of revenue that companies depend on for another several years of rapid growth.  However, with project-based funding, the consequence is that this sort of pivot is effectively discouraged.

… The main alternative to the project-based funding model is the dedicated product team model.  In this model, rather than funding specific projects, you instead are funding product teams which work on distinct products.

Rather than have the teams focus on delivering specific features or projects, they are accountable for delivering against prioritized business KPI’s.  The team decides which features or projects or other work is necessary to deliver the necessary business results.  Some of the ideas will pan out and others will get quickly killed.  The product team is empowered to decide what is most appropriate to deliver, yet they are also held accountable to the results.”

Top 25 Dumb Mistakes Leaders Make

By Dan Rockwell   Article

“Feel free to add your own dumb mistakes to my list of twenty-five.

1. Creating complexity.
2. Losing sight of vision while focusing on details.
3. Using the same relational-methods with all employees.
4. Assuming people know what they’re thinking.
5. Giving conclusions without explaining thought processes.
6. Interrupting.
7. Relying too heavily on email for communication.
8. Blaming.
9. Lying.
10. Listening to critiques that don’t share organizational values.
11. Talking while in the heat of emotion.
12. Creating urgency and then not following through.
13. Focusing on problems rather than solutions.
14. Hiding in the office.
15. Wasting time in unfocused meetings.
16. Intimidating.
17. Not managing others emotional energy.
18. Neglecting their energy.
19. Postponing tough conversations.
20. Paranoia.
21. Partiality.
22. Not providing timely feedback.
23. Preaching teamwork while rewarding individual performance.
24. Focusing on low performers while neglecting high performers.
25. Tolerating behaviors that create office drama.”

No such thing as business ethics

By Seth Godin    Article

“The happy theory of business ethics is this: do the right thing and you will also maximize your long-term profit.

After all, the thinking goes, doing the right thing builds your brand, burnishes your reputation, helps you attract better staff and gives back to the community, the very community that will in turn buy from you. Do all of that and of course you’ll make more money. Problem solved.

The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don’t have much wiggle room here. If you would like to believe in business ethics, the unhappy theory is a huge problem. …

It comes down to this: only people can have ethics. Ethics, as in, doing the right thing for the community even though it might not benefit you or your company financially. Pointing to the numbers (or to the boss) is an easy refuge for someone who would like to duck the issue, but the fork in the road is really clear. You either do work you are proud of, or you work to make the maximum amount of money. (It would be nice if those overlapped every time, but they rarely do).

“I just work here” is the worst sort of ethical excuse. I’d rather work with a company filled with ethical people than try to find a company that’s ethical. In fact, companies we think of as ethical got that way because ethical people made it so.”

 

We’re all marketers now

By Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill   Article

“More pervasive marketing

To engage customers whenever and wherever they interact with a company—in a store; on the phone; responding to an e-mail, a blog post, or an online review—marketing must pervade the entire organization. Companies such as Starbucks and Zappos, for which superior engagement has been a critical source of competitive advantage from the beginning, already exhibit some of these traits. But these companies aren’t our focus, which instead is the kinds of actions everyone else can take as they strive for world-class customer engagement.

The starting point is a mind-set shift around customer interaction touch points. Companies typically think of them as being “owned” by a given function: for instance, marketing owns brand management; sales owns customer relationships; merchandising or retail operations own the in-store experience. In today’s marketing environment, companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions and instead think about it as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience. That perspective should stimulate fresh dialogue among members of the senior team about who should design the overall system of touch points to create compelling customer engagement, and who then builds, operates, and renews each touch point consistent with that overall vision. There’s no need to worry about traditional functional or business unit ownership: whoever is best placed to tackle an activity should do so.

Design

Designing a great customer-engagement strategy and experience depends on understanding exactly how people interact with a company throughout their decision journey. That interaction could be with the product itself or with service, marketing, sales, public relations, or any other element of the business. ….”

How to land your employees in therapy

By Suzanne Lucas   Article

“Therapist Lori Gottlieb kept encountering patients who had picture perfect childhoods, but nevertheless ended up feeling lost and depressed.  Her diagnosis?  Parents were too supportive, too accommodating, solved too many problems and never gave negative feedback. Believe it or not, there are bosses like that as well.  While they aren’t responsible for churning out adults, what does happen is that their employees become frustrated because there is no promotion, and no improvement in career, but they lack understanding of what they are doing wrong.  If you see yourself in these descriptions, better up the budget for your Employee Assistance Program, because you’re acting as foolishly as Gottlieb’s patients’ parents.

1. Always protect your group. If there’s a problem, it didn’t come from your people.  Well, of course, it could have, but they were late because Joe in accounting was sick on Tuesday and Karen in marketing made that spelling error on her power point presentation so therefore…Face it.  Your employees aren’t perfect.  If you aren’t willing to admit their errors to your peers and superiors, they will lose respect for your people.
2. Feedback is always positive. You should give positive feedback.  It’s a great motivator.  But, negative feedback is also absolutely necessary.  Your employees have to know what they can and should do better.  They need to know not only their strengths but their weaknesses.  If you never tell them their weaknesses, they assume they don’t have any, and then end up wondering why they aren’t getting promoted.
3. …
4. …
5. …
6. …”

Tough conversation that work

By Dan Rockwell   Article

Five Solutions to Tough Conversation That Work

“All great leaders have tough conversations; career success demands them. The more impact you have the tougher the conversations become.

The path to career advancement begins with technical skill and then moves to social/relational skills. The third step in advancement is developing managerial skill. The pinnacle is toughness skills.

A powerful secret.

Successful C-level leaders have learned the secret of having tough conversations while maintaining positive, productive relationship.

10 Topics of tough conversations:

1. Performance issues
2. Employee conflicts with each other
3. Behaviors and attitudes that stress office relationships
4. Violations of policies and procedures
5. Insubordination
6. Offensive language
7. Harassment
8. Gossips, whiners, and backstabbers
9. Blaming and excuse making
10. Discipline, probation, and termination

Five dynamic solutions to tough conversations. ….”

Who Are We Judging?

by FFF Team   Article

“Who Are We Judging?

It is easy for us to make judgments about people. In fact, it might be so close to us that it almost feels like a skin. Indeed, we must constantly assess the behavior of others to decide a myriad of things, like whether or not they are trustworthy, honest or dependable. What happens, however, when our need to discern begins to expand? When we take our need to assess and have that evolve so that we declare ourselves experts on judging other people’s ideas or religious choices, or begin to make decisions about them based on the style of their clothing or hair, let alone by the color of their skin or their ethnicity. Are we using our ability to make distinctions to its best end, or has it run away with us?

I was in a class once with a teacher who taught me to make a fist and point a finger at someone and declare a judgment about that person; an assessment that would diminish this person’s standing in my eyes, or that would cause me to distance myself from that person. I was asked to look down at my hand and notice that three fingers of my fist – or maybe even four, if you want to count the thumb – were pointing right back at me.  My teacher was expressing that it is quite common that when we are pointing out something in another that we don’t like or we think should be better or different, that we are really pointing to a quality or trait in ourselves; one that we don’t like. It is so much easier to point our finger at another than it is to acknowledge our own weakness or vulnerability.

Next each of the students was to ask ourselves if we might possess the very same characteristics or engage in the same behaviors as those we were negatively judging in others. If the answer was yes, we were asked to restate our remarks in the first person, with the caveat that we were to add compassion for ourselves for having this vulnerability or trait. We then were asked to re-approach the person we judged with this new-found knowledge about ourselves, and see if there would be a difference in the way we addressed them. In every single situation, the interactions were much more kind, with a level of accountability that was previously not present. In some situations, nothing was said at all, because the speaker realized that there was no longer anything to judge. In this process we began to take responsibility for our less desirable behaviors by telling the truth about them, taking action to better ourselves in those arenas and in having greater compassion for our own weaknesses as well as the imperfections and vulnerabilities of others.”

This was our compromise with legal

By Tom Fisburne Marketoonist

“A friend told me recently that if she listened to her lawyers on a new product launch, the packaging would be blank. Marketing and legal are often the functions with the greatest friction. A legal review of an idea is akin to running the gauntlet. There is inevitably risk in any idea. Removing the risk entirely can sand the edges off the idea. Yet much of this tension is a result of how the relationship is set up. I recently talked to a brand manager for Axe…
read the rest…”

While the mud settles

From the Art of Innovation Blog

The Power of Pause

The Body Language of “Horrible Bosses”

By Carol Kinsey Goman   Article

Image

 

“In real life, horrible bosses don’t have to go to extremes, or even say a word, in order to demean, intimidate or discount employees. An eye roll, a smirk, a “whatever” shoulder shrug, an expression of disgust or contempt – all of these send their own clear signals.

From the results of a recent survey of over 200 business professionals, here are the top twelve body language behaviors of less-than-ideal bosses.

You may not be a “horrible boss,” but you sure look like one when . . .

1. You stop in the middle of a discussion and simulate golf swings once you begin to lose interest.

2. You constantly interrupt or talk over a staff member as if the person hadn’t been speaking at all.

3. You ignore all underlings in the corridor, even if the employee extends a greeting, but you make sure to acknowledge your fellow executives.

4. You roll your eyes and grimace at any comment that differs from your own point of view.

5. You send nonverbal signals of exclusion and disinterest when members of your team are talking: You look away, lean back, cross your arms and legs, tilt your head in a “looking-down-the-nose” position, and angle your torso away from the speaker.

6. You conduct every conversation with female staff members with your eyes on their chests.

7. You check your e-mail, shuffle papers, work on your computer, take phone calls, and clip your fingernails while meeting with employees.

8. You announce an “open door” policy and glare at anyone who dares to enter your office without an appointment.

9. …

10 …

11 …

12 ….”

Continuously building skills of value in emerging market segments

By Rob Go   Article

The illusion of job stability

“I grew up in a fairly traditional Chinese home. There was a strong influence in my household to rack up fancy degrees, get nice jobs at brand name firms, and rise the ranks in an environment of “safety.” I certainly haven’t had the most non-traditional career (unfortunately!) but at almost every step, I faced resistance from my family, who were puzzled about why I was taking a risk in joining companies that were completely unknown to them (and most other people) at the time.

I was talking to the father of my partner Lee the other day, and he also jokingly remarked “I never understood why Lee left a steady job at Paypal to help start LinkedIn.  Why didn’t he just get a safe job like being a stockbroker?”

But if we’ve learned anything in the last several years, it’s that stability is over-rated. What seems safe today will not be safe forever. In fact, when everyone thinks something is safe, that’s probably the time when it’s starting to get too risky. Think about mortgages, municipal bonds, banking, etc.

For startups, this is actually great news. I agree with others that say that although working for an individual startup is risky, pursuing a startup career path is not so much. The great thing about this career is that you are continuously building skills of value in (hopefully) emerging market segments that will value your experience (win or lose) for a long long time.

So, with more and more excellent talent realizing this and opting out of “safe” and high paying roles in finance, law, etc., we are seeing more great talent flowing into the entrepreneurial world, and building innovative companies. Sure, that investment banker-turned-product manager may not be the best PM in the world initially. But the mere fact that she has chosen to embark on an entrepreneurial career path early means that there is a much much higher possibility that she will be a founder or an integral team member of a meaningful new venture that solves important problems and employs hundreds of people.

Maybe that doesn’t sound as stable as working for GE, but it sure sounds like a more meaningful career.”

Provide a MAP

By Guy Kawasaki   Article

Guy Kawasaki is the author of Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions and the former chief evangelist of Apple.

Enchant Your Employees

“Enchantment defines a relationship with employees that is deep, delightful, and long-lasting. If you can enchant your employees, they will work harder, longer, and smarter for you — and, ideally, you for them too. Here are the ten best ways to enchant your employees.

1. Provide a MAP. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink explains the big three of what employees want from a boss: an opportunity to Master new skills while working Autonomously towards a high Purpose. There are lots of other things that might attract employees, but a MAP is what really enchants them.
2. Empower them to do what’s right. A logical offshoot of autonomous work is that you trust your employee enough to make the right decision for customers. When you show this level of trust and empower employees, they do the best work that they can.
3. Judge your results and their intentions. Most managers are harsher judges of the results of their employees than they are of their own results: “You didn’t meet quota, but I really tried to meet mine.” This is the opposite of what an enchanting manager does. Be a tougher judge of your results than your employees.
4. Address your shortcomings first. Now that you know what to judge, now you need to know what to fix. No employee is perfect, but neither are you. Before you pontificate about what your employees should fix, talk about how you could have done a better job yourself.
5. Suck it up. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs is an enchanting guy. Why is he enchanting? It’s because he’s willing to suck it up and do whatever it takes to get the job done. Nothing is too dirty for him. Employees need to know that you’ll do the dirty, hard, and frustrating jobs too.
6. Don’t ask them to do what you wouldn’t do. The flip side of the willingness to suck it up is that you never ask employees to do something that you wouldn’t do. If you’re not going to fly coach class from San Francisco to Mumbai, don’t ask them to either. This is a great philosophy to apply to employees, customers, partners, and vendors.
7. …
8. ….
9. …
10. …”

Strategies are contingencies

By Dan Rockwell   Article

 

Seven Ways to Find Order in Chaos

“If duress, stress, and pressure represent the dark side of opportunity, today’s world offers great opportunity. Dr. Justin Menkes said of today’s business environment, “strategies are contingencies.”

How can leaders bring out the best in themselves and others when the world’s in constant flux? Dr. Menkes’ book, Better Under Pressure, explains three capacities every leader needs to thrive in a world of contingencies.

Realistic Optimism: an awareness of actual circumstances coupled with a sense of urgency.

Subservience to Purpose: people with this trait see their professional goal as so profound in importance that their lives become measured in value by how much they contribute to furthering that goal. What is more, they must be pursuing a professional goal in order to feel a purpose for living.

During our conversation Dr. Menkes said, “If you have firewalls to control your people and time card to keep track of time, you’ve already lost the battle.”

You need higher purpose to control behaviors and energize efforts. ….”