Effective leadership begins with professional intimacy

By Christina Haxton   Article

“Your ability to communicate with care and compassion is actually felt and builds trust. …

Professional Intimacy is a three-step process in which you can become a more sustainable, resilient leader while building trust.

• Know thyself. … Who am I? Where am I going? Why am I going there? Reflective questions build your EQ, or emotional and social intelligence muscles,  in your brain. Take time to reflect on what you learn about yourself from successes and mistakes.

• Seek to understand others. The same brain chemicals that are responsible for you feeling fear are also responsible for you feeling curious.  The only difference between feeling fear and feeling curiosity is how I explain the situation to myself, which may be inside or outside my awareness. When you are curious rather than defensive (fear) and willing to listen to others at a deeper level, the conversation becomes a way to make a positive connection at a personal and emotional level. This is experienced as caring, which inspires hope, connection and resilience in others. …

• See relationships as opportunities. It is in relationships that we learn and grow and in conversation that we create reality for ourselves and others. Here is your opportunity to build trust and create a strong relationship, which is the key ingredient to facilitating positive change, inspiring creativity and fueling internal motivation in people. Every conversation is an opportunity to learn and grow, which is the ultimate brain candy.”

How to avoid irrelevance, guaranteed!

by Dan Rockwell   Article

““Customers are the boss.” A.G. Lafley.

Customers determine what you must do well. You may be the world’s best pickle packer. But, if the world doesn’t value perfectly packed pickles, you are tragically irrelevant. …

Drucker said, “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” It doesn’t take a genius to understand the value of understanding customers.

P&G got it right because the only way to deliver valuable-value is to deeply understand customers. You must understand their aspirations, needs, wants, and desires. Understanding them is the only way you can deliver meaningful solutions, services, and products.

Good but off target:

You might think your core strength is innovation, efficiency, communication, leadership development, or organization. All of these are important, even necessary, but not first.

On target:

The center of your business, leadership, or management is your customer. Without a customer you’re irrelevant. The only way to create, serve, and retain customers is to deeply understand them. P&G nailed it. …

Choose your core competency carefully. Every list of core strengths must begin with, “Deep understanding of the customer.””

The specification is dead; long live the specification

About Ben Yoskovitz   Article

“In the olden days, most people followed a waterfall method. It involved writing “complete” specifications on exactly what had to be built, how it would be built, how it would work, look, etc. You’d have the “complete” package of documentation up-front and then you’d start coding. Seems like eons ago…

Then we were introduced to agile development, which encouraged us to throw away big specifications and go with user stories, or to eliminate documentation entirely and just start coding, building things iteratively.

I’m greatly simplifying the evolution of software development into a couple paragraphs, but you know the drill — specifications went from being necessities to being outlawed. To draw a quick parallel, the same has happened (to a large extent) with business plans. They started out as big ass documents you’d write before doing anything practical / hands-on with your business. People then decided they weren’t necessary whatsoever. We’ve now found a middle ground (which is constantly shifting and evolving based on practice and results vs. whim) with things like the Lean Canvas, which provides us with a focused and simplified means of designing a business. …

I don’t see specifications as ultra-descriptive product roadmaps. I see them as four things:

1. A high-level, but “all-encompassing” brain dump;
2. A customer-centric description of the value we’re trying to provide, describing the functionality to be built short-term (often including ideas, brainstorms, differing options);
3. A future-looking description of things to be considered, and potentially planned for; and,
4. A launchpad for discussion, debate, validation (or invalidation) with customers … a “working document.””

First, let’s fire all the managers

by Gary Hamel   Article

“How essential is it to have layers of executives supervising workers? Managers are expensive, increase the risk of bad judgment, slow decision making, and often disenfranchise employees. Yet most business activities require greater coordination than markets can provide.

Is there a way to combine the freedom and flexibility of markets with the control of a management hierarchy? Economists will tell you it’s impossible, but the Morning Star Company proves otherwise. It has been managing without managers for more than two decades.

At Morning Star, whose revenues were over $700 million in 2010, no one has a boss, employees negotiate responsibilities with their peers, everyone can spend the company’s money, and each individual is responsible for procuring the tools needed to do his or her work.

By making the mission the boss and truly empowering people, the company creates an environment where people can manage themselves. …

Your organization probably wasn’t built around the principles of self-management. It’s most likely a bureaucracy—with a thicket of policy rules, a multilayered hierarchy, and a host of management processes—built to ensure conformity and predictability.

Control is the philosophical cornerstone of bureaucracy, as Max Weber pointed out nearly a century ago. In a bureaucracy managers are enforcers who ensure that employees follow rules, adhere to standards, and meet budgets.

Bureaucracy and self-management are ideological opposites, like totalitarianism and democracy. To build a self-managing organization, you can’t just prune the brambles of bureaucracy—you have to uproot them. The founders of the United States didn’t set out to temper the excesses of a monarchy; they sought to supplant it. In the same way, if you don’t make an unequivocal commitment to self-management, you’ll content yourself with easily reversed half measures when you should press for more.

Nevertheless, no one is going to just give you permission to blow up the old structures. You will have to demonstrate that self-management doesn’t mean no management and that radical decentralization isn’t anarchy. Here’s how to get started.”

There’s no such thing as constructive criticism

By Tony Schwartz   Article

“Here’s a question guaranteed to make your stomach lurch: “Would you mind if I gave you some feedback?”

What that actually means is “Would you mind if I gave you some negative feedback, wrapped in the guise of constructive criticism, whether you want it or not?”

The problem with criticism is that it challenges our sense of value. Criticism implies judgment and we all recoil from feeling judged. As Daniel Goleman has noted, threats to our esteem in the eyes of others are so potent they can literally feel like threats to our very survival.

The conundrum is that feedback is necessary. It’s the primary means by which we learn and grow. So what’s the best way to deliver it in a way that it provides the greatest value — meaning the recipient truly absorbs and acts on it?

There are three key behaviors, I believe, and they’re each grounded in the recognition that what we say is often less important than how we say it. …”

What students don’t learn about work in college

By ALISON GREEN   Article

“1. Effort doesn’t matter; results do. … In the workplace, you’re judged by the quality of what you produce, not by how hard you worked to produce it. …

2. Procrastinating is a really bad idea. … At work, if you put off a project until the last minute and then you’re sick or something else gets in the way, you risk your professional reputation—and you could even get fired.

3. You need to be concise when writing in the workplace. … When writing for work, shorter is nearly always better. Most bosses don’t want to read long memos—they want the key highlights, ideally in bullet points.

4. Good writing isn’t stiff and formal. … the ability to write conversationally is a highly valued—and marketable—skill. Whether it’s a cover letter or a business memo, the best writers don’t sound stiff. …

5. You need to address both sides of an issue. … At work, you’re expected to consider all options thoroughly and make a recommendation that includes pros and cons. …

6. Conforming to business culture matters. … In the workplace, employers are looking for employees who fit in with the culture. That means conforming to office norms about dress and conduct and even small things like how phones are answered or how meetings are run. …

7. Employers are looking for experience, not just knowledge. Don’t spend all your time taking classes. Get out there and get some experience doing actual work.

8. Appearance counts. In most industries, if you dress overly casually or too “young,” you won’t be taken seriously. Flip-flops, nose rings, ultralow-rise jeans, visible bra straps, or revealing necklines all say that you’re still dressing for class, not a job.

9. You have to keep learning. … You’re expected to keep your skills and knowledge up-to-date and continue learning throughout your whole career. College is just the beginning!

10. No one will care about your career like you do. …”

The 99%

Source

Be your own hero

By Nilofer Merchant   Article

“When I was growing up, I looked for a savior in just about everyone.

There were too many fruitless visits from child protective services. There were too many police cars that arrived to “quiet things down” only to let them flare up again the next day. There were too many visits to the hospital.The police men, the agency representatives, and even the hospital workers seemed unable to do anything about what they clearly knew was a problem. …

Since those adults were unable to help me, it’s no wonder that I started to imagine a hero in my father, whom I did not remember and hadn’t seen since I was a toddler. I created a fantasy life where he rode to my rescue. Finally, when I was 12 years old, I met him again. And, of course, while the specific story is complicated, you won’t be surprised to find out that the person who had abandoned me when I was a baby wasn’t the person who was going to save me years later.

The day I met him, I realized something that would shape the rest of my life: there was no Hero (or Heroine) who was going to save me. I needed to save myself.

So, it’s with that life context that I am watching the beatification of Steve Jobs. Google the term, “Steve Jobs tribute” and you get back 5 million plus results. And I’m fairly sure that’s an undercount. There’s a good reason for this; the Hero Narrative has deep roots in our culture. …

Let’s take another look at Steve Jobs’s own example. He didn’t study other people; he followed his own passions. He didn’t seek meaning by trying to emulate someone else’s life, or even emulating the winning business practices of his day — as I’ve written before, he created a clarity of purpose for himself. The same principle can apply to all of us.

Certainly, we need inspiration to show us examples of clear purpose. But I wonder what happens in a world where we each figure out why we do what we do and we can live and work from that place. … We might even come up with our own mantra around this:

1. I shall not obsess over others’ success: not copying, idolizing, or mindlessly emulating.
2. I shall know my purpose and know why I’m doing something.
3. I shall ally myself to a tribe with a common purpose, though the tribe’s members may work in vastly different fields and forms.
4. I will make ideas stronger by uniting with others to do great work, not by holding my ideas all to myself but releasing them into the wild.
5. I recognize the truth in the credo that the future is not created, the future is co-created and will do my part as a part of the whole.

… We might create, rather than copy. We might initiate, rather than wait for permission. We might see ourselves as powerful enough. We might not believe that solving the many problems around us is someone else’s responsibility. We might each be willing to disrupt ourselves, as Whitney Johnson suggests we do. We might reimagine our careers, with clarity of purpose, and this might show up in our work with others.”

Delivering an effective performance review

By Rebecca Knight   Article

“It’s performance review season, and you know the drill. Drag each of your direct reports into a conference room for a one-on-one, hand them an official-looking document, and then start in with the same, tired conversation. Say some positive things about what the employee is good at, then some unpleasant things about what he’s not good at, and end — wearing your most solicitous grin — with some more strokes of his ego. The result: a mixed message that leaves even your best employees feeling disappointed. But if you take the right approach, appraisals are an excellent opportunity to reinforce solid performers and redirect the poor ones.

What the Experts Say


For many employees, a face-to-face performance review is the most stressful work conversation they’ll have all year. For managers, the discussion is just as tense. “What a performance appraisal requires is for one person to stand in judgment of another. Deep down, it’s uncomfortable,” says Dick Grote, author of How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals. Evaluating an employee’s job performance should consist of more than an annual chat, according to James Baron, the William S. Beinecke Professor of Management at Yale School of Management. Performance management is a process, he says. “Presumably you’re giving a tremendous amount of real-time feedback, and your employees are people you know well. Hopefully your relationship can survive candid feedback.” No matter what kind of appraisal system your company uses, here are several strategies to help you make performance review season less nerve-racking and more productive.”

 

Beware the cult of ideas

by Jeffrey Baumgartner   Article

“The Cult of Ideas is a dangerous cult lurking within the field of corporate innovation. It is a disturbing cult in which members worship massive numbers of ideas above all else. On the surface, this seems a good thing. After all, innovations are founded on ideas, are they not? So, if a company wants to innovate, the more ideas it creates the better. Sadly, however, the ugly truth is that the cult of ideas can actually stifle creativity and inhibit innovation. …

Think about it for a moment. Companies – like Gore, Google, Apple and others – that we think of as true innovators never brag about how many ideas they generate in this initiative or that initiative. Rather they demonstrate innovation. Indeed, take a look at Fast Company’s list of most innovative companies. Those on the top ten are recognized for their innovations and not for quantities of ideas. …

In order to innovate, you need an end to end innovation plan that looks not only at idea generation, but also on focusing idea generation on strategy, evaluating ideas efficiently and developing processes to implement the more outlandish ideas that could be breakthrough innovations. …

Instead of simply trying to wring as many ideas as you can out of each employee, allow employees time to develop ideas. Companies like Google and 3M are famous for allowing their employees to use 20% of their time to work on personal projects. … Moreover, think about what you would like employees to be doing during that 20% of their time: generating as many ideas as they can or developing a small number of ideas into experimental projects.”

Under-appreciated engineers and the curse of usability

by Michael Woloszynowicz   Source: Saturday, November 12 

“The life of an engineer is not an easy one. We’re expected to translate ambiguous requirements into a concrete, timely, and scalable solution that satisfies a wide range of stakeholders. We venture into the unchartered territory with an ever growing array of technologies and infrastructures to choose from, never knowing what direction the product will take in the future.

While such challenges plague us on a daily basis, the really depressing part is that only a precious few people will ever appreciate the effort that went into it. Often not your boss, and certainly not the end user.

The superficiality of human nature leads people to appreciate the physical aspects of the product rather than the beauty that lies within it. There’s no better example of this than Apple products. While Apple garners constant adulation for the beauty of its products, few praise the engineering effort that went into every detail of a MacBook Air or iPhone, and bringing the designers vision to life through a physical and functioning unit. …

From a technical product standpoint we suffer from a curse of usability. The simpler the product’s interface the more muted the engineering effort appears, when in fact the opposite is true. The simpler the interface, the less work the user must do, the more work the engineer must do to yield the desired result.”

The gap between the rich and the poor

By Grant Cardone  Source: LBN.com Tuesday, November 15

Do you believe the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is too large?

“As long as the CAUSE of the wealth gap is in place, the divide will widen.  The great disparity that people need to focus on is in the thinking, beliefs and actions between that differ between these two groups not just the gap itself.

• The wealthy think in abundance while the poor think in scarcity and shortages
• The rich see problems as opportunities, the poor seek to avoid and limit problems.
• The wealthy buy time by hiring people and the poor sell their time.
• The wealthy invest money while the poor entrust their savings to institutions.
• The wealthy are willing to get uncomfortable while the poor seek comfort.
• The gulf between the rich and the poor is an issue dating back to the ancient Pharaohs.

Also worth noting, the issue of economic disparity was overcome by 60% of all billionaires including Steve Jobs, Oprah, Carlos Slim Helu, Jeff Bezos and Henry Ford who created their wealth from nothing.”

Trends in CEO, senator, and electrical engineer salaries

by Doug Brock   Article

Why don’t more young engineers pursue Automation and Control Engineering careers?

Culture of innovation rule #1

John Cleese on Creativity   Article

“If you want to create a sustainable culture of innovation, you will first need to find a way to animate the buoyant energy lurking within each member of your workforce. If you skip this step, you will never hit the critical mass of mojo needed to turn theory into practice. In other words, you need to spark more of the feeling that moves someone to dance, than the thought that moves someone …”

Plans and missions

by Seth Godin   Article

“Plans are great.

But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.”

The cult of “great product”

By Sean Ellis   Article

“Great products aren’t anointed by product gurus.  Only customers can decide if a product is great.

Customers will decide your product is great if you can map it to their motivation for changing to your solution.  All customers change from something.  Generally they either switch from a competitive solution or from just tolerating a problem without a solution.  New products should decide on one of these markets.  Trying to serve both markets generally leads to failure.

One way to decide which market to serve is to ask yourself: “when we are generating $100m in revenue, which type of customer do we think will contribute the majority of this revenue?”  Your guess is usually the market you should serve.

Greenfield Customers

If you decide to target “greenfield” people (those without a current solution), then your product roadmap should be focused on simple, effective execution of their desired task.  Simplicity is usually much more important for greenfield users than being feature rich. Dropbox is a great example of a product that has succeeded in a greenfield market with a dead simple solution. …

Competitive Solution Customers

If you are targeting people who will be switching from another solution, then usually features are an important part of people’s decision to try it.  In this case, you’ll want to make sure that you at least have parity on the key features.  Of course they have no reason to switch if everything you do is the same, so you’ll need to understand their switching motivation.  If you can differentiate on one of the key gripes of the competitive solution, there is a good chance you can be successful.”

One share, one vote?

By Randall Smith   Article

“Investors eyeing two hotly anticipated Internet listings will have to weigh an unusual quirk in the ownership structures: extra-supervoting shares, which could set a new standard for how company founders retain control over important corporate issues. …

After Groupon goes public, its three founders will have shares that each carry 150 votes, according to the company’s latest regulatory filings. Investors who buy ordinary shares in the IPO or in the market, by contrast, will receive one vote per share for corporate matters such as the election of directors or sale of the company.”

The top ten lies leaders believe

By Dan Rockwell   Article

“The top ten lies leaders believe:

1. People love it when I tweak their work.
2. They’ll forget my emotional outbursts.
3. Hiding weaknesses works.
4. If I close my eyes, this problem will eventually go away.
5. Everything depends on me.
6. I am a good listener.
7. I welcome new ideas.
8. I don’t have a problem with arrogance.
9. I talk values, mission, and vision enough.
10. I need more time.

Bonus: My way is the best way.”

A brief history of corporate whining

Source

What startup life is really like

By Penelope Trunk   Article

“We raised money. We launched products, we pivoted 20 times. We were due to raise more money right after the markets crashed. So of course we couldn’t raise money. And of course I did what all startup founders do when they run out of money: I had a shit fit. And then I had a nervous breakdown. But the thing is, in a startup, everything moves at warp speed, even a nervous breakdown. So I recovered fast, convinced investors to put in more money. And we kept going. That cycle happened twice. Which is normal. Because startups are hell, and a startup is the perfect convergence of a brilliant idea and a founder just crazy enough to stick with it through anything.

At that point, I was exhausted. And I had to figure out: When is it time for a founder to step down? So I went through a time of personal assessment, which taught me a lot about when you know it’s time for a founder to leave:

Financial exhaustion
I had funded the idea with my own money for a few years before I launched Brazen Careerist as a social recruiting platform. I ruined my credit, I cashed out my 401K (don’t ever do this!) and I lost a baby sitter because she was appalled that we didn’t have any food in the refrigerator.

Emotional exhaustion …

Marital exhaustion
The dirty secret about startup founders is they can’t keep marriages together. …

Intellectual exhaustion
And it was time to pivot. … And really, you have to live and breathe the industry you are in if you’re going to rewrite the rules to that industry. …

Relationship exhaustion
While I was appearing on shows like 20/20 to tell the world how to manage Generation Y, I was having knock-down drag-out fights with my Gen-Y co-founder, Ryan Healy. Founder bickering is a common startup problem. Because if you have co-founders with different skill sets, which you should, then you are going to have different points of view, and inevitably, arguments about that.

Vision for where to go next
Fortunately, though, Ryan had not ruined his personal finances and he didn’t have kids. So he still had lots of energy to get the company to the next level. And after seeing all these issues listed on paper, I realized that even though I loved Brazen Careerist, I wanted to step down from the CEO position.”

2 non-negotiable demands of the 99%

By Rex Nutting   Article

“After a couple of years dominated by birthers, death panels and debt ceilings, the nation owes a huge debt of gratitude to the We Are the 99% movement for forcing our attention back on the most fundamental questions of our day: Who does our economy work for? Who does our democracy work for? Why is our country broken and how can we fix it?

Its critics have savaged the 99% movement (also known as Occupy Wall Street) for lacking a clear goal, but that’s not true. The whole point of “occupying” New York or Washington or London is to physically re-assert our proper place in the public sphere. To the bankers, the billionaires and the bureaucrats, the 99% are loudly and persistently declaring that this is our economy, too. We are not leaving. …

But the overarching complaint of the 99% movement is that our economy works only for the 1% who already have the most.

We don’t begrudge the winners of a fair fight. But everyone knows the game is fixed.

How can we level the playing field so that everyone has an equal opportunity? How can we make our political economy fair? How can we minimize the risk that the 1% will drive the economy back into the ditch and stick us with the bill?

I’d suggest that there are two big things we must absolutely do to create an economy that works for all of us: Eliminate too-big-to-fail banking and get money out of politics.”

 

There is no such thing as a good idea

by Tim Kastelle   Article

“Experimenting is a key part of innovating. In his new book REAMDE, Neal Stephenson has a great description of learning through experimenting:

“Much like a teenager who starts playing a new video game without bothering to open the manual, he tried things and observed the results, abandoning whatever didn’t work and moving aggressively to exploit small successes. A profusion of ideas spewed forth from his mind. There was no such thing as a bad idea, apparently. But, perhaps, more important, there was no such thing as a good idea either, until it had been tried and coolly evaluated. It was clear how he had become the leader of a sort of gang back home: not by asserting his leadership but by being so relentless in his production, evaluation, and exploitation of ideas that his friends had been left with no choice but to form up in his wake.”

It’s a great quote, and there are several crucial points about innovation in it:

• Prototype everything: ….
• We can win by experimenting faster: ….
• There’s no such thing as a good idea, until it’s been tested: ….”

Controlled chaos

by Jim Clemmer   Article

Leading Companies Create Continuous Innovation

Now, more than ever, management is a balancing act — the juggling of contradictions to try to get the best of attractive but opposing alternatives. Order is a temporary illusion, strategy a moving target. Leaders cannot impose authority on a world of constant motion; they can only hope to steer some of that action toward productive ends.”

- Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School professor

Today’s leading organizations are knowledge creating companies that thrive on continuous innovation. It’s a big competitive edge. New products and services can be “knocked off” or copied. But it’s much harder for competitors to duplicate a management system and corporate culture that produces a continuous stream of successful product and service improvements, innovations, adaptations, and extensions.

That continuous innovation stream comes from controlled chaos. It’s a tricky process that that has four main stages. The first two stages are dependent on people or leadership skills. Stages three and four lean heavily on disciplined management systems and processes.

1. Exploration — a broad, open search for strategic partnerships, unresolved problems, latent or unmet needs, new markets and customer segments that potentially fit the organization’s Context and Focus (vision, values, and purpose) as well as core competencies.
2. Experimentation — pilots, clumsy tries, and “mucking around” to test the potential opportunity for viability and to learn what would be needed to make it successful.
3. Development — major resources are now committed to fully developing or refining the few new products, services, or businesses that are clearly ready to be capitalized on.
4. Integration — the new product, service, or business enters the organization’s mainstream.”

The top 25 temptations of leadership

By Dan Rockwell   Article

1. “Using position to intimidate or manipulate.
2. Believing talent, experience, or skills compensate for preparation.
3. Choosing the easy way for you rather than the best way for them.
4. Overlooking the destructive behaviors of high performers.
5. Withholding benefits or resources as punishment.
6. Avoiding tough issues.
7. Staying the same.
8. Pretending you know when you don’t.
9. Hiring yourself. Surrounding yourself with people who have your strengths.
10. Playing favorites.
11. Self-protection.
12. Waiting for the perfect solution rather than choosing the best option.
13. Consensus decision-making.
14. Seclusion.
15. Considering power a perk rather than a platform for service.
16. Placing short-term wins before long-term success. “Let’s just get this done, we’ll fix the problems or big issues later.”
17. Ignoring your inner voice when it says something isn’t right.
18. Allowing people to think you agree when you don’t.
19. Telling people what they want to hear.
20. Shortcuts.
21. Forgetting it’s always about the people.
22. Focusing on problems and weaknesses to the detriment of opportunities and strengths.
23. Giving answers before exploring options.
24. Meddling.
25. Little white lies.”