Want to transform into a high performance business?

A car crash on Jagtvej in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately, as I work to better relate my own “transformation” value proposition into language meaningful and attractive to my clients. I mean, who wouldn’t want to own and operate a “high performance business”? But, what does that actually mean? What does a high performance business actually look like, and why are they so darn hard to build and maintain?

It’s pretty easy to speak generally about a “high performance business”: superior performance through a tight, well articulated business model and associated streamlined

Time: it’s relative and short. Use it well.

Golden number 10000 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here is a fascinating look at the length of a day, as a proportion of a month, a year, lifetime, eon, and various other measures of time. This was particularly compelling to me as I am going through a thinking exercise where I am trying to get some handle on some things I want to create/achieve over a 10,000 day period (27 years), in addition to the natural aging I am most assuredly going to accomplish…. this little timeline is a great reminder about the relative brief nature of our time here… so make the most of it…what did you accomplish today?   http://hereistoday.com/

Three big lies underpinning our societal challenges

Just came across this great little animated video from the Guardian and a British based social cause organization (aptly named Carbon Omissions).  The video content is specific to the UK and their current activities related to fighting CO2 emissions, however the general points made are applicable to us all.  Not a lot “new” here, but a cool animation  and yet another slap across the face to help us wake up  — although I’m still going to invoke my now favorite saying: “It is impossible to wake the person who is only pretending to sleep.”

The Life and Times of H.S. (Stan) Ragan

My father recently passed away at the tender age of 86. He was much loved by his family and many friends and colleagues.  We were honored that the newspaper in his “home town”, the Edmonton Journal, wanted to write a story about his many engineering contributions to the city and the province.

Following is a short story about the life and times of my Dad, of whom I am incredibly proud. I wanted to share this with you

Your vote required: “Designing for success in the 21st Century”

English: A polling booth in the New Forest for the UK vote change referendum and local government election. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I need your help.   How? Very simple — click on this link and vote for my manifesto: http://changethis.com/proposal/show/403

Here’s the back-story to this request: I recently submitted a proposal  for writing a manifesto titled “Designing for Success in the 21st Century”. The organization accepting these submissions runs a process whereby manifestos accepted at the proposal stage are then voted on by their readers and the ones that receive the highest votes are then created by the author(s) and the ChangeThis! editorial team and published. My manifesto proposal is based on a recent book I co-authored that explores a handful of key design

Are you a boss or a leader?

A friend of mine put me on to this little gem today that you might enjoy — simple and true:

You got crabs in your bucket?

crab bucket (Photo credit: strottrot)

A while back, I remember reading a most interesting thing about a key difference between fishing for lobsters and for crabs. Apparently with lobsters you have to keep a watchful eye as once caught and dropped in a bucket, lobsters will keep trying to escape — so you need to have a top to your bucket. With crabs, not so much. Crabs won’t try to escape from a bucket, but instead will pull any other crab possibly making a break for it back into the bucket — all for one, and one for all, as long as they’re all in the bucket together. Misery truly does love company, it seems.

So here’s the question as it relates to your own daily life — how many crabs do you have in your personal bucket, grabbing you and holding you down, not letting you escape the

Change management? Change required = management

London underground, mark “Mind the gap”. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Last evening I sat through a very informative presentation given by a colleague of mine; the topic was on why Canadian industry is suffering from an “innovation gap” (comparatively speaking, based on international ranking systems) and what the various actors — industry, government, academia, etc. — needs to do about it to systematically close the gap. The objective, of course, is that improved innovation (at the company level) leads to improved profitability and sustainable company

Are you a reluctant change agent?

Radio Dial (Photo credit: tmray02)

A few days ago I was in Maryland visiting with some good friends. We had a thoughtful discussion about “change”, in which they suggested that most people are forced through circumstances to deal with all kinds of change. Family issues. Career challenges. Business issues. Whatever. The key is — something is happening and we’re forced to face up to it and deal with it. Whether we want to or not.

More concretely, what does this look like? In our business and career life — and maybe more broadly in our personal lives — I think it comes

Daydreaming about retirement? You need to watch this.

Just came across an excellent video presentation of a keynote address by Ken Dychtwald, who is a highly respected researcher/writer on the topic of retirement. The full video clocks in at 42 minutes so it will require a time commitment on your part, however it is well worth it if you are in your 40′s, 50′s, or 60′s and trying to figure out what your “retirement” might look like, and what you might like to design it to be.

What makes an effective change agent?

Paradigma del Change Management (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been mulling this question over for some time now, partly as (one of many) ways of continually improving my own articulation of my value proposition and brand as a “change guy”.  Here’s my short list for how one should approach a potential change initiative with multiple stakeholders involved:

1. Get everyone to the table.
2. Forget everything you know.
3. Hold your tongue. Listen. Deeply.
4. Dig through your toolbox and share your tools with the team.
5. Collaboratively construct possible solutions to try out.
6. “Lock and load” on something. Move forward. Measure.
7. Adjust the path accordingly based on real feedback about the progress made.
8. Be a good guest and leave before you are asked.
   

Weighing in on the “unpaid internship” debate

sign unpaid intern (Photo credit: pameladrew212)

On a local radio call-in talk show today,  the subject was “unpaid internships”. It’s been in the news a lot recently, and it seems to me that a lot of fairly unscrupulous companies are taking advantage of getting access to free labour under the guise of “unpaid internships”.

Full disclosure: A young German woman worked for me a few years ago as an (unpaid) intern. She sought out my company (Career Coaching International) and approached me about taking her on as a summer intern as part of her university program requirement. It was great to work with her and I tried to get her involved in all the different parts of the company. Based on that experience, I’m a big fan of the school-based intern approach.

“Ruts in the brain”: Driving successful change (part 5 of 5)

Brain scanning technology is quickly approaching levels of detail that will have serious implications (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Over the past several weeks, I have been writing a series of blog posts on how to plan and manage successful change. This is the final  installment in the series of 5 steps I laid out, and as such contains some final thoughts about pulling it all together and holding ourselves accountable to whatever change program we commit to. Recall, the 5 steps are:

1. Tuning your language, setting the goal, and visualizing success;
   
2. Describe your starting point, formalize the gap;
   
3. Set out milestones and personal rewards;
4. Designing and building habits for success;
5. Pulling it all together and holding yourself accountable.

A class act: Groupon’s ex-CEO Andrew Mason

Image via CrunchBase

Just before getting into this, full disclosure: I never really liked Groupon as a business venture. I think it has a business model that, well, kinda sucks: Very little barriers to entry so the first-mover advantage wasn’t much of a benefit. Appeals to a lot of people who are going to buy exclusively on price, so not much customer loyalty. And I now get regularly spammed by a whole bunch of local Groupon-type competitors, so that doesn’t help my disposition towards this whole category of e-coupon discounters. All that to say — I haven’t really paid much attention to Groupon, but knew from various headlines over the past several months that they were in some trouble. So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that they just fired

How to change (Tiny Habits)

Given my interest in better understanding “change” and working to help people build positive habits in their personal and business lives, I want to share a resource I recently came across — Tiny Habits, offered by B.J. Fogg. In his words:

Let me explain . . . I’ve studied human behavior for 18 years, mostly at Stanford University. Here’s what I’ve learned: Only three things will change behavior in the long term.
Option A. Have an epiphany
Option B. Change your context (what surrounds you)
Option C. Take baby steps
Creating an epiphany is difficult. You should rule out Option A unless you have mystical powers (I don’t).  But here’s the good news: The other two options are practical. And they can lead to lasting change if you follow the right program. However, few winning programs exist…

Tiny Habits is a free resource created  by Mr. Fogg that you can sign up for (every Monday a new “class” begins); effectively it provides email support for your “tiny habit” change initiatives you commit to. So if you really do want to change and want to experiment with a proven resource to see how it can help you, then check out Tiny Habits…

Reasons to quit (from REWORK)

I just finished reading the book “Rework”, which is a nice little gem of short (1 to 2 page) thoughts and ideas about how to conduct business (geared more to small business and owner/operated businesses than the Fortune 500 type).

One of the author’s contentions in the book (Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, who founded and run the company 37 Signals) is that often you need to stop what you are doing and consider

Company policy as “scar tissue” (from REWORK)

REWORK (Photo credit: Jake Mates)

I just finished digesting Fried and Hansson’s book “Rework”, published in 2010. Fried and Hansson are the founders of 37Signals, and their book is a nice little gem of short (1 to 2 page) thoughts and ideas about how to conduct business (more geared to small business and owner/operated businesses than the Fortune 500 type). It is a really quick read (a couple of hours will have you easily through the whole thing) and probably every reader can find at least a couple of nuggets that they can take action on. This gem stood out on page 260 – their take on company policy:

“Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreations to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual. This is how bureaucracies are born. No one sets out to create a bureaucracy. They sneak up on companies slowly. They are created one policy — one scar — at a time. So don’t scar on the first cut. Don’t create a policy because one person did something wrong once. Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again.”

For me, this was a great take-away from the book, and an analogy that I will most certainly use in my ongoing business consulting work.  Thanks, Jason and David!

Externalities, plastic bags, and the “power of habit”

The Power Of Habit (Photo credit: Earthworm)

The following is an extract from my recently published book “Through the Detox Prism”, (pages 61, 62) where we explored some examples of how one might set about to change some of our corporate habits. I have pulled it out here (and done some slight adaptation and editing) because it illustrates an important concept that Charles Duhigg develops in his book “The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business”.   In this book, Duhigg develops a 3 step model of cue, routine, and reward for better explaining habits (and how to adapt/develop them). If you are interested in mastering your habits, this is definitely a book you will want to read cover to cover.

In our “Detox Prism” book, we explored this model to help us better understand why we have seen such spectacular success recently with the pricing of

Planning for successful change (part 4 of 5)

number 4 (Photo credit: Leo Reynolds)

In previous blog posts (highlighted below), I introduced a 5 step model for driving successful and sustainable change in your life; I’ve detailed out (through a worked example) the first three steps in the process:

1. Tuning your language, setting the goal, and visualizing success;
   
2. Describe your starting point, formalize the gap;
   
3. Set out milestones and personal rewards;
4. Designing and building habits for success;
5. Pulling it all together and holding yourself accountable.

We’ve now broken up our whole “desired change” into believable, staged milestones (Step #3 of our process) that represent a viable and do-able road map to the “future you” you

Planning for successful change (part 3 of 5)

number 3 (Photo credit: Leo Reynolds)

In previous blog posts (highlighted below), I introduced a 5 step model for driving successful and sustainable change in your life and have detailed out (through a worked example) the first two steps in the process . To recap, those steps are:

1. Tuning your language, setting the goal, and visualizing success;
   
2. Describe your starting point, formalize the gap;
   
3. Set out milestones and personal rewards;
4. Designing and building habits for success;
5. Pulling it all together and holding yourself accountable.

The example used for illustration has been around physical health, for two reasons: (1) it is something that we can all relate to, and (2) it is generally straightforward so we can

The secret to success and failure

I am your constant companion.
I am your greatest asset or heaviest burden.
I will push you up to success or down to disappointment.
I am at your command.
Half the things you do might just as well be turned over to me,
For I can do them quickly, correctly, and profitably.
I am easily managed, just be firm with me.
Those who are great, I have made great.
Those who are failures, I have made failures.
I am not a machine, though I work with the precision of a
machine and the intelligence of a person.
You can run me for profit, or you can run me for ruin.
Show me how you want it done. Educate me. Train me.
Lead me. Reward me.
And I will then…do it automatically.
I am your servant.
Who am I?
I am a habit.

 

Why your organization is struggling…

A number of years ago, I read “Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Chip and Dan Heath. They wrote of a great example that they attributed to Stephen Covey from his book “The 8th Habit”; it describes the results of a poll of 23,000 employees drawn from a large sampling of companies and industries:

• Only 37 percent say they have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why;
• Only one in five was enthusiastic about their team’s and their organization’s goals;
• Only one in five said they had a clear “line of sight” between their tasks and their team’s and organization’s goals;
• Only 15 percent felt that their organization fully enables them to execute key goals;
• Only 20 percent fully trusted the organization they worked for.

While sobering enough findings, imagine what this actually means in the day to day of business. Covey provides an illustrative human metaphor by saying:

“If, say, a soccer team had these same scores, only 4 of the 11 players on the field would know which goal is theirs. Only 2 of the 11 would care. Only 2 of the 11 would know what position they play and know exactly what they are supposed to do. And all but 2 players would, in some way, be competing against their own team members rather than the opponent.”

So if these survey results reflect anything like reality in your organization (and there is a strong likelihood that they do), is it any wonder your organization is struggling?

10 Steps to Guarantee Failure

I was going through various “thinking pieces” that I have collected over the years in my business consulting files and came across this gem — 10 Steps You Can Take To Guarantee Failure. I had first stumbled across this some years ago, and just now when I went back to the original web link it wasn’t live, but I did find it here after a quick Google search, so I wanted to at least provide a link back to someone reputed to be the real author, since as we say all too often in the blog-o-sphere: “It wasn’t me…”. Here it is, and it’s a gem:

Planning for successful change (part 2 of 5)

In the first post in this 5-part series, I introduced a 5 step model for driving successful and sustainable change in your life. To recap, those steps are:

1. Tuning your language, setting the goal, and visualizing success;
   
2. Describe your starting point, formalize the gap;
   
3. Set out milestones and personal rewards;
4. Designing and building habits for success;
5. Pulling it all together and holding yourself accountable.

The lighter side of change…

Came across some great short videos pointing out the lighter side of change. Enjoy…!

We all need a pep talk

A great three-minute pep talk (example of the wisdom: “…if there are two paths, I want to be on the one that leads to awesome!”) will follow shortly after the 18-30 second advertisement. Persevere and you shall be rewarded…

Planning for successful change (part 1 of 5)

Worry (Photo credit: StormKatt)

In a recent public newsletter, I committed to developing a series that break down the whole “goal setting and achieving” thing into 5 steps. As the first in that series, I want to set the stage with a bit of a preamble.

• First off, I’m assuming there is something meaningful that you actually want to change about some aspect of your life — personal, family, or business, it doesn’t matter. To me, “meaningful” means that you are actually willing to put some concentrated effort into making it happen;
• Second, I’m assuming that you are prepared to actually reflect on the change/improvement you are seeking and see that it begins with you changing something about you. If the “change” you are seeking follows the general theme of “I’m OK, it’s them that have to change” then — save you time reading any further. You’re not going to get anything useful out of what I share with you over the next several weeks;
• As my final point, I’m assuming that you have the ability and willingness (this is really a re-statement of the first point) to stick with something for a while as you develop new habits. Basically, I’m assuming you can tap into your self-discipline when you’re really motivated to change.

The future of motoring

Too funny for words to fully describe this. Really don’t know what else to say. Enjoy!

 

Our deepest fear

A good friend of mine sent me a note about my recent blog “4 Obstacles to Pursuing Your Dreams” and in her comments passed along this great quote from Marianne Williamson (who, up to now I must confess, I had not heard of). Apparently, based on her Wikipedia page anyway, this is a well known and often quoted piece. Great to now know about it — thanks,Sylvia, for putting me on to it. Love the quote and wanted to share it:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

4 Obstacles to Pursuing Your Dreams. Facing the Flinch

I’m just reading “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho (great little story, I definitely recommend reading it), and in his introduction he suggests there are 4 obstacles that explain why most people don’t pursue their dreams. With my focus of helping people achieve meaningful change in their lives, careers, and businesses, the message of this really resonates with me. Here they are:

1. We’re told from an early age it’s impossible or silly, or not realistic – basically we’re told not to dream. This is often the role played by our educational institutions and when we are instructed to “colour within the lines”;

The Impact Equation (book review)

The Impact Equation (Photo credit: HighTechDad)

I recently finished reading “The Impact Equation” by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. Overall I give the book good marks although (secretly?) I was hoping for a bit more “how to” instructions that I could put into action for immediate success — probably I’m just looking (just like everybody else is, I suspect) for the “secrets and short cuts” section that makes everything easy. The authors insist it doesn’t exist.

Anyway, I did take away a few really good thinking pieces from this book, two of them being in the form of equations:

IMPACT = C*(R+E+A+T+E)

Step Up. Now.

The following extract from a motivational book made it into my email inbox today, and the theme lined up nicely with a newsletter I was busy working on about why many people don’t take more proactive steps in their working (and their personal) lives. Here is the original link to the extract and information on where you can find the book, however I thought it short and “on point” enough to paste some of the extract below. The book is titled “Stepping Up” by John Murphy —

Do you have a Succession Plan?

You may well think this post doesn’t really apply to you — after all, aren’t Succession Plans those things big companies have that lay out how they should develop their key internal people? Or they are those formal plans that business owners have (or should have!) so they can get ready to hand over the keys to their company to the new owner and exit stage left, off to enjoy retirement?

Sure, those are both true, and maybe those scenarios are not your current reality or concern, but when you stop to think about it, don’t we all need a “succession plan”?

In essence, a succession plan is just a road map that addresses “Where am I (are we) trying to get to, and what’s the set of steps to get (me, us) there?” 

If life were a game…

I’m currently in the middle of a full scale clean-up of my office space as I get ready for 2013 and the next phase of my journey (more on that another time). One of the things that I have done over the past several years is collect various quotes and inspirational sayings on my office walls, as I come across them, so that I can reflect on their messages from time to time. So of course in my current clean-up phase I’ve pulled them all down and am busy packing them away with my other 2012 memorabilia. Here is one I wanted to share, as I find reviewing it always insightful — it is the “rules of the game of life” from a short book by Cherie Carter-Scott:

My greatest teacher

Many years ago when my children were young, they used to do various things that made me pretty angry in the moment. I realized at the time that they weren’t doing anything different that most young kids did, but I would still get angry — shoes not put away, garbage not collected and taken out, TV on while doing homework; you get the general picture.

Not that my kids were committing capital crimes — I certainly got that. Not that I wasn’t being overly critical — in my quieter moments, I absolutely got that. It was just that in the heat of the moment I had a tendency to lose my temper more often than I wished I did, and for reasons that frankly didn’t warrant the extra grief that me losing my temper caused everyone around me. (I suspect that, unfortunately, many a parent can easily relate to my story thus far.)

The psychology of change

Several months ago I was lucky enough to stumble across a great blog which I started to

subscribe to.  PSYBLOG (written by researcher Jeremy Dean studying in the UK) is chock full of interesting studies and findings about how we really work. In their summary of the top stories of 2012, they included these gems:

• Why the incompetent don’t know they are incompetent — this is something referred to as the Dunning-Kruger Effect: basically, the poorest performers are the least aware of their own incompetence. For some reason they seem to fail to learn from their own experiences.
• When (and why) you’re better than you think — known as the worse-than-average effect. When you are good at something (requiring special skills), you assume that everyone else is good at it also, and so you underestimate your own ability and competence.
• Why society doesn’t change — referred to as “system justification bias”, it suggests that humans have a mental bias towards maintaining the status quo. They tend to go with what they know rather than a new, unknown option. People feel safer with the established order in the face of potential change.

new book release: “Through the Detox Prism: Exploring Organization Failures and Design Responses”

Let me start with an apology, as I feel I should beg your forgiveness for the following bold-faced and shameless self-promotion blog post… so with that lame apology provided, here goes:

In conversations with hundreds of people over the past number of years I’ve worked at finding a way to introduce “the detox project” into the conversation so I could gather their feedback — well, it turns out that I annoyed enough people for long enough that my friends and family eventually called me on it and told me to quit bugging them and write a book, already… so I did.

The sorry state of work-place productivity

In my daily trolling through the internet, I came across this interesting infographic examining the reasons contributing to poor workplace productivity. I think you’ll find it interesting to scroll through (shown in its entirety below), and it hits all the highlights of “time wastage” — estimated total cost (to the US economy), average hours/week, biggest time wasters, internet surfing, our reasons for wasting time, etc.

For me, two sections jumped out and had me pondering what they really tell us: where we think we waste our time, and why we waste it. For “where”, the reasons given are: 47% — meetings; 43% — office politics; 37% — fixing others’ mistakes; 36% — annoying co-workers; 22% — busywork; 20% — tending to work emails; 18% — internet; 14% — dealing with bosses. For “why” we waste time, the survey says: 35% — not challenged enough; 34% — hours are too long; 32% — no incentive to work harder; 30% — unsatisfied with job; 23% — bored; 18% — underpaid.

transform/21 — the process of mastering change

If you feel like a lot of your life comes down to being a hamster on a wheel, then this blog post may just be worth reading.

transform/21 is the formal name of my “mastering change” newsletter, where I share with my readers the best tools, articles, and ideas I have come across for really understanding now change works and how to put it into personal use for developing your own personal and career success.

Happiness — Dr. Pangloss was right after all

This was a frontispiece of Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism. It reads, “Candide, or Optimism. Translated from the German of Dr. Ralph.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I was first in university I took a course in “intellectual history” — or some such grandly labelled conceptual course — where we studied the works of various big name philosophers like Rousseau, Locke, Marx, Voltaire, and others. Mostly I forget the others. Actually I’ve forgotten pretty much everything of what we studied so many years ago, however one memory that has always stood out was Voltaire’s character Dr. Pangloss in his story “Candide”.

While I don’t remember much of the story of Candide, what I do remember what that Pangloss’s response to every situation was to say something to the effect of “it is the best of all possible outcomes” or “the best of all possible worlds”, no matter what tragedy befalls them. In particular I recall a scene in the book where Pangloss, Candide and their traveling companions have been caught by cannibals and are in a large pot being boiled for dinner when Pangloss starts up (again!) about how in reality it is all for the best….

200 years of global economics in 4 minutes — Hans Rosling

If you haven’t seen this yet, it is definitely worth watching. Hans Rosling presents a compelling lesson on what two centuries of economic development has looked like for 200 countries — his work involved developing and plotting out a total of 120,000 data points. All condensed into a highly enjoyable and informative 4 minute 38 second video…. enjoy!

 

Louis C.K. – Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy

If you like the humor of comedian Louis C.K. and are older than about 35, you’ll probably really enjoy this video of him with late night talk show host Conan O’Brien from 2009, talking about the rapidly emerging technology world and the sense of “entitlement” that seems to be developing at least as rapidly as the technology itself…. funny stuff..!!

Apologies (28-Jan-2013) — I just noticed that the original embedded video (which was from YouTube) is now being blocked due to copyright issues. I believe you can still see a copy of the video at this URL: http://pixelbark.com/559

Three types of people

Quite some time back (years? not sure how many…) I remember coming across this statement about different kinds of people and being quite taken by it. In my experience it really sums up accurately how you can categorize most of the people in your life, in your company, or maybe even in your family.  I came across it again a few days ago from fellow blogger Kris the HR Capitalist (check him out at www.hrcapitalist.com).

A nod of the hat to Kris for reconnecting me with this gem. So what kind of person do you aspire to be, and what kinds of people are you hanging with?

Apple Inc. — nothing short of a profit machine

Apple Inc. (Photo credit: marcopako )

I came across this very interesting — and very telling — info-graphic today in my email in-box. I can’t validate the actual numbers used, however given that Apple has over the last several years strategically designed a holistic “ecosystem” that has been engineered at every point to extract dramatically higher (than industry norm) margins, the 3rd graph shown in the series below — the profit one — looks pretty accurate to me.

Re-inventing yourself

I came across this article today about how to re-invent oneself; the article touches on a lot of things and for the curious reader has a lot of content that provides an opportunity to ponder things. There is lots here, and one key thought for me is this quote from Daniel Goleman:

“For leaders, the first task in management has nothing to do with leading others; step one poses the challenge of knowing and managing oneself.”

Reading through the article and pondering its content got me reflecting on my own experience. Since I left the corporate world some ten years ago, I have been on a fairly proactive path of continual re-invention. Throughout my working career I was always comfortable with a high degree of change, and now I’m somewhat channeling that “need for change” into personal change and self-improvement. At some level, of course, this appeals to me and is at least some of the reason why I decided to ultimately follow the path of a “free agent” one short decade ago…

Breeds apart: Generalists and Specialists

hedgehog (Photo credit: FletchtheMonkey)

Just came across a great little article in the HBR blogosphere that extolls the virtue of being a generalist in our rapidly evolving complex, globalized, interconnected world. While most of the focus of our institutions is on deeply developing specialization, it seems that generalists are perhaps better at addressing some complex problems due to their being more “multidisciplinary” in nature…

Of course this appeals to me as I see myself as first and foremost, a “generalist”. Having said that, I did indeed attempt to “square the circle” by presenting myself in my blog profile as “having specialized in being an excellent generalist”.

Anyway, this little article reminded me of a fun little saying I heard at some point many years ago that really puts thing into the proper perspective:

“A specialist is someone who knows a lot about a little, and continues to specialize until they know absolutely everything about nothing at all. A generalist, however, knows a little about a lot, and continues to develop until they know absolutely nothing about everything.”

Taken to the extreme, I guess they both get to the same point of utter uselessness to society… however, which path feels more interesting to you? For me, I’m pretty happy to be well on the road to knowing absolutely nothing about most everything…

One description of “teamwork”

Two men were working along the side of a busy road. One was digging a hole and the second one was filling the same hole with the dirt dug up by the first one. A passerby walking along the road stopped by to ask what they were doing, as he could clearly see that what they were doing didn’t make any sense. The first one replied: “We are a team of three. My job is to dig a hole, the middle one then lays the cable, and the third one fills up the hole. The middle one is out sick today, but the two of us are just doing our regular jobs!”

Unfortunately, this makes about as much sense of some of the stuff that I have seen over the years in real companies with real work products. Anybody out there a member of a team that works and thinks that way? I guess it would be funny, if it weren’t so soul destroying…

Technical sales: an engineer’s view of the sales call

D, a friend of mine that I attended engineering school with (sometime last century), surprised me the other day by admitting that he had seen my recent blog post  about engineers and technical career paths. Here’s what he went on to share with me:

This Dilbert cartoon reminds me of the recent entry you had on The Engineer’s Dilemma.  One of our hybrid presales-product management guys sent it to the entire sales organization earlier today. He got no replies, at least no public ones. It cuts very close to the bone… 

Your career: can you think like a start-up?

I read a short book review in the Economist recently for Reid Hoffman’s (founder of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha’s new book “The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career”.

While I haven’t read the book (yet — has anybody out there reading this blog read it? If so, let me know what you thought…!), the book review itself contained a few nuggets that certainly resonated with me in terms of both my own career experiences and with the program we coach our clients through at my company Career Coaching International (CCI).

The book review suggests that thinking like a start-up (company) is “…an excellent way for workers to prosper in a world in which the notion of a job for life has been consigned to the scrapheap.  By being on the lookout for new opportunities all the time, changing course if markets shift and tapping professional contacts for advice and leads, people can avoid ending up on the slush pile themselves.” It goes on to suggest that in some cases, people may need to completely rethink their careers. Again it makes the point that this is pretty consistent with how start-ups continually “pivot” in the marketplace until they find the kind of market traction they need to commercialize effectively.

I’m personally very committed to looking at career management this way, and I think it helps explain (to me, anyway) why a few years back I evolved beyond my traditional “sandbox” of business consulting with C-View Strategies to add “career coaching” to the mix and experiment with CCI. At the time I saw them as highly complementary  business activities — nice to see that viewpoint supported now with a highly rated new book on career management written by a high profile “name”.

Frankly, that feels good… still not sure if I’m going to read the book myself, though!

The Yahoo! board: Jonathan Swift would be chuckling…

Illustration to Gulliver’s Travels, by J.J. Grandville. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Somewhat unbelievably, Yahoo! has now cycled through their 4th full time CEO in less than 5 years, which if not a record for a Fortune 1000 company must certainly be up there in the top rankings.

While it has been a long time since Yahoo! was really very strategically relevant to where the internet world was heading, the latest self-imposed misstep on the company by the apparently hapless board was hiring the now ex-CEO Scott Thompson and not bothering to really vet his credentials too closely. So when early in his tenure (Thompson lasted only 4 months in the CEO job) he got