Management Craft

Love this #ted talk from Shawn Achor - Will help you be happier.

Check out this supercharged and amusing talk from Shawn Achor - it is excellent and has the potential to help us all live more fulfilling - and successful - lives. 12 minutes.

Action and Mental Garbage Model

I hope you have a great week. Here is a quick model that I hope helps you shape your week. You choose the path and how many self-imposed barriers you allow to slow you down. Openness - versus defensiveness - enables us to fully trust in ourselves because we take in the world fully and can respond flexibly. When we carry a lot of mental garbage, we rely more on history that might not be relevant for today, inflexible mental models, manic mantras, and motivational posters to guide us. Why do we need to list our values? Answer: Because we are not open enough to fully trust ourselves.

What's Your Big Idea? How Many Can You Generate? #management #innovation

This post is inspired by four thoughts coming together.

1. A few years ago I pitched a book idea to Berrett-Koehler's President, Steve Piersanti. He passed on the book because the idea was unremarkable. He asked, "what's your big idea?" And he said, "I don't see it here." He was right, BTW.

2. A mentor of mine was trying to help me lower my expectations for a project that was frustrating me by suggesting that, "most people have only one revolutionary idea in their lifetime." He was wrong, BTW.

3. I was reviewing a piece of writing for a friend. He took a perfectly logical approach to laying out his idea but one that ended up stripping out the drama, magic, and most importantly, his big ideas. Ironically, his topic is innovation. And he has great ideas - big ideas.

4. I was re-reading Meg Wheatley's Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (a must read for all managers) and was re-struck by her assertion that information is a force, not a thing. And that change occurs in jumps enabled by invisible connections. Big ideas are ideas that make quantum leaps and this happens every day (it is not a rare thing, see #2).

I believe that you and all your team members have the potential to generate MANY big ideas. But often, we don't know how to A) identify them, B) convey them, and C) use them.

Think about this the next time you create an email, a PPT, or have a conversation. What is the big idea that you want to share? Is it coming through in your communication? Start with the big idea first to generate interest and engagement. Great books do this, too. I remember one of my publishers suggesting that I move a chapter that I had in the second half of the book to the beginning because it contained the big idea (in Focus Like a Laser Beam, I think). I fought to keep the Tony Bennett story in the front of my book Hip and Sage because I knew that it encapsulated the big idea behind the book (I won, BTW, and I love the way it starts the conversation about relevancy and vibrancy).

When I coach, I am looking to discover the big idea each person has that makes up their unique brand of leadership - what is driving them every day?

And as a manager, you will catalyze team member success when you help each person define and convey their big ideas. In fact, I think one of the funnest and most special things we can do is to be mid-wives for big ideas.

Managers, Are You Telling TOO Many Stories? Be a little more messy. @tylercowen

I really like this TEDx talk from economist Tyler Cowen called Be suspicious of stories. I think anyone in a leadership role should watch it and think about what it might mean. Like Tyler, I am not advocating we stop using story - but it is useful to think about the potential ramifications of oversimplifying things through story. Stories, by their nature, are easy to remember and draw broad conclusions.

For managers and leaders, stories can pull people in, galvanize them, and build momentum. The down side is that many situations are more complex than can be told in a story and are not helped when made into a punchline.

I have seen employees roll their eyes and have heard them say their manager was clueless after hearing him/her oversimplify a situation. Work life (and personal life!) is messy and stories can increase mental laziness.

Check out the talk here.

My favorite line from the video is, "It might just be a mess." How often do we force one or two plotlines onto something that is not plot driven? How often do we assume intent where there is just chaos? How often do we rush into a convenient narrative that does not fit the circumstance because we can't find a narrative that works?

Share this video as pre-work for your next team meeting and see what happens.

 

#Book Signing Disaster and How to Avoid - Funny and Tragic

I just got an email from someone who discovered an essay I wrote a few years ago about a book signing distaster. The essay was published by the legendar editor Alan Rinzler and is meant to be dark comedy. You can check it out here.

I remember reading this essay to a group of aspiring writers....they seemed a bit horrified, because they were all likely hoping that nothing like this would ever happen to them. It likely will, however, because nearly all writers have similar experiences at some point.

I thought I would share this again as we head into the weekend. Sometimes the best way to progress through difficulty is to laugh and learn. Enjoy.

The Best Decision Makers are Reflective - Happy New Year #leadership

Many people set goals for the new year. I do that, too. Even more important than goals, however, is reflection. How did 2011 go? Of what are you most proud? What would you do differently if you could have a "do-over?" If your last year ended up being your last year, would it have represented your best living?

Reflection is critical for our growth because it is often only through looking back that we can see things that will shape our future.

What is reflection? We throw this word around, but do we all know how to do it? I am continually honing my ability to reflect. Try these practices:

• Take stock - define and list your accomplishments.
• Be real - acknowledge those outcomes that make you wince when you think about them.
• Remember players - this is perhaps most important - who enriched your life, helped you become a stronger and better person, cared for you (and visa versa)?
• Look around - how have your physical suroundings changed? What did you buy, get, make, and get rid of and do your things add value to your world? What's missing? What's unneeded?
• Notice how you feel - assess your vitality and the habits that have either improved or diminished your health.

Reflection allows us to learn - to do the next year better than the last. We all want this. New Year's Resolutions and goals are wonderful and can generate breakthroughs. This is especially true when they are informed by a humble and nonpunitive look back.

Happy New Year and here's to a great 2012 - the Year of the Dragon. Brave, bold, benevolent.

HCI M-Prize - Enter Your Best Idea! @hackmanagement @human_capital

Last year I had the pleasure of participating in, and winning, the HCI M-Prize competition for management innovation. The contest is put on my Gary Hamel's Management Innovation Exchange (the MiX) and the Human Capital Institute (HCI).

It is time for the 2011/12 competition and here is why I think you should enter.

• The prizes? Yes, that is fun, but not the most compelling reason.
• Contributing to the collective intelligence of managerial sciences? Yes, that is a great thing.
• The people you will meet? Yes, this is a BIG bonus, but comes in at reason #2.
• What you will learn? YES, this is the most amazing bonus of all. Participating in the contest means that you are putting your ideas and yourself out there and the process of articulating them will help you advance them forward. It is invigorating It is fun. It is expanding.

For me, my idea of the talent management cloud was something I had been working on in a variety of ways and in pieces with varrious clients. For the contest, I brought my ideas together, utilized great thinking from others, and created something that was more complete and effective. Having to articulate my idea for MiX readers and judges - who don't know me - was a great process and I learned a lot.

I am also very thankful to have met the great people at the MiX and at HCI.

Bottom-line. Check out the contest theme and rules. And then share your best idea. Contribute

One last hint/tip: Last year, many smart people entered the contest and the ideas were awesome. My idea was not necessarily any better than the others, but the judges told me that one of the things that put my entry out front was the level of detail I provided in my final write up. Why did this matter? The objective of the contest is to create a repository of great ideas that others can use to improve their organizations. The more detail you can provide, the more likely it will be that someone can take your idea and put it to use.

Scenario Planning - build alternative futures.

I am embarrassed that it has been nearly three weeks since I offered a post. After 8 years (yes, this blog is THAT old), I find that I need periodic breaks. The muse does not come. The blog seems like a dose of cod-liver oil. My mojo is focused elsewhere.

Am I less interested in management? No.

Do I think I have written it all? Heck, no.

I do feel like I am at a crossroads, however, and I am taking some time to figure things out. Time is too prescious not to reflect and reconfirm your path. When is the last time you have done that?

BTW, I was looking at Thomas Chermack's book, Scenario Planning in Organizations. Do you use scenario planning? You should. Today's chaotic (complex systems) work environment demands that we get good at this. Here is how Tom defines scenario planning (from his website):

"Scenario planning is a discipline for building alternative futures  in which decisions can be played out for the purposes of changing thinking, improving decision-making, fostering individual, team, and organizational learning, and improving performance.

Scenario planning differs from strategic planning in that it gives up the assumption that the environment will stay the same.  Most traditional approaches to planning simply focus on creating a set of steps to get from the current reality to the desired reality.  None ask deep questions about the nature of the industry and environment.

Scenario planning is focused on a continuously changing environment and makes it a part of planning.  Scenarios enable conversations about how the organization can be best prepared, no matter what the future may hold."

Sounds like a great skill to learn, doesn't it? Check out Tom's book here. Building an alternative future is what I an working on and am excited to do that. I will share more once I figure it all out! In the mean time, go do the same for you and enjoy.

The Process of the Good Life

"The process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of ones potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life." Carl Rogers

I just found this quote in my notebook and thought I would share it with you. The key part of this idea, I think, is the word "process." The good life is not a designation, a characteristic, or an outcome, but a process in which we either choose to engage in fully or something less than this.

Silence Isn't Always Golden @drbret

It's never pleasant to give the boss bad news.  But he has to know about problems before he can fix them.  But some (a lot of?) organizations discourage employees from sharing bad news through managers' behavior.  Bret Simmons discusses three beliefs that managers have that cause employees to clam up.  Check out his post here.  You don't want to inadvertently send the wrong messages and then be faced with making decisions based on partial or bad information.