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Wasting Time

by Ron Potter

This concept was brought to me by my favorite author, Shane Parrish, through his farnamstreetblog.com.

It’s a review of the book “How to Live on 24 Hours a Day” by Arnold Bennett.

While I believe this fits into today’s issues, Bennett wrote this book in 1910.

This is one of the things written about in 1910:

The 1910s were a time of great change in American industry. The managerial side of industry was growing and American corporations were reorganizing and becoming more efficient. Technology was available to make corporations run more smoothly and increase production.

A few of the things happening in 2020:

The 2020s are a time of great change in American industry. The managerial side of industry is shrinking and American corporations are being forced to reorganize and become more efficient. Technology is available to make corporations run more smoothly, increase productivity, and help teams run virtually.

What are you doing with your time?

Shane pulls out a few quotes from Bennett’s book.

You cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow, it is kept from you.

Remember: You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. It’s right use…is a matter of the highest urgency.

So, what are you doing with your time?

One of our blogs a couple of weeks ago included the following quote:

Executives who were bracing for a months-long disruption are now thinking in terms of years. Their job has changed from riding it out to reinventing.

Reinventing

Our work-life is changing.  You may have been “bracing for a months-long disruption” to your work life.  But now we’re starting to think in terms of years, or maybe even forever.

How are you spending your time?  Another quote that Shane pulls from Bennett’s book says:

Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum…but I have never seen an essay ‘how to live on 24 hours a day.’ Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time, you can obtain money-usually. But…you cannot buy yourself a minute more time.

You cannot buy yourself a minute more time!  Bennett makes another statement:

The supply of time is truly a daily miracle. You wake up in the morning and lo! your purse is magically filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours.

It’s a miracle!  Every day you wake up with a new 24 hours that are yours!

Don’t Waste Time

Even though you have a new 24 hours every day, the time that you waste will never be recovered.  Again, Bennett says:

You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. It’s right use…is a matter of the highest urgency.

Do you put the highest urgency on your time?

Don’t Be Busy

I’m not talking about being “busy.”  I was once told that the word ‘busy’ is represented by two symbols in the Japanese language.  The first symbol represents “people.”  The second symbol represents “destroyer.”  Therefore, a translation of the Japanese symbols for busy is “people-destroyer.”

Being busy is not productive.  Consciously deciding what to do with the time that we have is productive.  In fact, the word “decide” means to consciously figure out what not to do.

Don’t be busy.  Decide what you are not going to spend your time on and then consciously spend it on the things that are important. Those things should include (but not be limited to):

  • Health
  • Pleasure
  • Family
  • Your immortal soul
  • Reinventing yourself

Reinvent Yourself

Just don’t be busy!  Reinvent yourself!

Bennett says “You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.”

We all have excuses for not taking the time to reinvent ourselves.

  • Too Young – not enough experience
  • Too Old – can’t change my habits
  • Too Poor – no resources available
  • Too Rich – need to “protect” the wealth
  • Too Secure – if I change I might fail.  I’ll lose my security

What’s your excuse for not reinventing yourself?  Believe me, the world is moving much too fast not to reinvent yourself!

My father’s generation didn’t have the urgency.  The country was rebuilding after WWII and he was riding the wave.

My generation has needed to reinvent a few times.  I went from engineer to micro-computer entrepreneur to executive coach/consultant to animator.

My kid’s generations have moved even faster as the world changes around them.

My oldest grandson graduated from high school this year and I’m already watching him reinvent himself as he goes.

Time is Limited

24 new hours a day is a great gift.  But it’s easy to waste 10 minutes here or 2 hours there.  Its right use is the highest urgency.

Don’t be busy.  Reinvent yourself.

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BlogCulture

High Tech – High Touch

by Ron Potter

Those words keep haunting me.  They are the four words I remember from the book Future Shock.  The book was written by Alvin Toffler in 1970.  That’s 50 years ago!

Description

Wikipedia says that

Alvin Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change overwhelms people. He argues that the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaves people disconnected and suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation”—future shocked.

Stress and Disorientation

I am familiar with these feelings.  I wrote about them recently in my blog titled “Divided” where I talked about being confused, hurting, and even angry.  I love this country and love the people in this country.  But I am feeling stress and I’m definitely disoriented.

Virtual World

Covid-19 is contributing to this stress and disorientation.  By all predictions, more than half of employees indicate that they would like to stay in the virtually connected world, rather than go back to the office.  I believe that many corporate leaders are salivating at the cost savings of shedding their physical office space by allowing everyone to continue in the virtual world of video connection, they just don’t know the real costs.

High Tech, High Touch

Toffler was emphasizing one point with these words.  You can have all the high tech you want, but without high touch, it won’t work well.  In this day of division, with many taking “sides”, what can we do to help this situation?   The answer is also in the four words: High Tech, High Touch.

Without building personal, “high touch” relationships, we don’t have a chance of solving this issue.

Virtual World Better

So, if we’re going to be in this virtual world for some time to come, how do we solve the “High Touch” issue.  Unfortunately, I don’t think we do completely.   But with some additional High Tech we can at least get focused on the issue and help people connect and build relationships if they’re willing.

I’ve been working with a group of consultants (High Touch) and technical people (High Tech) over the last couple of years in anticipation of this virtual world happening.  Even without Covid-19 impacting the world, I was seeing more and more geographically separated people working together on teams.  Through this effort, we have created a platform we call GPS4Leaders.  It’s made up of four modules:  Interact, GPS4Teams, GPS4Leaders and GPS4Culture.  We might refer to it as iTLC.

Here is a short video about the iT of iTLC.

We have designed the GPS4 modules to help virtual teams.  It can help in the following ways:

  • Identify the makeup of the team from a personality type.  Built into the system are three assessments based on Social Styles, Competing Values, and a partial Myers-Briggs.  If there is discord on the team or the teams lack the ability to make decisions, the Interact Module can help.
  • GPS4Teams will also help the team to determine where they are now and how they get to the needed future state of a highly functioning team.  This happens through team assessment and pulse surveys.
  • GPS4Teams also identifies disagreements.  While protecting individual member scores, it will show if there is Diffusion, Polarization, or an Outlier.

The best that can happen in this virtual world is to help teams focus and spend time developing understanding and relationships between members.

Reach for the Best

It’s going to be difficult to create the relationships that are required for high functioning teams.  Using the tools available can help focus the need for building these relationships.  But, it’s going to be up to the team leaders and team members to use technology to help build high functioning teams.  It looks like the only thing we’re going to have as the world changes.

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BlogCulture

We’re not in Kansas anymore

by Ron Potter

I’ve just started reading a book titled Epidemics and Society.  This book makes the point that epidemics have done more to shape society and the course of human history than wars.  This book was written before our current battle with COVID-19 was even on the radar.

What will our Future Look Like?

During this time of self-containment, I’ve had many thoughts about what our future will look like when we finally emerge for the worldwide pandemic.  My thoughts have taken me from movie theaters to the workplace and topics in between.  We’re not in Kansas anymore!

Video Connected Teams

One of the things that I believe will happen during this time is employers and employees will realize that much can be accomplished over the Internet.  While we’ve been moving this way already, this forced telecommuting may help us finally pull the trigger to use technology more broadly.

All of the collaboration software such as Microsoft Teams, WebEx for Teams, Zoom, and others are seeing this as an opportunity to push their technology farther and faster then they would have before we left Kansas.  We’re not in Kansas anymore!

Art of Teamwork

We’ve heard “Art of Teamwork” used to show that collaboration is needed as much as simply getting things done by groups of people.  In other words, there is an Art to building great teams with collaboration platforms.

A few years ago, a small group of my colleagues gathered to talk about creating an app that would help leaders form better teams.  We believe it’s more than simply adding the “art” of great teams.

We called our app GPS4Leaders (You can see more on our webpage).  In doing so, we were expressing that teams, like a good GPS system, is more than just functioning well at the moment.

Think about what a GPS system does for you:

  • Clearly identifies where you are now.
  • Helps you locate your desired destination.
  • Maps out the best route to reach that desired destination.

Where are you now?

Knowing where you are now means knowing who you are as a team.  GPS4Leaders uses four modules to help you assess your team and guide you toward the desired future.

GPS4Leaders is made up of four modules:

  1. Interact (available now)
  2. Teams (available now)
  3. Leadership (coming next)
  4. Culture (in the near future)

Knowing where you are now requires the first two modules.

Interact helps the team identify who they are as individuals and what the make-up of the team looks like when you put all the pieces together.  This is accomplished by a self-assessment looking at personality types.   You can think of these similar to the familiar DICS or Myers-Briggs.  We’re not trying to build the best assessment; we’re trying to make whatever assessment you use more visible and useful.

Teams looks at the dynamics within the team.  GPS4Teams has two assessments built-in.  But again, we’re not trying to become the best assessment in the world.  Our goal is to help you assess how your doing so that you know where you are now and your progress toward a better future team.

Leadership will be built in the near future.  This will allow teams to assess their leaders.  It will provide the same advantages as Team but be focused on the leader.

Culture will be coming in the future.  This will look at the company as a whole and determine the extent to which leaders and leadership teams are being successful in pushing positive behavior throughout the organization.

We’re not in Kansas anymore

Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we are now in a very different place.  The rules and patterns of our old way of working together have disappeared.  How are we to function now?

Please visit our website today and experience how this new app will help you navigate this brave new world.

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Blog

Coronavirus and Deep Work

by Ron Potter

I know, I know, enough of the Coronavirus already.  We’ve been self-isolated and at this point have no idea what to believe is true and what is hype.  What I do know is the interesting journey I’ve been on in relation to Deep Work.

Deep Work

The COVID-19 virus may be offering the opportunity that you’ve been looking for to stand-out in a crowded world.  In his book Deep Work by Cal Newton he makes some great points about Deep Work and the lack of it.

One of the things that Cal says is:

To remain valuable in our economy you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things. This task requires deep work. If you don’t cultivate this ability, you’re likely to fall behind as technology advances.”

“A McKinsey study found that the average knowledge worker now spends more than 60 percent of the workweek engaged in electronic communication and Internet searching, with close to 30 percent of a worker’s time dedicated to reading and answering e-mail alone.

This state of fragmented attention cannot accommodate deep work, which requires long periods of uninterrupted thinking. At the same time, however, modern knowledge workers are not loafing. In fact, they report that they are as busy as ever. What explains the discrepancy? A lot can be explained by another type of effort, which provides a counterpart to the idea of deep work:
Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.”

How not to be replaced by a computer

The “easy to replicate” emphasis is my note.  Why did I highlight that particular statement?  Because when something is easy to replicate it means that a person who makes less wages can easily to the same work.  More importantly, a computer can be taught to do easily replicable work.  Your job is in danger of becoming computerized if you don’t shift from shallow work to deep work!

How do you counter this danger of being replaced by either cheaper labor or a computer?  You learn, practice, and become good at and known for your deep work and deep thinking.

Cultivate Deep Work (Thinking)

You can pick up almost any article, magazine, podcast or post that will tell you how to survive working from home.  These sources talk about

  • Get started early (don’t let your day get away from you before it starts)
  • Act like you’re going to the office (wrong, take advantage of doing things differently)
  • Have a dedicated workspace (good idea, but focus on making it a non-interruptable workspace)
  • Go to coffee shops, libraries, public lounges (may not be a bad idea but discipline must tag along as well.  You can’t go to a coffee shop just so you can enjoy your favorite drink)  And during the pandemic, many of these public places are not even available to us.
  • Stay off the public media! (Great suggestion.)  Regardless of where you’re working from, stay off public media.

What you really need is the discipline and focus for deep work.

Living a life of Deep Work and Thought

As Cal Newton closes his book he says

Deep work is way more powerful than most people understand. To leave the distracted masses to join the focused few, I’m arguing, is a transformative experience.
The deep life requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many, there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind.”

Take advantage of the opportunity being offered

We’re all looking for a silver lining to the isolation caused by our current pandemic.  Take advantage of the forced isolation to become a deep worker and deep thinker.  It will pay rewards that you can’t even think of at the moment.

 

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Elegance: Summary

by Ron Potter

We’ve looked at three of the four sections that will help us build great teams: Truth, Respect, and now Elegance.  This week’s blog is a summary of the Elegance portion that has been written about over the last three weeks.

Elegance is made up of Simplicity, Focus, and Role Clarification.

Simplicity

Simplicity:  We all know the old adage KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  I love old adages because they’re built on truth, even if they are a little rude like this one.  But the point is right on target.  Keep It Simple!  Once we start adding complexity to an issue, it becomes less elegant, more prone to mistakes, missteps, miss understandings, and missed results.  Our human brain is lazy and overloaded.  It looks for ways to simplify things so we have the capacity to understand and deal with complexity.  The more we simplify the greater chance the team has to perform together.

Focus

Books have been written about how our modern technology is not only destroying our focus but is destroying our ability to focus.  That’s scary to me.  But, like any muscle or ability, we can enhance that ability through dedication and practice.  You’re not going to be in good physical shape without regular exercise.  You’re not going to be a good reader without reading on a regular and disciplined base.  You’re not going to be focused without regular exercising of focus.

In every case, the concept is simple but the execution is difficult.

  • Go out for that walk, run, or bicycle ride on a regular basis.  Get to the gym several days per week.  Seems simple enough.  But it takes dedication and determination
  • Pick up that book rather than turn on the TV or flip through social media or complete just two more games on your phone.  Seems simple enough.  But, there we are, watching TV, finally looking up from our social media not realizing that we just spent an hour.  Time is more valuable than money.  We can always earn more money.  But, once you spend that hour, ten minutes or even ten seconds on something frivolous, it’s gone forever.  You’ll never get it back.  Focus.

Role Clarification

This one is a negative, not a positive.  While simplicity and focus are things that will greatly enhance teams, demanding that everyone stay in their “swim lane” or just do their role well and don’t worry about everyone else is a negative when it comes to great teams.  Yes, good teams rely on everyone knowing and doing their roles well but great teams tend to blend and mix thinking and perspectives in order to come up with the best solution.  Great teams function more like orchestras where the parts blend well together and are much richer and stronger in harmony they are as individuals.

Elegance

Elegance is the third leg of our team journey.  It’s an important and positive leg but is more subtle than the previous two.  When we’re not sharing the truth or showing respect, it’s obvious.  When our Elegance is slipping it is not always to see it happening right away.  Stay diligent on this one.  Look for the signs of Elegance waning.  Build an Elegant team.  It’s powerful!

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Elegance: Focus
BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Elegance: Focus

by Ron Potter

We’re working through the Elegance section of a TREC.  TREC stands for Truth, Respect, Elegance, and Commitment.  These are the four elements that make up great teams.

Elegance consists of Simplicity (our last blog post) Focus and Role Clarification.  This blog post will explore Focus.

Focus

Lack of Focus is another issue that keeps teams from becoming Elegant in their approach.

I’m a baby boomer.   The Beatles didn’t come on the scene until I was in my teens.  I started a microcomputer software company when Microsoft was still in Albuquerque, NM before moving it to Seattle.  I owned one of the first Blackberry’s on the market.

I’m not sharing all of this just to demonstrate that I’m old, I’m setting the stage by saying that I’ve seen a lot of changes in my life and career.  But what I have not seen through those many years of changes is a population so distracted as I see today.  I watched a person walk straight into a lamp pole while being distracted on their phone.  When I’m on the highway I can immediately notice a driver several cars ahead of me when they turn their attention to their phone rather than the road and traffic.  We are losing our focus people.  Even scarier, we’re losing our ability to focus.

One of the more profound books I’ve read over the last several years is Deep Work, Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.  Cal gives us research, reason, and ideas on how to regain some of this lost focus.  It’s well worth the read.

Over my 30 years of consulting work, the people who I would put in the category of best leaders all had an ability to focus.  In fact, one common trait that began to emerge over the years was their experience and belief that they could only hold the proper focus if they kept their list of key issues to three or less.  Their time frames might change, usually from quarterly to yearly but the numbers was always three.  If they begin to feel distracted from those three, even if it was for very good and legitimate reasons, they would start to hand-off the responsibility to others so they could get back to their three priorities.  This was also a good way to grow others in the process.

Have you begun to look at what distracts you from your primary three goals?  Our technology is geared to distract us or at least to attract our attention at a moments notice.

  • Have you turned off the notifications on your phone?
  • Have you set aside a period of time each day for no email or texts?
  • Even more powerful, have you established an hour a day, a day per week, a few days per month when you eliminate all of the distractions to get into some deep work?

Just like Einstein’s quote on simplicity, it takes courage.  But without the courage you’ll never grow, progress, reach your goals, stay focused, become an elegant performer.  Another definition of elegance is:

Pleasingly graceful in appearance or manner.”

Are you and your team pleasingly graceful in your manner?  Maybe you need to work on your simplicity and focus!

Stress

One final thought on focus before we leave.  If you’ve fallen into the trap of being constantly distracted by your technology or connected 24/7, you will be experiencing stress in your life that is unnecessary!  If you’re experiencing constant stress that you don’t seem to be able to escape, read Cal Newport‘s book, Deep Work. Just the act of focusing on a book for a while will help relieve some of the stress and you’ll find good lessons for returning to a more satisfying and less stressful approach to live and work.  Focus!

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Truth: Truth with Half a Brain

by Ron Potter

Do you use half or all of your brain to understand the truth?

We’ve been introducing and preparing ourselves to walk through the elements that make great teams. The first of these is Truth. Great teams can tell each other the truth. But truth needs some special understanding.

“Any one with half a brain…”

“Anyone with half a brain can see the truth.” That’s an old saying that expresses some derision toward someone who doesn’t see the truth as you see it. The implication is that if you used even half your brain, you would see the truth.

Have you noticed that people (sometimes yourself) “know” the truth? But if you point out to them that someone else sees things differently, their reaction is the other person has a perspective, but you have the truth.

Separating the brain

Years ago, it was discovered that the cure for people who have extreme epilepsy is to sever their brain halves. Each half of the brain is still fully functional; it’s just that the two halves don’t communicate with each other anymore.

For people who went through this procedure, their epilepsy issues were cured. One patient said “You don’t notice that your brain halves are not working together. You just adapt to it. You don’t feel any different than you did before.” However, the researchers did notice a difference.

To further clarify this difference they created an experiment with some of the earliest patients. These first experiments were conducted in the days before the personal computer, so they used the technology available to them at the moment, a View-Finder. With a View-Finder, each eye sees a slightly different image. The intended purpose was to give a sense of 3-D depth perception. The researchers modified this technology slightly and gave the patient entirely different photos in each eye. In the right eye, they showed the patient a picture of a women. In the left eye, there was a picture of a man.

Before placing the View-Finder to the patient’s eyes, they asked the patient to describe what they saw in the View-Finder. After a few seconds of observing, the patient described the women (in her right eye) in complete detail. When asked if she saw anything else the answer was “No, I described the woman as completely as I could.”

Then the patient was asked to repeat the experiment, but this time instead of describing what she saw, she was to pick out the image of what she saw from a group of images. After viewing the View-Finder for a few seconds, the patient pointed to the picture of the man that appeared in the left eye. In both cases, the pictures of the man and the woman appeared in the same eye. However, the patient was “manipulated” to either verbalize what she saw or point to a point at what she saw. In other words, the researchers could control which image the person saw and remembered by setting them up ahead of time. Verbal description caused the person to describe the image in the right eye. Muscle and physical control caused the person to describe the image in the left eye. Their “truth” was dictated simply by prepping them for how they would answer the question.

A similar experiment conducted with another patient years later with the use of a personal computer provided the same results. This time the patient was asked to concentrate on a dot right in the middle of their computer monitor, and then two images were flashed on the screen: one image to the right of the dot, the other image to the left of the dot.

When the patient was asked to describe what they saw, they described the hammer that appeared to the right of center. When asked to draw what they saw, they drew the screwdriver that appeared to the left of center. When asked to describe what they had drawn, the answer was a screwdriver. When asked why they drew a screwdriver when they originally described a hammer the answer was “I don’t know.”

So, what was truth to that person? The man or the woman? The hammer or screwdriver? The answer is both answers were true. But the brain used some pre-determined criteria to be aware of and record for memory the “truth.”

Current day brain science has taken us a step further. Because of the functional MRI, brain scientist can track an image as it enters through our eyes all the way to being implanted in our memory. What they have found is that the image doesn’t go directly to memory. They’ve been able to determine that once our eye perceives the image, it is parsed into about 127 million bits of information, sent through at least 12 (they think as many as 24) processing centers in the brain, then processed through the older centers of the brain for object recognition and motion detection before being reassembled in our memory.

These early discovered centers include:

  • Values
  • Emotions
  • Goals
  • Beliefs
  • Ideas
  • Happy/Sad
  • Memories
  • Pain
  • Stress

This clears up the old question, do you believe what you see or see what you believe. You see what you believe.

Team Perspective

Courtroom judges will tell you that if two eyewitnesses tell the court exactly the same version of what happened, they know they’ve colluded. Judges know that no two people see the same event in exactly the same way.

So, if our goal is to speak the truth with each other or to get at the truth as a team, we need to start with the premise that we each have our perspective. Great teams value and understand each of those unique perspectives and then work hard to develop a collective team “truth.” What will be the team perspective based on all of our individual perspectives? What will be the truth that solutions will based on so that the team can move forward with unity and commitment?

By sharing beliefs and assumptions plus perspective of the situation, great teams begin to build an understanding of what they face and how to move forward.

Use your whole brain plus have the respect (next series of blog posts) to allow for the diverse points of view held by all team members. You’ll have a better chance of succeeding and be happier doing it.

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BlogTrust Me

Chaotic Order

by Ron Potter

The world we live in is chaotic. A great leader learns how to leverage chaos into creativity, to bring a sense of tranquillity to a crazy world.

Dealing with new technology, profit expectations, continual new-product development, the fickle shopper, and global competitors requires perpetual change and lightning-fast reactions. Markets change, old competitors consolidate, new competitors emerge, and attempts at re-engineering threaten our daily bread. Both leaders and employees can soon feel under siege and at the mercy of chaos.

A creative, energy-filled calm is what we need. A word picture may aid our understanding of this. Imagine you are a surfer. There you are with your board, waiting for the “big one.” If you are in Hawaii, the waves you are playing in might rise to twenty feet. All around you is surging, frothy chaos. Currents, tides, and the weather have combined to create a uniquely unstable environment. Conditions are always changing; every moment the ocean is different. If you try to catch a wave exactly the way you did yesterday, you will take a hard fall. You must stay alert and react quickly to every nuance of water, tide, and wind.

Gutsy leaders confront chaos. No one who is content to just paddle a surfboard beyond where the waves break has ever caught a “big one.” Neither has such a person ever wiped out. If you want to ride a wave, you have to enter into the chaos. If you panic while riding a big wave, you are sure to wipe out. If you stay calm, you can have a wonderful ride while tons of water crash down around you.

Creating calm in the office requires a similar ability to assess the environment, to act quickly, and to stay calm. The economy, products, competitors, consumers, and employees all constantly change. Someone has to have answers; someone must be an independent thinker, able to calmly think things through.

I am familiar with a banker who had a client ready to sell a branch location of his business. The main location seemed to be prospering, but this particular branch appeared to be a drain on energy, time, and resources. The business owner was upset, but the banker remained calm. He took the time to analyze the underlying causes of the owner’s problems. He visited the location, recast the numbers, and advised the owner not to sell the branch but to move and resurrect it. In reality, the branch location was producing extra cash, and the owner, following the banker’s advice, turned his entire business around.

People will follow leaders who stay steady in the chaotic times and work with them to create new answers, new plans, and a new future.

Whatever you do, don’t slip into what I call the “arsonist’s response to chaos.”

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that firefighters in Genoa, Texas, were accused of deliberately setting more than forty destructive fires. When caught, they stated, “We had nothing to do. We just wanted to get the red lights flashing and the bells clanging.”

Do you know any leaders who intentionally start “fires” so they can get the “red lights flashing and hear the sirens”?

Leaders in one of my client organizations proudly described themselves as “firefighters.” They were proud of the fact that they were good at hosing down crises. But when they were asked, “Is it possible you might also be arsonists?” it caused a great deal of reflection within the company.

The goal is a creative, steady productivity—not a chaotic environment that squanders energy and resources on crisis management.

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BlogCulture

NEXT

by Ron Potter

What will you do next? This one question may be the key to success.

Our lives are filled with events. This list is long and complex, especially when you add personal experiences, but I’ll just stick with corporate issues in this blog post.

Events can include issues such as:

  • A competitor surprises you with a new product or strategy in the marketplace.
  • A disruptive new technology catches you off guard.
  • You fail at an assignment.
  • A teammate seems to be cutting you down behind your back.
  • Your boss seems to be showing favorites on the team.
  • You just experienced great corporate, team or personal success.

As you can see these events can range from outside your control, to personal experiences, failures, successes and everything in between.

With each of these, we will experience emotions. These emotions will vary as wildly at the events themselves and range from good to bad. We may experience:

  • A desire to retaliate.
  • Feelings of failure.
  • Wanting to react immediately.
  • Being a victim.

Again, our reaction, emotions, and immediate feelings will be all over the board. They’re natural and they will happen. Don’t assume that “as an adult” you should keep your emotions under control and feel bad about your reactions. They’re human. They will happen.

But, what you do next will determine your success or failure now and throughout life. Having the initial reaction is involuntary. What you do next is a choice.

If you’re part of a team or maybe even the team leader, you should intentionally talk about what you do next to deal with the issue.

If you’re dealing with a failure:

  • don’t stick your head in the sand
  • don’t ignore the truth
  • don’t hang on to some false or out of date view of the world
  • don’t write it off as bad luck

If you’re dealing with success:

  • Don’t let it go to your head
  • Don’t assume you’ve got everything figured out
  • Don’t assume your success will last more than a day
  • Don’t stop figuring out how to get better every day

Whatever the circumstances, figure out what to do next.

Great individuals and teams are constantly learning and growing. They’re figuring out what to do next.

Enjoy your success. Mourn your failures. But in all circumstances constantly be asking “What should we (I) being doing next?”

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BlogLeadership

The Dilemma of Leadership

by Ron Potter

The dilemma of leadership: If you’re not dealing with dilemma’s, you’re not leading.

Quality, Fast, Cheap

You might remember the old joke about the watch repair shop with the sign that said “High Quality, Fast, Cheap. Chose any two.”

Unfortunately, many leadership teams work on these kinds of issues. How do they deliver quicker, with higher quality and keep their costs down at the same time? It’s difficult to deliver all three but they believe doing so is the holy grail of business.

That may be true but it’s not leadership, it’s management. Michael Hammer, who I respect as a researcher and business consultant, put out a book a few years ago titled Faster, Cheaper, Better: The 9 levers for transforming how work gets done. And he’s right, this will transform how work get’s done. That’s the business of management. Getting work done better.

Leadership is not Management

However, leadership is not management. Management knows what the goals are and are working towards getting there faster, cheaper and better. If your leadership team is focused on any one, two or three of these issues, realize that you’re a management team.

Dilemmas

Dilemma comes from the word delaminate. This is the same root word that describes the laminated horns of a bull. Thus, the old adage, “On the horns of a dilemma.”

The idea here is that you need to choose one direction or the other. Both are essential. You just don’t have the resources to do both.

The choices may be about faster, cheaper, better. They may be about markets or customers or technology or cannibalizing your business with a better or newer product. Whatever the issue, you’re faced with deciding between two good choices or two bad choices. The ancients would say “Either way, you will get gored!”

Issues of Leadership

These are the issues of leadership: Dilemmas.

  • If you’re not dealing with dilemma’s, you’re managing, not leading.
  • If you’re not dealing with dilemma’s, you’re not being realistic about your marketplace or your competitors.
  • If you’re not dealing with dilemma’s, you’re avoiding the conflict that will arise when you do face them.

And if you’re not identifying the dilemmas you face and building a team that works through the dilemma to give direction to your managers and your company, you’ve abdicated the role of leadership.

Step up. Face the dilemma. It’s hard. It’s essential. Be a leader!

Dilemma quote

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BlogLeadership

Leadership Transitions

by Ron Potter

If you think you can be a member of the leadership team by representing and defending your function, you don’t know what it means to be a member of the leadership team. You really don’t get it.

I think this might be one of the toughest life transitions I’ve seen people go through. Some of the transitions have been well documented through the years and are observable.

Doer to Manager

The first transition in our career tends to be from being a doer to a manager. A manager teaches, moves from empowerment to delegation, grows people, increases their ability to influence, helps them learn. A good manager is very hands-on, growing the people and teaching them basic aspects of the work to be done.

Manager to Leader

The second transition is one that I’ve observed and coached people through for many years. The reason that it sometimes requires a coach is that it is a difficult transition, one that many people never successfully get all the way through. After you’ve been that manager who has experienced some success, you’re now transitioning from being a manager to a leader. You’re now leading managers. You’re not managing doers anymore.

You’re moving more from a teaching mode to a guiding mode. You’re leading is helping managers to also become leaders. This one is particularly difficult because it seems to be the end of the period of your career where we get rewarded for actually getting things done and accomplishing things. People who reach this level have been rewarded consistently through pay, bonuses, and recognition for accomplishing the work. Moving to a leadership role means that you let go of that hands-on application of getting the work done. It means that you need to trust the people around you who report to you to get the work done. You can’t jump in and do it yourself when they fail. You actually have to let them fail to do this. It can be a very tough transition and one that only a percentage of people seem to make through the years.

Leader to Member of Leadership Team

I don’t think we’ve talked about this transition much. I haven’t seen much written on it. I’ve certainly experienced it myself but began recognizing the symptoms only a few years ago. Moving from being a leader, even a solid, well-respected, effective leader, to a member of a leadership team. This move emphasizes collaboration. It’s focused more on the company, or the overall division, not necessarily on functions. It means that you’re faced with dilemmas.

I recently wrote a blog post about bioscience describing why organizations don’t work. It’s because we seldom realize that we need to sub-optimize functions within the overall organization. This is one of the more difficult dilemmas you will face. Making the whole organization work often requires that parts of the organization operate at suboptimal levels for a season. Maybe even the part that you run.

It requires taking off your function hat and putting on your corporate hat. You may be sitting on the CEO’s leadership team, you may be representing finance, or operations, or HR, or transportation, or manufacturing, or information technology, whatever it is that you run as a member of the organization. It’s very difficult to let go, take off your function hat and put on your corporate hat. But, if the leadership team is functioning well, it’s your job to help them make decisions that may cause you to ratchet back your individual and your team’s success over a period for the success of the whole.

This transition to becoming a member of the leadership team may be the most difficult one to make. Few people will get the chance to even try. If you’re one of the fortunate few, don’t sabotage your (and the team’s) success by letting your ego get in the way of the team’s success. Becoming a great team member on a team doing great things brings the highest level of happiness. It’s really a kick!

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BlogCulture

The Machines won’t stand a chance!

by Ron Potter

Earlier this year I reviewed the book Only Humans Nee Apply. The question raised by the book is:

How do we as humans survive in this incredible technology, robotic age that we’re now entering?

One way to look at history is through the “ages” that have been identified.

  • The Agricultural Age
  • The Industrial Age
  • The Information Age
  • The Technology Age

The Agriculture Age and Industrial Age are well documented and understood. One important thing to remember is the workers at the center of those ages were essentially the upper-middle class of the day.

The landowner or industry owners were the wealthy of that era, but the agricultural and industrial workers were the upper middle class of the day.

The steam engine brought an end to the industrial age when factory workers began making more money. The industrial age ended in September 2007 when the United Auto Workers wages dropped from $60/hour to $20/hour. Industrial workers could no longer make upper-middle class wages.

But when did the information age end? By some measures, it ended 50 years ago. We just haven’t noticed yet.

The Next Age

The next age has gone by different identifies. The Conceptional Age. The Creative Age.

What we know for sure is that we’re entering a new phase where the technology is finally hitting its stride and doing many things that the information or knowledge workers used to do. Several of our major colleges today employ sports writing “robots”. Plug in the stats from the game and the computer writes the sports story.

In his book, Only Humans Need to Apply, Tom Davenport talks about the different ways humans will survive and thrive in this machine age.

  • You can become a machine maintenance person, a technician. Machines will always need maintenance and repair.
  • You can use the machine to augment what you do. My first example of this was using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets began to augment what I did as an engineer. The problem with allowing machines to augment what you do is they quickly get smart enough to take over what you do.

Davenport says our best chance is to augment what the machines can do. How do we begin to use that technology and apply our creativeness? The one aspect that machines haven’t mastered is being creative (so far). How do we begin to apply creativity in ways that machines would never think doing? This is how humans will survive in the technology age.

Augmenting Teams

But, I believe our greatest augmentation opportunities lie in teams, not technology. We need to think about our teams in a similar way. How do we augment each other? If we don’t, we’re not gaining the incredible power of teams. We’re just a group of individuals working together. But in the same way, we think about augmenting machines, we can augment what each other do. By doing so we’re creating a team that can go far beyond even what the best individual on the team can do.

This idea of augmenting each other means we’re required to know each other not as human doings, not as what we do or how we do it but as human beings.

  • Who are we?
  • How do we think?
  • What are our beliefs and assumptions?
  • What are the values that we hold?
  • How are we going to face difficulties together?

This is where growth happens when we’re faced with difficult situations. Teams that learn to augment each other, that function better as a team than as a group of individuals. These are the teams that will be extremely successful in the future. In fact, my belief is that if teams fully augment each other as human beings, the machines won’t have a chance.

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