The Little Big Things
Page 6
Known for integrity, a “straight shooter.”
Sense of humor! (Critical! Able to break the insane level of tension.)
Empathy (“I feel your pain”—not weepy empathy, but obvious human compassion; understands that some people have little resilience and treats such folk with respect, not as “losers”).
“Cruelty”! (Must make tough decisions instantaneously, without looking back.)
Decisive, but not rigid.
A strong individual, and an equally strong team player. (Nirvana, of course, but one can aim to find these two traits co-mingled.)
Understands the chain of command and its importance—and evades it as necessary.
Comfortable being challenged by way-out thinkers, but with a strong “doer” bias overall.
A person of Hope. (“Religious-like”?)
Observable Attributes of Resilient Organizations:
Conscious hiring of resilient folks at all levels and in all functions. (I.e., “demonstrated resilience” is on the spec sheet.)
Promotion for demonstrated resilience—be explicit about so doing.
Decentralization!!! (In organizational structure, physical configuration, and systems alike. Decentralization = Less hooked up. (Helps avoid “house of cards” problem.)
Shadow “emergency organization”—ready to roll. (“Excess” resources available to throw into the breach—the “just-in-time,” zero inventory–zero slack concept works brilliantly in maximizing efficiency when things run smoothly, but it can be an unmitigated disaster when uncertainty and ambiguity and confusion rule.)
Very serious “War gaming.” (But don’t let it lead to false confidence. To some extent, if you can game it, it ain’t a Black Swan.)
Redundancy!!! (Redundancy in “trivial stuff” is a must—there is nothing “trivial” about “extra” flashlights, in reality or metaphorically, when a Black Swan appears.)
Culture of (1) self-starting, (2) caring and respect, (3) execution as Priority #1, (4) accountability-responsibility by 100 percent of folks. (Oddly, or not so oddly, the illegal Mexican immigrant who sneaks across a guarded border successfully and is now a busboy may well have far more resilience than a Summa Cum Laude Harvard grad!)
“Culture of Resilience” (as a de jure explicit “plank” of organizational values set).
Focusing obsessively on initiative-taking at the frontline. (One of the big weaknesses of contingency planning is that it more or less depends on well and expensively equipped “first responders” to guide affairs. Overwhelming evidence indicates that the on-the-spot participants make most of the critical decisions—before even the most agile of First Responders appears on the scene.)
MBWA/Managing By Wandering Around—communicate all the time about everything “at the coal face.”
Transparency. (Keeping everyone in the know, no one in the dark.)
Financial padding (cash on hand, etc., needed if the computer system crashes for a few days).
Excellent equipment. (But …)
Remember that … Training Trumps Equipment.
Ability to get by for (quite) a while without IS-IT. (This is imperative and perhaps expensive; but the odds of a serious cyberinterruption are close to 100 percent.)
Testing the whole organization with uncomfortable situations—sports teams routinely do it, why not your accounting department?
Pattern of promoting an unusually high share of mavericks. (Mavericks think “weird is normal.”)
Diversity per se!!!!!!!! (Differing views and backgrounds are priceless, especially in exceptional circumstances—nothing better than having someone who at age 20 was an Army ranger.)
PLANNING FOR THE UNPLANNABLE
Four words: redundancy, slack, $$$, breathing.
Many of the meetings I attend have been planned for more than a year—and I am the sole speaker. Hence, neither snow nor sleet nor revolution nor Montezuma’s revenge (nor any combination thereof) is an excuse for my not showing up. And yet, shit happens—the only question is what consistency said shit is and from whence it was hurled.
My “secret” to resilience in the face of nearly impossible circumstances lies in four words:
Redundancy. Multiple flights booked via multiple paths. Double (or treble) everything—from passports to computers to world phones. Travel clothes that could double in a pinch as “event” clothes. You name it, and, like NASA, I’ve got two or three of them. As a statistics buff, I constantly calculate the probabilities of treble and quadruple screw-ups—it drives my wife crazy when she travels with me.
Slack. I’m a pretty busy fella, but I bite my tongue till it bleeds and program lots of slack into the system. I aim for gaps between flight legs of four or five hours—they reduce the odds that an errant thunder squall, or two, could make a godawful mess of a Boston to Mumbai or Boston to Seoul trip.
$$$. Resilience is not free. First, there are those duplicate tools—like computers. But there are also the likes of travel-services fees associated with double- and triple-booking. (And the cost of a lot of flowers and candy for the numerous people who help make the impossible possible!)
Breathing. I am, alas, not Mr. Calm. I’m no Barack Obama. But I have taught myself some breathing rituals—and after years of practice, I can induce a pretty satisfactory calm with one or two or three minutes (no more) of “right breathing.”
I share these personal “tricks” with you, not because I think you care about my flavor of paranoia, but because I think that this quartet of practices has something close to universal validity. I couldn’t survive without redundancy-slack-$$$-breathing; and I really don’t see how others could, either.
18. Lifetime Employment Is
Dead. Your Career Is Not.
The world is flat. (Or at least a lot flatter than it was.) Outsourcing is ubiquitous. (In big companies.) “Lifetime employment” is dead. (Period.) You’re on your own. (Not entirely, but more than has been the case in recent decades for, again, bigger company employees—there was never a “guaranteed anything” for those who work in tiny and small businesses.)
So if many of us are more on our own than before, then:
1. The “signature” of our work and …
2. The vitality of our network will determine our professional fate.
Though I introduced the idea of “Brand You” (translation: you’ve got to stand out to survive professionally) some 15 years ago, and although chaos in the workplace has accelerated madly since, huge numbers of people continue to have problems with the situation that, say, a local electrician faces every day: The newly precarious necessarily need to see (must see, per me) themselves as a “business,” as a “brand” unto themselves. And many are scared out of their wits at the idea of “going entrepreneurial.” Ubiquitous rejoinder: “It’s not my thing.” “I didn’t get the entrepreneurial gene.” Or some such.
I feel their pain, but as to the “missing genetic ingredient”— baloney! I stand foursquare with the father of microlending and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. He claims—and I wholeheartedly agree—that we’ve mostly lost the mojo we all once had. “All human beings are entrepreneurs,” Mr. Yunus states. “When we were in the caves we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where the human history began … As civilization came we suppressed it. We became labor because [they] stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.”
That statement doesn’t remove, or perhaps even diminish, our fears—especially if you are 53 years old, you have been laid off permanently, and your pension has evaporated as well. No, I’m not offering insufferable “tough love.” I am simply reminding us that we who made it this far along the evolutionary path are highly skilled and resilient survivors from the get-go. We do, like that very “normal” electrician down the road from me, have what it takes.
(Yes, I keep referring to that “local electrician.” Simply put, his cohort numbers in the millions—and the Ivy League degree
count is minuscule. “This stuff” can be done and is done, routinely, by mortals—not just the Steve Jobses of the world.)
We’ve pretty much got to work full-time on buffing up our skill set, sharpening our sales proclivity* (*sorry—you’ve gotta learn to sell), and networking like a maniac. It won’t be easy for many, but it can be done by “normal” people; and though life will doubtless appear to be more precarious, the odds are actually pretty good, very good in fact, that the improving skill set and enhanced network will enhance our long-term “career” viability—and will also be a damn sight more fulfilling than the lot of the cubicle slaves so aptly documented by Scott Adams’s Dilbert comic strip.
Message: You … dO … have the … Right Stuff!
BRAND YOU: “INC.” THE DEAL
First step (assuming you didn’t take it long ago) toward building a “resilient” career: Redo your résumé.
To begin with, for your private consumption, put Judith Sanders, Inc., at the top of the page where “mere” “Judith Sanders” used to reside. As you rework the résumé, imagine yourself going before a panel of venture capitalists to sell your business plan. Are you (Judith Sanders, Inc.) a going and growing concern with a fabulous service offering and bright prospects—or not?
The gaping holes in your draft of Judith Sanders, Inc., if you are bone honest, may scare the hell out of you. But, assuming you are still employed, there are immediate steps to take. For example: Revisit immediately your current projects and spiff them up in such a way that you can imagine them … as exciting-“remarkable” entries … on your résumé one year or two years hence. Volunteer for projects that will contribute to your growth both by extending your main skill set as well as filling in holes in, say, financial management.
I could go on—but I’ll simply conclude with a mantra coined by my friend Julie Anixter:
“Distinct or extinct!”
19. “Failure—Celebrate It!
Notes toward a Theory of Failure (or is it a Theory of Success?):
(1) To succeed, you have to try more stuff than the other guy—fast.
(2) If you try more stuff in a hurry, you’ll make lots of mistakes. (It’s an Iron Law of Nature.)
(3) Hence, screwing up a lot is a very good sign of progress—perhaps the only sure sign.
(4) If we aim to (more or less) maximize screw-ups, then we must do more than “tolerate” screw-ups.
(5) We must “encourage” screw-ups.
(6) We must cel-e-brate screw-ups!
A (brilliant) variation on this theme comes from successful Australian businessman Phil Daniels, who attributes a large share of his success “to six words.” Namely:
“Reward excellent failures.
Punish mediocre successes.”
Those words belong in my “Top Five Quotes” club (from among perhaps 5,000). I believe the idea is profound, and the impact enormous … if … you use a literal translation. That is, if you literally … reward … excellent failures. And if you literally … punish … mediocre successes.
As Les Wexner, founder of Limited Brands, once told me:
“In fashion, your batting average is never anywhere near 1.000. Your strikeouts will always, over time, surpass your hits—especially your home runs. So a buyer with no mistakes is taking no chances—the kiss of death in this business; and cause for a poor evaluation. The buyer who will hit home runs, like power hitters in baseball, will also have a bushel of swinging strikeouts. I will in fact reward those swinging strikeouts—as the price of the home runs that are required for our growth.”
Amen.
“FAIL-SAFE” WISDOM
“Fail. Forward. Fast.”
— High-tech exec, Valley Forge, PA
“Fail faster. Succeed sooner.”
— David Kelley, founder IDEO
“Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”
—Samuel Beckett, Nobel laureate, Literature
“Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”
—Winston Churchill
Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins
—Book title, Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes
“Sam was not afraid to fail.”
—David Glass, former CEO, Walmart, on Walmart founder
Sam Walton’s most significant success trait
“If people … tell me they skied all day and never fell down, I tell them to try a different mountain.”
—Michael Bloomberg
“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
—Michael Jordan
20. The World’s Worst Advice
(Please Ignore It).
An old friend visited me for a couple of days. Google him, and you’ll be impressed. Or you would be, if I were to tell you who he is.
In the course of a dozen conversations—old-guy conversations—we shared stories of joys and sorrows, anger and pain, good fortune and ill winds, pals and foes and traitors and through-it-all supporters.
His Hall-of-Fame career includes bushels of excoriating criticisms along the way. Embarrassing and well-deserved failures. Off years—in fact, off decades.
And musing on it all reminded me of a Very Sensible Saying that I think is pure, unmitigated crap—in fact, (the) World’s Worst Advice:
“Know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.”
Forget “fold ‘em.”
Drop it from your vocabulary.
Excise it.
Bury it.
Stomp on its grave.
If you care, really care, really really care about what you are pursuing, well, then … pursue-the-hell-out-of-it-until-hell-freezes-over-and-then-some-and-then-some-more.
And may the naysayers roast in hell or freeze in the Antarctic or bore themselves to death with the sound of their “statistically accurate” advice.
My anonymous visiting friend gave me The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, by David Price. Consider this paragraph:
“One of the curious aspects of Pixar’s story is that each of the leaders was, by conventional standards, a failure at the time he came onto the scene. [Animator-superstar John] Lasseter landed his dream job at Disney out of college—andhadjust been fired from it. [Tech genius and founding president Ed] Catmull had done well-respected work as a graduate student in computer graphics, but had been turned down for a teaching position and ended up in what he felt was a dead-end software development job. Alvy Ray Smith, the company’s cofounder, had checked out of academia, got work at Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Center, and then abruptly found himself on the street. [Steve] Jobs had endured humiliation and pain as he was rejected from Apple Computer; overnight he had transformed from boy wonder of Silicon Valley to a roundly ridiculed has-been.”
That is, shit happens. And if enough of it happens to you, then, if you are (statistically) wise, you’ll fold ‘em. And God (and I) will love you just as much as if you’d endured.
But we won’t read about you in the history books.
Now, if you do indeed “endure”—well, we probably won’t read about you, either, because the odds indeed are loooooooooong against you making it into that history book.
But if you really really really (really) really care … then there ain’t no time to “fold ‘em” until your last breath has been drawn—and even that’s too soon if you’ve bothered along the way to inflame others about your purportedly quixotic cause.
In the (absolutely not) immortal words of Tom Peters:
“There’s a time to hold ‘em and a time to keep on holdin’ “em—if you really really really care.”
SPECIAL SECTION
The Recession 46
Forty-Six “Secrets” and “Strategies” for Dealing with the Gut-Wrenching Downturn of 2007++
I am constantly asked for “strategies/secrets
for surviving the recession.” I try to appear wise and informed—and parade original, sophisticated thoughts. But if you want to know what’s really going through my head, see the list that follows. (Note: I introduced this list in May 2009, when all the economic statistics were gruesome. Nonetheless, many immediately pointed out that it’s as relevant in good times as in bad.)
1. You come to work earlier.
2. You leave work later.
3. You work harder.
4. You may well work for less; and, if so, you adapt to the untoward circumstances with a smile—even if it kills you inside.
5. You volunteer to do more.
6. You dig deep, deeper, deepest—and always bring a good attitude to work.
7. You fake it if your good attitude flags.
8. You literally practice your “stage face” in the mirror each morning, and in the loo midmorning.
9. You give new meaning to the idea and intensive practice of “visible management.”
10. You take better-than-usual care of yourself and encourage others to do the same—physical well-being significantly impacts mental well-being and response to stress.
11. You shrug off shit that flows downhill in your direction—buy a shovel or a “preworn” raincoat on eBay.
12. You try to forget about the “good old days”—nostalgia is self-destructive. (And boring.)
13. You buck yourself up with the thought that “this too shall pass,” but then remind yourself that it might not pass anytime soon; and so you rededicate yourself to making the absolute best of what you have now—character is determined, virtually in full, by one’s reaction to adverse circumstances.