14. You work the phones and then work the phones some more—and stay in touch with, and on the mind of, positively everyone.
15. You frequently invent breaks from routine, including “weird” ones—“change-ups” prevent wallowing in despair and bring a fresh perspective.
16. You eschew all forms of personal excess. 17. You simplify.
18. You sweat the details as never before.
19. You sweat the details as never before.
20. You sweat the details as never before.
21. You raise to the sky and maintain—at all costs—the Standards of Excellence by which you unfailingly and unflinchingly evaluate your own performance.
22. You are maniacal when it comes to responding to even the slightest screw-up.
23. You find ways to be around young people and to keep young people around—they are less likely to be members of the “sky is falling” school. (Naiveté can be a blessing.)
24. You learn new tricks of your trade.
25. You pass old tricks of the trade on to others—mentoring matters now more than ever.
26. You invest heavily in your Internet-Web2.0-Twitter-Facebook-“cloud”-computing skills.
27. You remind yourself, daily, that this is not just something to be “gotten through”—it is the Final Exam of Competence, of Character, and, even if you’re not a boss, of Leadership. (People often make great leaps in a short period during difficult times.)
28. You network like a demon.
29. You network like a demon inside the company—get to know more of the folks who “do the real work,” and who can be your most dependable allies when it comes to getting things done seamlessly and fast.
30. You network like a demon outside the company—get to know more of the folks “down the line,” who “do the real work” in vendor-customer outfits. (They can become, and will become, your most avid allies and champions.)
31. You offer thanks to others by the truckload if good things happen—and take the heat if bad things happen.
32. You behave kindly, but you don’t sugarcoat or hide the truth—humans are startlingly resilient, and rumors are the real spirit-killers.
33. You treat small successes as if they were World Cup victories—and celebrate and commend people accordingly.
34. You shrug off the losses (ignoring what’s going on in your tummy), and get back on the horse and immediately try again.
35. You avoid negative people to the extent you can—pollution kills.
36. You read the riot act to the gloom-sprayers, once avoiding them becomes impossible. (Gloom is the ultimate “weapon of mass destruction” in tough times.)
37. You give new meaning to the word thoughtful.
38. You don’t put limits on the budget for flowers—“bright and colorful” works marvels.
39. You redouble and retriple your efforts to “walk in your customers’ shoes.” (Especially if the shoes smell.)
40. You mind your manners—and accept others’ lack of manners in the face of their strains.
41. You are kind to all humankind.
42. You keep your shoes shined.
43. You leave the blame game at the office door.
44. You call out, in no uncertain terms, those who continue to play the “office politics” game.
45. You become a paragon of personal accountability.
46. And then you pray.
Self
21. You Are Your Product-
Develop It.
Assignment. To be completed no more than 24 hours from the moment you read this.
Find a mirror. Stand in front of it …
Smiling.
Saying … “Thank you.”
Doing … jumping jacks. (Or some equivalent thereof.)
“For God’s sake, WHY?” you ask.
Smiling begets a warmer environment. (Home or work.)
Thanking begets an environment of mutual appreciation.
Enthusiasm (the likes of those jumping jacks) begets enthusiasm.
Love begets love.
Energy begets energy.
Wow begets Wow.
Optimism begets Optimism.
Honesty begets honesty.
Caring begets caring.
Listening begets engagement.
How do you “motivate” others?
Take a B-school course on Leadership?
No! (Don’t get me started.)
Answer: Motivate yourself first.
By hook.
Or by crook.
Call it LBUAA: Leadership by Unilateral Attitude Adjustment.
Are there things that can be labeled “circumstances”?
Of course.
Do bad things happen to good people? Of course.
Is there such a thing as “powerlessness”?
Perceived powerlessness?
Yes.
Real powerlessness?
No!
No!
No!
Viktor Frankl, psychologist and Holocaust survivor, on concentration camps:
“The last of the human freedoms—the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
If you can figure out how to go to work with a smile today, I (despite my engineer’s training, and the resulting baggage of an MBA from a “quant school”) will … guarantee … you that you will not only “have a better day,” but will (eventually) infect others! And performance will improve—maybe even take a Great Leap Upward.
NB: As usual … “easier said than done.” On the other hand, as a trained and avowed “behaviorist” (devotee to B. F. Skinner, his rats, and “operant conditioning”), I will indeed guarantee that if you can drag your sagging self as far as that mirror, the simple act of practicing your smile—no matter how apparently infantile—will, in fact, beget more smiles from you which will beget more smiles from others which will (consider Smiler-in-Chief Nelson Mandela) perhaps change the shape of the world!
Take charge now!
Task one: Work on yourself.
Relentlessly!
“ME FIRST”
A few wise words on why a “me first” approach is anything but … “selfish”:
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
—Gandhi
“Being aware of yourself and how you affect everyone around you is what distinguishes a superior leader.”
—from “Masters of the Breakthrough Moment,” strategy + business, no. 45
“To develop others, start with yourself.”
— Marshall Goldsmith, executive coach
“Work on me first.”
— Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan,
and Al Switzler, Crucial Conversations
“How can a high-level leader like be so out of touch with the truth about himself? It’s more common than you would imagine. In fact, the higher up the ladder a leader climbs, the less accurate his self-assessment is likely to be. The problem is an acute lack of feedback, especially on people issues.”
— Daniel Goleman et al., The New Leaders
22. Job One: Amuse Yourself!
I luuuuuv great customer–“end user” feedback! I am competitive to a fault in that regard. And a slave to the market—still, “after all these years.” At a higher level of marketplace engagement, I love a hearty business backlog, especially if it’s based on repeat business—and I carefully measure it against that of previous years. And I love a fee-per-event yield that exceeds last year, the year before.
And yet … in an important way … I indeed put the customer–“end user” second …
Second to what? To put it simply (to me, anyway):
To give a high-impact, well-regarded speech to customers, I first & second & third have to focus all my restless energy on “satisfying” … myself.
I must be … physically & emotionally & intellectually agitated & excited & desperate beyond measure … if I want to … communicate & connect & compel & grab by the
collar & say my piece … about a small number of things, often contentious and not always “crowd-pleasing,” that, at the moment, are literally a matter of personal … life and death.
I crave great “customer feedback”—but in no way, shape, or form am I trying to “satisfy my customer.” I am, I repeat, trying instead to satisfy me, my own deep neediness to reach out and grab my customer and connect with my customer over ideas that consume and devour me.
Hence … my “Job One” is purely selfish and internally focused: to be completely captivated by the subject matter at hand. That is, to repeat in slightly different words: Job One is … Self-motivation.
As Warren Bennis, my primo mentor, to whom this book is dedicated, wrote in On Becoming a Leader: “No leader sets out to be a leader per se, but rather to express him- or herself freely and fully. That is, leaders have no interest in proving themselves, but an abiding interest in expressing themselves.”
So I’m back to my somewhat disingenuous message: To put the marketplace customer truly first, I must put the person serving the customer (me, in this instance) “more first.”
Excitement & self-stimulation first!
“Service” second!
(Think about it.)
TAKE AN (INTERNAL) VACATION
Stay fresh!
Stay engaged!
Learn!
Devote “adequate” time to self-development!
(That is … a lot of time!)
It is not self-indulgent!
Let’s say you’re a systems salesperson.
So … Take the day “off.”
That is: Spend the day in the lab with the scientists and engineers. Take a couple of them to lunch. Learn about their new projects—even the ones for which the payoff is five years out.
Repeat monthly: Devote at least two work days to “far-out stuff” aimed at personal battery recharging.
23. Fitness Power = Staying Power.
A moody friend, faced with high-tech employment disruption (and, partly, burnout), is now a physical-fitness trainer. She told me that she was no less than “flabbergasted” by the positive attitude of the people she worked with.
She is a keen “people observer,” and says she doubts that the phenomenon can be traced to “a certain kind of person” who is attracted to the job. And she says so, in part, because of her own attitudinal transformation (right word, she insists: “transformation”). Her conclusion:
“It’s simple. Men or, especially, women are ‘happy’ if they are comfortable with their bodies. And if they are very physically fit they are by definition at least happier with their bodies. They simply can’t help being more positive and more optimistic. It’s quite extraordinary.”
I don’t urge, or believe in, or countenance, shoving extreme physical fitness down anybody’s throat. But I do suggest that having programs available pretty much free of charge, tools within reach, and “regular” folks doubling as fitness mentors will improve overall organization effectiveness—perhaps “remarkably.”
(FYI: The value of this idea goes up by an order of magnitude in tough times … when “attitude enhancers” are worth their weight in gold.)
24. Mental Gymnastics, Urgency Of.
While writing the “tip” above on physical fitness, it dawned on me, in spite of being a voracious seeker and absorber of new ideas, how rarely I can put my head on the pillow and actually say,
“I really had my mind twisted into a pretzel today.”
Or: “Holy s**t, I can’t believe …”
Many of us have been convinced of the value of those physical stretching regimens alluded to immediately above. But what about the mental equivalent?
We may, especially in Web World, come across “new stuff” numerous times in the course of a day. In fact, the extraordinary is now so ordinary that it rarely registers.
But what about truly weird stuff, genuinely surprising stuff, counterintuitive stuff, the stuff that makes your head literally spin and sets you to digging and digging and digging some more?
If you go to bed three days in a row without some genuinely new ideas wandering around and around in your brain and kicking your synapses—well, I suggest that you let that worry you.
(And then act upon your very appropriate concern.)
25. You Are Your Story! So Work on It!
He/she who has the best/most compelling/most resonant story wins:
In life!
In business!
In front of the jury!
In front of the congregation!
From the local district rep seat all the way to the White House!
Stories are 100 percent about emotion—and emotion, far more than dynamite, moves mountains. (Trust me, I just finished an excellent book on the digging of the Panama Canal. The dream, kept alive for centuries by a parade of unhinged dreamers, made the canal that changed the world—the sticks of blasting material were almost incidental.) And effective storytelling—concerning your career or your company or your current six-week project—is a refined art. Maybe it comes naturally to your 79-year-old grandpa … but it didn’t/doesn’t to me!
I WORK LIKE HELL AT IT!
Do you ever make “presentations”?
I bet the answer is “Yes.”
Well … STOP.
No more presentations.
Ever again.
I stopped years ago.
I never give presentations.
I do … for pay, no less … tell stories.
Story after story after (linked) story.
As I prepare I am conscious … 100 percent of the time … of the evolving story, of the plot, of the narrative that I wish to follow.
For example: Regardless of the intensity of the client demand (“We need to translate your slides into Spanish”), I never submit my presentations ahead of time. That’s because I rework them—keep refining the story collection, its plot, its flow, its rhythm—until moments before I go onstage. I suspect that in the last few hours before a speech, I revise my “script” well over 100 times.
Your schedule today is … a short story with a beginning, narrative, end, and memory that lingers on.
Your current project is … an unfolding story about making something better, exciting users, etc.
Your organization’s raison d’être, and hence its effectiveness, is … a story.
Your career is … a story.
HE/SHE WHO HAS THE BEST STORY WINS!
SO … WORK … ON YOUR STORY!
MASTER—become a “professional at”—THE ART OF STORYMAKING/STORYTELLING/STORY DOING/STORY PRESENTING!
(“Master” is a word that, as you’ve doubtless figured out already, I use again and again in this book. Storytelling “excellence” is not something you “pick up along the way.” It is an art, a craft, a discipline to be mastered—like playing the flute. If you buy my “story line” here, you will pursue its implications as that determined flutist would pursue her instrumental skill.)
On a related note, I conclude from the likes of the preceding analysis that “brand” is, though thought to be the apex of marketing achievement (“brand power”), encompassed by and in fact subsidiary to “the story.”
“Word games,” you say. “Of course the ‘brand,’ in effect, tells a story.” Yes, of course it does, but I’d argue that semantics do matter.
“Brand” has to some extent become a sterile concept, wildly overused and hence almost made meaningless, that has burned itself out or is in the process thereof—no one screams that message more loudly and effectively than Saatchi & Saatchi chief Kevin Roberts in practice and in his mold-breaking book, Lovemarks.
Furthermore, when we say “brand,” we are likely to begin with a clinical analysis of the market, competition, etc. But a story is a story is a good yarn or potboiler or thriller or whatever—it connects and changes your worldview, or it doesn’t. To grossly oversimplify, by more or less erasing the word brand from your vocabulary and instead obsessing on “story-story-
story,” stories that move mountains, stories that grab, stories that shock, you will, in my opinion, end up looking at the world in a different and more useful way. “Story” is a far more animated and engaging, less clinical formulation than brand—and is a great yardstick for effectiveness. “Does our story really enthrall?” may be the most potent business-profitability-effectiveness question one can ask—and, besides, a question that as readily applies to a revised business process (“What’s the story of this new reporting scheme?”) or training course as to a more traditional product or service.
A WHOLE NEW … STORY
Story time! Here’s what a few smart folks have said about the (business) value of storytelling:
“A key—perhaps the key—to leadership is the effective communication of a story.”
— Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership
“Leaders don’t just make products and make decisions. Leaders make meaning.”
—John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC
“Management has a lot to do with answers. Leadership is a function of questions. And the first question for a leader always is: ‘Who do we intend to be?’ not ‘What are we going to do?’ but ‘Who do we intend to be?’”
—Max De Pree, Herman Miller
“The essence of American presidential leadership, and the secret of presidential success, is storytelling.”
The Little Big Things Page 7