The Simplest Thing That Works

What's Up With This?

Link: Independent Street : Ayn Rand, Where Are You?.

Here's a great post from the Wall Street Journal's "Independent Street" blog, noting that the WSJ's recent list of top business thinkers and a recent story in USA Today talking about rich entrepreneurs have one thing in common: neither one contains a single woman. The comments are even better than the post itself.

I don't know the solution to this problem, but I suspect that having these kinds of conversations is part of it.

And, at the risk of sounding way too hopeful, I think time is part of it, also: I hang out quite a bit with my son (20), my daughter and her husband (24 and 25), and their friends (18-30, mostly)...and I just can't imagine that, when they're my age, there will still be this disparity between men and women in business. They seem much clearer (to me) about actual gender differences and fake gender differences: much less likely to assume - for instance - that men are intrinsically better at business than women.

I don't want to wait 30 years, though -- so let's keep talking...

With all due respect, Mr. Porter...

Michael Porter has sold roughly eight ka-jillion more books than I have, so this may seem a bit audacious of me, But here goes, anyway.

I've gotten into the habit, over the past couple of months, of googling the phrase "being strategic" - mostly to make sure that someone hasn't purloined my title and beaten me to the punch, but also just out of curiosity. One entry that consistently shows up near the top of the Google-pile is an article (or rather, some excerpts from a talk) by Michael Porter at a Balanced Scorecard confab in 2002, titled "The Importance of Being Strategic." As you might suspect, I felt quite curious to see what Mr Porter had to say. So, I bought it from the HBR website, downloaded and read it.

It was interesting. And I have no doubt it was useful to the folks to whom he was speaking, who - in their post-dot-com-bust angst - seem to have been wondering if they should throw their strategy out with their internet investment bathwater.

At the same time, it reinforced my conviction that most people severely and unnecessarily limit their idea of what it means to be strategic -- Mr. Porter, again with all due respect, included. All of his comments focused on and were applicable only to relatively large, for-profit companies. For instance, he outlines "four principles of good strategy" as follows: set as your primary goal superior, long-term return on capital; set separate strategies for each of the business areas in which you complete; recognize that profit is driven by the industry of which your company is a part and the position your company occupies in that industry; and view your firm as a collection of activities.

I may or may not agree that these are the four principles of good strategy (I don't actually, but that's a whole other blog post) but regardless: he's clearly focused on "good strategy" only relative to large, for-profit, fairly complex organizations.

My point of view is that "being strategic" is much broader, simpler, and more useful than this. In fact, I define being strategic as: "consistently focusing on those core directional efforts that will best move you toward your desired outcomes."

This deceptively simple sentence implies a series of powerful mental disciplines. And learning to do them well provides a framework for thinking and effort that can serve you in any arena, and support you in creating the life, work, business or relationships you desire. In my experience, being strategic isn't a rarified, arcane capability only to be understood and made use of by highly-paid consultants and C-level executives of publicly held corporations: it's a valuable life-skill for anyone.

An analogy: when the Volkswagen was first created, it was envisioned as "the people's car"; a simple vehicle that was reliable and easy to operate; one that would serve the normal person's transportation needs at a reasonable price. Not everybody needs a Mercedes.

I guess I'm a proponent of "Volks-strategy": Strategy for everyone!

No Longer a One-Hit Wonder...

I'm thrilled to share that St Martins Press has just bought my next book, Being Strategic: Crafting the Hoped-for Future! They'll be publishing it in May of '09. I'm already a big fan of my editor, Phil Revzin, not least because he suggested that we use the principles from the book to work together to create the marketing plan for the book.

I'm also very excited that Barbara Cave Henricks and Dennis Welch, from Cave Henricks Communications, have agreed to serve as publicists. They're lovely, smart, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic, and I feel honored to be working with them.

Here's a look at what the book's about (from the proposal):

BEING STRATEGIC helps the reader understand why approaching one’s business – and life - strategically is worth the time and effort required, what's involved, and how to do it.

Unlike most other strategy books on the market, which focus only on organization-level strategic planning – BEING STRATEGIC offers a model and skills for strategic thought and action that are broadly applicable and thoroughly practical: explaining the core skills and practices needed at each point, and providing simple models, real-life examples and self-directed activities for learning and applying them.

If any of you, dear readers, have ideas about how to market the book, or anything at all you'd like to share with me about it -- please, feel free! (And yes, I do own "beingstrategic.com" - astonishingly, it was available.)

Synchronicity?

Link: Earthpages.org - Jung and Synchronicity.

"Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous."
Albert Einstein

I've had a strange and wonderful couple of days. I won't go into all the details, but I will offer you one little piece of it: yesterday three different and completely unrelated people, none of whom knew each other, all strongly recommended that I read the same part of the same book.

The article above talks about this phenomenon - Carl Jung posited a principle called synchronicity, which he defined as "meaningful coincidence" or "an acausal connecting principle."

I don't know if you've had this experience, but I often find that when I have a clear intention - that is, when I have a good sense of the future I want to create for myself in a particular realm - events seem somehow to conspire to support me in achieving my goals. Obstacles are removed, resources show up, subtle and not-so-subtle directional signals get posted around my life.

This doesn't really track in the logical part of my brain...but then, I often suspect that logic is the tip of the iceberg of human experience.

Maybe it just comes down to this; that knowing what kind of life you want to create for yourself is a powerful thing.

What do you think?

Joy + Leadership = ?

Sometimes I google things just for fun, just to see what happens.

Tonight I tried "joyful leadership": nothing came up. Does that seem strange to you? It does to me. That in all the millions of places on the net that this phrase could exist, waiting to be found by Google's ubiquitous spiders, it doesn't.

Does that mean no one thinks leadership can be joyful? If so, then I beg to differ. Leadership, as I experience it and observe others experiencing it, is often joyful. It's also challenging, frustrating, exciting, at times demoralizing and just plain hard...but there is joy in it.

When you're the leader, and your team rallies around a common goal to achieve something that's beyond their individual capabilities: that's joyful.

When, as a leader, you agonize over and then make a difficult decision that turns out to be the right thing to have done: that's joyful.

When you invite and challenge someone who works for you to step up into a more demanding role, and he or she does it and succeeds: that's joyful.

When you, the leader, envision a future that others don't think is possible - and your passion and clarity are enough to open their minds, and you work together to make it happen: that's really joyful!

Maybe we think there's not supposed to be joy in leading -- but it's there. And it's wonderful not only for the leader, but for everyone else around her (or him). Go for it.

Take a Break

Link: The Heart of Innovation.

I believe this is the longest hiatus I've ever taken from my blog; if you've wondered where I've been, I just got back from a marvelous vacation. I spent a week in Barbados with my daughter: lying on the beach; drinking far more than is my usual wont; eating fresh seafood -- basically lazing around. And the internet connection was iffy at best, which I took as the universe's way of telling me to chill out. Here's a pic of the beach that was about a two minute-walk from our wonderful guesthouse.

So, here I am again, recharged and ready to go. One of the things I wanted to do when I got back to blogging was introduce you to my friend Mitch Ditkoff's blog. And lo and behold, his latest post is about the importance of taking breaks. Serendipity.

Mitch calls himself the Archduke of Idea Champions, his own company, which he describes as:

a consulting and training company dedicated to awakening and nurturing the spirit of innovation. We help individuals, teams and entire organizations tap into their innate ability to create, develop and implement ideas that make a difference.

I encourage you to explore his blog: Mitch is a wonderful person, an endless font of interesting and worthwhile ideas, an untiring supporter of others' ideas, and the author of the newly published book, Awake at the Wheel.

Teaming

Today I have the too-rare pleasure of spending the day with my business partner, Jeff. Generally speaking, the fact that we're almost always in two different places (he lives in Minneapolis, I live in the Hudson Valley and New York City; when we're with clients, it's rarely with the same one at the same time) isn't a problem: we communicate well and frequently, and we share a clear sense of where we're trying to take the company and how to get there.

However, when we do get the chance to be in the same room, I really appreciate it. Wonderful, serendipitous things happen that only arise out of the cadences of face-to-face conversation. For instance, this morning we were talking about my new book, and we surfaced and began to develop what I think might be a great idea about creating a quick "Are you a 10?" self-test that people could take to determine how strategically they're approaching their work and their life before reading the book. That ad hoc creative session almost certainly wouldn't have happened on the phone or via email.

It reminds me: even though technology makes it possible for people to work together without ever seeing each other...it doesn't mean we don't need to see each other. There's so much that happens when you're sitting in the same room, looking into each others' eyes; you get so much more nuance about the other person, and how he or she is processing the conversation; the silences carry weight and meaning and become a part of the dialogue in a way that just doesn't happen when you're on the phone; you can build an idea together in a way that's virtually impossible when you can't see the other person's subtle facial responses.

What do you think about this...have you found it to be true?

Buffett + Drucker = Continuity

Link: Buffett's Plan for Successful Succession.

Faithful readers, you know I'm a big fan of Warren Buffet. And I'm also, generally speaking, a big fan of Peter Drucker. In this article, writer Rick Wartzman talks about how Buffet's recent focus on succession planning fulfills Drucker's core premises about how such things should happen.

I've been thinking about this lately because I've run into a couple of long-time CEOs who are around Buffet's age, and who - I was shocked to learn - don't have any kind of a viable succession plan in place. In both cases, it's going to be a huge shock to the organization when the top guy leaves, and - from my observation - there's no really appropriate candidate currently in a senior position in either company.

Both these CEOs are the founder of their company. Do they actually not care if the organization continues past their tenure? That seems unlikely. Or perhaps focusing on succession planning seems too much like admitting their own mortality. Or maybe they just can't imagine someone else doing what they do, as well as they do it.

What do you think: why do CEOs or companies not do succession planning, or why do they do it badly?

Hear Hear!

Link: MANAGEMENT MATTERS: Managers should be coaches too - Waltham, MA - The Daily News Tribune.

Just for fun, I Googled "management" in the news category tonight, and got this. I really like this article: it's a good, solid, thoughtful reflection on why skillful people management implies coaching - and why that's important. I especially like and agree with this line:

My grandfather knew this when he wrote in the 1930s: "People like to progress. They like to feel that each day, week, month or year they are taking a step ahead. If you can make someone feel that you can show them the way or help them, you can influence them.''

I really think that's right - most people DO like to progress. They may talk themselves out of it, through fear of failure or a need for security and control, but still -- that urge to grow and improve, I think, is hardwired in. And as Stuart Danforth, the writer of the article, says - when people feel you truly support them in their efforts to grow, they'll support you in return.

That's certainly true of most of the people I deal with...how about you?

Happy Author Day

Link: Independent Publisher Online Magazine: Promoting Books, Authors and the Independent Movement.

A lovely way to end the week: just found out that Growing Great Employees won the silver medal in the HR/Employee Training category of the 2008 Axiom Business Book awards.

Hope you had something happen for you this week that made you feel proud of your efforts, your results, or your relationships with other people...

Have a wonderful weekend.