Careers

success secret? (not really)

There are all sorts of books and blogs about the “Secrets of $uccess”. Sadly, they tend to overcomplicate things or make it sound like success is outside the reach of most people, or attainable only through the authors 10 step program. Yet, as I look around, one thing that really sets people apart in their careers (and lives) is an insistence on doing things right. Very few set out to do things wrong, but most seem to strive to do “just kinda ok enough” (that’s a technical term). The number of people striving to do things right is so small that they immediately stand out. Be that person.

To be clear… Right isn’t a moral term. Right doesn’t mean perfect. Right isn’t “my way”. Right is not a generational issue. Right has nothing to do with position in the organization.

Doing things right means:

  • Holding yourself to a higher standard. It’s making decisions and taking actions with the intention of exceed the standards given versus doing just enough to not get fired.
  • Correcting things as soon as you notice they are incorrect or below standard. Mistakes happen, things get overlooked, and sometimes it just doesn’t work out like you expected. That’s a given to living on planet Earth. The bigger question is do you fix it?
  • Making decisions. There is such a difference in outcomes between making a conscious decision based on understanding and weighing the pros and cons of a situation and a “decision” made by not doing anything until it’s too late. It’s one thing to intentionally choose to do something at a bare minimum standard because you decide to focus your time and energy on higher priority items and quite another when do something at a bare minimum standard because you’re lazy or simply don’t care.
  • Accepting (embracing) responsibility for your outcomes. People striving to do things right rarely get caught up in playing the victim, blaming others, or using convenient or glib excuses. This rarely works in the long term and often does nothing more than damage your reputation.
  • Asking questions, seeking feedback, and finding ways to improve.

In short, “right” is simply caring about the outcome. There’s no secret to it. Nothing mystical, esoteric, or complicated. No system or program. Just caring.

Ken Blanchard said it so well: “There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses; only results.”

HR hero

Today, I’m guest blogging over at Melissa Fairman’s  HR Remix site. A quick taste:

Us humans place a lot of weight on our heroes. We need them to inspire us to be better, to set an example, to show us the way, to push back the edges of what we thought was possible.

Who are your HR heroes?

Brian Tracy has said that if you don’t love what you’re doing enough to strive to be in the top 20%, you’re probably in the wrong field. What’s it mean to be in the top 20% of HR? Who do you consider in the top 20% of HR? Who do you look up to as a role model or example of who and how you want to be? Who is setting the pace for you?

Follow the link to see the rest: HR hero.

success is easy…

Photo: Success is easy...I have a quote written on my whiteboard from Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid): Success is easy. All you have to do is learn to use your career the same way Hendrix used his guitar.

I don’t know what Hugh meant by that, but I know what it means to me and it is one of my all-time favorite quotes. Here’s my take on it:

Jimi Hendrix used the guitar as an extension of himself. He was unconstrained by the idea of “this is how you play guitar” and completely shattered the boundaries of what others thought was possible or useful or even musical. He was a master with thousands upon thousands of hours of practice and experimentation, continually trying to find new sounds. Hendrix did things different and sought the sounds that pleased him, not what he thought would make him popular. He disliked being categorized as any musical genre and was so far ahead of the curve other masters noticed and promoted him well before being followed by the general public.

From Wikipedia: His Rock and Roll Hall of Fame biography states: “Jimi Hendrix was arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music. Hendrix expanded the range and vocabulary of the electric guitar into areas no musician had ever ventured before. His boundless drive, technical ability and creative application of such effects as wah-wah and distortion forever transformed the sound of rock and roll.”

So, just do that with your career. Become a master of what you do for the sheer love of it. Go your own way even if it means you’re not understood or popular at first. Push, push, push the limits and then go push them some more. Have the type of bravery to be different, challenged, and misunderstood. Take your career exploring in the places where there aren’t maps because you’re the first one there. Redefine how things are done in your field.

That’s a tall order few can do. Maybe the place to start for most of us is simply using our careers as an outlet for joy and creative expression. Striving for the top for no reason other than a love for excellence. Then see where that takes us.

Today, I’m leaving you with two videos. One is of Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. The other is of the 2CELLOS playing the legendary Hendrix song, Purple Haze. Why? Because everyone knows that guitars and cellos don’t make those sounds. And everyone knows you can’t do that with your career. Better to play it safe and stick to the maps and the 10-point programs for $ucce$$ and try to get ahead by doing things exactly like everyone else.

What thinks you?

 

fair warning

“To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.” ~ Carl Jung

“Anybody who courts the mainstream deserves everything they get.” ~ Hugh MacLeod

book review: Be A Free Range Human

psst. Hey you. Want to know a secret?free range human

Don’t tell anyone, but the world has changed in the past few years. Massively. Technology has made us all interconnected, made location irrelevant, and costs almost nothing.

This thing called the Internet connects us all email, social media, Skype, and online commerce. Computers, tablets, and smart phones hook us to it 24/7. Work is more about processing information than making widgets so we can live anywhere and work everywhere. It’s amazing!

What’s that? You knew that already? Everyone knows that? Really, then why do we still organize our work and structure businesses as though carbon paper is the latest innovation? Why do we keep the way we do work stuck in the forgotten past? What if much of what we’ve been told about career and business success is now irrelevant (or even wrong)?

If we really got how much the world has changed, we’d realize the dream of just a few years ago is now a distinct possibility: Freedom! No office, no schedule. Working from bookstores, coffee shops, and tropical beaches. Your office – your entire business – packed into a laptop bag; all you need is an outlet and a Wifi connection. Live anywhere, work everywhere. That’s the dream, right?

Timothy Ferriss popularized the idea with his book The 4-Hour Workweek and Marianne Cantwell now gives us a practical how-to guide with Be a Free Range Human: Escape the 9 to 5, Create a Life You Love and Still Pay the Bills.

Let me say this up front: even if you’re not looking to drop out of the corporate world, there’s still quite a bit of great information here. Many of the skills that let you be an independent consultant, contractor, or solopreneur translate well to any career. Even if you are not wanting to leave your current role, Marianne underscores how much work has changed so quickly, and how career-savvy employees can take advantages of those changes.

When we consider how different the world is, we realize we can do business differently. Networking and relationships replace advertising, credibility replaces business cards and letterhead, and an internet connection replaces expensive office space. Location has become irrelevant for many jobs and businesses. Results count for more than prestige and purchased impressiveness. Why spend money on the trappings of a “business” when you can simply bypass all that and provide value?

The author shares what she has learned both in her own transition and in coaching and helping other make the leap to the free range life. Refreshingly, it’s not a call to quit today and figure it out tomorrow. Rather, she advocates a much lower risk approach of doing small experiments and starting off with as little expense and overhead as possible. She advocates playing and experimenting and testing, starting small and finding what will scale to a larger business and what you’ll actually enjoy doing. The book has plenty of examples and case studies, exercises to help you think it all through, and links to additional information.

The author clearly takes to heart the idea of standing out and being true to self as a competitive advantage. Not a new message, but well delivered. She reminds us that being all things to all people is a tried and tested formula for grey mediocrity. Standing apart creates people who don’t understand us and don’t like us AND creates excitement and loyalty for those who do appreciate it. It’s not being average at everything for everyone, it’s being great at a few things for a specific audience. The “beige army” (as she calls them) strongly wants you to join them in mediocrity. They hate to see anyone stand out, be different, or succeed uniquely (remember Puttnam’s Law?). They want you to fit in and be average and do things the way they think everybody does things.  They will bully and push and complain and criticize, but aligning yourself with them only ensures conformity, not success. She highlights how there’s little point in reducing your strengths to appease them – they weren’t going to buy from you anyway. Far better to cultivate a small group of diehard customers that love you than pandering to a large group of potential customers that don’t hate you.

Without giving it all away, here are some topics to look forward to:

  • A great section on networking that works. She never refers to her approach as networking because it’s not done as an add-on or a separate activity, rather it’s done authentically as a natural course of the day. How to grow your business without advertising.
  • Creating status and credibility without the overhead of unnecessary business trappings such as nice offices, business cards, brochures, etc.
  • The four (plus one) free range business types.
  • How to test your idea in a week to see if it will work.
  • Why you don’t need a business plan.
  • Why it’s a business-killing idea to try to make everyone your customer. The paradox is you will actually reach more customers by concentrating on fewer customers.
  • The do’s and don’t’s of getting press.
  • Communicating like a human, not a business drone.

A few quick gems from the author:

  • If you can’t see the woods for the trees, the answer isn’t to add more trees.
  • … don’t use the fact that you’re not world class in two hours as an excuse not to keep going.
  • For every person who laughs at you when you are at your brightest, someone else loves you for exactly the same reason.
  • The middle of the road is the most dangerous place to be (that’s where you get run over by fast-moving traffic).
  • Be the person who does it differently; be the example you’re looking for.

That should have you covered. Again, whether you’re looking to set up shop from the world’s beaches or just want to bolster your career, there is a lot of great information offered up. Practical, straightforward, easy to read. Good stuff and worth a read.

Live anywhere, work anywhere. What thinks you?

 

 

 

 

In the spirit of transparency: a while back, the publisher asked me if I’d like them to send me their catalog to see if there were any books I’d like to read and review. [YES! Now, please!] This was one of the books that caught my eye so they kindly shipped me a copy.

 

 

linearity is a lie

Us humans so want certainty and security in an uncertain and insecure world that we’ve created this myth – a lie – of the importance of living a linear life. Life in a straight line, always stepping forward, never getting sidetracked, each movement building on the past – it sounds so great.

We created the lie and we’re suckers for believing it. Buy into the lie and we’ve undermined our own success and fulfillment. Believing in the Myth of Straight Lines leaves us asking why our life isn’t that way; it leaves us unhappy and wondering what we’re doing wrong. The reality is simply LIFE IS NOT LINEAR. It rarely moves in straight lines. It leaps forward, sideways, backwards. It zigs, it zags. Sometimes it does nothing at all. Dumb luck, random events, accidents, disease, decisions that made sense at the time, poor choices, and timing conspire to ensure life is not straightedge precise.

Life is sloppymessy. Zig Ziglar once advised us to: Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and capitalize on what comes. It appears that those who play big and make a difference understand this and can work with it. They have the end destination in mind but are flexible about how to get there and even willing to accept a different destination if a better one reveals itself along the way.

Consider the possibility that when we buy into the lie of linearity and are unwilling to deviate from the straight line, we are generally unable to accept setbacks and failure as a part of the process. Unable to risk creativity or innovation or simply trying something different. Perhaps even unable to recognize how strong, how unique, and resourceful we actually are. We might miss how much we’ve actually done, the difference we’ve made, and the success we’ve had.

What thinks you?

 

3 favorite short videos: truth, innovation, 21st Century worklives

Thought I’d do something quick and fun on a Saturday morning. Being able to communicate big thoughts in a short time is very difficult to do, but powerful. Below are three of my favorite short videos that quickly serve up big ideas. Enjoy.

The first is from Joe Gerstandt (@joegerstandt) on Why Profanity Kicks @ss. It’s not really about using swearing words, more about bringing truth, passion, and authenticity into our jobs and lives (but, yeah, there’s some swearing words in it). Time to BBQ those sacred cows in the company.

Next is Max McKeown (@maxmckeown) and his brilliantly short Why Does Innovation Stop?

Wrapping it up is a song about modern worklife from Doug Shaw (@dougshaw1) called Livable Lives.

Thanks for the inspiration!

don’t wish it were easier

“It seems like every time we start to get caught up, something happens. If only we could get a good year or two, then we could get ahead.” I’ve heard statements like this from several leaders recently. Although I understand and empathize with the uncertainty and pain and fear they are wrestling with, I am left thinking, “so what?”

Worrying about all the outside factors causing me to lose will ultimately cause me to lose for several reasons:

1. “If onlys…” are a distraction. It’s a drain to put time, emotion, and energy into worrying about things I can’t control, or even influence. The economy, conflicts around the world, the government, the weather, changing social norms, shifting demographics, etc. are what they are. If I can change it, change it. If I can influence it, influence it. Otherwise, I can only accept it and move on OR focus on what I need to change about myself to better deal with the circumstances.

2. Regardless of where I am today, this is the only starting point I have. Things are not going to suddenly be different and the world doesn’t owe me anything. That said, I have easy access to clean water, food, shelter, medical care, and transportation. I can call up an aeon’s worth of information instantly and communicate globally on my computer. There is due process of law, minimal corruption, free education, guaranteed human rights and individual freedoms, and a democratic system that seems to work ok. People tell me how miserable the economy is, but someone is buying all those smart phones and tablet computers. Perfect? Not a bit. But I don’t have to look back too far in time or too far across a map to realize just how good I (and anyone reading this) have it. Life may get scary, uncertain, and overwhelming, but if I had to choose a place and time to be at today, I could do much, much worse.

3. If the world were easier for me it would also be easier for my competition so I wouldn’t be any further ahead. Sure, it’s easier to run downhill, but if we’re all running downhill, so what?. If you’ve ever been an endurance athlete, there is a state of mind where you take solace in knowing that if it’s difficult for you and you’re hurting, it’s at least as bad for your competition. Some even see the difficulty as a source of competitive advantage and look forward to the brutal courses and bad weather. They know that many of their competition will have mentally given up even before the start. So, as I look at my life, career, and business today, I can join in all the worry and complaining or I can accept that it’s difficult, appreciate the challenge, and smile every time I hear leaders from other companies complain because I know they are believing their own excuses and mentally handing the race to me. The worse they think they have it, the easier they make it for me.

4. I can complain about the challenges, situations, and general state of life OR I can figure out who I need to be and the skills I need to develop to get where I want to go GIVEN the challenges, situations, and general state of life.

I’m going to wrap up today with my favorite quote from Jim Rohn:

Don’t wish it were easier; wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems; wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenges; wish for more wisdom. 

Your thoughts?

the future-now of work: a review of “Culture Shock: A Handbook for 21st Century Business”

This book is Will McInnes’ (@willmcinnes) invitation to make a difference in your organization and change the world. He extends a hand and asks you to join him in considering what business could be, should be, and – in several cases – already is. This is the future-now of business and work.

I am fascinated with the humanness of business. I like business and I believe that business is people and people are business. Humans – and humans alone – create business results. It seems so obvious, but gets overlooked, ignored, and dismissed in the forever pursuit of the short-term shortcut. We remove humanness thinking it will create greater results. Instead it creates disconnects between people and their contributions; it chokes off engagement. What if work had purpose and meaning? What if it were different? That’s this book.

Democracy

Imagine if your business was driven by a “purpose of significance”. What would work look like if your business wanted to do great things beyond cut its own throat to make a quick dollar for shareholders? It works for Patagonia, Noma, Grameen, and of course Apple and Google. Purpose sounds all gooey new agey soft but it is simply the “why” your business exists.

What if your organization was more democratic and got more input from more of the right people? What if we could (finally!) ditch or at least minimize the hierarchy and move decisions from a narrow few to a broader many? Interestingly, this is a no brainer method for running a country, yet freakishly terrifying to many as a way to run a business. So much of this “new” way of doing business that Will describes underscores the idea that we have to give up control to get influence because, ultimately, influence has far greater reach and power than control. If we move past the idea that we have to control and create every good idea, we are able to tap into a much broader and deeper pool of ideas, insight, and perspective.

Progressive Business

If it’s true that “the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience” (and I believe it is) then the most competitively rational actions a business could take would be to radically bolster the employee experience. Yet, what tends to happen? Businesses strive to gain an advantage by cutting, narrowing, dehumanizing. It’s as though they are saying, “We’ll gain new business and create customer loyalty by doing everything in our power to ensure that they are served by the most unsupported, undertrained, worried, demotivated, disconnected, disengaged, and uncaring workforce we can possibly create.” Lunacy.

What if – play along with me here – we did the opposite and created a workforce that was supported, well trained, secure, fired up, passionate, and cared about creating great results for their customers, co-workers, and company? Nah, that’s too crazy. Or is it?

Having Fun With Humanness

Zappos is a tremendously celebrated and studied company. They are at the heart of a huge number of articles and case studies of how they do business differently and get different (better!) results. Yet for all their fame, glory, notoriety, and profits, how many businesses have really tried to emulate them? It’s like we all cheer them and then say, “But, it’ll never work at my company.”

But what if it could? The point isn’t to be just like Zappos, Apple, etc., etc.; the point is to find ways to celebrate and inspire humanness, personality, meaning, fun, authenticity, and transparency. How much time and energy get wasted keeping up corporate appearances?

Will shares some stories and principles from Zappos, W. L. Gore, and his own company, NixonMcInnes. Some of my favorites are:

  • Zappos’ Culture Book, which is “a ‘collage of unedited submissions from employees’, that gives every employee the opportunity to say what they feel and think about the company.” That level of transparency takes massive courage, but what a great tool for building and celebrating people and culture.
  • Zappos’ Reply-All Hat. This is basically a dunce hat for those who accidently hit “reply all” when responding to an email. We’ve all done it. It’s embarrassing. Why not have some fun with it?
  • W. L. Gore’s small facilities. They discovered early on that when a facility gets above 200 – 250 people, the communication, relationships, innovation, engagement, etc. suffers. To counter this, they keep their plant size small and will build a new facility whenever their current facilities are getting too many people. What? Does this mean that relationships and people are important to business success? Is that business blasphemy or just a pretty basic understanding of the intersection of people and work?
  • NixonMcInnes’ Church of Fail. This is a ritual designed to acknowledge mistakes, bring them out in the open, and learn from them. It also helps people get comfortable with the idea of failure (a tip: there is no innovation without failure) and serves as a reminder that everyone in the company has setbacks. Rather than covering them up, drag them out and let everyone benefit from them.
  • NixonMcInnes’ Happy Buckets! I love this idea for its simplicity. They measure employee happiness every day using three buckets and tennis balls (even your budget can afford this). At the start of the day there is a full bucket of balls and empty Happy and Unhappy buckets. On the way out of the office at the end of the day, employees grab a ball and put in in the bucket that best sums up their day. The results are tracked and used as reference point for discussions. Again, a simple act that creates greater transparency and provides information for leading and managing.

So What’s it Going to Take?

Better leadership, yo. That’s what it’s going to take. Your people won’t be able to change business if you aren’t making it ok by setting the example and leading the charge.

How authentic and transparent are you willing to be as a leader? How open are you to the feedback that will help you develop yourself and others?

Are you willing to do a 360-degree survey to get feedback from those around you?(Will shows you how he does it for almost no cost. Use the money you save to buy some buckets and tennis balls).

Are you willing to share your setbacks and failures? Will you be first in line at the Church of Fail?

Are you willing to be emotionally congruent and share how you are feeling? (Gasp! A leader with emotions!)

Are you willing to use new/social technology to improve your results by gaining information and acting and deciding closer to real time, without the lags and delays that happen when leadership is isolated from the front line?

Organizational Openness

This is a big subject in the future-now of work and it is simply continuing the trend of authenticity and transparency; of giving up control to gain greater influence (and results). Some quick examples:

Culture: do people have access to almost all information (e.g., financial data), is there honest and direct communication and collaboration, are silos and info hoarding unheard of?

Work Environment: are workspaces set up to allow easy collaboration, are people allowed to choose the technology best for their job (or are they stuck with one option that works marginally well for everyone), is IT a gate keeper or a work enabler?

Innovation: do all great ideas come from just a few people or are ideas crowdsourced from employees, customers, and maybe even competitors?

Marketing & Communication: Can your organization come to grips with the idea that marketing is now two-way and they can no longer control – only influence – the message? Would your company be willing to post an unedited Twitter/Facebook feed of ALL comments made about the company on the front page of the website?

Change Velocity

How fast is change happening? [answer: very, very, exponentially very fast].

How fast can your company change? A better question: how fast can you change? Does it matter if there is an ever-widening gap between you, the company, and your customers/the world. [answer: uh, yeah, it does. A lot.]

At a time when continued success is dependent on your ability to effectively change, I’m reminded of the old quip: some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, and some people ask, “What happened?”

Will describes eight areas that affect your company’s change velocity and what you can do to pick up the pace in each area. This section will only be important to you if you ever do any planning, hiring/firing, rewards, need to deal with structures/processes/systems, or want to create attitudes that support change…

Anything Else?

Just sections on digital strategies and fair finances. I won’t go into detail here because I’m sure your org already practices open book accounting, fair (and open) rewards,  collective budgeting, employee ownership, etc. etc. Yawn, right? All old hat stuff that everyone does…

Oh wait, you mean salaries aren’t known in your company? Financials aren’t published (and your employees couldn’t read them even if they were)? Hmmm…

Finally…

My conclusion: I loved it and you should read it. But then, I’m biased. I was already sold on some of the concepts Will presents. He does a great job fleshing them out and expanding them and introducing me to companies where the ideas are actually in use. It’s a well written book with plenty of case studies and examples from current organizations, including his own.

This book inspires me, makes me a little relieved to find others thinking this way, and also torques me off to no end that this is the future-now of business and the world hasn’t arrived yet. The promise is there; the reality is slower in coming. But that’s actually good news – the businesses that make the shift to being human, authentic, and transparent will (in my less than humble opinion) gain significant advantages. BUT, in some ways these advantages can’t/won’t be measured directly with our current measures (where does “humanness” show up on the balance sheet?) This isn’t bad, but it is important to be aware of: if we’re shifting how we think about work and business we also need to shift how we are measuring and evaluating it.

All of this involves a big leap of faith. Consider the knights in shining armor: they were very well protected from swords and arrows. The weight of the armor slowed them down, but they were heavily defended from enemies. Then gunpowder came along and suddenly all that armor was a hindrance. The competitive advantage that had existed on the battlefield for years and years and years was suddenly a sitting-duck-route-to-failure. The rules for success changed completely and it was actually safer to be significantly less protected but much, much more nimble by wearing no armor. It’s obvious in retrospect, but I suspect that was still a tough decision to take the leap, give up the known safety, and shed the protection, despite the “knowledge” that it might be better to not have it.

How many businesses are at that decision chasm today? Being big, armored, controlled, and locked down – protected by layers of armor – was crucial to success not that long ago. The world has now changed and that protection now looks dangerous, counterproductive, and useless against the future-now of business.