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too safe is too dangerous

Ok, back from vacation. I’ve returned from visiting family and friends with a strong desire for a rat rod T-bucket, an AR-15, and a new mountain bike. I’m not sure what this says about me (or my friends, for that matter). Fortunately, I’m going to use the time proven method of combining a complete lack of introspection with denial and not think about too much. Beats Prozac.

Speaking of mountain bikes. I decided it was time to expose my bike to sunlight and try out some trails I’ve been hearing about. (Hang in there, this is going to connect to business sooner or later). There was one easy section of trail where the left side was a rock wall and the right side was a steep descent into the river. Nothing life threatening, but it would certainly inconvenience the morning to somersault into the murky water. My first instinct was to head to safety by veering away from the edge leading to the water. That’s a rookie move. The rock wall is no safer. Getting close to the wall risks catching the handlebar on the wall and pinballing over in slow motion. Move away from the edge, clip the wall, and fall in anyway.

The safest way to ride that stretch of trail is to stay in the middle and look at where I want to go. Just like business and life.

Although I don’t advocate unnecessary risk, how often do we create more problems for ourselves by lunging for safety? We avoid, we choose to not take action on the iffy belief that it’s safer than taking action. We sit still when we should be moving or if we do move, it’s backwards at full speed. Our peers, our competition, the world passes us by when we insist on trying to create absolute safety.

Where are you trying to be too safe?

 

your job is to maximize profits… sorta

Leaders talk about their fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits for the business owners (shareholders). This is largely true, but in my opinion, incorrect.

From my point of view, their fiduciary responsibility is to maximize profits based on their clearly defined business strategy. This sounds the same but it isn’t. Not even close. Let’s consider some examples. (But before we do, I need to offer the full disclosure that my understanding of general business strategy far exceeds my specific investment knowledge. I’m approaching this from a business philosophy perspective NOT a business law perspective.)

A conservative investment company with a strategy that prizes long-term soundness above rapid growth has a responsibility to make different decisions and take different actions than an investment company that is trying to grow as fast as possible. I’m not suggesting that one strategy is better than the other – both have their place – but a leader that went for the quick buck at the expense of the long-term for the company seeking soundness would be just as remiss as a leader at the high-growth company who delayed growth when there were still funds available for expansion.

It was years before Amazon.com made a profit because they were aggressively seeking market share to position themselves for maximum profits in the future. Does this mean that top leadership was liable to shareholders. No. They had a clearly defined strategy and aggressively pursued it. In the early days, no one bought shares because of the steady consistent profits Amazon was making (it wasn’t). Rather, they invested voluntarily and eagerly because of the company’s future profit potential based on their strategy.

Some people invest in utility companies. It’s an unsexy, flannel nightgown of investments, BUT people do it because utilities tend to turn consistent and stable profits year after year. Investors aren’t expecting (or even wanting) maximum profits this quarter. They are seeking reasonable profits from now through eternity.

Again, companies have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits based on their clearly defined business strategy. The problems come when they: 1) don’t have a well-defined strategy; or 2) try to maximize both short and long term profits. Without a well-defined strategy they will just do a bunch of stuff and hope they are profitable. This is like trying to lose weight without any particular ideas about, say, nutrition and exercise.  Trying to maximize both short and long term profits is like going on a crash diet for the rest of your life.

Different investors have different investment strategies (gasp!) and are investing for different outcomes (double gasp!). No company has the responsibility to be all things to all investors – it’s folly to attempt it. Every company has the responsibility to be clear about their strategy and stick to it so that investors can choose and invest in the companies that best fit their needs.

all you need to know about training design

When training fails, it is generally because the learners haven’t understood the material on both an intellectual AND an emotional level. Intellectual level training focuses on the “what” and the “how”. What needs to be done and how do I need to do it?

We see this all the time. Where people say they don’t need training because they already know it, but they aren’t doing any of it. They haven’t truly connected with the “why”. Why is it important that I do it? What are the benefits of doing it or the consequences if I don’t?

There are only two reasons that humans do anything: 1) to seek pleasure; and 2) to avoid pain.  These are the same two reasons that humans learn anything. Why do we learn the newest version of Microsoft Office? To do our jobs better (pleasure) and to avoid failing at our jobs (pain). Why do we learn new exercises or diets? To get sexy and delay death.

So, no matter how much we read, research, discuss, and ponder, we never truly learn until we connect with the material at an emotional level. Everyone knows that smoking, drinking, or eating too much will shorten their lives. We know at the intellectual level, but often don’t get it at the emotional level (if we did, we’d stop). Until a person really, really connects with the consequences at an emotional level, intellectual warnings do zero good.

All great training – regardless of topic – teaches the what, how, and the why. And it does it in a way that each participant can individually understand and key into. Experience is the best teacher because it provides the emotional learning.

Will Rogers really understood this principle. He summed up everything important about training design in three sentences: “There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

Design and evaluate your training programs accordingly…

No Problem Too Big?

We all have more personal and professional resources at our fingertips than we can imagine. I am not naturally good at networking, but I suspect the advantage that great networkers have is that they are simply better able to see and tap into these resources.

I recently attended a training program that really underscored this idea for me. There were six table groups with about five people at each table. For one of the activities, each table was given a large, hypothetical, community issue to solve. As an example, one group was told that they were trying to offer low cost health screenings at a community health fair; another group was trying to create transportation solutions for a low income area. There were six different groups all trying to solve overwhelmingly huge problems.

Everyone then mingled throughout the room asking people from other groups what they could do to help. Amazingly, EVERY SINGLE PERSON had a skill, access to resources, or knew someone who could help. Although the situations were hypothetical, the resources and solutions weren’t.

The point of the exercise was to demonstrate the sheer volume of resources available in a community and I was blown away by it. Normally, if you went around and asked a bunch of relative strangers what they could do to help, you’d get little response and few ideas. So what made this activity different?

First, the focus was on gathering all ideas, big and small, and no ideas were dismissed. Also, we weren’t looking for a solution, only asking what the others could contribute (and a lot of times their contribution was to offer to connect them with someone else). Finally, no one said, “I can’t help.” The expectation was to think of some way, no matter how small or unorthodox, to help. This generated a ton of good ideas that would not have been otherwise considered.

If that magic can happen with a group of strangers, how powerful would it be with people you know? We’ve all done this to some extent, but I wonder what would happen if we really leveraged it? What if you took a problem you were working on and directly asked everyone you know what they could offer to help? (Posting it on Facebook or Twitter is not directly asking. Emailing is not directly asking. I mean to have a one-on-one in-person or over the phone conversation where they have to give you an answer right then.)

This is really leveraging the six degrees of separation. We don’t have to go too far out in our network to find someone who would be a great resource whether we are trying to find a job, buy a car, hire a personal trainer, find great day care, locate investment property, etc.

I’m becoming convinced that there are few problems bigger than the people we already know. The only thing we need to do is ask.