Category Archives: Thinking Aloud

August 28, 2019 · 10:45 am

Back To School Again

It’s the time of year when the kids head back to school. I wish I could join them. Knowing what I know now, and more importantly, what I don’t know now, I’d make better use of my time there. Of course, like the quote commonly attributed to Mark Twain, I tried not to let my schooling interfere with my education.

I’ve written before what I think the only two things one needs to learn while in school, but to sum them up it’s the ability to:

  • Acquire pieces of information, figure out which pieces are accurate and synthesize your own ideas or opinions based on them;
  • Express those ideas or opinions clearly both verbally and in writing.

Does that make you smart? Not exactly although you certainly will sound a heck of a lot smarter. It does make you well-educated in the sense that you’ve obtained the most important skills education can provide. Smart, however, is an entirely different deal and I want us to think for a few minutes today about the different kinds of smart one can be regardless of education.

I’ve never made it a secret that I have a deep affection for smart people, especially those smarter than I am. I always tried to find job candidates who were, above all, really smart in every sense of the word. What do I mean?

First, there is the kind of smart where one is able to synthesize information and develop great insights. Yes, that kind of matched the first part of being well-educated. I’d couple that with intellectual curiosity, however, to make one smart.

Second is what many people would call educated. This is being full of information, what some might call book-learned. However, just because you can puke back a lot of facts, which might make you great at Trivial Pursuit or the trivia contest at your local tavern, you can’t really fool me that you’re smart unless you couple it with the other two parts.

The third part is being emotionally intelligent. As Wikipedia defines it, this is

the capability of individuals to recognize their own emotions and those of others, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one’s goal(s).

In many ways, this is the most important of the three “smarts” in business since it’s the one that helps you behave optimally in areas like customer service, employee management, and partner relations. I know there are other kinds of “smart” – street smart that is probably the personification of Twain’s statement, IQ-smart, which is just raw brainpower to name just two, but I think my three are the ones most critical to business – and life – success since they can be learned and developed while most others one either has or doesn’t.

So as the kids head back to school, maybe this is a good time for each of us to think about how we can get smarter too. What do you think?

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August 23, 2019 · 4:23 pm

Tasting Change

I was thinking, this Foodie Friday, about how my tastes have changed over the years. Years ago I would eat pretty much anything except beets. They reminded me, as my youngest daughter often describes them, of eating dirt. Now for a vegan, which is what my daughter is, to complain about any vegetable it really has to be bad. Somewhere along the line, I gave them another try and I really liked them.

My older daughter’s tastes have changed too. When she was a child she loved eggs and puddings. Now, almost 30 years later, she is revolted by the sight of eggs and won’t eat them unless they are a binding ingredient in a baked good. If they’re a major element in, say, custard or pudding then she will pass. Something about the texture and smell. Her favorite foods have become her non-starters. Of course, today she will eat just about anything else when she would have to be tricked into tasting anything new back in the day.

Tastes change. Look at the decline in soda consumption or the increase in sushi consumption (you want me to eat raw what?). It’s a given in any market, not just food. It’s incumbent, therefore, on any smart business executive to be open to change. I don’t know about your experience, but mine has been that most executives are not. They generally feel that sticking with what’s been successful will carry them forward, riding the horse that brought them, so to speak.

Ask yourself if you’re really open to change. Can you accept multiple perspectives on things and, more importantly, can you hold off on forming an opinion until you’ve heard some differing points of view? Do you always ask the same questions? That usually results in you getting the same answers. If you’re seeking change you need to ask something different. When was the last time you or someone in your organization tried an experiment? It’s like tasting a new food or, even better, giving something you’d thrown on the trash heap another taste.

I have a friend who has had a limited culinary vocabulary in that she’s not been exposed to a lot of different cuisines. She’s tried some things such as the chopped liver and gefilte fish that even hard-core fans of Jewish cuisine struggle with. She didn’t like them but the point was that she tried them. She was open to change.

I’m sort of in that process. I’m migrating out of the world of management and business consulting and into the world of franchise consulting. It’s been hard to give up the old stuff since I’ve had 40 years of doing it. Truth be told, I’m enjoying the new work a lot more. My tastes have changed but had I not been open to it, I’d still be in the same old rut. Is that where you and your business are?

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August 12, 2019 · 3:12 pm

Ball Position

I haven’t bored you with a golf-related screed in a while so let’s try that today. Yes, it relates to business too, of course. As I generally do over the weekend, I played golf. If you’ve been a reader for any amount of time you know that I find a great number of life lessons (and business lessons) on the links. Of course, given how badly I played the last few rounds, the only learning of which I became convinced was that I was really terrible at this game.

This morning, with my head a little more clear I went to the driving range. For those of you who are golfers, I thought that my problem was that I needed to shallow out (make a little flatter) my swing because I was digging very deep divots and not striking the ball particularly well. From time to time, especially when I was off the fairway (it happens), I was spraying the ball right because I couldn’t get the clubface back to square due, I thought, to the steepness of my swing.

None of that technical stuff matters, however. I had diagnosed the issue and thought I knew the answer so I went to the range to make a swing change. As with anything, big changes take time and I wanted to get going. You with me so far?

Well, as I was warming up to begin practice, an odd thing happened. I hit a ball with it positioned farther forward (think closer to my left foot) in my stance. The result was an absolutely pure shot – straight, high, and far. No real divot either, just a nice scrape along the ground. I tried it again – the same result. OMG – I don’t stink – the ball was just too far back (toward my right foot) in my stance and I had to come at it too steeply to hit it. With it forward everything else was fine. The club pro was on the range giving a lesson and he wandered over when he was done. He confirmed my swing looked pretty good. and that yes, something as simple as moving the ball forward 3 inches could change everything. Which is, of course, the business point.

How many times have things not been going well and someone – the boss, the management team, maybe you – rants that wholesale changes are needed? This usually starts a chain of events that paralyzes the enterprise. Here is the thing – it’s rare that a business loses its mojo overnight. It’s usually a gradual process of tiny changes, much like me having the ball slide further back in my stance little by little until I became used to playing it too far back which was making it difficult to play well. Businesses let things “slide back” too until they can’t operate well.

Much like my fix, it’s rare that major changes are needed in a business. It’s usually just a matter of paying attention to what had become different over time. It may require some outside eyes to help with that, but usually, the folks with good institutional memory can provide answers (yet another reason why you don’t get rid of all us older employees!).

Wholesale swing changes? Nah – just a tweak in ball position. Think about that the next time you’re contemplating a major change in your business. Yes, that might be needed but isn’t starting with some simple changes much easier and cost-effective?

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