Tag Archives: life lessons

September 27, 2012 · 10:35 am

Atonement

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. For those of you unfamiliar with the holiday, it concludes the 10 day period at the start of the Jewish calendar – Rosh Hashanah – head of the year – during which all Jews are supposed to reflect upon the past year and examine how they’re going to change their lives going forward. One also seeks forgiveness from those against whom he has transgressed – both those of this earth and higher powers. There is a lot of other imagery connected with the period – inscription in the Book of Life being a big one – but I think there’s something each of us can take as a business lesson in a non-denominational way.

We all get off track.  Sometimes it’s in little ways like eating badly or drinking too much.  Sometimes it’s in big ways like alienating our families or hurting friends who love us.  The concept in Judaism of repentance is called Teshuva  which means “return”.  I love the notion of coming back to one’s self as well as to the basic human tenets that are common to all religions and peoples.

We can take a period of reflection and “return” in our business lives as well.  The most obvious way is for us as individuals   Whom have we alienated this year?  What client have we taken for granted?  But it a bigger opportunity.  How has the business diverged from the mission?  Why have we stopped getting better and are just marching in place?  What can we be doing to grow our people but are ignoring?

We ask those kinds of questions from time to time but I guess I’m suggesting that it become a more formal process.  Set aside a period every year for “return” thinking.  A period of repentance?  Maybe, in some cases.  But in all cases a chance to change.  A chance to regret past bad actions and to vow not to repeat them.  Most importantly (this is true in the religious sense as well), to correct the transgression.  To apologize.   To make restitution.  Whatever is right and lets everyone move forward with a clear conscious and a vow to do better.

Sound like a plan?

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August 22, 2012 · 8:36 am

Good Results

There’s an expression one hears in sports sometimes that a final score is a good result.  It doesn’t pertain to your team winning (which I guess is always a good result).  Instead, it means that the outcome of the match is in line with the way the game was played. The team that dominated the game won even if it was a sloppy match or something unusual like an own goal kept it closer than it should have been.  Ugly play didn’t get in the way of the outcome.  You hear the expression in boxing too.  It means that there was no lucky one-punch knockout or the fight was stopped by a cut on the person who was winning.  The “right” guy won.

I had the same thought when the whole controversy about Jordyn Wieber happened during the Olympics.  Even though she finished fourth during the qualifying round she couldn’t compete for the all-around gymnastics gold because international rules only allow two competitors per country in the finals.  This was seen as a bad result – she played well and yet she wasn’t allowed to continue (one could ask why no one complained about the rules in advance of the Games when the US had such a deep squad but hindsight is always perfect…).

Maybe it’s the notion of fairness that’s inherent in thinking something is a good result.  That’s certainly part of it but I think it’s a bit of a misplaced focus too.  There’s a golf expression – “it’s not how, it’s how many.”  That means it doesn’t matter if you hit a soaring perfect shot to 3 feet or if you skull it along the ground to the same place.  All that matters is the final score.  As Bobby Orr said, forget about style; worry about results.  Here’s the thing: business outcomes often aren’t fair.  Idiot self-promoters get great jobs and smart, quiet people languish.   There’s a lot of focus in business on style, on “how” instead of “how many.”  Are those a “good result?”

We might ask ourselves how many good people or excellent opportunities are we overlooking because they don’t fit into our idea of perfect.  Winning ugly is still winning, right?

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August 14, 2012 · 8:43 am

Do Less, Be More Productive

Every manager I know – heck, every business I know – is having to do more with less.

English: Productivity comparison for the membe...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fewer resources.  Fewer people.  Hopefully not fewer consultants!  That means that every person on staff needs to be more productive.  Productivity is one of those tricky numbers – it’s a ratio of output to input – that seems more attuned to an industrial age than to a time when the world is moving to an information-based economy.  Still, one thing I speak with clients about all the time are results – key performance indicators, things we can measure to gauge our progress.  Sometimes I even get paid based on those productivity measures so I’m very focused on improving them.

One thing I’ve found is that we sometimes confuse putting out more with making more value.  I think many of the technological innovations which we enjoy these days were originally designed to help improve our ability to be productive.  In fact in many ways I think they had the opposite effect.  We’ve become tools of our tools.  For example many years ago when I began in business I was very careful about how I wrote each and every document because someone would have to type that document and if we needed to make changes we had to retype the entire thing.  Once word processing became the norm it was very easy to make revisions. In theory we could put out the document more rapidly since changing a word didn’t mean retyping everything.  The reality is that we spent a lot more time focusing on formatting – how the document appeared – and making little changes – a word here and there – because we could.  We didn’t think through what we were saying before we started to write.  I’m not sure we became all that more productive.

Email is another tool that should make us productive but has the opposite effect in many cases.  It’s easy to add recipients to a chain and everyone seems to want to weigh in.  What could be a 5 minute hallway conversation turns into an 8 hour chain of notes.  We’re less productive.

I advocate doing less to be more productive.  Send less email (but have more face to face conversations).  Don’t respond to every note unless it’s directed to you.  Don’t multitask – finish one thing before starting another.  Trust your staff and delegate.  Spend more time on the 20% that produces real value and less time on the other 80%. Maybe even pretend that a lot of the “productivity tools” don’t exist. What are your productivity secrets?

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