Tag Archives: life

January 21, 2019 · 11:33 am

Happy MLK Day. Dream On!

I think I got it right last year so I’m reposting it this year along with the introduction I wrote at the time. Happy birthday, Dr. King!

As I sat down to write this morning’s screed with Dr. King’s birthday on my mind, I realized that it’s been 50 years since that horrible year of 1968. I was 13 at the time and if you’re younger than about 55 today you probably have no memories of the almost non-stop bad news. It’s hard to believe but things seemed even more screwed up and polarized than they do today. The day Dr. King was shot is one of my indelible memories and the killing of Bobby Kennedy two months later snuffed out a small glimmer of hope that Dr. King’s legacy might come to fruition soon. It took another 40 years for that although there are valid arguments that we as a country are still waiting in many ways.

With that, what follows is my post on celebrating Dr, King and his message from a few years ago. It’s about listening, something many of us don’t do often enough. Maybe you can give it a try this week?

Today is the day we pause to celebrate Dr. King’s birthday.  I went back and looked at my post from two years ago, which was about dreams – specifically one of Dr. King’s dreams becoming a reality.  That was sort of focused on what he saw – his vision.  Today I want to focus on one of the great man’s best qualities that influenced how he acted to make that vision real.  I think it’s applicable to business.  No, it’s not going to be another ethics rant (although those are never out of style in my book).  Today, it’s about the most important skill I think all great businesspeople – and great leaders – possess.

To me, great leaders serve to fulfill the needs of their people.  For Dr. King, it meant endless meetings with various groups to understand their concerns and explain how broadening civil liberties to be more inclusive could help meet them.  For those of us in business, it means paying more attention to the concerns of our customers and co-workers than to our own agenda – these folks ARE our agenda to a certain extent, along with the underlying needs of our businesses.  In a word – listen.

Everyone wants to feel as if their ideas and thoughts are being heard if not acted upon. Without someone hearing them, acting on those concerns is impossible. Listening, then speaking, brings trust.

I know this isn’t a new thought in this space but it came to mind on this day thinking of Dr. King.  If you go back to the early days of Dr. King’s involvement in the civil rights movement, it’s pretty clear that he was a reluctant leader. He was drafted to lead and was kind of unsure of himself.  As he listened to the members of the community and other clergies, he realized that he was simply a voice for the community and their agenda became his agenda.

Many of you will be familiar with Stephen R. Covey, who wrote that we ought to “seek first to understand, then to be understood.”  I think Dr. King if he read pop-psychology, would have appreciated that.

What are you listening to today?

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December 27, 2018 · 3:30 pm

Top Posts Of 2018 #2

This is the second most-read post written in 2018. I wrote it following the passing of my uncle, the husband of my only aunt and my godmother. The post is about being willing to be surprised and to be wrong. What I found out about him changed a view I had held for many years. Since then, I’ve reminded myself constantly that what you think you know today might be completely wrong tomorrow and I try to behave accordingly as I run my business and consult with clients. Enjoy!

My uncle passed away last week. He was married to my mother’s sister and, obviously, wasn’t a young man. Still, a loved one’s death is never easy and due to a lengthy illness, this one was especially hard. I flew to Florida to attend his funeral and to offer love and support to my aunt and cousins. If you’ve ever sat with folks who’ve experienced a loss, maybe you’ve had a similar experience to what went on. There was much talking and reminiscing about my uncle and many old family memories were shared with a mixture of laughter and sadness.

My uncle was a man I’d known my entire life and yet during the time spent chatting I learned something I’d never known. There was a book on my aunt’s table. In it were poems that my uncle had written over the years, mostly to her. It turned out he had also written a play. I was very surprised by this since my uncle was a rather vocal prognosticator on whatever topic happened to be at hand. Sports, in particular, was something about which he was never at a loss for an opinion. He was in an odd way a less knowledgeable Howard Cosell and although he was frequently wrong he was never deterred from speaking his mind. The fact that he had written love poetry to his wife was not exactly something that I thought he’d be doing.

The point of this is to remind each of us that no matter how well we think we know a topic or a person we need to keep an open mind and a readiness to be surprised. If someone had told me that my uncle was a playwright I’d have thought they were joking. That fact that I saw his poetry reminded me how little I really knew or understood about him.

Be willing to be wrong. Accept that there are things you don’t know and seek them out. Get as many facts as you can. Oddly, my uncle would often opine without having some key facts at hand. Even so, it’s his last message to me as expressed through the existence of his poetry that was probably the best thing he ever said to me. Does it resonate with you too?

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November 30, 2018 · 9:59 am

Put It Away!

It’s Foodie Friday and today’s topic is an article I came across about something a restaurant chain is doing that I think is a fantastic idea. I’ll admit that I’m an old-school kind of a guy. When I go out to eat with family, friends, or business associates, I like to interact with them. You know: eye contact, conversation, a few laughs, that sort of thing.

That was the norm until about a dozen years ago when suddenly, everyone got smartphones. All of a sudden the table looked like the reading room at a library. Not a lot of talk and everyone with their heads down reading their phones. I hate it, especially since I generally keep my phone off the table and in a pocket when I’m drinking or dining with others. I figure if it’s an emergency, someone will call me. Responding to an email can wait a few minutes while I finish my meal and my conversation. And trust me – the intense argument on Facebook isn’t worth your time or attention.

What this restaurant chain is doing is simple and smart:

The lack of communication among its diners has prompted British restaurant chain Frankie & Benny’s to offer free meals for kids if families give up their phones when they enter the restaurant. The Italian-American restaurant…came up with the idea after examining the results of a survey it conducted about the way adults use their smartphones. After questioning 1,500 parents and children, the results revealed that around 10 percent of kids had at some point hidden their mom or dad’s handset in a bid to get their full attention. More than 70 percent of the children surveyed said they wished their parents would spend less time fiddling about on their phone, while about the same figure said it felt as if their parents preferred to be on their phone than with them.

Sad that it’s come to that but I often feel just like one of those kids. There is a broader point to be made as well. Walk into most meetings these days and one or more of the “participants” isn’t really participating because they’re preoccupied with their phone. Frankly, I’m a fan of turning phones to silent during a meeting and keeping them out of sight. If what’s going on in the room isn’t more important than what’s happening on your phone then either the meeting never should have happened or you shouldn’t be there.

I guess I have a love/hate relationship with my smartphone. I love that almost all the world’s information is right there and that I can communicate no matter where I am (I still remember running around NYC trying to find a working pay phone during a business emergency). I hate the fact that we respond like Pavlov’s dog to a beep or a buzz. I despise that we’re far less connected during our interactions even as we have the ability to be constantly connected. I didn’t like the fact that as the host I had to ask all the kids to put their phones away while the family was eating, at least for 10 or 15 minutes. You would have thought I had asked them to eat turnips.

Try putting down the phone in social situations and see if the quality of those situations doesn’t improve. Try it in meetings too. What do you have to lose?

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