The joy of whining
Before starting, a question: Will it help?
Like holding a grudge, or like panicking, whining rarely helps. If anything, any of the three make it far less likely that you'll make progress solving the problem that has presented itself.
And, like knuckle cracking, it's best enjoyed alone.
Unconscious consumption
Black Friday, of course, is a con.
But it's also a symptom of a terrible trap we've set for ourselves.
Consider the joy a little kid has the first time he spends his own money to buy an ice cream cone. This isn't something he does every day, it's not something he has to do, it's not something he's trying to get over with. Instead, the entire process unrolls in slow motion. It's consumption, no doubt about it, the last step in a long industrial/agricultural/marketing system. But at least this last step is special beyond words.
Now, consider the mall. The mall, today.
Running out of room (length vs. density)
A reporter recently hacked an interview he did with me, turning 17 emailed sentences into two and changing both the message and the way it was delivered.
That used to make sense, when papers involved column inches, but it was for an online article.
Why make things shorter than necessary if you're not paying for paper?
Why make make a podcast or a talk 18 minutes long... the internet isn't going to run out of reels of tape.
Full speed, then stop, gracefully
Quitting slowly doesn't serve you well.
At work or in anything else you do, people will remember how you ended things. All in, then out is the responsible way to participate and to end that participation. Too often, we seduce ourselves into gradually backing off, in removing ourselves emotionally and organizationally, as if making ourselves unuseful for a while makes it easier for everyone.
Professionals bring their A game to work. Every time. (Rare sports analogy: this is how good hockey players skate. Full speed, then stop.)
Of course you will need to close things down, quit your job, move on someday. The responsible way to do that, though, is not to act things out while you agonize over a decision. Decide, give notice, make the transition work.
Just passing through
Older guy walks into the service area on the parkway and asks one of the staff, "do you have a pay phone? My car broke down and I need to call my daughter."
The staff person, killing time by checking his cell phone, is confused. He's not sure what a pay phone is, then he figures it out, and says, "no," before going back to his phone.
It never occurs to him to hand the phone to the man so he can make a call.
Part of it is the boss's fault. He's not paying much attention to hiring or training or incentives. He's paying as little as he can, and turnover is high. After all, every one of his customers is just passing through, no need to care.
Making a new decision
It's almost impossible to persuade someone that he's wrong. Almost impossible to make your argument louder and sharper and have the other person say, "I was wrong and I will change my mind."
Far more effective: Help someone make a new decision, based on new alternatives and a new story.
Arnold got it right in this passionate invitation to (re) think about our future.
No direction home
There are millions of college seniors beginning their job search in earnest.
And many of them are using the skills they've been rewarded for in the past:
Writing applications
Being judged on visible metrics
Where does leadership come from?
Leadership is a choice. This is apparently controversial, but more than any other element I can track, leadership occurs when someone decides it's important that they lead.
The challenge, then, is in making the choice to lead.
I'd like to invite you to a new real-time online workshop on leadership. The goal of this group sprint is to create an interactive, real-time environment where you can safely explore what the leadership choice is capable of accomplishing, what it means, and how to get there.
You can find all the details here.
Are you ready?
You're more powerful than you think. The altMBA is now accepting applicants for its second class. The program is working. We're helping accelerate the impact people are making in the world, and I hope you'll forward this post to someone in search of transformation.
Are you ready to grow, to see, to be transformed?
One way to get to where you're going is to surround yourself with people on a similar journey. That's what I set out to create when I founded the altMBA, and it has dramatically exceeded all of my expectations.
This week, some extraordinary people are graduating from our first month-long intensive session, and the feedback from our inaugural class is even better than I hoped.
Alphagrams
It turns out that competitive Scrabble players always arrange the letters on their rack in alphabetical order.
The reason makes sense: By ensuring consistency, the patterns appear. You've seen this before...
That same discipline works in most kinds of problem solving. Develop a method where you organize all the inputs, the assumptions and the variables in the same order. Consistently grouping what you see will make it ever more clear that you've seen something like this before.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Promotion, demotion and opportunity
You can learn a new skill, today, for free.
You can take on a new task at work, right now, without asking anyone.
You can make a connection, find a flaw, contribute an insight, now.
Or not.
Day traders rarely make history
The short-term stuff is pretty easy to do well. Respond to incoming. Check it off your list. Next!
The long-term stuff, on the other hand, is so easy to postpone, because tomorrow always sounds promising. And so we might hesitate to define the next project, or look for a new job, or visualize something that breaks what we're already used to.
Two thoughts:
a. Keep them separate. The best way to avoid long-term work is to be exposed to juicy short-term urgencies.
Scientific Management 2.0
130 years ago, Frederick Taylor changed the world forever.
Scientific Management is the now-obvious idea that factories would measure precisely what their workers were doing. Use a stopwatch. Watch every movement. Adjust the movements until productivity goes up. Re-organize the assembly line for more efficiency. Pay people by the piece. Cull the workforce and get rid of the people who can't keep up. Make the assembly line go faster.
Once Scientific Management goes beyond system setup and starts to focus on the individual, it amplifies the gulf between management and labor. No one wants to do their work under the stopwatch (except, perhaps, Usain Bolt).
And now, here comes SM2.0.
Past performance is not indicative of future results
This is clearly and demonstrably true of mutual funds. It's easy to confirm.
And yet...
We are very uncomfortable with randomness. So the newspaper does a 12 page section of mutual funds, filled with articles and ads and charts, all touting past performance.
Superstition is what we call the belief in causation due to a mistaken correlation of unrelated data. A broken mirror doesn't actually cause seven years of bad luck, and cheering in a certain way isn't going to help the Yankees, sorry.
The vulnerability of 'thank you'
Thank you as in: I couldn't do it without you. As in: I don't want to do this alone. As in: I was afraid. And mostly: I would miss you if you were gone.
Thank you brings us closer together.
Thank you is a limb worth going out on.
Yes, in my backyard
The opposite of NIMBY, the opposite of isolation.
Building a fortress is expensive. It cripples your tribe. And it won’t work.
Modern fortresses amplify fear, destroy the value that's at the heart of the connection economy, and don't actually pay off. It's far more valuable to live in a community of hard-working, trustworthy refugees and (former) strangers than it is to become isolated.
To be clear, the threat might be real. And the fear certainly is. That's not in question. The question is: What to do about our fear?
A reason persuasion is surprisingly difficult
Each of us understands that different people are swayed by different sorts of arguments, based on different ways of viewing the world. That seems sort of obvious. A toddler might want an orange juice because it's sweet, not because she's trying to avoid scurvy, which might be the argument that moves an intellectual but vitamin-starved sailor to take action.
So far, so good.
The difficult part is this: Even when people making an argument know this, they don't like making an argument that appeals to the other person's alternative worldview.
Worth a full stop here. Even when people have an argument about a political action they want someone else to adopt, or a product they want them to buy, they hesitate to make that argument with empathy. Instead, they default to talking about why they believe it.
Thanksgiving reminder
Today's a good day to download The Thanksgiving Reader. It's free to share, of course.
We're gratified at the huge number of families that have already downloaded and printed a copy. And the creative ways people are choosing to share it. A school in California printed a copy for each of their staff, and distributed them in beautiful folios.
If each of us shares it with ten people this week, we'll have created a new tradition.
Have a wonderful holiday.
All cases are special cases
The art of the successful institution is figuring out which cases are special enough to deserve a fresh eye.
It's virtually impossible to scale an institution that insists on making a new decision every time it encounters a new individual. On the other hand, what makes a bureaucracy stupid is its insistence that there are no special cases.
They're all special. The difficult work at scale is figuring out which ones are special enough.
And, if you want to be seen and respected and sought out as the anti-bureaucracy, there's your strategy: All cases are special cases.
The end of the future is premature
Twenty years ago, when I was working on projects with AOL, we were sure that this was the next big thing for a long time to come. It was a profitable natural monopoly, one that could expand to serve everyone's needs. They were the end of the future of the Internet.
When you surveyed people in 1996, most thought AOL = The Internet. They were the same thing, game over.
Then, of course, just four years later, Yahoo cornered the market. It was where everyone started their internet experience. All you needed. That didn't last more than a decade.
We have similar conversations about the form factor and platform of the iPhone. And Facebook, of course, will be the way generations connect online... it's hard to imagine the next thing.
