Thoughtful and Thankful

‘Tis the season for giving.  

Luckily, you have just the heartfelt, significant gift to give now and throughout the year.

It’s a sure fire choice that will be valued today even if was already received before.

This time of year is the perfect time to give your thanks - expressing your appreciation specifically and sincerely.

Think about some of the high points of this past year ... who helped make them so?  

Who do you count on for the things that matter most?  

It’s time to say thank you. 

As each of us gets busier, it’s understandable that to-dos can crowd out thank-yous.

But hearing what others appreciate about us energizes and expands, making us feel valued, sometimes even delighted.

And isn’t that the idea behind a gift?

What's Your Big Assignment?

Khol Vinh, former design director at the New York Times, became "internet famous" for his use of grids.  He's now co-founder and CEO of Lascaux Co., makers of Mixel, the world's first social collage app.

In a recent interview he said,

"Becoming an entrepreneur is really about giving yourself a big assignment....If you pick an interesting enough problem and you develop an interesting enough solution you can continue to work on that and spend several years really getting it right."

As a leader, you have the same opportunity to give yourself a big assignment.

Something that will take everything you do best. 

Your big assignment is the impact you hold yourself accountable for having no matter where or with whom or how you work. 

It's interesting and meaningful enough to hold your attention and intention over time.

What others expect of you is important, but what you expect of yourself is more important.  The 'big assignment' you give yourself is how you've decided to measure your success.

As Kohl Vinh pointed out, the point isn't perfection. It's the pursuit.

Our natural talents and developed strengths uniquely qualify us to pursue this big assignment, giving us each the ability to make a difference that matters. 

What is yours?

"Change or Die"

Your doctor says, "Change your behavior, or you'll die sooner." 

What do you do?

If you're like 90% of patients with severe heart disease, you won't make the changes. 

Logic and facts aren't enough to inspire real change. Force and fear tactics aren't sufficient either.

If they were, 

• Surgeons' warnings would have eliminated smoking,
• The "three strikes rule" would stop repeat-offenders from committing crimes,
• And management and labor would readily collaborate to improve business outcomes.

Instead,

• The illnesses consuming most of our health care budgets are caused by poor smoking, drinking, eating, and exercise habits.  
• Our prisons are populated with career criminals.
• And employees and companies cling to unsuccessful business practices, even as revenues decline and plants close. 

Many of our long standing assumptions about how to create change are wrong. 

But some leaders are discovering what will work over the long term. 

    

In his concise, engaging book Change or Die, Alan Deutschman offers success stories like:

• The Dean Ornish program, where a three year follow-up showed that 77% of the patients had stuck with their lifestyle changes. 
• The Delancey Street Foundation, where 60% of their residents (including ex-felons, prostitutes, and substance abusers) transitioned into productive law-abiding citizens.
• And a union/management partnership between Toyota and NUMMI that revived a failed plant, producing better cars with fewer workers (and grievances).

What do these examples have in common?  Leaders who provided opportunities to

• Relate:  forming a relationship with a credible person or group who believes, and inspires hope that, the change will happen.
• Repeat:  guidance and support while you practice new skills and habits that create the change. 
• Reframe: highlighting experiences that help you find new ways to think about your situation. 

These "3 R" components frame effective change processes on both the personal and organizational level. 

Are they playing a strong enough role in your change effort?

Solving the Right Problem

Even the best problem solvers face chronic challenges.  If you're confronting one yet again, ask yourself if you've been finding the right answer to the wrong question.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's research found that Nobel laureates achieved breakthroughs by finding better ways to frame their problems.  The ability to reframe challenges is critical for all kinds of leaders.

Here's a reframing process you can use on your own, with others, or have several groups complete simultaneously:

1. Write your challenge in the form of a question:

    How to stop tactical work from crowding out time for more strategic 
    work?

2. Ask "Why?"    
   
    Why do you want time for more more strategic work?
   
    and turn the response into a question.
   
    So the answer "I need to develop a strategic plan in 90 days"
    becomes, How to develop a strategic plan in 90 days?

3. Repeat step 2, using the most recent question:

    Why do you want to develop a strategic plan in 90 days?

    "To have a stronger impact on the business planning process."

    Which becomes, How to have a stronger impact on the business 
    planning process?

4. Working from each successive response, repeat this process until
    you've asked "Why?" and turned the last response into a question
    five times.

5. Now return to the original challenge statement (Step 1)
    How to stop tactical tasks from crowding out time for more strategic 
    work?

    And ask "What's stopping you?"

    What's stopping you from stopping tactical tasks from crowding 
    out time for more strategic work?

    And turn the response into a question.  So the answer, "The skill set
    on my team isn't what it should be," becomes

    How to make the skill set on my team what it should be?

6. Repeat step 5, working from each successive response turned into a
    question, until you've asked "What's stopping you?" five times.

    What's stopping you from making the skill set on your team what 
    it should be? ....

As you review the questions you (or the different groups) created, which look like a more interesting or promising starting point?

What Kind of Failure Will Work?

Innovation leaders navigate a balance between understanding

-  the contributions failure can make in innovative processes
-  and the drivers of risk-adverse business environments.

So, taking a lead from the Eskimos' rich vocabulary for snow, Jamer Hunt proposed the following failure spectrum:

"Abject failure
This is the really dark one. It marks you and you may not ever fully recover from it. People lose their lives, jobs, respect, or livelihoods. Examples: British Petroleum's Gulf oil spill; mortgage-backed securities.

Structural failure
It cuts -- deeply -- but it doesn't permanently cripple your identity or enterprise. Examples: Apple iPhone 4's antenna; Windows Vista.

Glorious failure
Going out in a botched but beautiful blaze of glory -- catastrophic but exhilarating. Example: Jamaican bobsled team.

Common failure
Everyday instances of screwing up that are not too difficult to recover from. The apology was invented for this category. Examples: oversleeping and missing a meeting at work; forgetting to pick up your kids from school; overcooking the tuna.

Version failure
Small failures that lead to incremental but meaningful improvements over time. Examples: Linux operating system; evolution.

Predicted failure
Failure as an essential part of a process that allows you to see what it is you really need to do more clearly because of the shortcomings. Example: the prototype -- only by creating imperfect early versions of it can you learn what's necessary to refine it."

Yes, we can learn something from any type of failure.

But this kind of language goes further, by helping us recognize and optimize the kind of failure that just may work.

Sleeping Your Way To the Top

Many top performers have quietly discovered the same secret weapon: 

consistently getting eight hours of sleep.

Time and time again; we've learned that our brains go to work as our bodies rest - thinking differently than they do when we're awake:

• Broadening the tunnel vision that develops after concentrating on something for a long time.
• Making new connections among previously unrelated ideas and memories.
• Practicing and ingraining recently learned concepts and skills.
• Strengthening our ability to sustain our attention span and engagement when we're awake.

Although aggressive company cultures laud 24/7 availability and Type-A personalities boast about getting by on just a few hours of sleep, research has demonstrated that the less sleep you get the worse you perform. 

The National Sleep Foundation reports that Americans are averaging only 6.9 hours of sleep a weeknight - and think that they're getting by just fine.  But, in fact, they're not

 Thinking as clearly,
 Learning as quickly,
 Coming up with as many new ideas,
 Or performing as productively as they think they are.

They've simply lost their edge.

Unlike resilient achievers like Arianna Huffington, who have learned how to "Shut your eyes and discover the great ideas inside us."

Take Your 'Swing Thought'

You'll communicate with more impact when you are crystal clear about

-  What you're trying to accomplish, and

-  How you need to show up to accomplish it.

Author Scott Eblin compares creating this clarity to the "swing thought" professional golfers practice before taking a shot, mentally rehearsing their process and outcome.

When communicating, 'what you're trying to accomplish' includes more than just your point of view, and the points you'll make to support it.

It also encompasses how you will convey your points:  the energy, emotion and body language you'll bring to bear.

'How you need to show up to accomplish it' includes envisioning what you want others to be thinking and feeling, during and afterwards.

And what they need to know or experience beforehand for this to occur.

For example, watch how Sir Ken Robinson and Raghava KK prepare for and deliver their successful TEDTalks. 

See if you can spot these considerations, and pick up a few additional pointers, during this 11 minute insider's glimpse: "Behind the TEDTalk 2010."

Communication is a life-force running through leadership and innovation.  Take your swing thought, and then enjoy the exchange.

Speaking Like a Leader

In the English language, we expect the subject at the front of the sentence ... how often do you begin sentences with "I"?

Leadership is not about the leader. It's about challenges, opportunities and empowerment. It's about the people to whom you're speaking.

As communications expert Phyllis Mendell points out:

- The Gettysburg Address contains no "I" statements.

- Tony Blair's brilliant 3,500 word "A Fight for Liberty" speech used the word "I" only 1/2 of 1% of the time.

- Even Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech used the word "I" to give a voice to the stories and aspirations of his audience. He wasn't just speaking about himself.

A stronger way to talk and write replaces "I" with the shared topic of interest, followed quickly by an action that relates to it.

This shifts the focus to what's most important, often increasing brevity and clarity.

Notice how the focus shifts when Ralph Nadar's statement:

"I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers."

is simply edited to,

"The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers."

Intelligent Memory

Conventional wisdom says that turning off our analytical, logical left brains and turning on our creative, intuitive right brains helps us come up with new ideas.

After all, Roger Sperry won the Nobel Prize for his right/left brain theory.

But Eric Kandel also won the Nobel Prize - for research disproving Sperry's theory. Kendal found that we don't think with a two-sided brain. We use recall and learning, throughout our whole brain, as we exercise "intelligent memory."

A strategy+business article explains:

From the moment you're born, your brain takes things in, breaks them down, and puts them on shelves.

As new information comes in, your brain does a search to see how it might fit with other information already stored in your memory. When it finds a match, the previous memories come off the shelf and combine with the new, and the result is a thought.

The breaking down and storing process is analysis. The searching and combining is intuition. Both are necessary for all kinds of thought. Even a mathematical calculation requires the intuition part, to recall the symbols and formula previously learned in order to apply them to the problem.

When the pieces come off the shelf smoothly, in familiar patterns ... you don't even realize it has happened. When lots of different pieces combine into a new pattern, you feel it as a flash of insight, the famous "aha!" moment.

To mine "intelligent memory" when your team needs better ideas:

Together, define and describe your challenge.

Separately, everyone researches, "Has anyone else in the world ever made progress on any piece of this puzzle?"

Continue this treasure hunt, alternating work with relaxation to encourage the subconscious use of intuition.

Bring your ideas back to the team. Work together to highlight, experiment with and improve the best ones.

Here's to your next "aha!"