Growth & Workload: from Worthwhile Magazine

In an attempt to refocus, have recently started reading Worthwhile Magazine. If you haven’t already, please do visit their website. They have a cool blog too!

In the latest issue of the magazine, Kirsten Johnson, a 26-year old community-builder from Minnesota, in “A Letter to Corporate America”, writes:

…many of my peers are seeking out jobs where they can be challenged to grow. What they are receiving instead is the challenge of having more to do – a growing workload made up of mundane tasks.

And if this did not jolt you into re-thinking your company’s approach to work, she goes on to say that, the current generation,

(while not being afraid of work, is) not interested in giving our heart and soul to an organization unless there is something in it for our heart and soul.

Wildly Important Goals

In the audiobook, “The Four Disciplines of Execution”, Stephen Covey and Jennifer Colosimo say that the first discipline is to focus on wildly important goals. To do this, they state that people can only accomplish two or three goals at once with excellence and insist that we must narrow our focus in order to achieve such WIGs. An excerpt:

One of the most fundamental principles of organizational activity is that human beings are genetically hard-wired to do one thing at a time with excellence. And there’s no better place to illustrate how this principle is honored than at the airport. Because right now there could be more than 100 airplanes either approaching, landing, taking off or moving around. And all of them are very, very important – especially if you happen to be in one of them.

For an air traffic control specialist only one aircraft is wildly important right now. That’s Flight 457. The controller is aware of all of the other planes on her radar. She is keeping track of them, but all her talent and expertise is solely focused on Flight 457. If she doesn’t get Flight 457 on the ground safely, if she doesn’t do that with total excellence, nothing else she might achieve is really going to matter much.

Wildly important goals are like that. They always share one unique characteristic. They are the goals we must achieve with total excellence. Any other goal we might achieve really won’t matter much. This is what we suggest you must do in your work. You must make the hard choices and separate what is wildly important to you and your organization from all of the other merely important goals that may be on your radar. Then you must approach that wildly important goal with focus and diligence until it is delivered as promised with excellence.

The other three disciplines as per Covey & Colosimo are:

1. Create a Compelling Scoreboard
2. Translate Lofty Goals into Specific Actions
3. Hold Each Other Accountable — All of the Time

Quotes – by Milton Friedman

1. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.
2. I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible.
3. A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
4. The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
5. We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.
6. We don’t have a desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow.
7. With respect to teachers’ salaries – Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.
8. If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can only gain at the expense of another.
9. History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
10. Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
11. Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
12. There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income. – Fox News interview 2004

Celebrate Failure

So says Richard Watson in this FastCompany column. An extremely interesting observation is regarding people’s response to failure. Most people will deny it, or attribute it to causes outside themselves! This is because as Watson says “Most people believe that success breeds success and they believe that the converse is true too, that failure breeds failure”.

Another interesting viewpoint in the essay is regarding the oft-repeated “tenacity advice”. Most motivational speakers urge people not to give up. They say that if you just keep on trying, you will eventually succeed. And if you don’t, it must have something to do with your not trying hard enough. Watson believes this to be false. He advises us to learn from failure and try again differently.

As Henry Moore said: “The secret of life is to have a task, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is: It must be something you cannot possibly do.”

Watson’s top five tips for failing with greater frequency and style:
1. Try to fail as often as possible but never make the same mistake twice.
2. Set a failure target as part of each employee’s annual review.
3. If projects are a failure, kill them quickly and move on.
4. Create a failure database as part of knowledge management.
5. Set up annual failure awards. If this gets too successful, stop it.

What do you think?

Quotes from Peter Drucker

1. Help is defined by the recipient
2. The critical question is not “How can I achieve?” but “What can I contribute?”
3. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. He alone gives employment.
4. It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of a whole mass.
5. An executive should be a realist; and no one is less realistic than the cynic.
6. You cannot prevent a major catastrophe, but you can build an organization that is battle-ready, where people trust one another. In military training, the first rule is to instill soldiers with trust in their officers — because without trust, they won’t fight.
7. Listening (the first competence of leadership) is not a skill, it is a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.
8. It is easy to look good in a boom.
9. Luck never built a business. Prosperity and growth come only to the business that systematically finds and exploits its potential.
10. The one person to distrust is the one who never makes a mistake. Either he is a phony, or he stays with the safe, the tried, and the trivial.
11. There are keys to success in managing bosses. First, put down on a piece of paper a “boss list,” everyone to whom you are accountable. Next, go to each person on the list and ask, “What do I do and what do my people do that helps you do your job?” And, “What do we do that makes your life more difficult?”
12. Workmanship is essential: In fact, an organization demoralizes itself if it does not demand of its members the highest workmanship.
13. A decision is a commitment to action. No decision has, in fact, been made until carrying it out has become somebody’s responsibility.
14. It’s much easier to sell the Brooklyn Bridge than to give it away. Nobody trusts you if you offer something for free.
15. The ultimate test of an information system is that there are no surprises.
16. Until a business returns a profit that is greater than its cost of capital, it does not create wealth — it destroys it.
17. The question has to be asked — and asked seriously — “If we did not do this already, would we go into it now?” If the answer is no, the reaction must be “What do we do now?” Very often, the right answer is abandonment.
18. Freedom is not fun. It is a responsible choice.
19. One can’t manage change. One can only be ahead of it.
20. Just go out and make yourself useful.
21. Conventional wisdom is often long on convention and short on wisdom.
22. Businessmen owe it to themselves and owe it to society to hammer home that there is no such thing as “profit.” There are only “costs”: costs of doing business and costs of staying in business; costs of labor and raw materials, and costs of capital; costs of today’s jobs and costs of tomorrow’s jobs and tomorrow’s pensions. There is no conflict between “profit” and “social responsibility.” To earn enough to cover the genuine costs, which only the so-called “profit” can cover, is economic and social responsibility — indeed, it is the specific social and economic responsibility of business. It is not the business that earns a profit adequate to its genuine costs of capital, to the risks of tomorrow and to the needs of tomorrow’s worker and pensioner that “rips off” society. It is the business that fails to do so.
23. I would hope that American managers — indeed managers worldwide — continue to appreciate what I have been saying since day one: Management is so much more than exercising rank and privilege, it’s so much more than ‘making deals.’ Management affects people and their lives, both in business and many other aspects as well. The practice of management deserves our utmost attention; it deserves to be studied.
24. Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven’t.
25. Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately generate into hard work.
26. So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.
27. What everyone knows is usually wrong.
28. Popularity is not leadership. Results are. Leadership is not rank, privileges, titles, or money. It is responsibility. There may be ‘born leaders,’ but there surely are too few to depend on them.
29. Leadership is not magnetic personality – that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’ – that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
30. Leadership is the lifting of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard and the building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations.
31. Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people, because they determine the performance capacity of the organization.
32. In today’s marketplace, productivity is the true competitive advantage.
33. The effectiveness of an organization depends on work being done at the lowest possible organization level.
34. The one truly effective way to cut costs is to cut out an activity altogether. There is little point in trying to do cheaply what should not be done at all.
35. The best way to predict the future is to create it.