Relationships

Business / Relationships — No Comments
31
Dec 11

The diversity of doing

When I am scouting for talent I lead with the belief in diversity, in all ways – race, gender, discipline, thought etc. – because it makes for a better, more creative, compelling and competitive organizations. Somewhere in that principle there is an assumption that the person gets things done, since people that don’t are unlikely candidates. It occurs to me, now reflecting upon a momentous year of doing that its not enough to simply get things done. Getting things done just demonstrates a person’s ability to work their work. More important than getting things done is what and how they decided to get it done. Evidence of this level of thought and engagement can be found in the variety of experiences an individual has especially if they do not set the direction for their organization.

It’s estimated that the average human has 60,000 thoughts a day. This is not surprising. What is disconcerting is that 90% of the thoughts you have today are the ones you had yesterday. Deepak Chopra, M.D.

Ever since I read this passage as a teenager one of my goals was to do better than repeating 90% rethink. One way I tried to accomplish this was to be endlessly curious about anything and everything. I carefully investigated, considered and questioned what appeared to be an unrelated set of interests. Of course, I was the rhyme to my reason knitting together my evolving point of view and discovering what makes me tic.

Experiences in doing are not only tied to a person’s day job. In fact what someone is interested in on the side is often more interesting than the remarkable but expected accomplishments of talented professionals. For me, this year launched a new chapter in my family with the arrival of my daughter in August.  She is currently amazed by her hands, that they are useful and more recently that they are her own. Babies may be sponges, learning all the time, but parents are blessed with the opportunity to learn as well in a deep and personal ways. Sleepless nights are rewarded with knowing how precisely delicate a baby’s breath can be – subtly sweet and endlessly delicious. Our daughter gets the majority of our attention and in turn the things we use to make time for get brutally prioritized (Did you notice the gap in posts!). It also drives a new level of communication and compromise as mother and father work as a team to ensure things get done despite the competing desires.

Recently I was on a three month assignment to a large customer in the healthcare industry working through what cloud computing could mean for their business. This was an opportunity to diversify – as a professional and as a family. Sadie was just old enough to travel and my wife was on maternity leave – off to California we went. I had the luxury of working full time as part of the customer, leveraging my connections into IBM to help drive value. From first day to last it was endless learning about the good, bad and ugly from some very special people. It has irreversibly changed my understanding and insight – a priceless experience. For my family it was an adventure trying out a different land and experiencing the time warp of not being in Eastern Standard Time. Points of view are relative to the perceiver and it helps to be reminded how fragile that “reality” is.

We settled on a great area of Oakland called Rockridge. It reminded us of Brooklyn – strategically located with more diversity in people, food and shopping. It also came with stadium seating of the Occupy Oakland dance and what seemed like daily violence. California in general seems to need to go to driver education. On any given morning a mostly sober population of motoring public gets into no less than half a dozen accidents on the major roadways. I know there are a lot of people etc. but have you seen the size of these roads?! Like anything there are many contributing reasons, but it begs the question as to why a place has such an impact on its people – so is true in the workplace.

If diversity of doing is a desirable element in developing greater talent and creating remarkable teams then there too is a responsibility to create a climate and environment to enable such performance. One without the other is having this amazing thing called a hand, but not knowing its yours.

Business / Culture / Innovation / Relationships — No Comments
10
Jul 10

Am I repeating myself?

History informs us and refers us to a context other than our own. We look to it to provide insight into something happening in the present and future. Past performance is not an indicator of future performance and yet almost all of our predictions come from formal or informal historical record. Life is a series of educated, inspired and intuited choices and yet we analyze our randomness for pattern. We need to get comfortable with how accidental decisions can be and establish more confidence in defining a future in our context. Who better to predict or create your future than you?

There is a lot to learn from past experience – if there is enough in common context. There are endless factors as to why things happened they way they did. Often the context is radically complicated. My guess is that war historians face this often. The context of a given war is a scope that can be appreciated but only broadly learned from. Specific battles however, can be abstracted as patterns for future engagements. Executives at large companies often play a game of “big boy” chess working agendas in the marketplace that may take five to ten years to deliver. They balance their need for immediate returns with the clever game of creating future business. Watched too closely an employee may think a high level executive is missing both opportunities – it is all about context!

Looking for inspiration outside of your specific domain is an excellent way to ensure you are not repeating yourself. My dad always said, if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always gotten. History is an informing resource not a road map – the context is often too different to offer the play book most people are looking for. By reaching to other domains, you create interdisciplinary connections and innovation.

A few years ago the IT world was drunk with the concept of mashups, where a web hacker type would take the services exposed by more than one application and assemble it in a meaningful way. You will remember this phase because the most profound examples had content plotted on a geographic map. One had to wonder, is the radical new approach the introduction of extendible, shareable map services or the introduction of a new programming paradigm? Mashups permeated popular culture to the point that at the time a hot new show Glee used it as a creative way to create new music for the cast to perform – a music mashup. Mr. Schuester, the Glee club faculty member, would mix two songs together and challenge the students to do the same. The IT world has moved onto other booze, but the Glee Empire found a new way of introducing more related, varied and original content into their production. YouTube is filled with content mash. Similar to the desirability of adopting a mutt at the pound, I quickly take the derivative over the original. Mutts embody diversity. Derivative choices often have the benefit of more information. Let the thousand flowers bloom, pick one and when it dies, pick another – if you are paying attention you will get better. Some people get really good at picking the right ones, but rest assured most are bad. The key is not losing what was at the heart of the original. It is all about context. Ever look at Seurat’s La Grande Jatte up close and in person?

 

 

 

Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte

Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte by George-Pierre Seurat

Seek out diversity in both your references and the level at which you examine. Past experience might let you question what you see – objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. In the 1999 block buster The Matrix, Neo speaks to a little boy that apparently knows how to bend spoons.

The Matrix - There is no spoon

A screen shot of the bending spoon from The Matrix

Boy: Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Boy: There is no spoon.

Neo: There is no spoon?

Boy: Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

Quote from IMDB.

 

Sometimes you get what you always got because you can’t see you are repeating yourself. Stop acting drunk and disorderly and get yourself a pint of diversity.

Psychology / Relationships — 1 Comment
25
Apr 10

Setting the stage for insight

Jonah Lehrer’s post this past Friday, Dreaming and Remembering, shares research around the role dreams play in sorting, consolidating and strengthening memories. In a New York Times post from March, Lehrer relates an experiment from Jan Born that showed sleeping between problem solving increased their pattern detection ability allowing the participants to use a short-cut instead of the more complex brute force method.

Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming “set the stage for the emergence of insight” by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.

Lehrer ends presenting…

One of the main remaining controversies for sleep researchers is whether or not REM dreams are a mere side-effect of a subterranean process – this would suggest that the narratives themselves don’t matter – or are actually a core feature of the sleep-remembering cycle. This is an academic question with plenty of practical relevance, as it will determine whether or not it’s worth recounting our dreams in polite conversation.

Regardless of the potential findings people respond to storytelling as a method of engagement and understanding. Stories provide context for other more important content. Done well it involves the listener in a mentally interactive exercise making it easier for them to find meaning and relate the underlying messages to other important ideas. Dreams may be a “side-effect of a subterranean process” but it would be such a waste of fantastic stories.

Business / Relationships — No Comments
7
Mar 10

A lesson on reality from a call girl

One of the many things people can do to sustain a high-performing work life, is to care about what they do. This shifts the energy we usually reserve for our life and moves it to the workplace. It makes a significant difference in an individual’s ability to genuinely connect with other people and drive success across teams and projects. Making work personal is one of the simplest gas pedals people have to get things done, yet the highs it brings are matched equally by the lows.


A reclining Belle from Secret Diary of a call girl

The key to fantasy is knowing that you’re in one. So when you start thinking it’s real, things become complicated. Fantasy and reality and never-the-tween shall meet.

-Belle, Season 3, Episode 2, Secret Diary of a Call Girl

 

People tend not to manage their reality at work as a relationship, especially if they care. Consider the intimate relationships you have had and think of the ways you protected yourself during the moments of turmoil.  Sometimes the protection is creating physical space – breaking up, separation and divorce. Other times it is far more subtle, a reminder that the person you love is upset about something and just needs compassion and support, not for you to feel angry and attacked. Are you managing your romance with work or are you pretending that it is different? How we react to changes in our reality is how we manage our relationships with it. In the workplace this is what distinguishes the best leaders.

Melt down with as few people as possible. Try to pick people you have a close and safe relationship with. If you don’t have any like that, then do it on your own, but do it nonetheless. If you care about your work, the melt down is unavoidable – it is literally the relationship having been malnourished. In business, the chances that it is getting fed all the time are unlikely. The key is to manage it separately from the prevailing brand you present as a professional. People have enough challenges dealing with their own reality, so when yours bleeds into theirs there is a level of dissonance that if not received with care tends to irritate. Regardless, taking the time to heal the complications of treating work like life is vital to keeping your mojo flowing.

Caring about what you do is powerful. It parts the tribe in two and those that care have the upper hand. It comes with additional responsibility to yourself, which is to manage your work (fantasy) as you would you life (reality). People tend to blend them and engage in the resulting complication. When you find yourself unable to distinguish, remind yourself that these two are really never meant to meet. That you introduced them to each other was a gift to you and others. If you see others going through challenging times where the emotional component is as high as business at hand, then receive it with care – it builds meaningful relationships between people that transcend the workplace. Some would say this makes for a messy world view, but I would argue it was messy when we started caring.

Business / Innovation / Relationships — No Comments
26
Feb 10

Secrets are ment to be shared

Never say no to someone that is looking for a mentor. Most of the time, the limitation is not your time, but the ability of the protégé to consume the coaching and advice you impart. Almost always there is time between when you listen and share to when they come back looking for more. I also believe that it is the job of everyone to support others, regardless of their relative position in the community. Often people filter that they are willing to mentor, as to prefer only the absolute top talent. If we spent more time developing everyone, we might have better talent all around.

There is no shortage of ideas. This is one of those statements most do not agree with. Maybe we do not all come wired with this confidence, but I know it to be true. Being free with your ideas is the simplest way to enable the best thinking to flow into innovation. It also makes it irrelevant who owns which ideas – there are so many more it really does not matter. Secrets are the same way. There is no shortage of secrets to learn and sharing them does no harm.

Almost always, a protégé needs to have a certain level of experience to understand and make use of relevant secrets.  It takes some time to make sense of the words you use or the situations you share. As a mentor you likely cannot practically compress everything for easy digestion. In fact, the simplest of lessons is often distilled to the point that it needs dilution. In the end, more often than not, the protégé is the gas pedal. When that pedal gets stuck, it will be your own inability to communicate at high enough bandwidth – help these folks get strapped to the fastest rocket ship you know.

People think that if they share what they know they will lose their power. This is the absolute wrong way to think about things. Creating a legion of individuals everywhere that grow to be giants is the ultimate in success and likely power. It transcends the walls of your organization and is the right thing to do for humanity. We need to take better care of each other.

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