2008 Career Challenges: Wrap-Up

Throughout January, a number of posts have highlighted potential challenges to consider embracing in 2008 to improve your strategy skills. Here's a recap of the challenges:

• Finding a Strategic Mentor


• Learning from the Challenging People in Your Life


• Identifying What Clears Your Mind for Better Thinking


• Shaping Strategic Thinking in Meetings and on Projects


• Identifying What Matters


• Making Sure Your Work's Special and You Can Say Why


• Collecting Questions to Use When You Have Nothing to Say

So have you selected one or two to pursue? If so, that's great.

If not, you still have plenty to time to choose something to work on for the remainder of the year to expand your strategic impact. Best wishes, and please share how it's going and what you're learning.

Change Your Character – Doing It Babysitter Style

Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

At the conference I presented at this weekend, we worked on the “Change Your Character” exercise for a customer service example. One suggestion was that an internal customer service rep is similar to a babysitter in that they both have to manage bosses (parents) and front line employees (kids).

Sounds close, so if your challenge is helping customer service providers improve their effectiveness, work through how a babysitter handles a new situation:

• Shows she really likes kids & can get along with them
• Demonstrates a professional attitude
• Makes sure she has clear instructions from the parents
• Establishes her role right away with the kids
• Focuses on the kids
• Has strong listening skills
• Knows positive ways to help kids follow rules
• Displays maturity in handling difficult situations
• Acts with firmness, but understanding
• Ensures that kids are fed and comfortable
• Can be flexible when necessary

As always, try to generate 3 new ideas for your situation from each of the babysitter’s behaviors. And remember, my mother lets me stay up to watch Craig Ferguson all the time. She really does!

Don't Forget Your Creativity Sources - Part 2

This is part 2 of highlighting some of the creative inspirations behind my presentation on "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation." As the first reference below suggests, improving your creativity is linked to your ability to change, adapt, and customize various inspirations to address your opportunities.

• The Remix Planet – My wife Cyndi wanted to go to Wired Magazine’s NextFest in Chicago in 2005. The admission included a free one-year subscription; one of the first issues featured the “Remix Planet.” This provided a nice way to talk about borrowing & morphing ideas for your own use!
• Steve Farber – Steve is a great speaker that we’ve had for several executive management programs. He talked about reading magazines on the cutting edge (i.e. gaming, technology) to spot emerging trends headed for the general culture. We morphed the idea into taking any graphics-intensive magazine outside your field of expertise and looking through it page-by-page with a marker, writing down new ideas to address your challenges.
• IDEO –A well-known design & innovation firm. One of the companies I work with did some brief exploration with IDEO. One of their approaches is prototyping – quickly doing something with an idea to make it more tangible and to be able to experience it. That’s been helpful in moving us beyond simply generating a bunch of ideas for a marketing manager and instead prioritizing them quickly and taking the first few steps with them.
• "Made to Stick" – I’ve written about “Made to Stick” previously. Its six principles for making ideas take hold and flourish can benefit anyone trying to create change and implement new approaches.
• Benjamin Zander – I’ve also written about Benjamin Zander earlier. Specific to “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation,” his discussion about simply replying “How Fascinating” to things that go wrong in life had a major impact. My natural personality is to become frustrated and complain when things don’t work. Zander’s challenge to identify what you’re learning from a bad situation has helped me to be calmer when things are frustrating and to genuinely look for the lessons God is trying to teach me when nothing seems to be going right. Click here for a blog post from PresentationZen with a quick overview of Zander’s key messages.
• Serving Others & Helping to Make Them Successful – I’m an ardent believer in servant leadership. While the Bible is certainly the chief inspiration for that approach to life, the idea of improving your successfulness by figuring out how to make other people successful comes from Ziz Ziglar, an incredible speaker.

Which leads to a big thank you to Jessica Myers, a senior media relations specialist at Garmin, for the inspiration to start a blog. I saw her present at an IABC Communications Summit in October 2007 on how easy it is to get a blog started. I thought I’d check it out, and was launched into the blogosphere.

That’s how a presentation comes together, with a tremendous number of great inputs & ideas that get molded (ideally) into a cohesive message. Enjoy checking out the links as potential departure points for your own new inspirations. And realize - it’s actually more creative to REMEMBER your sources. That way you can go back and borrow from them again and again!

Don't Forget Your Creativity Sources – Part 1

A comment on Jan Harness’ Creative Instigation blog struck me as interesting: “Creativity is the art of forgetting your sources.” In the age of the remix culture, that’s very true, and I’ve been accused of it in presentations. While I try to credit sources of inspiration, you don’t often get to explain why something inspired you.

Saturday, I did “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” for a great conference audience. Since that presentation is all about creativity, I thought I’d try to RECOGNIZE some of the inspirations behind that material over the next two posts. Here’s part 1 - check these out and see if they can help remove some NOs from your InNOvation efforts.

• Max Utsler - In 2004, Max asked me to talk to his Kansas University class about innovation in marketing communications. That was the start - no Max, no presentation.


• Google Images - Still my favorite source for “found objects” that are a fun (ok, maybe slightly inappropriate) way to liven up a presentation.


• Chuck Dymer – I met Chuck in the mid 1990’s, and he’s been an incredible strategic & innovation mentor to me ever since. He’s a Master Trainer of Edward de Bono (the father of lateral thinking) methods who continually opens my eyes to new ways to think creatively. You name it – trait transformation, themed exercises, using toys, prioritization grids, plus-minus-interesting…I learned it all from Chuck!


• James Lipton – As a collector of great questions, I love James Lipton’s segment on Inside The Actor’s Studio where he asks his guests the same questions about themselves eac show. His references to Bernard Pivot using the questions on French TV prompted some background research. There’s an interesting little history to the questionnaire that highlights that great questions always have a place.
  
• Greenhousing – Chuck Dymer gave me a book from ?What If!, a UK-based innovation company. In it, they address greenhousing ideas, i.e. creating an environment that allows new ideas to grow & develop when they are at their most vulnerable. It’s includes questions to ask about new ideas that are certainly more productive than what I had typically been asking, “Why the *#!% do you want to do that?” Hey, we can all change!
  
• Diet Dr. Pepper – My mom drank Dr. Pepper when I was growing up, setting the stage for me loving Dr. Pepper (now Diet Dr. Pepper). We never knew why, but when I was little, Dr. Pepper bottles were always sticky on the outside. Years later, the economist at work told me that he had previously worked at a Dr. Pepper bottling plant. Their method to control the volume in the bottles was to tap those on the bottling line that had too much liquid so that they would foam over. Mystery Solved! In any event, Diet Dr. Pepper has become my creative catalyst drink of choice.


• "Get Out of the Mental Doldrums NOW!” Card - My Uncle Jerry was the most incredible Monopoly savant that I’ve ever played against. He had the distances memorized between properties, knew all the rents for each number of houses, and frequently bankrupted his competitors within 30 minutes. Suffice it to say, at that rate, we played a lot of Monopoly games over the course of an afternoon. This fueled my love for the game, and when trying to come up with a leave behind for the InNOvation presentation, the Get out of Jail Free card came right to mind.

In part 2, you'll learn more about the creative inspirations behind "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation."

Strategy in Action - Suzy and Jack Welch & Fast Company Links

Two recent articles do a great job of addressing the real world benefits of having a strategic foundation in business.

In a recent Business Week column, Suzy and Jack Welch provide a brief rationale for the value of mission statements and then cover several steps toward developing a meaningful one that actually drives business decisions.

A longer piece in Fast Company issue 121 by Charles Fishman called “To the Moon in a Minivan” reports on NASA’s approach to develop, along with Lockheed Martin, the replacement spacecraft for the space shuttle. What makes it particularly interesting is the treatment of the strategic elements within NASA’s plan, providing a behind the scenes look at how a major enterprise applies strategic concepts to move an effort ahead.

We learn NASA’s "vision" statement (“To the moon, Mars, and beyond”) and how its effort is bounded by direct critical success factors such as keeping the spacecraft’s weight under 50,250 pounds, focusing on simplicity & utility, and exploiting pre-existing technology (even going as far back as the Apollo program) before inventing new solutions. Importantly, the program has a simple and very visual statement to align its development efforts. According to Ship Hatfield, the NASA project manager for the capsule, the Orion spacecraft is “more like a mini-van. It’s more of a vehicle to go to the grocery store in.” With a picture like this for a project team, making strategic decisions becomes much easier.

2008 Challenge - Ask and You Shall Receive with Great Questions

At the start of a recent conference call for an upcoming planning session, it was clear that I was expected to lead the discussion. That was my suspicion coming in, but with other responsibilities, there wasn’t a chance to prepare as I typically would. So after a brief introduction, all eyes and ears turned to me to start talking – gulp.

Here’s Your Challenge – What do you do when you’re not ready to speak or don’t know what to say?

Mark Twain said, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” How about a middle ground? Next time you’re in a similar situation, think for a moment, open your mouth, and ASK a great question. Doing this provides three clear, immediate benefits:

• You shift the focus from your lack of preparation and give the floor back to the other participants.
• The other people feel better because they’re able to provide input.
• By actively listening, you can pick out cues from their comments that can shape your next move – to talk, to change course, or to ask another question.

The trick is asking the right type of question. That’s the key for this year – to develop a quick list of 8 to 10 questions that you can rely upon with ease. Here are a few to get you started (along with when to use them):

• Can you elaborate? (If someone has provided information, but you’re not clear what it means.)
• How have you approached this before? (If people have previous experience they could share.)
• What are your initial thoughts for how to approach it? (When participants have pre-conceived notions about what to do.)
• What’s most important for you to accomplish? (To understand the other parties’ motivations – and what matters in this situation.)

In this example, I chose the last question, allowing participants an opportunity to share their individual and collective objectives for the upcoming planning session. Their initial comments set up a follow-up question (What percent of the plan should be devoted to each of the 3 sections you’ve mentioned?), creating the opportunity to start capturing topic areas. A productive meeting was thus snatched from the jaws of unpreparedness with two great, simple questions.

So what questions will you be better prepared to ask this year?

Change Your Character – Identifying & Doctoring Your Problem

Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

Doctors are trained in asking questions, making observations, and using tests to identify possible infirmities that patients are suffering. Their techniques can be adapted within the Change Your Character exercise to help find new ways to diagnose business issues also. Doctors' approaches that can be used for your brainstorming include:

• Figuring out who / how services will be paid for
• Having you fill out paperwork on yourself
• Asking how you’ve been feeling
• Having someone do a quick vitals check before seeing you
• Checking vital signs
• Reviewing your previous treatment history
• Following a standard diagnostic procedure
• Prescribing a treatment
• Referring you to a specialist
• Scheduling a follow-up appointment

Remember, strive to identify three potential ways that each of bulleted points above can be generalized to address & resolve your situation. It's easier than taking two (make that three) aspirins and calling me in the morning.

“I’m Special, So Special, I Gotta Have Some of Your Attention”

“If there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself, you won’t get noticed and that increasingly means you won’t get paid much, either.”

Michael Goldhaber, Wired

Here’s Your Challenge -This quote from Michael Goldhaber in Wired magazine is several years old, but it remains absolutely true. So what is special about your work? If you don’t have an immediate answer to the question, figure out which of the statements below best describes your situation and take action right away:

“There is something very special about my work, but I just haven’t found the words to describe it in a concise way.” Remedy – Craft, edit, rewrite, re-edit, and memorize the elevator speech for your “very special” work aspects immediately.

“There are very special things about my work, but nobody notices it.” OR “My work used to be very special, but it doesn’t feel that way anymore.” In both cases, there’s some mismatch between your work and the audience. Here are some possibilities behind one or both statements:

• Possibility #1 – You’re kidding yourself; there’s really nothing very special about your work. Remedy – Change your work right away. Figure out a new audience, a new objective, a new approach, a new project, a new level of performance, or something (anything) to inject specialness into your work.
• Possibility #2 – There is something special about your work, but your most important audiences, don’t get it because they lack either the sophistication, appreciation, or need for what you’re doing. Remedy – Decide if it’s worth trying to develop the audience you have, radically changing what you’re doing, or simply trying to find a new audience.
• Possibility #3 – Maybe the work is (was) special, but it’s passed you by (you’ve failed to keep up) or you’ve passed it by (it just isn’t as motivating for you to excel as it used to be). Remedy – In either case, it’s time to transform your current situation (if that’s a possibility) or quit and transform elsewhere. (For more on this remedy, read this review of Seth Godin’s “The Dip” – the review is even shorter than the book and pretty much covers it.)

“There never has been anything very special about my work.” Remedy – Sorry – there’s no quick answer here. You’re not alive career-wise and probably never have been. But take heart, if you’re willing to put up with this situation, it’s highly unlikely you’d ever find your way to this blog.

“Let me briefly tell you (show you) what’s very special about my work!" Congratulations! That’s the right answer. Proceed immediately to starting your own blog on what’s special about your work and tell the world - or at least the 10 loyal friends who will read your blog! (P.S. For a great Seth Godin post about being passionate about your work - as opposed to being a workaholic - check this out. And no, despite the two references today, P.S. doesn't stand for Pointing to Seth.)

Be more special this year (don’t just pretend) and deservedly earn some more of your audience’s attention.

Strategy in a Full House of Brands

I’m on a panel today addressing “Global Branding Trends, Challenges, and Possible Solutions” at the HDMA Heavy Duty Dialogue ’08 conference. It’s being moderated by Sally Staab a VP at Weyforth-Haas Marketing in Overland Park, KS. The other participants are Walt Delevich from SKF and John Beering from Eaton Corporation.

From my segment, here are a few keys for branding amid significant M&A activity:

• Elegant brand architecture often isn’t in the cards with an M&A-based growth strategy - With significant M&A activity, a number of very real factors may confound attempts to create elegantly simple brand architecture. Among the potential issues: the relative strengths of brands in the family, customer loyalty to existing brands, management demands, deal structures, challenges in doing a large-scale conversion, required investment, and long cycles for replacing branded assets.


• Work with experienced brand strategy partners - A brand is more than a logo and an ad; it’s the promise you make to your key audiences. It’s multi-dimensional and encompasses all customer contact points with the company – employees, products, service, visual and physical cues, and communications. Given this broad definition, few advertising agencies have the full range of capabilities to address all of your brand issues. Engage firms that specialize in branding across all these dimensions.


• Invest in the necessary fact finding effort to determine your brand strategy - Facts need to be at the heart of any brand strategy decisions, and they should come from as many sources as possible – internally & externally. Inventory the key data sources and audiences whose perceptions you need to understand and project. Beyond analysis of available data, look to both qualitative and quantitative research techniques to bolster your understanding of what the market expects, accepts, and will ultimately reward from your brand.


• Figure out where you want your brand to be in the future and then work your way back to the present through multiple scenarios – Hypothesize various scenarios on where you want the brand to be in the future relative to customers, products / services, markets, competitors, and the external environment. Pick a future point linked to the longest relevant decision cycles for your brand. Then, work your way back on how you expect to get there, recognizing likely decision points, operational issues, future M&A events, sales & marketing efforts, competitor activity, and the best and worst developments that could happen with your brand.


• Look to others brands for lessons, even if their situations aren’t completely comparable – You can’t simply follow your industry’s branding conventions if your situation differs dramatically. In that case, find brands outside your industry that you can look to for insights. Ideally seek out brands in similar current situations and others that have brand architectures that resemble how you’d like yours to look. Go to school on what their brand migration paths look like, what rules or approaches they use, etc. Additionally, there’s great value in networking with them and being able to ask direct questions on their strategies.
  
• Use in-country experts to assess how your brand will fit in global markets – Don’t depend on uninformed or remote perspectives for determining in-country brand strategy globally. Identify branding partners & key employees with on the ground experience that can provide knowledgeable input and reactions to global brand strategy development. Do the qualitative and quantitative fact finding work in-country or in-region as well.

Wisdom Found in Pei Wei Fortune Cookies

• Become more passionate and determined about your vision.
• You’ll never know what you can do until you try.
• Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness.
• Surround yourself with good friends and laughter.
• Honing your ability to find the silly in the serious will take you far.
• Make sure others feel blessed for having you as a friend.
• One learns most from teaching others.
• Your co-workers take pleasure in your great sense of creativity.
• Face any problem with dignity.
• To climb the ladder of success, work hard and you’ll reach it.

2008 Challenge - "Figuring Out What Matters"

The new year is a time for reflecting on what’s really important. If I may turn that concept on its side a little, since articulating a new definition for “strategic thinking” (addressing things that matter with insight & innovation), I’ve been trying to get down on paper a list of questions whose answers would help shed light on “what matters.”

Here’s Our Collective Challenge – What are great questions to best identify what really matters in a particular business situation? This is a starting list of questions:

• What does our brand stand for?
• What do we most want to accomplish in the business?
• How would we describe our best, most valuable customers?
• Who don’t we do business with?
• Who do we win the most business from and why?
• Who do we lose the most business to and why?
• What are the biggest cost drivers in the business?
• What things would be most devastating (or most embarrassing) if our customers knew about them?
• What’s the biggest unknown in our business?

Feel free to start using questions from the list above. Feel even freer still to comment on other questions you’ve used successfully to identify “what matters.”

Change Your Character - Brand Repositioning

Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

Two celebrities have become well-known for being able to reinvent themselves when they hit a financial or creative dead end –Donald Trump and Madonna. You can go to school on their rebranding techniques and apply them in business when you have a brand that needs to be refreshed. Here are approaches they’ve used successfully that you can apply in the Change Your Character exercise.

Donald Trump:

• Host a TV show
• Fix your financial situation
• Put your name on something new
• Do a BIG deal
• Fire somebody
• Start a new TV season
• Pick a verbal fight with another celebrity to generate attention
• Change out the important people in your life
• Redevelop a prominent property

Madonna:

• Change your look
• Change your wardrobe
• Do something controversial
• Explore a new style of work / expression
• Create news through your unusual lifestyle
• Use multiple media to get your message across
• Write a book
• Incorporating new cultures or points of view
• Adopt a child

So try these approaches as you brainstorm how to get your brand back in the news and to the top of the charts in customers’ eyes.

Check Yourself Out

Going back through some old files, I re-discovered the following self-assessment that was prepared for my team 13 years ago this month in response to a question about what my expectations were of them. It’s reassuring that with minimal updates, the list of personal checkpoints stills works for our team today. Having stood the test of a dozen years, here it is for you to use as a self-check on your orientation and performance or for adapting and sharing with your own team.

Self-Assessment – You should be known for . . .

• Stepping up to challenges as they arise with your time, effort, learning, innovativeness, etc.
• Honesty--with yourself and with everyone in the department and the company.
• Attention to detail and accuracy in everything that crosses your desk.
• Absolute integrity in using and reporting information.
• Asking and answering for all analysis: "What does it mean for our brands, customers, competitors, and/or the market?" and "What actions do we need to take to realize an advantage from it?"
• Making communication clear and simple--getting to the point without jargon and unessential information. Constantly work to improve both oral and written communication skills.
• Completing assignments in a timely manner.
• Being innovative--what can be done differently to increase efficiency, productivity, value, and revenue or reduce costs?
• Being above reproach in dealings with all parties within and outside of the company-how you conduct yourself reflects on you, your co-workers, the department, and the company.
• Using the knowledge and expertise of others inside and outside the company; recognize and acknowledge their contributions.
• Sharing your own knowledge and expertise with others, i.e., what were the five most important things you learned at a seminar or from a book you just read.
• Being a leader--even if you are not personally heading a group or project.
• Being oriented toward helping people solve problems.
• Embracing technology and using it to further profitable revenue.
• Solving problems if they arise.

Originally delivered 1/09/95

Fixing What You and a Bad Organist Have in Common

We attend an early Sunday mass that doesn’t have a choir but has an organist. It’s intriguing (okay…annoying) though that she can’t actually play the organ. This was quite evident recently when she couldn’t get through well known Christmas carols without fracturing them - mangled chords, wrong notes, incorrect tempos. Even though all the inputs to playing better are right in front of her (since the organ has every note needed to play songs correctly), she can’t identify the answer and properly execute it.

All of us face similar situations – everything to solve a problem or realize an opportunity is at our disposal, but successfully identifying & executing the right answer eludes us. It’s easy to figure out the organist’s options to improve; it’s tougher when we’re in comparable situations. To help, here are 13 things the organist could do. Next time you’re similarly stuck, see if you can generalize from her potential options and help yourself by:

1. Getting more training – take lessons or do homework to increase knowledge and skills.
2. Practicing more – don’t stop preparing until there’s adequate performance.
3. Simplifying the situation – look for easier answers (i.e. only play the melody) to better execute.
4. Improvising – change what the possible answers can be (i.e., don’t play a strict melody line, but at least do it intentionally!)
5. Getting help – have someone more skilled assist (i.e., she could play melody and somebody else the chords).
6. Using a different tool – identify alternative resources that can help improve the probability of success (i.e., a keyboard with pre-programmed songs).
7. Rearranging – find an alternative arrangement that’s easier to perform.
8. Using a different talent – rather than stick with what isn’t working, use another talent to address the challenge (i.e., singing a cappella to provide music).
9. Doing something less familiar to the audience – in order to alter audience expectations, perform alternatives that are unfamiliar to the audience.
10. Delegating / finding a replacement – have someone who can perform do it successfully.
11. Suggesting alternatives – address the underlying need (musical accompaniment) in a better, alternative way (i.e., playing pre-recorded music).
12. Doing less – work to lower expectations in certain areas (playing several songs adequately) while over-performing in others (only play one song really well, and repeat it as necessary).
13. Quitting – Accept that you can’t be successful, and move on to other endeavors better suited to your talents.

I do admit that quitting (#13) was the first option that came to mind for her. But the important point is that any of us have more than a dozen options available when we’re beating our heads against the wall without success. Oh by the way, if you can beat your head against the wall at a reasonably steady tempo, please get in touch with our pastor. There may be a Sunday morning gig in it for you!

Offered Without Comment

2008 Challenge – “Tactically Influencing Strategic Situations”

I’m a big believer that bold distinctions made between strategic and tactical people are for the most part a bunch of nonsense. The contrasts are mutually perpetuated by “strategic” people who want to seem “important” and by “tactical” people who don’t want to expend the mental energy (or give up the apparent decision making freedom) to connect their activities to an overarching business purpose.

For me, there’s a very fuzzy space between strategic & tactical. Strategy is the connecting principle that ties tactics together. Tactics are absolutely necessary to successfully carry out a strategy. As a result, neither strategies nor tactics can be successful without the other, and business people can’t maximize their contributions & success by paying attention to only one of them.

Here’s Your Challenge – Do you view yourself (and the business world) as either strategic OR tactical? If so, make 2008 the year where you abandon that view and focus on increasing your overall business contributions. Here are a few straight forward tactics you can use to increase your contribution to successful business strategy in very subtle ways:

• Show up at a meeting with a proposed agenda, suggested topics, and/or relevant information. Often even the person calling a meeting isn’t properly prepared. There have been countless occasions where by showing up with a little pre-thought and something written out, a person not leading a meeting has inserted themselves to set the meeting’s (and the ultimate project’s) direction.


• Offer to take and report out the notes. Somebody said that “history is written by the winners.” What better way to help solidify a winning business position than by offering upfront to write the meeting’s “history.” This provides the opportunity to shape the messaging and direction coming from the meeting, setting the stage for future steps.
  
• Get to the whiteboard first. If you can’t write the history, at least do the reporting. Picking the right time to go to the whiteboard or the easel pad provides the opportunity to visually depict what the meeting looks like. Within the bounds of being an above-board, unbiased reporter, you can choose what goes up for display, how it’s worded, and begin inserting a specific point of view.


• Volunteer to lead an analytical effort. This can be more challenging and more work, but taking the lead on identifying and delivering insights is an outstanding way to shape its progress and direction.
  
• Volunteer to develop a draft hypotheses / business model. Potentially more involved, framing a starting hypothesis or model allows you to influence overall thinking on the effort.

Doing a great job on any of these options will start to make your co-workers view your business contributions in a new and different (and probably a more strategic) light. Just make sure that if you pick “getting to the whiteboard first,” you take a moment to select a dry-erase marker!

Need Some New Ideas? Change Your Character

A great technique to generate new ideas is delegating your challenge to someone else…say, Mary Ann or Ginger or the Professor from “Gilligan’s Island.” Too good to be true? It’s not. Here’s how it works:

1. State the business challenge that you’re addressing – it could be an opportunity, a problem, a new process or approach, etc.


2. Pick who you want to have work on your situation. This could be a real person, a fictional or cartoon character, or even another business.


3. Once you’ve identified who you’ll put on the job, list 8 to 10 approaches that the person, character, or business uses to address opportunities or challenges.


4. Using each of the 8 to 10 approaches, apply them to your situation to generate at least 3 new ideas for solving it. The result should be at least 30 new ideas to consider for your situation. (For ways to prioritize, check out this earlier post on narrowing ideas.)

The reason that the seven castaways are such good people to delegate to is because they are so different (thus approaching challenges differently) and still relatively well-known as pop culture icons (download a pdf overview from mikebrownspeaks.com that you can use in a team brainstorming session).

Typical approaches that surface for the castaways to address situations include:

• Make something out of coconuts & bamboo (whatever is available)
• Create a new invention
• Perform an experiment
• Plot an elaborate plan
• Get somebody else to do your work for you
• Play / act out a different character
• Flirt with someone (use your talents to get your way)
• Pay money to get what you want
• Sleep with a Teddy Bear (do something to improve comfort)
• Look out for the benefit of others

On Wednesdays for the next couple of months, we’ll highlight other characters that are very helpful when you delegate to them. And really, where else can you put Donald Trump to work for you!

2008 Challenge - “What’s Your Mental Lemon Sorbet?”

Auguste Escoffier, a nineteenth-century French food connoisseur, popularized the idea that something should be served between main courses in a formal meal to clear the palate, allowing the diner to fully enjoy the next course as if it were the first. Because of his efforts, lemon sorbet has become the popular means to cleanse palates.

The idea translates to mental activities & strategic thinking also. As many topics as we generally have thrown at us to process mentally, it becomes difficult to move between them with the expectation that you’ll start the next project with the same mental freshness as the first.

Here’s Your Challenge – Can you identify your “mental” lemon sorbets – the activities or exercises that you can use to clear your mind when shifting between efforts. They may be simple (going for a quick walk or taking a nap) or more challenging to accomplish (one of mine is riding roller coasters, which unfortunately only happens infrequently). Make the effort to identify a repertoire of activities that you can use to effectively clear your mind, refresh, and get ready for the next activities you’ll face throughout the year.

As for me, I’ll be having an icy Diet Dr. Pepper and a quick nap on the floor to clear my mind before starting on tomorrow’s post!

The Rules of CBR (Can't Be Right)

I gave up using a red pen while reviewing work several years ago because someone in our department said she felt as if she were being graded in school. Regardless of your pen color though, a critical part of performing & reviewing analysis is the ability to quickly spot mistakes. It helps to have a sixth sense regarding CBR—items that obviously “Can’t Be Right.” In case you don’t have that special power, here are rules you can use to help spot mistakes – whether they’re yours or someone else’s:

• Before you work on or review analysis, think about what the answer should or will likely be. If the results aren’t in the ballpark, and there’s no apparent reason, do some digging.
• When reviewing work, start with a “skeptical” attitude - the expectation that something’s wrong - and look specifically for mistakes.
• Assume things typically won’t change dramatically (or at least outside a typical range). If changes look like big deviations from the norm, investigate why.
• Try to “break” things—when testing a spreadsheet or program or reading a document, look for ways to make it not work or look for passages that don’t make sense.
• With a spreadsheet, do the unexpected—put in numbers that you wouldn’t normally expect (i.e., a negative number where it should be positive, change the order of magnitude of important numbers, etc.). As a double check, if a spreadsheet uses lots of formulas, dramatically change some numbers that should make the results change.
• Do things or read sections out of the natural sequence. This often makes irregularities more recognizable.
• When reading, repeatedly ask the questions, “Why would I know that? Does it tell me that somewhere else in the document? Is the point consistent within the document?” Be skeptical when you think you have satisfactorily answered these questions.

While it might feel a little better to not use a red pen while marking up analysis, it feels tremendously better to catch a mistake before your boss or client does. Use these rules to help increase that likelihood. And if you have rules that you use successfully, let me know, and we’ll put them in a follow-up post.

A Challenge - “I’m OK - You’re Somebody I Should Learn From”

It’s amazing how specific instances stick with you for years. A childhood memory that’s profoundly shaped my thinking was from the TV show “All in the Family.” Richard Masur played a mentally challenged grocery store delivery person ­that Archie didn’t trust because he was different. After an unpleasant exchange, the young man disappeared, only to return with a framed quote that was tremendously important to him: “Every man is my superior in that I may learn from him.”

Googling the quote provides mixed opinions on whether it’s from Emerson or Thomas Carlyle. In any case, it will always be linked for me to that program and the impact it’s had on my perspective ever since. It’s caused me to realize that I’m the lesser of every person that I meet and that I need to understand what I should learn from them.

Here’s Your Challenge - Think about the people in your life - the person ­that you don’t quite “get,” the person that gets under your skin, or even the person ­­­that circumstances has dropped into your life unexpectedly or for no apparent reason. What is there that you can learn from that person? It probably isn’t readily apparent, particularly with people that frustrate you. Don’t give up easily though because it may take years to discover; your perseverance will ultimately be rewarded.

I recently had the opportunity to learn from somebody whose personality posed a major challenge to me several years ago when our paths first crossed. Through a lot of prayer and reflection (on my side) and tremendous personal development (on her side), our working relationship improved dramatically over time.

As she left my day-to-day work life recently, what I learned from her became apparent: the incredible personal growth that can take place with someone who is receptive to feedback (even criticism), able to process it without personalizing it to the point of demoralization, and is motivated to truly transform. Under challenging circumstances, she demonstrated a level of poise to which I could only hope to aspire. But if we’d given up on each other, I never would have learned this lesson she taught me – one that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

Challenges to Improve Your 2008 Performance

I’ve never been big on New Year’s resolutions for a variety of reasons that I’ll spare you here. Suffice it to say that in the past couple of years, I’ve tried to do a better job personally of committing some overall goals to writing - albeit written during the Christmas holiday on a bunch of 25 year old note cards still in my room at my parent’s house.

Nevertheless, throughout January we’ll sprinkle in a few lessons and underlying challenges for you to consider while improving your strategic thinking & innovation successes in 2008. No need to take them all on or to report back on how you’re doing, but read them, grab the immediate learnings, and pick one or two of the challenges to work on throughout the year.

The first one is “Finding a Strategic Thinking Mentor.”

A mentor can be invaluable for any business person as part of your informal business team, providing a different and more experienced perspective than you’d have on your own. Not all mentors are suited to fill every role, so it’s beneficial to have various mentors to satisfy specific experience gaps.

Here’s Your Challenge – Do you have a strategic thinking mentor - one who can help you identify the things that matter in your business situation and provide new insights & perspectives on how to approach things innovatively? When seeking one out, look for the following characteristics - beyond those that any great mentor possesses. The best strategic thinking mentors are:

• Smart
• Experienced & diverse
• Adept at asking productive, probing questions
• Oriented toward innovation
• Gifted with perceptive, accurate instincts
• Able to identify “what matters” in a particular situation
• Visionary
• Open to challenging both you and the status quo
• Comfortable holding a contradictory view
• Able to make solid, insightful connections

I've had several great strategic mentors, two of whom I was able to spend time with over the holidays. One is Bill McDonald, my first boss in a professional job, at Kansas City Infobank. It would take pages to list what I learned from Bill about strategy, secondary research, and great business writing. Another is Greg Reid, who I met eleven years ago today and has been a wonderful strategic thinking mentor ever since.

In today's post on her Creative Instigation blog, Jan Harness also writes about one of her strategic mentors, Cotton Smith.

Strategic mentors are out there - find one of your very own this year!

Strategic Time is Tight

Since things are usually pretty hectic on January 2, with a lot of catch up to do, today’s post is brief, focusing on a key point for consideration.
Great strategic thinking flows more readily if you’re able to use multiple perspectives that help you gain new insights into your situation. You can also improve the time efficiency of strategic thinking by using productive exercises & tools. We’ll cover both of these areas throughout the year.
Ultimately, though, you will have to set aside some time to actually do the work of strategic thinking. You can make the time as productive as possible if you know under what circumstances you do your best thinking:

• Do you need quiet time away or are you more insightful when you’re active and in the thick of things?
• Inside or outside?
• By yourself or with others? With which other people?
• Well in advance or under time pressures?
• Being quiet or talking it through aloud?
• Scheduled or impromptu?

Figured out yet what type of strategic thinking time works best for you? Once you do, make time throughout 2008 where you can create the ideal situation for productive strategic thinking. We’ll bring the tools & exercises to help create the perspectives you’ll need. It’s a date!