Ch Ch Changes

Thanks to everyone responding with website comments. Based on your ideas and my objectives for it, look for:

• “Creative Quickies” - brief creativity starters – running Mondays and “Brainzooms” appearing several times monthly as strategic thinking prompts. Shifting toward creativity-oriented material reflects my focus as Jan Harness and I work on a “Creative Instigation” book.


• The “Change Your Character” exercise to stop appearing Wednesdays. Following this week’s exercise and next week’s summary, it will run once or twice monthly.


• Shorter articles.


• Week-long topics to still appear (i.e., the “Get ‘Er Written” week during June). July will have a variation, with Tuesdays starting July 8th focused on strategic thinking styles.


• Guest authors and more variety in communicating content (including first-version looks with original sticky notes, cartoons, and concept sketches).


• Experimenting with brief surveys and other ways to solicit your participation.


• More personal perspectives where it makes sense.

Taking advantage of other ideas depends on your active participation:

• Some suggested topics are outside my areas of expertise or personal passion. Consider this an open invitation to you to create guest articles for the website on these related areas. One suggestion was doing more on strategic games & puzzles, especially related to chess. I’ll follow up with Seth Chapin (who’s been posting great comments on Brainzooming) about some possibilities!


• If you have blogs or other links you find interesting, please send them. Leslie Adams has been great at suggesting intriguing sites. Look for your ideas to appear in future “Surf’s Up” pieces.


• If it’s convenient, sign up for an email of each day’s article (upper left on the page). Provided through Feedburner, you get a daily email, generally by 6:30 am central time. It’s a great way to forward articles to others who might find them of value.


• Whether via email or other means, please suggest the website to others and link to it on sites you visit. This can help build the richness of the discussion for the benefit of you and other readers. Thanks to Amy Hoppenrath for suggesting the blog in answer to a LinkedIn question!

After all that, you’re probably still wondering – who won the book? I decided to give away two, with Seth Chapin and Bob Kizer winning “Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide.” Congratulations!

Understand the Political Fray and then Stay the Hell Out of It

The title is from a leadership presentation that I do. It’s how I’ve tried to live my life in business, organizations, and relationships. I’d never specifically articulated what “understanding the political fray” means though until a good friend said recently that she’s just not politically savvy. Here are eight general principles I shared with her for being attuned to an organization’s political environment.

• Understand the organization’s long-term needs. Use your strengths to best address those needs and create results.
• Know “what” drives the business - which revenue streams and cost centers really matter.
• Translate that into “who” drives the business. Then figure out where you stand now relative to the “what’s” and the “who’s,” and where you want to stand relative to both in the future.
• Figure out the organization’s tolerance for variation from the norm in the areas (important and unfortunately, trivial) on which people judge people. Know what the expectation is for fitting a certain type and make very conscious decisions about where you’ll play along (i.e., “fit”), and where you’ll make your stand for being different.
• Consistently and unequivocally deliver value. Do it for lots of people at all levels of the company – above you, with peers, and at lower levels of the organization.
• Make sure you’re seen as someone people can talk to and confide in reliably. Ask open ended questions, listen, provide a little bit of sound counsel, and keep confidences. You’ll help others and learn a lot.
• Always know who you can trust. Challenging issues and situations are great tests of this. The people who support you and / or have your back during the intense times are the people that you should go out of your way to invest in generously.
• Don’t stop thinking, and don’t say everything you think.
• Cultivate as many personal options as possible, and know how realistically they can come to fruition.

This list has helped me. Please take the opportunity to share what’s worked for you.

Today’s Get ‘Er Written Approach – A non-starter that was rescued. The original approach was too specific. I needed time to come back and generalize it for the blog.

Thanks for coming along on “Get ‘Er Written” week.

Ideally you’ve gotten some ideas in these posts for how to rescue the scraps of paper and incomplete electronic files that may still hold the seeds of creative or strategic value for you. Don’t be reluctant to twist, turn, and gut them in the interest of revealing lessons that could be very relevant for your current situation in business or personal life!

Organizing Information to Help Your Audience Perform

Someone showed me a list of nearly 30 salesperson expectations in their company; these were things salespeople were expected to be informed about and follow at all times. Most of the processes and behaviors were reasonable, although the list came across as sprawling because there was no attempt to help readers make sense of its varied topics.

It was a classic example of intellectual laziness - failing to make the effort to help the audience process and act on information successfully. The lesson is if you must share a long list of complex or diverse information with a broad audience, do the hard work yourself of organizing it in ways to make it more memorable and easily implemented.

Understanding that people can only remember about 7 things at one time, look for meaningful groupings in a big list. Some possibilities could include:

• Categorizing it by subject or type
• Using a chronological sequence in particular steps or phases
• Assigning clear priority levels to tasks

These are just a few possibilities; there are certainly others. The key point is to place yourself in the reader’s role, imagine you know nothing about the information, and think through and organize it in a way that allows your audience to spend much less time on deciphering it, and much more time on doing something with it.

Today’s Get ‘Er Written Approach – Eliminating a theme that wasn’t relevant (in this case, cutting out a rant about bosses and teamwork that was getting in the way).

Change Your Character – Training as the Best Teachers Do

We can all recall great school teachers who made otherwise boring subjects come alive and taught lessons that shape us still.

We’re all teachers in our own ways. There are people that we work and interact with daily who look to us for both technical learning and life lessons. Let’s explore great teachers’ approaches and see what they can teach us about our teaching roles. Great teachers:

• Present challenging concepts
• Are passionate about their subject(s)
• Use vivid stories to illustrate lessons
• Ask you about the subject area even outside the class room
• Are true to the principles they teach
• Teach heuristics to master & use the content
• Make complex topics understandable
• Are interactive
• Make learning fun and rewarding
• Don’t simply give answers away for the asking
• Are still actively learning themselves
• Have a love for the material / topic
• Adapt to students’ various learning styles

Identify three new ideas for each of the approaches above that you can adapt to become a better teacher to those around you. Note – for the previous post on how to use the Change Your Character technique, click here.

Today’s Get ‘Er Written Approach – This involved taking an idea and shifting it. I originally planned to do something specifically on the Montessori approach (which may still show up someday), but couldn’t get it to work. The focus then shifted to teachers in general and some of the great educators that I’ve had the honor to learn from during my schooling.

This post is dedicated to Dave Wessling, for so many reasons. May he rest in peace.

So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star

“I like progress, but I hate change. And I think that counts for something in this day and age. I think it also has helped my career . . . You just stay the course, and do what it is that you do, and grow while you’re doing it. Eventually, it will either come full circle, or at least you’ll go to bed at night happy.” – Jon Bon Jovi

This quote is intriguing, and it appears to come down to this question: are there parts of your life that you are willing to live in an apparent “rut” so you can disproportionately focus your creative energy in areas that are most important to you? In Bon Jovi’s case, he points to having the same band members and a long-term marriage (18+ years) as constants that allow him to concentrate progress on the work that his band produces.

The idea resonates with me because I make similar trade-offs, keeping some long term constants (where I live, my car & employer, clothing choices) so that I can save up creative energy to pour into things I really love (what I do and create at work, speaking, writing, cartooning, etc.).

While this approach isn’t for everyone (one of my incredibly creative strategic mentors keeps most things in life in a state of flux), if it sounds like you, embrace putting parts of your life on idle so that you can be a rock star in the areas of greatest creative interest to you.

Today’s Get ‘Er Written Approach – Breaking apart an overly ambitious idea and keeping only part of it.

"Just Get 'Er Written Week" - Trying to Finish the Previously Unfinishable

I’m okay with having started projects that will never be completed. While I don’t have a problem finishing things, sometimes the overwhelming amount of learning and growth a project will yield comes well before its completion. Or perhaps the effort to finish it far outweighs the benefit it will provide. In either case, if there’s no overriding reason to finish such a project (i.e. a commitment has been made to someone else), it’s likely it will be abandoned.

Usually, though that means keeping the remnants around in case there’s more value to be squeezed from them later. Whether you’ll really get more value at some point in the future often depends on modifying the original idea. Based on the potential issue that’s halted progress, here are questions to ask for modifying an idea that’s:

• Not good or relevant – Is there an element that has value and can be moved to something else?


• Not fully formed – Can it be combined with something else?


• Being used too ambitiously – Can you break it apart and only keep some of it?


• Inconsistent with your brand – Could it fit with another brand that’s available?


• A true non-starter – If you walk away and come back later, might it make more sense?

This is relevant because I have a number of partially-written blog fragments started weeks or months ago that haven’t yet made it into the blog. Before completely trashing them, I applied these questions to try and resuscitate four ideas into posts for the rest of the week. Check back in, and see which of the possibilities above worked to rescue these ideas.

Vincent Van Gogh's “The Starry Night”

My wife and I were strolling through Union Station in Kansas City three years ago and happened upon a collection of paintings in the styles of famous artists – Picasso, Van Gogh, Warhol, and others. All of them were done by Montessori students under the tutelage of Matt Barr. The paintings were on display as a pre-cursor to being auctioned to raise money for the school.

Having always loved Andy Warhol’s work, this seemed the closest I’d ever get to owning one. On the night that bidding was closing, a number of people were trying to outbid each other via email with Matt. All of a sudden, the bidding exploded on the Warhol picture, probably from parents of the students whose images made up the picture. At the last minute, my wife said she really wanted “The Starry Night.” On just two bids, we bought the Van Gogh painting for about $400. Pretty cheap by Sotheby’s standards!

The highlight was when Matt delivered the picture accompanied by his daughter, who had contributed to “The Starry Night.” Matt explained that he sketched out the paintings, setting the kids up to be successful in reproducing the works. They did the lion’s share of the painting, and he touched them up at the end.

We’ve not been in contact with Matt since then (although if you Google him you’ll find an interesting Snakes on a Plane for kids project), but what an incredible teacher! To figure out a way to allow the students to learn and actively contribute to reproducing a wonderful work of art is such a cool gift to them. It had to open up so many possibilities for those kids. And for us, it means we can always claim to have an original Van Gogh!

The challenge for all of us is to figure out what we can do in a similar vein to share our creative passions with kids and adults. Take the steps to introduce people you know to your creative pursuits. Give the gift of some basic structure and then encourage their creative energy to take over. I know I haven’t done enough creative instigation lately. How about you?

What "Creating a Strategic Perspective" Looks Like

A few readers have already emailed PMIR comments in response to the opportunity for one of you to win a copy of “Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide.” All you have to do to be eligible is to offer a Plus-Minus-Interesting-Recommentation comment on what works and doesn't work for you about this blog from the Monday, June 16 post. The deadline is next Monday, June 23. You can email me the comments if you'd like. Thanks and looking forward to hearing from you!

In other news, as of today, I'm blogging weekly on more mainstream marketing topics at Schmoozii.com, a new social networking and career development website that launched Monday. Join Schmoozii and check out those blogs as well.

Last night's session on DIY strategic thinking with the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO) was great, and I hope they found value in the exercises relative to programming ideas for the upcoming year. Thanks to long-time friend Amy Hoppenrath for extending the invitation!

A frequent question when I talk about strategic thinking approaches is, “What do they look like?”

That’s only natural considering I describe the approach we’ve put together as various parts:

• Big time consulting (for its structure and deliverables without the endless templates)
• Edward DeBono (for broad use of lateral thinking approaches learned via Chuck Dymer at PeopleWorks)
• Stand up comedy (for its improv-like flexibility and funny props)
• 3M (for lots of sticky notes)
• “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” (for pairing people with specific expertise with people that don’t to help them be more successful)

You’re probably wondering too how all that comes together. Based on time, I didn't get to show this video to the group last night, so to give you a picture as well as some of the specific principles we apply, here’s a quick video from actual strategic thinking sessions.

If you have specific questions after watching the video, let me know via email (or write it on a little yellow post it)!

Generating Leads As a Police Detective Would

Based on a reader's recommendation, the request for your comments on what works and doesn't work on the blog is being sweetened. One person who offers a Plus-Minus-Interesting-Recommentation comment on the Monday, June 16 post by next Monday, June 23, 2008 will be selected to receive a copy of the book, “Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide” by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway, and Jon Warshawsky. So please share your perspectives! Thanks!


Police detectives are responsible for identifying and developing leads, often with little actual information to go on, and successfully solving cases. The challenge is not unlike the effort required to find and develop solid leads for business development purposes.

Next time you’re faced with that task, delegate your challenge to a police detective and see how their methods could help you solve the case of the missing customer. Detectives:

• Interview witnesses & knowledgeable people for clues
• Gather evidence
• Check for & analyze fingerprints
• Perform forensic analysis
• Search databases for suspects in previous similar cases
• Work with other related agencies
• Tap phone lines
• Conduct surveillance
• Ask the public for help

Once again, try to generate three ideas for each of the police detective approaches above. And be careful out there!

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

Get a Different Tool

I’ve always wondered why Bruce Springsteen has only played a few guitars on stage during his career while Tom Petty seems to change guitars on nearly every song. It probably all comes down to what it take to fuel their creativity. The last several weeks, I’ve gotten a little better insight into that.

The morning of a recent trip to Las Vegas, we stopped at Wal-Greens for last minute items. I bought a relatively inexpensive sketch pad similar to ones I’d had as a kid. My desire was to simply have a tool that offered a different type of bare wall to go along with the change of scenery (Las Vegas) and activity (an actual non-working vacation).

Lo and behold, the bare wall theory held up. On the way, I sketched out seventeen potential posts for another blog I’m doing. Once in Vegas, the creative tool of focus shifted briefly to the camera on my phone, which yielded another 5 ideas for posts. Returning from a quick trip to Washington last week, it was back to the sketch book, writing out some posts (including this one) with a Sharpie marker.

Going back to a previously familiar tool has provided an opportunity to wring some new and varied creativity from it. Needless to say, I’m really enjoying the creative stimulus provided by the sketch book right now!

So ask yourself – are you more like Bruce Springsteen or Tom Petty when it comes to your creative tools? And do you have all the tools you need to keep your creativity flowing in various situations? Act on the answers to these two questions to fuel your creativity!

I Need Somebody's Help - Not Just Anybody's Help, I Need Yours!

Seven months into daily posts on the blog, it’s time to directly request comments from those of you who are reading it.

One objective in starting the blog was to force myself to commit new ideas to writing. Rather than just creating Powerpoint slides for presentations, I wanted to express concepts in new ways and to avoid forgetting them because they had never been captured. From that standpoint, the blog has been very successful. As I’ve done many strategic thinking “how to” sessions this year, there’s been plentiful new content to freshen the basic presentation.

Other clear positives have included:

• Being able to answer questions emerging from live presentations with more depth & permanence
• Providing a means for some great strategic thinkers to share their perspectives in a new venue

What hasn’t worked, from my perspective at least, is creating a strong dialogue with you. Amid sporadic comments (which I appreciate more than you’ll ever know), most posts don’t trigger much response, although at times I get email comments that aren’t left on the site. Interestingly, the dearth of comments or questions happens often in live presentations. I’m not sure if it’s the content, the quantity of material, or my delivery style, but obviously something isn’t triggering you to share your perspectives as frequently as I might have anticipated.

An interesting for me is that this blog has helped trigger the introduction (or re-introduction) of several other blogs – some among all of you and several that I’ve started in related, but narrower categories tied to my personal and professional work. Additionally, I’m beginning this Thursday as a weekly marketing blogger on Schmoozii, a new business-oriented social networking website. It’s an exciting opportunity resulting from writing this blog.

With this new effort, my weekly “blog output” quota will reach 12 posts (plus graphics and trying to respond to comments that are offered). For me at least, as a part-time blogger, that’s a lot to produce. Which led me to a personal recommendation: ask you for your perspectives to help shape the content and frequency of my efforts. And being a fan of the Plus – Minus – Interesting – Recommendation format, I’d sincerely appreciate your thoughts on the following:

1. Plus - What works for you about this blog (content, frequency, certain types of posts, etc.)? Where does it provide value to you professionally or personally?
2. Minus - What is lacking in the blog from your perspective? Are there things that are less valuable or could be re-tooled to be more helpful for you?
3. Interesting - What are things you’ve found interesting, intriguing, or surprising as a result of the blog?
4. Recommendation - What recommendations do you have relative to changes or enhancements?

Please leave a comment with your PMIR thoughts (or send me an email at mike@mikebrownspeaks.com if you’d prefer) and help me shape the blog in the months ahead. Thanks for you help!

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity - Just a Few Words - Quotes on Simplicity

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” - Frederic Chopin

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” - Albert Einstein

“What's really important is to simplify. The work of most photographers would be improved immensely if they could do one thing: get rid of the extraneous.” - William Albert Allard

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

“I apologize for the length of this letter, but I didn't have time to make it shorter.” - Mark Twain

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity - A Simple Strategy Check

Here’s a quick check for generating a simple, solid strategy. Is your strategy?

• Understandable – Will employees be able to read it and comprehend your direction, even if someone isn’t there to explain it?
  
• Implementable – Will something be able to be done with the strategy to create positive business results?
  
• Aligning – Will following the strategy create a natural inclination for employees to work in a cooperative fashion toward a common goal?

Solid (and simple) strategies should generate three “Yes” answers to these questions. So how does your strategy stack up? Ideally it displays the appropriate level of simplicity.

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity - Change Your Character – Forrest Gump – “Simple Is as Simple Does”

No matter what you think of the character, Forrest Gump’s approach to the simplicity of life found him at the center of most major events of the second half of the twentieth century. When striving to simplify some of your complex problems, it would be interesting to see what possibilities would emerge by applying his outlook. Try it, seeking three new ideas from each of these perspectives that Forrest Gump applies:

• Listening to his mother’s advice
• Not having a lot of expectations
• Being open to new experiences
• Seeing all people the same, without prejudice
• Not making demands on others
• Not being judgmental
• Finding the good in negative situations
• Maintaining a positive outlook
• Being loyal to his friends
• Following simple philosophical principles
• Doing the basics that make a significant impact
• Being good hearted and generous

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

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity - The Simplicity of Next to Nothing

In a Kansas City Star film contest, one entry was “The Bible…In 29 Seconds.” Pick a project and see what a 90+% reduction in one resource means. How pinpoint could your storytelling get?

A Week of Struggling for Simplicity

“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

This week’s posts are on simplicity, something which doesn’t come easily to me, unfortunately. It’s a challenge to readily bridge the gap between thinking with complexity and expressing ideas simply. While doing that is easy for some, I’ve personally met very few individuals where that’s the case. So like many, I work very hard to make things simple and have adopted some approaches to help, including:

• Focusing on what matters from my personal core purpose and minimizing everything else.
• Forcing myself to pick between options in a situation and not trying to pursue them all.
• Not saying everything about a topic and focusing on what’s most relevant for the audience.
• Going through a “finished” post or presentation to eliminate 10-20% of the words or slides.
• Applying the rule of three and limiting lists to three major themes or categories whenever possible.

These are a start, and the remaining posts this week explore other aspects of simplicity: the result of all but eliminating a key resource, checking your strategy for clarity, and delegating your complex issues to get help from the most famous simple man of our generation. The week finishes with a few more quotes on the topic. And by Friday, ideally, we’ll all be able to meet on the other side of complexity, with a greater command of simplicity.

What Gets Said About Customers?

How do the companies we do business with feel about us as customers?

And no, not the standard corporate b.s. about being customer-centric, customer focused, or dedicated to serving us. How do the executives and the people we interact with really talk about us when we aren’t around?

Hope it doesn’t sound like the "Charge More" ad from Direct TV. But the ad works because we probably all suspect this IS what it sounds like. The scary part is that those suspicions are likely formed by what discussions about customers sound like at our own companies. If that’s the case, figure out what you can do to change it and start doing something about it right away!

My Shot at the Rule of Three

I prompted Jan Harness to write about a lesson she solidified for me – the rule of threes. As expected, it resulted in two additional posts (“original” + “ignore original” + “apologize for original” = 3). In her third one, she expressed frustration with the first post because the rule of threes is such a part of how she approaches communication that it’s difficult to step away enough to explain it. Jan’s not giving herself enough credit, but in any event, since I’m not as close to it, here are my thoughts on the rule of three.

As Jan notes, the rule of threes works in many situations. Interesting applications among what I do are in both innovation and humor. For instance, many innovation exercises involve:

1. Introducing a current situation
2. Twisting or changing the view of the current situation by altering your perspective
3. Capturing new ideas through having looked at things from this new perspective

The formula in humor looks similar with a slight shift:

1. Introduce a familiar situation
2. Reinforce the situation to create a pattern
3. Change, twist, or break the pattern in an unexpected way to trigger laughter

A more general approach in applying the rule of three to list making, story telling, or information sharing could work like this:

1. State something evident or common
2. Follow item #1 with a related, but slightly modified second item. The modification could be that #2 is more powerful, stronger, or unusual but is still consistent with #1.
3. Follow item #2 with a third item that uses the modifier for #2 in an even more exaggerated fashion – even more powerful, strong, or unusual.

Need more? Click on these three links to see an overview, examples, and how you can better use the rule of three in your communication.

Get it? Got it? Good!

Change Your Character – Bart Simpson, Chief Strategy Officer

There’s been perhaps no greater disruptive force to come on the scene in the past 20 years than Bart Simpson. And in a business environment where disruptive strategy might be the only thing you can do to gain a near term advantage, couldn’t we all learn a thing or two if Bart were the Chief Strategy Officer at our company.

So as a result, let’s kick Bart upstairs and see how disrupting life in Springfield can be applied to disrupting competitors and markets. Try to generate at least 3 new competitive strategy possibilities from each approach Bart employs:

• Having an “in your face” attitude
• Not being restricted by respect for authority
• Displaying a very sharp wit
• Showing some signs of good behavior and character
• Using a healthy dose of street smarts
• Making friends with less popular people
• Devising elaborate and complex pranks
• Continually getting into something
• Playing jokes on people over the phone
• Mooning people
• Displaying some unexpected talents
• Becoming easily distracted from the task at hand
• Using an alias to hide his part in creating mayhem
• Reveling in his mischief and rebellion

One caution: using Bart Simpson in the Change Your Character exercise will lead to ideas that could be illegal, immoral, or create such bad PR that you’d never pursue them. Yet, those possibilities may have the seeds of really great strategy. Use the Shrimp exercise discussed in a previous post to turn outlandish Simpsonesque ideas into more practical ones.

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

Guest Blogger Barret Sydnor - Alternate Universe

Here's another post from Barrett Sydnor, this one addressing how the sequence of competitive alternatives can suggest both threats and potential opportunities:


One of the most interesting things I ever heard a client say came from a person who had spent most of his work life in cable television. Talking about the future of the industry, he wondered if cable television would ever have come to be if satellite television (DIRECTV, DISH Network) had been invented first.

This leads to an intriguing way of looking at the current and potential competitive landscape for your organization. Ask the question: If their (newer) X had been invented first, how much of a market would there be for our (older) Y? (X and Y can be physical products, services or even brands.)

If your answer is “not much” or even “considerably less,” it’s hair on fire time. It doesn’t mean that life as you know it will soon end, but it does mean that you need to do something and do something fast, no matter how small Product X’s market share might be currently.

Cable did do something, if offered bundles of video, telephone and high-speed internet service that satellite couldn’t match. It did not totally stop the bleeding, but it did cut satellite’s growth from 12% year over year to 7% for each of the last two years. Unfortunately for cable, it has not grown at all and its market share is still shrinking.

As with any type of planning it is often instructive to look at examples outside your industry. Here are some thought starters. A good exercise would be to determine how the entities on the right in each bullet have reacted to incursions by the entities on the left. Have they been successful, why or why not? What can you learn from their successes and failures?

If _________ Were Invented First Would We Have _________ ?

• Satellite television - Cable television
• Wireless phones - Landlines
• Google - Yahoo
• FedEx - Post Office
• Email - Post Office
• Wal-Mart - Sears
• Kindle - Printed Books
• MP3 - CD
• Lexus - Cadillac
• Riverboat casinos - Las Vegas
• Macintosh - Microsoft

Quit Raising Cain and Raise Your Hand

It’s easy to wallow in a bad situation. Many of us do, because there can be an odd comfort in complaining. It’s the courageous person who will stand up amid frustration, form a viable recommendation, and take it to someone who can help solve it.

There was a work situation recently where a person took the initiative to call my attention to a stupid situation we were potentially getting ourselves into soon. Realize that in doing so, he went across multiple organizational boundaries and reporting lines with all the associated personal political risks that can entail. But he did it, not to complain, but to make a recommendation on a smarter decision for the company to pursue.

It took about 3 phone calls and emails combined to advance his recommendation (and yes, I used the format suggested in a previous post). Once that was done, everybody above in the organization supported it, and the company is better off for having implemented his suggestion.

So here’s a question for you (okay, and for me also) to answer: What is there you b!7#h about all the time (to anyone who will listen) even though you refuse to go out on a limb and actually take a positive step to resolve? Figure one out? Or maybe two, three, or four of them? Now create a recommendation, reach out to somebody who can assist you, and actually do something to solve it!