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| B07PVCYJMX
| 4.69
| 13
| unknown
| Apr 02, 2019
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it was amazing
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Really interesting book about creating an environment of love within the workplace. I have an ex-work colleague called Ron SIAHPOOSH who’s doing somet
Really interesting book about creating an environment of love within the workplace. I have an ex-work colleague called Ron SIAHPOOSH who’s doing something similar. The best bits: Most businesses live in industries where competition is fierce, so being on your game means everything. This is similar to the environment our caveman ancestors experienced, who needed fear to avoid danger. Today, we have the same instincts. Our ancestors didn't experience fear all the time, though. Chronic fear was unlikely in their vocabularies, but it is an unfortunate habit in ours. If you walk into your office with an air of superiority because you are the CEO, then you're missing a key point. You are the CEO because that's the role for which you are uniquely qualified and at which you excel. You are not better or higher or superior in any way to anybody else in the company. Habits are nothing more than repeated behaviours and those behaviours can be modified. You can unlearn the patterns that have been detrimental to you or to those you lead. I finally asked Sally out on a date, and when I showed up at the front door with a big bouquet of roses, she burst into tears. It was like we had met and fallen in love all over again. In De-cember, nine months after our divorce, we remarried, and we have stayed very happily married ever since. I was working in Indianapolis, Indiana, when, one day, the account manager (my big boss) walked up to my cubicle and invited me to lunch. We left the building with little small talk and walked way past where folks normally went to eat. Then he turned into the downtown tennis center where the Indianapolis Clay Court Pro tournament was underway. We proceeded to seats at center court and spent the afternoon, just the two of us, enjoying pro tennis. I would have killed for him after that. The things that made the afternoon special were (1) he somehow found out that I was a tennis fan and had played on a team in high school, (2) he invested his time with me in a personal way, and (3) we did something that had nothing to do with work. This probably cost the company $100 for the 2 seats and $20 for the beer and hot dogs, but it was the best employee recognition I'd ever experienced. I will never forget it, and | have told hundreds of people this positive story about leadership. In a love-based culture, there must be recognition that not all performance issues can be quantified and totted up to 100%. With this in mind, I came up with a few categories in which performance could be measured. I gave those categories a total weight of 50%. I then created a second category called WIN, which addressed the intangibles discussed above. The total of the items in the WIN category also received a weight of 50%. For a project, I was the lone rookie on what I discovered was an all-star team of seasoned professionals. Our consulting firm's CEO was on site to make herself available and help in any way. I watched in awe as she went seamlessly from meeting with the key client stakeholders to showing concern for individual consultants. As the week came to a close and I was boarding the plane that would get me home around midnight, I passed her in first class. To my utter bewilderment, she recognized me, called me by name, and literally jumped out into the aisle to block my path. At the same time, she traded her boarding pass for mine, grabbed her luggage from the overhead compartment, and offered me her first-class seat. We exchanged insistences briefly until she made it very clear to me this was not an offer, and explained that She never lets any of her employees sit behind her on a plane. I sat in disbelief the whole flight home, contemplating how | now wanted to make it to a place someday where I could show her a return on her investment in me. When customers and employees enjoy the effects of discipline, superior quality of products and services, happiness, and a sense of purpose, the result creates a "buzz" in and around the company that is contagious. Rod Canion, who was the chairman of our board at the time, asked why we were concerned about burnout. I explained that people were working long hours. Rod wisely told us that long hours and hard work don't lead to burnout; burnout happens when that first inkling enters your mind that you won't be successful. A poorly handled fear of failure is more likely to lead to burning out than working really hard. At a previous employer, my coworker's wife has been diagnosed with a very serious form of cancer. They had 3 kids, who were then 18 months, 3 years, and 4 years old. After using all of his holidays and legal time to take care of his wife, my coworker was facing the dilemma of either quitting the job to take care of her-therefore losing the only income in the household-or to keep working and therefore not be around his wife and kids very much. All of the company's employees (including executives) agreed to give him one of our own vacation days to help. The CEO then decided that every day given would count for the giver as only half a day, while for our coworker it would count as two days. Thanks to that Act of Love, my coworker was able to take nine months of paid time off to take care of his wife. To this day, I wish I could find another workplace where humanity is the primary focus, where we are all there to help each other, and where we feel like a true family. "The only reason you don't come to a consensus on solving a problem is that you either haven't worked an issue hard or long enough, or you don't have the right people in the room to engage in the conversation." ROD CANION Leadership - Louis V, Gerstner, Ic. the former CEO of IBM, once said: "Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization's makeup and success-along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like. I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game. It is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value." ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jul 21, 2024
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Sep 16, 2024
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Jul 21, 2024
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Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1509856692
| 9781509856695
| B079RLDXH6
| 3.65
| 267
| unknown
| Aug 09, 2018
|
it was amazing
| Amazing book about the New Zealand rugby team. The all Blacks are one of the most successful teams in the world ever. Here are the best bits: Wayne Smi Amazing book about the New Zealand rugby team. The all Blacks are one of the most successful teams in the world ever. Here are the best bits: Wayne Smith concedes that one of the crucial elements in the game that keeps New Zealand ahead is decision-making. 'If there is an edge that New Zealand has got in the game, I think it is probably that, he says. 'You listen to coaches and players around the world now and they talk about playing "heads-up rugby". But I think, "What does that mean?" If you have your head up but don't know what to look at and you are trying to see everything, you will see nothing. Not only that, but it will make you sluggish because you are having to think too much. Teaching players simply what they need to look for and where they need to look is critical in the game. It is a big part of New Zealand rugby - really good decision-making based on simple cues. Rugby is a multilevel, decision-making game and you need everyone on the same page. When they see the cue, they need to react in the same way. That's what great decision-making is?' What they found when they got there was next to nothing. Yet conversely, their epic travails now became their sustenance, invaluable experiences that prepared them for the immense task of making a life in a new land. Used to walking miles each day to work, and then labouring for hours in grim conditions, they rolled up their sleeves to tackle the job. They were to prove themselves phlegmatic, dogged, good decision makers and dedicated to whatever task they attempted. Stoicism was akin to a soothing balm on aching shoulders. The warrior soldier. The man refusing to contemplate defeat, the man able to dig deep at times of crisis. The man capable of handling danger, remaining calm and making decisions. the Greek philosopher Diogenes was a man of many talents. Indeed, the words of the old sage, born in 404 BC, could have been crafted solely for New Zealand rugby and its devotees. 'The foundation of every State is the education of its youth, Jerome Kaino reveals the demands that are made. 'At a young age, the basics of this game are pushed a lot harder than how to score a try or anything like that. If you are catching a ball, put your hands up so you can catch it easier, and when passing, make sure you are pointing to where you pass. This big focus on the basics when young is so that it becomes second nature when you grow older. 'You just keep doing it. It's like speaking a language - use it or lose it. Even at our level Al Blacks and a professional franchise], we are drilled in the basics at every session. Just to make sure that when the pressure comes on, the basics are still there, they are ingrained. Anyone on a farm in the area looking to employ workers is given strict instructions. Check that they play rugby when you interview them! Since they don't have too many big, heavy forwards (because working on a farm mainly produces lean, fit young men), they try to play a running game. They're one of the smallest teams in the competition but the idea is that they can use their fitness to wear out opponents. Many coaches in New Zealand rugby are former school teachers used in calculating values such as discipline, dedication, and organisation within their charges. The 'Ka Mate' haka is almost 140 years old, first composed by Te Rauparaha, Ngäti Toa Rangatira. 'That really deep connection is what I took out of it. The "Ka Mate" haka talks of a warrior hiding from his enemies: "I am going to die, I am going to live." I reckon that is so powerful because there is this guy having a battle with himself about life. He is going through this internal conflict. He is hiding. 'Kapa O Pango, a new haka created by Derek Lardelli of Ngäti Porou, took a year to choreograph. It modified the first verse of Ko Niu Tirini, the haka used by the 1924 All Blacks. Many experts in Maori culture were asked for their views. It is regarded as complementing 'Ka Mate' and is used for special occasions. First performed before a 2005 Tri-Nations international against South Africa in Dunedin, the words used were considered more specific to the rugby team than Ka Mate. Fact is, few countries ever achieve the harmony enjoyed within the All Blacks by peoples of vastly differing backgrounds. Yet, due to considerable efforts by a variety of people - administrators, coaches, players and unknown numbers of ordinary rugby fans - New Zealand has successfully integrated three peoples - Maori, Pakeha and Pasifika - into a single nation and sports team. It is made very clear to you and therefore you understand very early on that getting into the all black side is not the finishing point it’s the start. You are expected to leave it better than you found it. This is a key factor in the building of New Zealand rugby and difference between a Mazda and a Maserati. Furthermore, being brought through and offered opportunities in a system without age another reason for their supremacy. Players encouraged for years to play in a specific style, and forced to operate under pressure, will inevitably make better, smarter decisions on the field. Quick hands, quick feet, quick brains. Again, it's no coincidence the decision-making under pressure of New Zealand players is light years ahead of most of their counterparts in other countries. Vince Lombardi: winning isn’t everything but wanting to win it. This bold statement is palpably short on two things. Compassion and indictment. This single act, by a man worshipped universally throughout New Zealand in both life and death as one of the greatest ever (if not the greatest) All Blacks, represents one of the worst, most brutal assaults ever perpetrated by a New Zealand rugby player. At the time, Meads said, 'That's the game. You do what you have to do? Catchpole embraced a rather different philosophy. He always said he played for the enjoyment of the game. Colin Meads' philosophy was that you played to win. What Meads thought he 'had to do' was examined afterwards by Dick Tooth, the ex-Wallaby orthopedic specialist. He diagnosed Catchpole's hamstring muscle had been completely torn from the pelvic bone. There were ripped and stretched groin muscles and a damaged sciatic nerve; he said it was the worst injury of its type he had ever seen. Three months after the incident, Catchpole still could not touch his toes. He told friends the pain was terrible. It was an agonizing recovery and, thereafter, he was always troubled by a weak thigh. The instant acceleration, once the hallmark of his play, never returned. Enoka says that they simply had to correct the culture of 2004. 'We are a team (now) that is built very much on "we", not "me". But it was the other way around then. All the focus had been on "me". It was about ego. One of our core principles is that the team towers above the individual. It is alright to say that, but another thing to deliver. Professionalism had moved us to a particular way of thinking. But the individuals asked, "What can I get, what are the opportunities for me?", which created fractures. That defeat and its aftermath was one of the worst losses I have been involved in with the team. South Africa absolutely thumped us. I remember coming home, and when we sat down and discussed it, we said, "Right. We have got to pull this thing to bits."' It was the start of what became known infamously as the 'No dickheads policy. One reason for this is what former All Blacks lock Andy Haden calls 'the inherent knowledge of the sport not only by New Zealand males, but from plenty of knowledge by females. And they have their say. In that regard, he suspects, it is hard to see New Zealand falling back for long. 'There will be leaner times. But with the expertise, they won't last for long.' Former Australia coach Alan Jones echoed these sentiments. What makes New Zealand so good? Jones is in little doubt. There is a prevailing culture about New Zealand rugby, isn't there? The thing that always used to fascinate me about them was the women knew as much as the men. You have got to be prepared to come last to come first The trouble was that most became like rabbits caught in the headlights; pre-programmed players, stuffed full of orders by coaches, lost the ability to make decisions on the pitch. They couldn't adapt and play what was in front of them, no matter how propitious the opportunity. Decision-making, in an attacking sense, had withered like the dying branch of a tree. It is still the same in many countries. Take England's witless display in the Six Nations Championship against France in Paris in March 2018. Six points behind in the last moments, with a five-on-two overlap beckoning out wide; the English ball carrier sticks his head down, charges forward into contact, knocks-on and invites the final whistle. Rugby's traditional adage about finding space and running into it has been turned on its head. Mourie had a simple response. 'He plays too high above the ground. He plays vertically so he won't get picked. You have got to have your nose half a metre from the ground! Dwyer also highlighted the example of half-back Aaron Smith. 'There was a time very early in his Test career when he was replaced at halftime in one game. I thought at the time I knew why. He lifted the ball up, took a step sideways before passing it. The next match he was on the bench and only went on in the second half. I have never seen Aaron pass the ball like that since. Now, no New Zealand halfback ever takes a step sideways. This precise attention to detail, forged in the toughest rugby proving ground in the world, is a key element in keeping New Zealand at the top of the sport. The reason that it's unlikely you will see the latest Ferrari or Lambo behind the gates of an All Black's home is the tall-poppy syn-drome. There may be the odd one who is different, but most New Zealand rugby players have long since been made aware that such ostentatiousness strays into the world of arrogance. And if they didn't understand it, every watching inhabitant of this nation would cut them down to size in a trice if they demonstrated such traits. But there are other factors at play here, too. Nowadays, youngsters want disposable income. Tempted by the technologies of the modern world, myriad products take up their time. Along with the Rising technological distractions, there are more serious social issues to contend with like an increasing number of single parent families. Getting kids to and from training is a big factor. Commitment to a sport is becoming less attractive to young people. Ask him what sort of things he would tell players, and he says he doesn't really like to 'tell them. That would create a sort of hierarchical structure, in his view. 'It's about getting alongside them and together unfolding layers that generally identify things that can be improved. Then subconsciously, you let go fear of failure. It becomes about playing to win not playing to lose. They are different universes. In the field of decision-making, Evans says, 'The focus is not the decision itself but the information that leads to good decisions. Decision-making is a skill as well and all skills have an internal struc-ture. Once you can structure the processing for them to get the right information, they tend to make better decisions! 'A massage, nutrition, sleep and stretching. These are the key ingredients, says Shand. Nothing is better to aid recovery than sleep. All our research shows that hot and cold compression, cryotherapy... all those things are not as effective as eating well and getting good sleep. The trouble with sleep though, is that you're not receiving any medical care or attention. Well, you can be, say the All Blacks. Several of the players have their own personal recovery pants. Manufactured in America, they contain a mini-compressor that pumps cold water around your limbs. If you have a knee injury, you can wear them to bed and set up a timer to turn on and off silently every two hours, for a two-minute period, during the night. Shand says the first twenty-four hours after a match is critical in a recovery process. Eating is an important part of any recovery. A tough Test match takes a lot out of the players and they need to put it back, which means eating every three or four hours. 'What is your greatest achievement?', I asked him, as we sat in the study of his stunning, architecturally dynamic modern home at Prebbleton, 14 km outside Christchurch. Framed All Blacks rugby jerseys hung on the wall, his desk was a clutter of papers and books. It was a deliberately simple question. You think you know the answer even before you're told it. 'Winning the so-and-so Cup in whichever year. Yet Hansen surprised me. What he said revealed more about the man than the rugby coach. 'I think probably the greatest thing I have done is understand my own identity, so I can become a better person. And therefore be a better father, a better husband and a better friend. Those things are enormously important. I would say those things took me longer than they should have done! But we have given them too much without getting too much back. We have created a sense of entitlement. It's a very different generation now and it's not their fault, it's ours. Of all the values that underpin the All Blacks, he cites integrity within the group as one of the most vital ingredients. It's an honesty, the same that every team and business has, he thinks. But the key is living them daily. 'It's about living them from the top down rather than expecting the young guy to do it and the guy at the top not having to. That is the difference between a good culture and a bad one? 'The other strength he had, especially in the latter years of the All Blacks, is that nothing went unsaid. He really made sure he was honest and that we didn't pussyfoot around. We had honest conversations in terms of feedback on your game. His unique ability was to be able to sit down and tell you when you had got everything wrong, but you still went away thinking, "He believes in me." Not many people can do that. Another thing about Steve is that he has a really good feel for what is needed, during a match and during the week leading up to a game. He has got a feeling of when you need to give the team a real rev-up or you just need to put your arm around everyone and say, "Just hang in there." He has great man-management skills. He does quite a bit on the fly, too, which is another strength. He grabs some tough situations pretty damn good and pretty quickly. He also is really good if you sit down and want a yarn about your game. You end up answering your own questions with him prompting This, they always said, was a distinctive characteristic of the outstanding 1971 British & Irish Lions coach, the Welshman Carwyn James. He would sit his players down before a Test match and canvass opinions as to how the Lions should play. James invited views from as many players as possible. Cleverly, by the time the players had spoken, they had invariably outlined the tactics James would later admit he himself would have advocated. But the players had done it for him. Simplicity equals clarity equals intensity It goes back to the basic tenets of the game: pass, run, catch, tackle, make decisions. ...more |
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Mar 19, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 0385055498
| 9780385055499
| 0385055498
| 3.72
| 755
| 1965
| Aug 01, 1973
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Feb 28, 2024
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Feb 28, 2024
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Paperback
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| 1587680009
| 9781587680007
| 1587680009
| 3.61
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| 1998
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| 1541730569
| 9781541730564
| 1541730569
| 3.38
| 16
| Sep 21, 2021
| Sep 21, 2021
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it was amazing
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Really interesting book that gives you a powerful framework with which you can deconstruct some of the principles of your own thinking as well as the
Really interesting book that gives you a powerful framework with which you can deconstruct some of the principles of your own thinking as well as the frameworks that people use for their thinking to try to get to the crux of truth and have honest open conversations which ultimately lead to results. As the books title suggests it's about thinking then talking then Co creating solutions to whole variety of problems. Here are some of the best bits from the book: Active inquiry, derived from our time studying the ancient Greeks, teaches individuals how to think carefully about a challenge or opportunity, how to engage peers in dialogue via open-ended questioning, and how to collaboratively build a strategy. In one study, nearly one hundred managers were broken into small groups and asked to solve a specific strategic challenge. But before they could begin brainstorming, one group was asked to go around and share personal stories of success, while the other group was asked to share personally embarrassing stories. After just ten minutes of conversation, the teams that had shared embarrassing stories generated 26 percent more ideas than those that had shared personal success stories. A psychologically safe environment in this case, an environment in which people had been willing to reveal their foibles and vulnerability fosters creativity and enhances performance. It allows ideas to be shared freely and teams to collaborate without fear of judgment, reprisal, or loss of status? It was after carefully analyzing and discussing these statistical models that Project Aristotle began to present a clearer picture of what precisely contributed to unit effectiveness- or, more plainly, what made certain teams perform better than others. The researchers identified four supplementary and one principal marker of performance. The four that played a supporting role were well-known, popular sentiments: dependability, clarity/structure, meaning, and impact. These were everyday words in both personal and professional arenas. Dependability meant for the employees of Google what it means for a parent and child: to be reliable and accountable. So, too, did the concept of clarity and structure: goals and responsibilities were well defined and understood by the team. Meaning likewise meant significance, while impact meant that, in the eyes of employees, their work actually mattered. But as we mentioned at the outset, the factor most closely associated with organizational performance, the one that far and away stole the show, was a concept little known out side academic circles: psychological safety. "Google's data," reported the New York Times, "indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.? Supplementing the research on psychological safety is the burgeoning body of research on the power of trust. Paul Zak, author of Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performance Companies, has demonstrated the high correlation between trust in a workplace and economic performance. 11 Zak describes how the hormone and neurotransmitter oxytocin, usually associated with childbirth and breastfeeding, actually stimulates trust in humans and other mammals. He presents an experiment devised by Vernon Smith (a Nobel laureate in economics), in which a study subject is given a certain amount of money, which they can keep or give to a stranger, for whom the amount would triple. The stranger would then have the option of returning the favor by sharing some of the increase, perhaps half the total. But would they? The study subjects given the money in the first place had no way of being sure, but when several of them were given either oxytocin or a placebo via a nasal spray, the oxytocin group displayed a significant increase in their willingness to trust, thereby possibly increasing their net gain. Companies cannot continually bathe their employees' brains with oxytocin, but, as Google's Project Aristotle reveals, creating an environment characterized by psychological safety can achieve the same kinds of positive outcomes. Emotional openness elevates oxytocin, which increases trust, which leads to further openness, and therefore more oxytocin and more trust. This creates the positive feedback loop known as a virtuous cycle also known as a great working environment. It's possible that the antidepressant medications had contributed to reducing Ramon's depression, as reflected on the HAM-D. But since antidepressants often infuse a person with more energy, they may have also given him just enough drive to act on his hopelessness and actually end his life. It's also plausible that Ramon felt relieved and emboldened when, during his hospital stay, he settled on a definitive plan that he would kill himself soon after getting home. Assured by this decision that he wouldn't have to suffer much longer, perhaps he felt freed from his demons and glimpsed light at the end of the tunnel. Now, maybe, he could relax, laugh, and enjoy his final moments with the friendly staff members at the hospital. Deaths of despair- which include suicides, alcoholic liver disease, and drug overdoses have been rising in a steady and alarming fashion in recent times. Case and Deaton point out that one of the major factors in this disquieting trend toward more self-inflicted death is that fewer people nowadays have "a long-term commitment to an employer who, in turn, was once committed to them, a relationship that, for many, conferred status and was one of the foundations of a meaningful life? He sought to transform bureaucratic CEOs into "value-maximizing entrepreneurs" who were to be paid with "significant amounts of company stock" instead of fixed salaries. That way, if the shareholders succeeded, the CEO succeeded. Urban legend tells of a story in which James was asked to deliver a lengthy speech in front of a crowd of academics and researchers eager to hear his thoughts on the history of psychology. Settled in for an extensive report, the crowd was shocked by James's choice to speak for just a few seconds. "They've asked me to talk about the last hundred years of psychological research," he is said to have told them. "It can be summed up in this statement: people by and large become what they think of themselves. Thank you and good night." James expanded further upon this idea of belief in oneself during another lecture entitled The Will to Believe," which was published as a book in 1896. According to James, the belief "I am capable of changing the world" can only be true- or become true if you first adopt the belief without prior evidence. In other words, assuming you haven't changed the world yet, the first step in doing so is believing strongly that you can. The 737 Max 8 was looking to replace the 737 as Boeing's cash cow, as industry experts estimated the aircraft would come to account for up to 40 percent of Boeing's annual profit." But in a shortsighted move meant to trim a few dollars off the price tag, Boeing decided to make some safety features optional rather than standard, which was a bit like making lifeboats optional on a cruise ship. Boeing's quantitative analysts had been tempted by their confreres at the airlines, often operating in cash-strapped developing countries, to play their own numbers game and bet on cost savings rather than passenger safety. To round out this catastrophe in the making, Boeing neglected to tell airlines and pilots about a possible software glitch that could make the 737 Max 8 take an uncontrollable nosedive. Boeing was following the teachings of modern scientific management and keeping its eyes on the numbers: the dates on a calendar for delivery of the aircraft, the dollars to be made or lost. When the Italian artist Raphael painted his masterpiece The School of Athens around 1510, he featured Plato and Aristotle as central figures, placing them directly in the center of the fresco. Their union at the center of the painting also highlights the disunion at the core of their thinking. Plato's hand points up, toward the heavens, as he believed our world did not consist of measurable absolutes. Aristotle, in contrast, is painted with his hand stretched outward, parallel to the ground beneath him, as he believed items in the world consist of measurable properties. ...more |
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Jun 30, 2023
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| 125023400X
| 9781250234001
| 3.50
| 51,317
| Jun 04, 2014
| Jul 30, 2019
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it was amazing
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Basically this is almost exactly like the dream team model that I’ve created. Where this dude has a colours i have the chess player, the archer, the b
Basically this is almost exactly like the dream team model that I’ve created. Where this dude has a colours i have the chess player, the archer, the boxer and the rower! Amazing book which gives you 4 personality archetypes and then shows you ways to adapt your style to them. God willing one day i will write a similar book! Here are the best bits: This method is called the DISA an acronym that stands for Dominance, Inducement, Submission, and Analytic ability system. These four terms are the primary behavior types, which describe how people sees themselves in relationship to their environment. Only dead fish to with the flow There are a few reasons for Robbin's creativity. It's easy for him to think in images. He can simply "see" things in front of him long before they even exist. And he has courage; he's not afraid to try new things. Or to talk about them. Usually, his mouth works parallel to his mind as he discovers these ideas. Yellows are very good communicators. With an emphasis on "very." None of the other colors come close to the Yellows' ease in finding words, expressing themselves, and telling a story. It comes so easily, so simply, so effortlessly, that you can't help being impressed. It's common knowledge that most people don't like speaking in front of others. They get heart palpitations and sweaty palms, terrified of making fools of themselves. This is totally alien to Yellows. Making fools of themselves isn't part of the deal, and if the improbable were to happen you could always laugh it off with another amusing anecdote. The modern English language contains about one hundred and seventy thousand words, of which we thousand are used regularly. In comparison, according to certain scholars, body language contains almost seven hundred thousand signals In the best of worlds, everyone can be themselves and everything functions smoothly from the word go. Everyone agrees at all times and conflicts don't exist at all. This place is said to exist, and it's called Utopia. Build relationships as much as you deem necessary. Just don't do it with Reds. For example, if you begin a meeting with a Red whom you've never met before, nothing could be worse than asking where he lives, where he spent his last vacation, or what he thought of the game last night. Nothing could be more irrelevant to him. He's not here to chat or make friends. He's there to do business. Deeply Red individuals become downright irritated and aggressive when they notice that someone is trying to be friends with them. A foolproof method to put a Yellow to sleep quickly and efficiently is to bring up lots of details. Don't do that. A Yellow simply can't cope with details. It just gets boring. Not only will he forget what you're talking about, but he'll also simply think that he doesn't need any of those details. His strength, lies in the broad brushstrokes. You can easily ask a Yellow to draw up a vision for the next ten years, but don't ask him to explain how to make it happen. "It Was Better Before. Much Better." When I'm talking about change, one of my favorite exercises is to ask everyone in the group who is afraid of change to stand up. Occasionally someone will stand up, but it's more common that no one moves. Why? Because we all understand that change is inevitable and necessary if we're going to keep up with the world. Some people can admit that they dislike change, but this observation is only at an intellectual level. And so we all sit quietly in our seats pretending that there are no opponents to change to be found here. And besides, no one else is standing up. After that, my second question is, "Who thinks that someone else in the group is afraid of change?" Suddenly the whole group stands up, and they look around quite amused. So who doesn't like change? Answer: "Everyone else. And because those other people are the prob-lem, I don't need to do anything at all. The issue is widespread. The majority of the population has Green as its dominant quality. This is the main reason why we can't accept change with open arms. Everything new is evil, and it should be strongly discouraged. Rapid change is the most difficult to accept. The faster it is, the worse it is. So the faster the wheels of society spin, the more frantic all those opponents of change become. So the basic rule is to meet a Red with Red behavior, Yellow with Yellow, Green with Green, and finally Blue with Blue. You may think that it sounds simple. The difficulty comes, for example, if you are Yellow and must adapt to a Blue. Based on Marston's theories (see page 227), the greatest challenge of all is to ask a Yellow and a Blue to work together. If neither of them is aware of how their personalities work, there will be friction from the outset. The Yellow dives into the task without the slightest idea what to do or how to do it. He doesn't read any instructions, and he doesn't listen long enough to find out what the task is actually about. He'll speak at great length about what an exciting project they've been given. In the meantime, the Blue starts reading and researching all the material available. He doesn't say a word but just sits there. More or less motionless- he thinks. Humoral pathology, or the theory of the four humors or four bodily fluids, has to do with the four temperaments. According to Hippocrates, our temperament is the fundamental way we react. It's our behavior or our natural frame of mind. Our temperament controls our behavior. ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 29, 2023
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Audiobook
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| 0241373662
| 9780241373668
| 0241373662
| 4.07
| 1,738
| Feb 01, 2020
| Feb 04, 2020
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it was amazing
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Amazing book which i read as a follow on from turn this ship around. This book covers a concept I’ve created myself called “brave new words”. This is
Amazing book which i read as a follow on from turn this ship around. This book covers a concept I’ve created myself called “brave new words”. This is all about creating a new language and the advantages that can accrue in business and lots of different parts of life of having access to new words and phrases. The books documents the disaster that befell the el faro container ship. Sinking of the US Cargo Vessel El Faro. National Transportation Safety Board. The accident. September 29. On the evening of September 29, 2015, the US-flagged cargo ship El Faro cast off from Jacksonville, Florida, bound for San Juan, Puerto Rico, with crew of 33 and a cargo of vehicles and shipping containers. It hit a violent storm that the captain had too much of an ego to try to avoid. The language the captain used, marquet, cleverly argues led to the deaths of all 33 on board. Here are the best parts of the book: Our interaction with the world is doing. Improving our interaction with the world is thinking. We need to always remember that the organization is perfectly tuned to deliver the behavior we see, and people's behaviors are the perfect result of the organization's design. As individuals, we should embrace our responsibility for being the best we can be within the design of the organization. But as leaders, our responsibility is to design the organization so that individuals can be the best versions of themselves. Thinking benefits from embracing variability. Doing benefits from reducing variability. As a statistician, Deming recognized that if greater variability in the manufacturing process meant higher costs and products that felt cheaper, the reverse must also be true: reducing variability in the manufacturing process would lower costs while producing higher-quality products. In other words, Deming's first key insight was that quality did not cost money, it saved money. This approach came to be known as Total Quality Management or Total Quality Leadership. The notion of quality is in fact defined by a manufacturers ability to repeat a process with as close to zero variability as possible. Nature is nothing if not efficient, so the fact that the human brain uses an astonishing 20 to 25 percent of our daily calories speaks to the survival value of this decision-making power. While most animals possess approximately proportional brains for their size, the human brain is an outlier, three times larger than it should be. "All hands" is an old nautical term referring to getting every crewman up to pull on a heavy line. It was, literally, about using your hands. First, working products were to be delivered frequently, as frequently as every two weeks. These short bursts of work were called "sprints." Early and frequent testing exposure to users allowed early and frequent adjustments. Second, the team would work with the product owners to decide which features they would include during the next sprint. Rather than the Industrial Age approach of separating doers and deciders the agile approach turned the doers into deciders. At Toyota they use the Andon cord. Andon is the Japanese word for a traditional paper lantern. At Toyota, manufacturing workers pull an Andon cord when they encounter a problem in the production system. The cord turns on an indicator light. Before Toyota made cars, they made sewing machines. Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, designed one of the first automated loom designs, which immediately stopped the machine when the nee-de broke. This prevented wasted material and defective product. When Toyota started building cars on the assembly line, the managers wanted a similar system, whereby workers could signal that they needed to stop production, thus avoiding unnecessary waste. So the plant designers installed pull cords that illuminated lanterns (andons). A worker simply pulled the cord to light up the andon, letting a supervisor know there was a problem at the production station. Hence the term Andon cord. Barings Bank a 233-year-old City of London bank, was brought down directly as a result of a culture of fear in which people didn't speak up. Faced with an error made by a member of his team, Nick Leeson, the star trader of the bank's Singapore operation, chose to cover up rather than speak up. He used an account, numbered 88888 (eight being a lucky number in Chinese culture), to hide the error, and when the cover-up worked, he used the account to hide his own growing losses until the amount reached an astonishing £827 million - twice the bank's trading capital and the whole institution collapsed. We judge ourselves by our intentions but we judge others by their behaviour. Ask probabilistic questions instead of binary ones. Instead of the binary "Is it safe?" or "Will it work?" ask "How safe is it?" or "How likely is it to work?" The idea is to invite thinking that considers future events as a range of possibilities, not as will-happen or won't-happen choices. Since all innovation starts as an outlier thought, driving consensus is bound to suppress innovation. Let's say you decide you no longer want to eat sweets, vet at the end of a long day you are faced with a bowl of sweets. You can consider two options for self-talk. You can tell yourself you can't eat sweets or that you don't eat sweets. Turns out that telling yourself you don't eat sweets is more powerful. You'll end up eating fewer sweets with "don't" than "can't" because, by using the word "don't," the motivation comes from within. "Don't" identifies you as "a person who does not eat sweets." It allocates the power to you. A psychological phenomenon called "escalation of commitment." Escalation of commitment means that once we select a course of action, we stubbornly stick to it, even in the face of evidence that the course of action is failing. In Ford's day, the pace of innovation was nothing like it is today. lames Watt invented the first viable steam engine in 1776. Eighty-three years later, in 1859, Étienne Lenoir developed the first commer. cially successful internal combustion engine. It was yet another twenty-seven years before Karl Benz patented the first automobile in 1886. Benz's car looked more like a carriage with an engine strapped to its back than today's modern automobile. It took another twenty-two years before Ford achieved the Model T. It turns out that immediate, positive, and certain rewards are the most powerful for establishing and maintaining a behavior. "If someone else had to take over this project, what would you say to them to make it even more successful?" It's unclear why nine minutes passed before this conversation finally took place. Either way, when it was activated, the blowout preventer did not operate properly and failed to seal the well. The subsequent investigation revealed problems with the assembly and maintenance of the device, including dead batteries and mis-wired coils. The delay in attempting to seal the well may have been a contributing factor to the disaster. With the well unsealed, the oil and gas mixture was able to flow rapidly to the platform, feeding the existing fire. Eleven people died. Over the next four hundred days, 5 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico, making the Deepwater Horizon oil spill one of the worst environmental disasters in history. In one experiment, 129 Jewish Israeli students were asked to rate their level of support for the statements "I support the division of Jerusalem" and "I support dividing Jerusalem." When the statement used nouns (division), participants reported less anger and increased support for concessions. Further, when asked how angry they would be if the policy were adopted, anger was tempered when the question relied on nouns. As Damasio continued to treat Elliot, he developed the hypothesis that emotions are critical to effective decision-making. One might have assumed that good decision-making comes down to some kind of pure logic, but Damasio suggests otherwise: we need to know what we feel in order to weigh the variables and decide what to do about them. Every time you use your senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell, electric signals travel throughout your body and into your brain, gathering in your frontal lobe (just behind your forehead) to form a perception about the world in front of you. These sensory signals pass through the emotion-creating limbic center just before reaching the reasoning area of your frontal lobe, giving you an emotional, intuitive picture of the world around you. Accompanying these intuitions are physical responses: a lump in your throat for sadness, flushing with heat for anger, paralysis for fear, rapid heartbeat and sweating for anxiety and anticipation. These emotions are finely tuned, sophisticated tools that have evolved over millions of years-ignore them at your peril. "It sounds like you need a commitment now, and that's not possible for me. I think you will need to find someone else." If Andy's colleague expects a clear and immediate commitment from Andy, I would advise Andy to be particularly wary of working with someone who operates like this, as ways of behaving are generally consistent. In other words, I would expect a lack of transparency or advance planning throughout the project. Instead, you could look forward to more coercion, with an expectation of compliance and conforming. It would most likely not be a fun project to work on. "Based on what you are telling me, it sounds like you need four to six hours in the next two weeks. I can commit to three hours next week, and three the week after that. The rest of my time is already committed to other projects, and after that, I have full-time commitments to other projects, so if your project carries over, you will have to find another set designer. How well does that work for you?" That way, if Andy does commit, it will be on his terms, not his colleague's. I've seen technology companies actually test a product without making it. They create the images and descriptions, market it, then count the clicks as potential buyers show interest. If someone acroally tries to buy the product, they are told that it is "sold out," or, more honestly, that there's "none available." In this way, the firms can reduce uncertainty in product development because they gauge the market before investing in the actual manufacture of the product ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 04, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 0142001104
| 9780142001103
| B01M0DFU7G
| 3.93
| 11,183
| 2000
| Jan 01, 2002
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it was amazing
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6 stars. Incredible book by the person who created the concept of the Zander letter and the whole concept of giving yourself an “A” before you start a
6 stars. Incredible book by the person who created the concept of the Zander letter and the whole concept of giving yourself an “A” before you start an assignment. Really enjoyed it and learnt a lot about coaching people and driving them to success. Here are the best bits: The frames our minds create define -and confine-what we perceive to be possible. Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear. Our premise is that many of the circumstances that seem to block us in our daily lives may only appear to do so based on a framework of assumptions we carry with us. Draw a different frame around the same set of circumstances and new pathways come into view. Find the right framework and extraordinary accomplishment becomes an everyday experience. "It's all invented anyway, so we might as well invent a story or a framework of meaning that enhances our quality of life and the life of those around us. A simple way to practice it's all invented is to ask yourself this question: What assumption am I making, That I'm not aware I'm making, That gives me what I see? And when you have an answer to that question, ask yourself this one: What might I now invent, That I haven't vet invented. That would give me other choices? We speak with the awareness that language creates categories of meaning that open up new worlds to explore. Life appears as variety, pattern, and shimmering movement, inviting us in every moment to engage. The pie is enormous, and if you take a slice, the pie is whole again. Anne regarded her five-year-old niece with astonishment, and then began to tell her the true story of Mahler- how sad his life was, how he'd lost seven brothers and sisters from sickness during his childhood so that the coffin became a regular piece of furniture in his house. She told Katrine how cruel his alcoholic father had been to him, and how frightened his invalid mother. She told her that Mahler's little daughter had died at the age of four, that he never really got over that loss, and that he'd been forced to quit his important job at the famous Opera House in Vienna because he was Jewish. "And then, just before he wrote this symphony, Anne said, "Mahler was told by his doctor that he had a weak heart and only a very short time to live. So now, Mahler was really saying good-bye to everything and looking back over his life. That is why so much of the music is so sad and why at the end of the piece it dies out to nothing, it's a description of his death as he imagined it, his final breathe Two prime ministers are sitting in a room discussing affairs of state. Suddenly a man bursts in, apoplectic with fury, shouting and stamping and banging his fist on the desk. The resident prime minister admonishes him: "Peter," he says, "kindly remember Rule Number 6," whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologizes, and withdraws. The politicians return to their conversation, only to be interrupted yet again twenty minutes later by an hysterical woman gesticulating wildly, her hair fling. Again the intruder is greeted with the words: "Marie, please remember Rule Number 6." Complete calm descends once more, and she too withdraws with a bow and an apology. When the scene is repeated for a third time, the visiting prime minister addresses his colleague: "My dear friend, I've seen many things in my life, but never anything as remarkable as this. Would you be willing to share with me the secret of Rule Number 6?" "Very simple," replies the resident prime minister. "Rule Number 6 is Don't take yourself so goddamn seriously." "Ah." says his visitor, "that is a fine rule." After a moment of pondering, he inquires, "And what, may I ask, are the other rules? "There aren't any." MISTAKES CAN BE like ice. If we resist them, we may keep on slipping into a posture of defeat. If we include mistakes in our definition of performance, we are likely to glide through them and appreciate the beauty of the longer run. The level of playing of the average orchestral player is much higher than it used to be in Mahler's day. So when Mahler wrote difficult passages for particular instruments, like the high-flying "Prère Jacques" tune for solo double bass in the third movement of the First Symphony, he was almost certainly conveying, musically, the sense of vulnerability and risk he saw as an integral For the orchestra and the conductor, playing Mahler's symphonies means taking huge risks with ensemble, expression, and technique. We will not convey the sense of the music if we are in perfect technical control, so in a sense a very good player has to try harder in these passages than someone for whom they would be a strain, technically. If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye, which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility - SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Either/Or On the whole, resources are likely to come to you in greater abundance when you are generous and inclusive and engage people in your passion for life. There aren't any guarantees, of course. When you are oriented to abundance, you care less about being in control, and you take more risks. You may give away short-term profits in pursuit of a bigger dream; you may take a long view without being able to predict the outcome. In the measurement world, you set a goal and strive for it. In the universe of possibility, you set the context and let life unfold. An A can be given to anyone in any walk of life - to a waitress, to your employer, to your mother-in-law, to the members of the opposite team, and to the other drivers in traffic. When you give an A, you find yourself speaking to people not from a place of measuring how they stack up against your standards, but from a place of respect that gives them room to realize themselves. Your eye is on the statue within the roughness of the uncut stone. This A is not an expectation to live up to, but a possibility to live into. "Each student in this class will get an A for the course," announce. "However, there is one requirement that you must fut-fill to earn this grade: Sometime during the next two weeks, you must write me a letter dated next May, which begins with the words, "Dear Mr. Zander, I got my A because. It is dangerous to have our musicians so obsessed with competition because they will find it difficult to take the necessary risks with themselves to be great performers. The art of music, since it can only be conveyed through its interpreters, depends on expressive performance for its lifeblood. Yet it is only when we make mistakes in performance that we can really begin to notice what needs attention. In fact, I actively train my students that when they make a mistake, they are to lift their arms in the air, smile, and say, "How fascinating!" I recommend that everyone try this. Not only mistakes, but even those experiences we ordinarily define as "negative" can be treated in this way. For instance, I once had a distraught young tenor ask to speak to me after class. He told me he'd lost his girlfriend and was in such despair that he was almost unable to function. I consoled him, but the teacher in me was secretly delighted. Now he would be able to fully express the heartrending passion of the song in Schubert's Die Winterreise about the loss of the beloved. That song had completely eluded him the previous week because up to then, the only object of affection he had ever lost was a pet goldfish. My teacher, the great cellist Gaspar Cassado, used to say to us as students, "I'm so sorry for you; your lives have been so easy. You can't play great music unless your heart's been broken? Strolling along the edge of the sea, a man catches sight of a young woman who appears to be engaged in a ritual dance. She stoops down, then straightens to her full height, casting her arm out in an arc. Drawing closer, he sees that the beach around her is littered with starfish, and she is throwing them one by one into the sea. He lightly mocks her: "There are stranded starfish as far as the eye can see, for miles up the beach. What difference can saving a few of them possibly make?" Smiling, she bends down and once more tosses a starfish out over the water, saying serenely, "It certainly makes a difference to this one. When i began playing the game of contribution, on the other hand, i found there was no better orchestra than the one i was conducting, no better person to be with than the one I was with; in fact, there was no "better." In the game of contribution you wake up each day and bask in the notion that you are a gift to others. As you get caught up in the excitement of explaining and sharing the music with your companion, would you have time to be nervous? Of course not! It wouldn't occur to you. But this is exactly what you are doing when you perform -you are pointing to the beauty and artistry of the music." There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing Four young men sit by the bedside of their dying father. The old man, with his last breath, tells them there is a huge treasure buried in the family fields. The sons crowd around him crying, "Where, where?" but it is too late. The day after the funeral and for many days to come, the young men go out with their picks and shovels and turn the soil, digging deeply into the ground from one end of each field to the other. They find nothing and, bitterly disappointed, abandon the search. The next season the farm has its best harvest ever. Things change when you care enough to grab whatever you love and give it everything And instead of revealing her hurt, she built up a case that Mark was dangerous, although he wasn't a danger in any real sense at all. I think she felt more powerful as the judge, but the diagnosis she assigned to him stuck, and from there arose a story of a guy no one in their right mind could tolerate. When she asked herself, "What would have to change for me to be completely fulfilled?" June recognized her own calculating self in action. She stopped taking herself and her story so seriously, and suddenly was able to distinguish her husband from the diagnosis she had given him. The sixth pillar presents a tale of a different sort, about a little girl named ilse, a childhood friend of Guerda Weissman Kline, in Auschwitz. Guerda remembers that Ilse, who was about six years old at the time, found one morning a single raspberry somewhere in the garden. Ilse carried it all day long in a protected place in her pocket, and in the evening, her eyes shining with happiness, she presented it to her Friend Guerda on a leaf. "Imagine a world," writes Guerda, "in which your entire possession is one raspberry, and you give it to your friend." MISTAKES CAN BE like ice. If we resist them, we may keep on slipping into a posture of defeat. If we include mistakes in our definition of performance, we are likely to glide through them and appreciate the beauty of the longer run. The level of playing of the average orchestral player is much higher than it used to be in Mahler's day. So when Mahler wrote difficult passages for particular instruments, like the high-flying "Frère Jacques" tune for solo double bass in the third movement of the First Symphony, he was almost certainly conveying, musically, the sense of vulnerability and risk he saw as an integral part of life. For the orchestra and the conductor, playing Mahler's symphonies means taking huge risks with ensemble, expression, and technique. We will not convey the sense of the music if we are in perfect technical control, so in a sense a very good player has to try harder in these passages than someone for whom they would be a strain, technically. Stravinsky, a composer whom we tend to think of as rather objective and "cool," once turned down a bassoon player because he was too good to render the perilous opening to The Rite of Spring. This heart-stopping moment, conveying the first crack in the cold grip of the Russian winter, can only be truly represented if the player has to strain every fiber of his technical resources to accomplish it. A bassoon player for whom it was easy would miss the expressive point. And when told by a violinist that a difficult passage in the violin concerto was virtually unplayable, Stravinsky is supposed to have said: "I don't want the sound of someone playing this passage, I want the sound of someone trying to play it!" When we dislike a situation, we tend to put all our attention on how things should be rather than how they are. How many times have we addressed a "should-be" child and found our words quite irrelevant to the child we've got? A man goes to see his rabbi. "Rabbi," he asks, "you told us a story-something to do with praise?" The rabbi responds, "Yes, it is thus: when you get some good news, you thank the Lord, and when you get some bad news, you praise the Lord." "Of course," replies the man, "I should have remembered. But Rabbi, how do you actually know which is the good news and which is the bad news?" The rabbi smiles. "You are wise, my son. So just to be on the safe side, always thank the Lord." There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. - MARTHA GRAHAM, quoted by Agnes DeMille, Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham I met Jacqueline Du Pre in the 1950s, when I was twenty and she was fifteen, a gawky English schoolgirl who blossomed into the greatest cellist of her generation. We performed the Two Cello Quintet of Schubert together, and I remember her playing was like a tidal wave of intensity and passion. When she was six years old, the story goes, she went into her first competition as a cellist, and she was seen running down the corridor carrying her cello above her head, with a huge grin of excitement on her face. A custodian, noting what he took to be relief on the little girl's face, said, "I see you've just had your chance to play!" And Jackie answered, excitedly, "No, no, I'm just about to!" When you identify yourself as a single chess piece -and by analogy, as an individual in a particular role -you can only react to, complain about, or resist the moves that interrupted your plans. But if you name yourself as the board itself you can turn all your attention to what you want to see happen, with none paid to what you need to win or fight or fix. WHEN YOU ARE being the board, you present no obstacles to others. You name yourself as the instrument to make all your relationships into effective partnerships. Imagine how profoundly Trustworthy you would be to the people who work for you if they Felt no problem could arise between you that you were not prepared to own. A little girl in second grade underwent chemotherapy for leukemia. When she returned to school, she wore a scarf to hide the fact that she had lost all her hair. But some of the children pulled it off, and in their nervousness laughed and made fun of her. The little girl was mortified and that afternoon begged her mother not to make her go back to school. Her mother tried to encourage her, saying, "The other children will get used to it, and anyway your hair will grow in again soon." The next morning, when their teacher walked into class, all the children were sitting in their seats, some still tittering about the girl who had no hair, while she shrank into her chair. "Good morning, children," the teacher said, smiling warmly in her familiar way of greeting them. She took off her coat and scarf. Her head was completely shaved. After that, a rash of children begged their parents to let them cut their hair. And when a child came to class with short hair, newly bobbed, all the children laughed merrily- not out of fear-but out of the joy of the game. And everybody's hair grew back at the same time. It is an ongoing choice for all of us -when a lover neglects to call, a colleague lets us down. or someone surpasses us, we can choose to tell the story of the WE or the story of the Other. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Paperback
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| 0307959503
| 9780307959508
| B00WPQ0PHU
| 4.07
| 817
| Jan 19, 2016
| Jan 19, 2016
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it was amazing
| Amazing book about leadership from a dude who worked in the air force, CIA and also a university. Lots of different types of organizations and lead th Amazing book about leadership from a dude who worked in the air force, CIA and also a university. Lots of different types of organizations and lead them all exquisitely well. How did he do that? See below for best bits: Harry Truman once said, "Every great achievement is the story of a flaming heart." The task of reforming institutions is a difficult one. A leader's heart must be on fire with belief in what she seeks to do. Changing institutions is a battle, and she must undertake it with courage, strength, and conviction. She must believe in it before she can persuade others to believe in it. She must be prepared to put her job on the line for it if she is to ask others to risk their careers and reputations to help her. Woodrow Wilson wrote, "When you come into the presence of a leader of men, you know you have come into the presence of fire that it is best not incautiously to touch that man- that there is something that makes it dangerous to cross him." The reformer must be very tough and, from time to time, ruthless. She will sometimes stand absolutely alone in pressing for change. She must hold people accountable and be prepared to remove those who are opposed or who cannot do the job. She will encounter criticism-sometimes vicious and personal along the way. The path of the reformer of institutions is never easy and rarely downhill. For openers, virtually all public bureaucracies report directly or indirectly to elected officials, whether Congress, state legislatures, presidents, governors, mayors, or city and county governing boards. Their political interests (getting reelected usually foremost among them) are often in direct conflict with efforts to streamline or reform the institutions they oversee. Another unpredictable factor in the oversight of institutions-mainly public ones but a lot of businesses as well is the Uneven quality of the individuals elected or appointed to fulfill the role. Members of Congress, state legislators, and (especially for business) regulators, for example, vary dramatically in expertise, diligence, understanding, and just plain smarts. Fundamental to bureaucratic culture is risk avoidance: It is almost always safer for the public bureaucrat and too often the business bureaucrat as well to say no than yes. In a public environment of exposés, recrimination, fault finding, and investigations both by officials and by the media, not acting is usually safer than acting especially if the action involves something new or different. John Adams, our second president, wrote to his son Thomas, "Public business my son, must always be done by somebody it will be done by somebody or other. If wise men decline it others will not: if honest men refuse it, others will not." Shortly after arriving at A&M, I appointed Dr. David Priot, dean of the College of Geosciences, executive vice president and provost my second-in-command. We immediately undertook a rigorous schedule of visiting each of the colleges in the university (engineering, agriculture, science, liberal arts, veterinary medicine, and all the rest) to meet with the dean, department heads, and faculty on a listening tour. A leader placed in charge of an organization facing a firestorm should reach for a hose, not a PowerPoint. I think my approach to winning the confidence of students worked, because when I left the university to become secretary of defense, ten thousand of them turned out to say good-bye. My chief of staff at Texas A&M was a young lawyer, Rodney McClendon. Rodney brought many skills to the position, but one special asset was that he knew by name nearly every staff person at A&M, whether secretaries, members of the grounds crew, people in food services, or custodians. President Obama's onetime White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said you should never let a crisis go to waste, an important lesson for all leaders. Further, I would add, if a new leader manages a crisis effectively, it can have an enormous ripple effect, enhancing his authority and his ability to address other problems. Many people in middle and senior positions have gotten where they are by offending as few people as possible and disrupting as little as possible. The erudite Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban insightfully observed that a consensus means that "everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually." Duke Ellington was quoted as saying, "I don't need time. I need a deadline." Increasing people's anxiety or fear by faultfinding is counterproductive. If an error is meaningless to the larger discussion, ignore it; dwelling on typos, format, or some trivial issue in a chart suggests to people that the leader is not just in the weeds but lost in them. There is a famous story of the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover writing in the margin of a memo, "Watch the borders." As a result, a number of agents were dispatched to the Mexican and Canadian borders. When this was reported to Hoover, he furiously informed the briefer that his note had been referring to the size of the margins on the original memo, not the country's geographic borders. Only later did I discover that there are little Stalins at every level of every organization. The trouble is that little Stalins are often hard for superiors to spot because they usually relate well to those up the bureaucratic and corporate ladder and are considered by their bosses to be polite, reasonable, and effective. There seems to be a direct correlation between the meanness of a little Stalin downward and his or her talent for sucking up to superiors the "kiss up, kick down" syndrome. The only way someone can achieve transformation in bureaucracy is to empower individuals to complete specific tasks, establish milestones to measure progress, and hold those individuals accountable for success or failure- and then reward or penalize as appropriate and possible. The CIA director Bill Casey taught me an important lesson when it comes to listening, one that I found applied especially to such boards (and a broad range of other interlocutors as well). Most people, he told me, will listen to a speaker and if they disagree with part of what he or she says will reject everything said. Bill advised me not to focus on what I disagreed with but to see if there were one or two kernels of information or wisdom worth seizing on finding a little wheat amid all the chaff. The famous football coach Vince Lombardi would warn his team, "If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm." I relate this story because, through this searing experience, I came to realize that while I had done nothing wrong, I hadn't done enough right. A favorite saying of mine is "Never miss a good chance to shut up." In the real world of bureaucratic institutions, you almost never get all you want when you want it. A good leader must compromise, adjust his plans, prioritize, and show flexibility and pragmatism. There is an old military saying that no plan survives first don-tact with the enemy. That is true in reforming institutions as well. The Japanese some time ago developed a business practice called kaizen, which basically means continuing change for the better in all aspects of an organization engineering, information technology, financial, commercial, customer service, and manufacturing. Many companies around the world have adopted the practice, which includes a very open process encouraging suggestions for improvements large and small from employees at every level, including especially on the shop floor the folks on the front lines. Developed for business, the concept of kaizen seems to me to have equal value for public sector bureaucracies as well. The central idea behind kaizen is very important: understanding that everything in an organization can always be improved and that people at every level can make a contribution. Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to his son in 1943, "The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men. . . . The idea is to get people working together . . . because they instinctively want to do it for you. Essentially, you must be devoted to duty, sincere, fair and cheerful The Nobel laureate Anatole France once wrote: "To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe." To those who believe our institutions can be better than they are, I say, Dream. Believe. Plan. Act. ...more |
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Dec 16, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 1591846404
| 9781591846406
| 1591846404
| 4.23
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| May 16, 2013
| May 16, 2013
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it was amazing
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Absolutely stunning leadership book about a dude who takes over a submarine and basically turns it around from a low performing submarine to a very hi
Absolutely stunning leadership book about a dude who takes over a submarine and basically turns it around from a low performing submarine to a very high performing one in about 2 years. One of the key takeaways from the book was his concept of empowerment and emancipation. So you don't have to have all the answers for the team but you make sure you give them the freedom to act in a way that they spot a problem and resolve it themselves. It's a very different thinking from a lot of companies and how managers act nowadays. Lots to learn from from a leadership perspective and higher recommended if you lead a team. I also loved his concept of language. Here are the best bits from the book: Things that’s a manager can do when he joins a new project: What are the things you are hoping I don't change? •What are the things you secretly hope I do change? • What are the good things about Santa Fe we should build on? • If you were me what would you do first? • Why isn't the ship doing better? • What are your personal goals for your tour here on Santa Fe? • What impediments do you have to doing your job? • What will be our biggest challenge to getting Santa Fe ready for deployment? • What are your biggest frustrations about how Santa Fe is currently run? •What is the best thing I can do for you? A submarine has a built-in structure whereby information is channeled up the chain of command to decision makers. Instead, we were going to deconstruct decision authority and push it down to where the information lived. We called this "Don't move information to authority, move authority to the information. "Captain, I intend to .." and he encouraged it. That's what we decided to do on Santa Fe. It wasn't just when you were on watch, and it wasn't just for officers. It started filtering through the crew and permeating the way we did business. For my part, I would avoid giving orders. Officers would state their intentions with "I intend to .." and I would say, "Very well." Then each man would execute. 'INTEND TO. " was an incredibly powerful mechanism for CONTROL. Although it may seem like a minor trick of language, We found that it profoundly shifted ownership of the plan to the officers. The Power of Words The key to your team becoming more proactive rests in the language subordinates and superiors use. Here is a short list of " disempowered phrases" that passive followers use: • Request permission to .. • I would like to . . . • What should I do about .. In his book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming/lays out the leadership principles that became known as TQL, or Total Quality Leadership. This had a big effect on me. It showed me how efforts to improve the process made the organization more effi-cient, while efforts to monitor the process made the organization less efficient. So, in order to make the fewest mistakes when reporting on things, we say as little as possible. This is a problem throughout the submarine force, and we worked hard to encourage the entire crew to sav what they saw, thought, believed, were skeptical about, feared, worried about, and hoped for the future. If all you need to do is what you are told, then you don't need to understand your craft. However, as your ability to make decisions increases, then you need intimate technical knowledge on which to base those decisions. It seems like a trick; we're still doing the same thing, we're just calling it something different. Yes and no. Yes, in that we will still keep the boat clean, drill, do maintenance, qualify, and the myriad other tasks that take up our time. No, in that how you look at things makes a difference. Instead of looking at a task as just a chore, look at it as an opportunity to learn more about the associated piece of equipment, the procedure, or if nothing else, about how to delegate or accomplish tasks. When you bring in something new, something that has never been seen before, you can talk about it and some will get it. On Santa Fe, we did have some chiefs who got it immediately. Senior Chief Worshek got it. Chief Larson got it. Some would get it soon; others would take longer. I discovered that what happens when you explain a change is that the crew hears what you say, but they are thinking, "Oh yeah, I know what he's talking about. That's like it was on the USS Ustafish.? They hear and think they know what you mean, but they don't. They've never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can't see in their imagination how it works. They are not being intentionally deceitful; they just are not picturing what you are picturing. the OOD was looking around nervously. This wasn't a good sign. During casualties, I would watch the eyes of the watch offi-cer. If they went down, bad. If they went to a written procedure, bad. If they looked unfocused, bad. If they were focused on the indications that would provide the necessary information for him to make the next decision, good. I entered the control room, where things were strangely calm. Surely my guys knew that if we moved out of position it would make it much harder for us to find the SEALs and for them to find us. The OOD on the bridge had already ordered "Ahead one third." looked at the digital chart. A little arrow indicated our direction of motion, and it was pointing slightly toward the beach. I thought, "We don't want to go ahead, we need to back out." So I shouted out, "That's wrong. We need to back." (This meant order a backing bell.) In the darkness, we recognized each other's voices. Sled Dog was standing quartermaster. There was a pause and silence for half a second, then he said frankly, "No, Captain, you're wrong." It stunned me, and I shut up and just started looking at the indications in the control room, including the compass repeaters Sowing the heading of the ship. I thought about what it takes for young sailor to say, "Captain, you're wrong." As I write this, the news is filled with the tragedy in Italy. On January 13, 2012, the cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground off Isola del Giglio. It appears the captain ordered a course deviation to take the ship close to the island as a nautical tribute to one of the employees. I wonder if anyone spoke up. How about the off-cer of the deck? How about the second in command? How about the helmsman, who must have seen the lights of the island less than a mile away? I sure wish some of them had had a questioning attitude. ENCOURAGE A QUESTIONING ATTITUDE OVER BLIND OBEDIENCE is a mechanism for CLARITY. ...more |
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Nov 27, 2022
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Dec 21, 2022
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Nov 27, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 178133708X
| 9781781337080
| 178133708X
| 4.00
| 4
| unknown
| Sep 11, 2022
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it was amazing
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Really good book from my good friend Rameez. I've known Rameez since the late 1990s when we were at university together in UCL and I had to protect hi
Really good book from my good friend Rameez. I've known Rameez since the late 1990s when we were at university together in UCL and I had to protect him against an overly aggressive squirrel that stepped in our path after the football training session in Regents park. I know you know what I'm talking about Rameez. Anyway, I digressed, I really liked this book because it's written in an incredibly easy to read style because Rameez uses anecdotes and stories and allegory's from films and books that he's read to make what could potentially viewed as a bit of a dry subject super super interesting. This book is essentially about pay transparency and how that could be used to build super cultures based around trust and openness. It isn't just about revealing your pay to everyone but about building a culture where pay grades and salary levels aligned to different job roles can be potentially made more transparent and what the potential implications that have on building trust in the wider organization. Anyway he explains it a billion times better in the book - strongly recommend you to read it especially if you work in HR. Here are some of the best bits from the book: films are a great form of entertainment and escapism but we underestimate the influence these stories and characters have on us. It is a concept known as “narrative transportation”. The idea that we become so involved in a storyline that even after we have finished watching the film or reading the story it influences our behaviors and attitudes. Sunny: books obviously do something very very similar :) Research from Oxford economics found that the average cost of replacing a single employee is over 30,000 pounds. This includes loss of productivity, advertising, agency fees, HR and management time. The cost goes up as we look at more technical and senior roles that take longer to recruit. People are different. They will contribute in different ways and value different things. I don't want to be forced or influence into making career choices to fit in with the perceived narrative or outcome. To establish trust in the performance management process we must completely rethink our approach. We have to change our language our process and our culture. The language we use is important and we need to shift to using more positive language and a name that doesn't imply that we can control and manage the performance of our employees. ...more |
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Sep 19, 2022
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Oct 04, 2022
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Sep 19, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1784525367
| 9781784525361
| B09D4YV91P
| 4.00
| 2
| unknown
| Sep 09, 2021
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it was amazing
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Excellent book which I'd recommend for anyone who works in a professional working environment and in particular in consulting. What I found really eff
Excellent book which I'd recommend for anyone who works in a professional working environment and in particular in consulting. What I found really effective about the book was that the key lessons that Andy talks about you can apply to life outside work as well. This is always a clinching factor for me when I read any business related books: will it help me as an individual outside work or not? This one certainly did. Here are the best bits from the book: I believe that if we focus on trying to be good at everything then we become average at everything. Giving feedback is so important and it comes with a huge responsibility to take care of the mental health of the person who's going to receive the feedback. I love the idea of sharing thoughts and ideas and holding them gently, not forcing them on others and being absolutely prepared to drop them when something more effective comes along. That way one’s ideas can help engage others and shape bigger better and more inclusive ideas. What we hear ourselves say has a dramatic impact on our mindset and this then reinforces what we continue to say and what we begin to believe and then what we choose to see and hear. I decided to try to find one thing just one thing that I respected about this man. It took some time but he was actually really good at engaging with very senior stakeholders and was super impressive in those huge meetings where one has to appear super slick and on point. I consciously focused on those strengths of his, on the area where I respected him. I verbalized this to those we worked with and made a point to hear myself say where I really valued and respected him. It didn't change the areas where I found him unreasonable, but it did seem to make him easier to work with. His attitude to me and those around me changed because he felt respected and he calmed down in those areas where he was difficult. Inevitably we risk moving towards diverse looking organizations where everyone can be successful if and only if they conform to a fixed cultural way of working that is aligned with the organization's predominant working style or culture. That culture is highly likely to exclude a huge proportion of those diverse voices, it's highly likely that one type of person will succeed in that environment and despite the forced measures and metrics it won't feel like a place where everyone can be themselves and celebrate their differences. We need to put our people first and our clients or customers first too. Clients or customers are not more important than our people. If you can't be honest, straightforward, vulnerable, respectful and always assume positive intent from your people in the same way you would with a client or a customer then why should those people move heaven and earth to support your clients or customers? Put your people first and your clients or your customers first too, don't be cheap, say thank you, cut your income before you cut the budget for the end of year party, send flowers, say hello, say happy birthday, be open and vulnerable, bring the real you as a leader to work, demonstrate your failures and learnings. ...more |
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Feb 03, 2022
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Apr 16, 2022
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Feb 03, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 1848769660
| 9781848769663
| 1848769660
| 3.95
| 655
| Apr 05, 2011
| Jan 01, 2011
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really liked it
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Another super interesting business book written by a former Olympic gold medal winning rower, Ben Hunt-Davis. The philosophy of the book it's based ar
Another super interesting business book written by a former Olympic gold medal winning rower, Ben Hunt-Davis. The philosophy of the book it's based around the simple concept: in life, in business and in sport anything you bring to the table or to the “boat” in this case needs to add value, and bring energy to the whole team add essentially “make the boat go faster”. Ben has gone on to build on this fantastic book by creating a company with the same name as the book. Highly recommended (both book and company) and here are the best bits: We can't help but have goals. Goals are just destinations and whatever we're doing with our lives right now, our actions are taking us somewhere. For example has your workplace got the cultural environment where it's OK, the norm to get praise and recognition? To have honest conversations and challenge each other to make the boat go faster? Sunny: this is very similar to the brutiful conversations concept that I've co-created :) One of the crews visual reminders was so powerful that it warrants a section in its own right. The crew used a wall in the boatshed to Blu-tack up evidence that they could win. They kept adding to it and adding to it. There were pictures, there were graphs and stats showing the force time curves achieved on the rowing machines, showing improvements. There were write ups of performance reviews, showing key learnings. Imagine the power of all that evidence? Imagine how that bolstered their belief? What would be the equivalent for you? “when all is black: one more”. In other words if you are pushing yourself physically so hard that you are about to black out, surely you can take it just one more stroke. Sunny: what we call “ICEing it up”. This is based off the Iron Cowboy, James Lawrence. In a team we can learn from others, copy the good habits and profit from their mistakes without having to go through the pain ourselves. We tend to judge our commitment levels by our intentions and feelings, but we judge other peoples commitment levels by their behaviors. Kate Richardson-Walsh GB hockey gold medalist and team captain calls this “stamping on the fires” early. Sunny: this is what I call BC level one or level two. Having those difficult conversations early to nip issues in the bud rather than let them grow into BC level 9 or 10 where the effect can be more disastrous. In the aviation and medical industries junior staff are trained to voice their concerns in any forum because there are irrevocable consequences of flying with no fuel or amputating the wrong leg. Do they talk in quick bullet points or in detail? Do they talk about needing a clear picture or being on the same wavelength? Sunny: this is exactly what the reason for “dream team” is all about. Understanding your audience and then adapting your style to them. I now knew that sleep was crucial, I knew that eating properly was crucial and I knew that being able to talk problems through was crucial. It was a bell curve shape which means your performance actually goes up to start with when you feel under a bit of pressure. After a certain point your performance plateaus. When even more pressure is piled on your performance plumets. In other words there is a “Goldilocks zone” with pressure: you don't want too much but you don't also want to have none at all. Have you ever messed up because you've been too blasé? Without a bit of adrenaline pumping you've had a lackluster today? HRV, how the heart is resting between each beat column which is a key indicator of pressure. If your organization expects people to pull all-nighters, go to four different time zones in a week, and run marathons at the weekend, then cold hard data can show that worshipping “hero behaviors” is actually barking up the wrong tree. It is damaging performance not enhancing it. Making “bounce back ability” into a habit is incredibly useful. Sunny: we call this “A to the P” or the mindset which differentiates “amateurs” and “professionals”. Amateurs tend to ruminate over the mistakes a great deal but professionals have the ability to bounce back and carry on as though they hardly made any mistakes. Personally I believe that's one of the huge mindset differences that enables individuals to play at a professional level. I don't think this is articulated or discussed enough. Brian talked about Shun Fujimoto in the Olympic gymnastic final in Montreal in 1976. During his floor routine Shun fractured his kneecap. Japan and the Soviet Union were battling out for gold, so Shun carried on. He did the pommel horse and did a perfect dismount. He finished on the rings and again did a perfect dismount: from a high of eight feet. Not only that he achieved a personal best of 9.7 despite dislocating his knee on the dismount. Japan won gold and Fujimoto walked unaided to get his medal. ...more |
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Jan 24, 2022
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Jan 24, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0787947237
| 9780787947231
| 0787947237
| 3.93
| 315
| Apr 1994
| Jun 15, 2002
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really liked it
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I really liked this book. four stars because it got a little bit boring in the middle but then it really picked up at the end once again after a brill
I really liked this book. four stars because it got a little bit boring in the middle but then it really picked up at the end once again after a brilliant start. The book, as it says on the tin, is a comprehensive guide to helping you facilitate groups of individuals in a professional working environment. Some really good hints and tips in this book. Here are some of the best bits that I have shamelessly copied directly from the book: This makes sense from a risk management perspective. For example if you run away from an apparent threat that turns out to be nothing, you just out of breath. But if you fail to run away from a threat that's real, you may end up permanently out of breath. I've adopted the mutual learning approach from the work of argyris and schon , who developed it and called it model 2, and Robert Putnam, Diana McLean Smith, and Phil McArthur, who adapted it and called it the mutual learning model. Overtime, I realized that requiring teams to make all their decisions using the same decision making rule, no matter what that rule is, fails to take into account the complexity of teams. Some decisions don't require consensus to be implemented effectively. And there are times too when even high performing teams are unable to reach consensus and the team needs to do a decision to move forward. What it means to be accountable and accountability: You willingly accept the responsibilities inherent in your position to serve the well being of the organization. You're expected to serve the well being of the client and the larger organization or context in which it functions. You expect that your name will be publicly linked to your actions, words or reactions. You expect to be asked to explain your beliefs, decisions, commitments, or actions to your team and others you work with. When you operate from a unilateral control mindset, you may try to hold others accountable without making yourself accountable. Or you may not even ask team members to appear accountable because you don't want them to hold you accountable. When your mindset is mutual learning, not only do you want to hold others accountable but you also want to be held accountable. You don't see accountability as a burden but rather as a way to honor commitments you've made that will help you and others achieve results. A key principle for ensuring accountability is that all are responsible for sharing their information directly with those they want to hear it. One of the mutual learning principles is to move towards the differences. As Aristotle wrote in the nicomachean ethics: getting angry is easy. But to get angry with the right person, in the right way, for the right reasons, at the right time. That is not easy. Good facilitation technique identify interests: ask group members to complete this sentence as many times as possible: “regardless of the specifics of any solution we develop it needs to be one that xxxxxxxx ” ...Record the answers in a single list of interests. If people keep identifying positions instead of interests ask them: “what is it about your solution that is important to you? This helps them to identify their underlying interests. (super powerful question) Just like a real ladder the higher you climb the more dangerous it becomes. We climb up the ladder of inference higher than we need to when we make an inference that is further removed from the data than necessary. I call these high level inferences. You probably seen others make these high level inferences. Imagine that you make a suggestion for how to improve a project and a group member responds: “you're just trying to make me fail”. When you make high level inferences your final inference is supported by many other intermediary inferences. Like a House of Cards if one of those intermediary inferences is false the logic collapses and the final inference can't be supported. We have a clinical term for people who routinely make certain types of very high level negative inferences with little or no data: paranoid. A good way of making sure that you've understood something: 1.observe. What did I see in her. 2.Make a meaning: using a mutual learning approach what do I think it means? 3.Choose: why is this worth or not worth saying something about? 4.Test observation: James, I think I saw or I heard you say XY or Z. Did I understand that right or did I miss something? 5.Test meeting: I'm thinking that this is what you meant and this is my understanding. What do you think? 6.Jointly design next steps: I think it would be helpful to do this as a form of next step. What do you think? You can tell when there isn't a good fit. When a group is inappropriately made to work like a team, members don't see the need to attend team meetings. They consider them a waste of time. When they do attend they get frustrated being asked to solve peoples’ problems that don't significantly involve them and to spend time deciding how to work together on issues that don't require the level of coordination being asked of them. The widely cited four stage Tuchman model of group development. Based on his review of 50 studies of mostly therapy groups, tuchman identified 4 development stages: forming, storming, norming and performing and then he later added a fifth stage adjourning. If you work with people directly and have concerns about their work, you are accountable for sharing your concerns with them directly, whether they have more less or the same amount of authority as you. A natural response to ambiguity and confusion as they try to impose some order. The challenge is to become comfortable with ambiguity and not impose order prematurely by rushing to inference and diagnosis. Diagnosing behavior prematurely reduces the probability that you understand important aspects of the group situation. One reason group behavior seems ambiguous at times is that you're observing a complex pattern, but the group has displayed only a part of it. In the nicomachean ethics Aristotle defined the challenge of dealing with emotions this way: anyone can become angry, that is easy. But to be angry with the right person to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way: that is not easy. The principle of the mutual learning approach is to move towards conflict and differences. By publicly identifying the conflict in the group and engaging people in a conversation about it you can help the group explore how people contribute to the conflict, how they're feeling about it and how to manage it. This is really aligned with the elephant in the room workshop and the brutiful conversations concept. As a developmental facilitator you can help group participants respond effectively by reducing the defensive thinking associated with their hot buttons. This first involves working with them to identify the trigger and then helping them reframe their thinking. Some people find it difficult to respond effectively when a person, especially someone with less power or authority, raises his or her voice at them in anger. Granted, raising your voice yelling is not a particularly skillful way of communicating and those who do so are still accountable for their behavior, but people whose hot buttons are triggered by this behavior believe that a person yelling at them is showing disrespect for their official position on their personal dignity. You might say: from your frown and head shaking I'm thinking that you're frustrated with me, am I correct? If the member agrees you can start to identify the cause of the frustration. I don't mean to do anything that will frustrate you, but I might be doing something I'm not aware of. Can you tell me what I said or did that lead you to get frustrated with me. There are times when your intuition tells you something is wrong, but you can't identify any group behavior to make or diagnose or have stopped having identified the problem you may have doubts about how to intervene. When this happens consider asking the group for help. “I'm stunned. I'm stumped. I think the group is having a problem but I can't figure out what it is and I also can't point to any behavior that leads me to conclude this. Does anyone else see something that I'm not seeing?” Although it's not helpful to the group if you intervene like this frequently using it occasionally can use the group skill to allow you to see things you are missing and also shows vulnerability and transparency on your side. ...more |
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May 30, 2021
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Jul 14, 2021
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May 30, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 0787986399
| 9780787986391
| 0787986399
| 3.99
| 348
| Jan 2000
| Jul 27, 2007
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really liked it
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I thought this was a pretty useful book overall. I really liked some of the concepts about executive coaching that Mary speaks about. One of the key s
I thought this was a pretty useful book overall. I really liked some of the concepts about executive coaching that Mary speaks about. One of the key strategies for coaching executive that I learned from this was a triple approach of ensuring that you can make sure that you're working with the executive to understand what you can do to support them at a personal level. What you can do secondly to support them at their program or project level. And then thirdly what you executive coach can do to coach the executive at a company wide level so that they try to increase their brand in the organization. Setting up a way in which you can track against these three challenges and be able to give feedback in the moment sometimes and join the executive in the meetings is a key to making sure that that executive is aligned and on cue to hitting the targets that you've specified at the start of your engagement. There were lots of other models in this book but for me the importance of having backbone and having those difficult conversations but doing it with empathy is a key part of beautiful conversations and something that the book also espouses.Anyway here are some of the best bits from the book: They also suffer from a belief that they should not ask for help, which exacerbates their lonely at the top experience. Coaches of top executives needs to treat these matters with seriousness and without being intimidated by the issues themselves. The coaching method outlined in this book follows four straightforward stages: the initial contract, planning contact, live action interventions and then debriefing. It's a very simple method. Backbone is about saying what your position is, whether it is popular or not. Heart is staying in relationships and reaching out even when that relationship is in conflict. I told bill in the presence of his team that it was time to name what is clear and unclear and what do we need? Also said that it felt uncomfortable, not because they were doing anything wrong because the situation was by nature unclear. It could also mean that they were on the verge of a burst of creativity because original thinking starts when they are willing to stop hanging onto familiar territory and start moving out into the unknown. I told bill to hang out in the confusion and hold less tightly to their needs to have clarity quickly. This is a bit like the concept created by Danny Meyer, the restaurateur, which is about loving the problem. I admired their development of a fluid structure that serviced and anticipated changes. And I was glad that we all had continued to manage the ambiguity by staying in conversation, distinguishing what is known and not known, clarifying plans to move ahead, and stating the needs that people had of others. Good ways of dealing with anger: identify the trigger to your reactivity. Then figure out your typical reaction to that trigger. Choose an alternative response to get you started down a different path. Same track with the goal you have for yourself in the session. You also have to be willing to enter a void before getting to the other side. Increasing your tolerance means strengthening and emotional muscle that you can hold on in that void. It's more than doing any specific action. However even an incremental increase in tolerance can provide a geometric gain in bringing newness to the situation either a dramatically different resistance, or a breakthrough with the client or both. Once you have identified your reactions you can do the last two steps. Tell the leader your direct experience and link it to her work world. You might say for example I hear you talk about your successes but I'm not seeing the connection to the topic we're discussing. Frankly I'm starting to guessing why you're doing it. Maybe your team tries to second guess your you sometimes too of course you can always take a chance when you use immediacy. You could be way off or two directly on target. You could offend your client. You could scare her off by getting too intense too soon. In the best case you could catch your clients attention in a new way and engender an invitation from the leader to get more of that kind of feedback from you without using immediacy, it's impossible to get to the heart of some issues. Immediacy helps a client identify her knee jerk patterns and helps her make new choices it takes tremendous presence to do this as a coach using the ability to observe patterns of interaction and reactivity in your client while you are also participating and interacting with her. When you do have the presence to stop the action conversation to report your observations and reactions, you evoke more presence from your client. The trance of her reactivity may break long enough for her to see herself in a new way. This can be a tremendous gift to your client. It requires courage to speak on the part of the coach and courage to listen on the part of the client. Interactional fields take a life of their own even as individuals in an organization, and go. I once worked for a restaurant that maintained the same level of service and quality through several years. Though they aspire to be world class theywe're good but not exceptional. The managers and 70% of the staff left and newcomers took their place. The forcefield remained the same: good but not excellent. There were factors in place affecting system that were more enduring than the individuals within it. What do these interactional webs have to do with coaching? Practically everything. First it's critical to know how organizational systems affect you: the ones you are in and Co create. Reactivity also shows where you are particularly vulnerable in a system and respond with kneejerk habits. When you maintain a self differentiated presence you can feel the effects of a system to avoid reacting automatically. The more you develop the four approaches to presents the greater is your effectiveness in maintaining your equilibrium in the systems force field. Although Barbara talked about excellence she did not insist on behaviors that would get their. She didn't challenge the actions or inactions of team members leading to their mediocrity. That was her side of the avoiding. The new team members avoided challenging each other to higher performance. Homeostasis is a fancy word for the forces keeping the system at its current level of functioning, thus preserving the established patterns At first it's easy to feel gloomy about systems: the thing is bigger than all of us. however there is a common proverb of system thinking: the unit and focus for change as a system and the agent of change the individual. New line leaders get this kind of immediate feedback so rarely that it's gets their attention and test the cliche they often used but do not live by: I don't just want another yes man. I call it the stick my finger in their chest moment which can be delivered at once boldly and respectfully, directly engaging the presence of the client. He may step into the moment seeking what information and learning about himself. When this happens he will say something to the effect of : this is the kind of feedback I can do something about. The three necessary conditions for a successful coaching contract are the willingness of the leader to :number one seem self honestly number to own his part in the patterns of play and number 3 receptive to immediate feedback. Goals: the business results needed. Find out what Team behaviours needs to be different to accomplish the results. Explore what personal leadership challenges the executive faces in improving those results and team behaviours. Identify specific behaviour is the leading needs to enhance or change in himself. When executive connects improvements and his leading to specific work goals he also builds in his own biofeedback system. Management competencies code on Strategic Thinking, customer relations, vision project management, facilitating meetings, decision making, utilising staff in change agent role, promoting conversations, coaching, thoughts management, advocacy, team coherence comma systems functioning. ...more |
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Apr 17, 2021
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Jul 10, 2021
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Apr 17, 2021
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| 2960133528
| 9782960133523
| B00ICS9VI4
| 4.21
| 6,084
| Feb 09, 2014
| Feb 09, 2014
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it was amazing
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I thought this was a super impressive book. The book is about teal organizations. Teal is a greenie blue turquoise type color. It describes a progress
I thought this was a super impressive book. The book is about teal organizations. Teal is a greenie blue turquoise type color. It describes a progression from the shareholder value gaining, profit gaining, organization to an org which essentially is able to self manage, have a lot more trust amongst the people, enable individuals to make more mistakes and feel more psychologically safer making those mistakes etc etc. The book gives examples of quite a few different organizations which are already heading in this in this direction and the one which really stood out for me was the Dutch home care organization called Burtzoorg. Basically the premise is that you allow individuals to manage themselves in non egalitarian non hierarchical structures where the teams essentially set the rules. Anyway enough of me rambling here are some of the best bits from the book: Change: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Richard buckminster Fuller Change: anthropologist Margaret Mead once said: never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has. Success: The goal in life is to get ahead, to succeed in socially acceptable ways, to play out best the cards we are dealt with. Innovation: One of orange’s shadows is innovation gone mad. Orange is a type of organization which is after success. with most of our basic needs taken care of, business increasingly tries to create needs, feeding the illusion of more stuff we don't really need: more possessions the latest fashion, a more youthful body, will ultimately make us happy and hold. We increasingly come to see that much of this economy based on fabricated needs is unsustainable from a financial and ecological perspective. We've reached a stage where we often pursue growth for growth sake, a condition that in medical terminology would simply be called cancer. Roles: Don Beck a student of development psychologist Claire graves uses an insightful analogy: if evolution were music, stages of development would be musical notes, vibrating at certain frequencies. Humans would be like strings capable of playing many different notes. The ranges of notes they can play depends on the range of tensions they have learned to accommodate. Complex change: The trigger for vertical growth always comes in the form of a major life challenge that cannot be resolved from the current worldview. When we face such a challenge we can take one of two approaches: we can grow into a more complex perspective that offers a solution to our problem, or we can try to ignore the problem sometimes cling more strongly to our existing worldview. Humanity: consciousness: The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human. John naisbitt Fear: fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions. Hafiz Know thyself: the ultimate goal in life is not to be successful or loved, but to become the truest expression of ourselves, to live into authentic selfhood, to honor our birthright gifts and callings and be of service to humanity in our world. In a teal organization, life is seen as a journey of personal and collective unfolding towards our true nature. Burtzoorg: in the 1990s the health insurance system in netherlands came up with a logical idea: why not group the self employed nurses into organizations? After all their obvious economies of scale and skill. when one nurse is on vacation, sick or simply trying to get a good night's sleep, someone else can take over. Teamwork: the question is not how you can make better rules, but how you can support teams in finding the best solution. How can you strengthen the possibilities of the team members so that they need the least amount of direction setting from above. Jos de blok Founder of Burtzoorg Working speed: when you operate a machine they told him, there is an optimal psychological rhythm that is the least tiring for the body. In the old system with the hourly targets, they had always intentionally slowed down. They gave themselves some slack in case management increased the targets. Fear: Ultimately it comes down to this: fear is a great inhibitor. When organizations are built not on implicit mechanisms of fear but on structures and practices that breach trust and responsibility, extraordinary and unexpected things start to happen. Self management: Valve a Seattle game software company whose 400 employees work entirely based on self management principles, have pushed the physical fluid one step further. All employees have desks on wheels. Every day some people will roll their desk to a new place, depending on the projects they join or leave. All it takes is unplugging the cables from the wall in one place and plugging them in somewhere else. Education: In grades 8-9 and ten students have a class called “challenge”. In Germany. They are invited to delve into some inner potential that lies dormant. During the year they organize and prepare for a special three week session where they alone or in small groups will challenge themselves to step out of their comfort zone. One group of four students prepared a three week survival camp deep in the words, where they lived in the shelter they built and on food they gathered. Daniel a 16 year old extroverted youngster found his challenge in a three week silent meditation in a monastery. A music teacher challenged a group of children to do intense music practice 8 hours a day for three weeks in an abandoned old farm. Other students biked through Germany together with little money having to ask for accommodation and food along the way. The experience is often taxing but students rave about their accomplishments and the personal growth they experienced, confronting their fears and growing beyond them. Feedback: a person puts in a sensory deprivation sound the room after only a short amount of time reports experiencing visual hallucinations, paranoia and a depressed mood. Put simply, without outside stimulus we go mad. I believe something very similar happens when we are deprived of feedback related to our work. feedback: Because feedback is exchanged so freely, some organizations: favi for instance: don't hold any formal appraisal discussions. Organizational structure: Clouds form and then go away because atmospheric conditions temperatures, and humidity cause molecules of water to either condense or vaporize. Organization should be the same: structures need to appear and disappear based on the forces that are acting in the organization. When people are free to act they are able to sense those forces and act in ways that fit best with reality. Self organization: the orpheus Chamber Orchestra has operated since its founding in 1972 on entirely self managing principles. The orchestra with residents in new york's Carnegie Hall, has earned rave reviews and is widely regarded as one of the world's greatest orchestras. It operates without any conductor. Musicians from the orchestra make all artistic decisions, from choosing their repertoire to deciding how a piece ought to be played. Meetings: “sounds true” a Colorado based business that disseminates the teaching of spiritual Masters through audio and video recordings, books and online seminars. In the early days Tami Simon the founder and CEO of sounds true, brought her dog along to the office. When the business expanded and employees were hired, it didn't take long for some of them to ask if they could bring their dogs to work to. Tami couldn't think of a reason to refuse . Today it is not rare for a meeting to take place with two or three dogs lying at peoples feet's. Something special happens within the presence of dogs, colleagues notice. animals tend to ground us, to bring out the better sides of our nature. Silence: Four times a year at heiligenfeld, there is a mindfulness day. A day that patients and staff spend in silence. Patients are invited to remains entirely silently while the staff speaks only when needed, in whispers. There are no talking therapy sessions that day. Instead other forms of therapy take place: walks in the word, painting or creative activities for instance. Information sessions help patients prepare for the day and there are emergency talking places for patients who feel overwhelmed by the silence. The majority of the patients loved the experience of many ask us to organize this day more often. Roughly a third of the patients are confronted with some of their shadows and find the experience difficult. If silence was hard for you, you got lucky. People have enjoyed it had a good day . But now you've got some great material for therapy. It's also a great day that employees look forward to. Collaborating in silence brings a special quality to relationships during colleagues. It requires a new level of mindfulness, listening not to what colleagues say but to their presence, emotions and intentions. Office space: architecture: we can learn much about an organization from simply looking at its office space. Churchill once said we shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us. Control: the architects refused: windows don't open in corporate buildings because that would interfere with centralized temperature control and because windows that open are more expensive. On a deeper level the matter of windows opening or not is revealing of our relationship at work with nature and with ourselves . How far have we taken the madness of control when we seal ourselves off from even a breath of fresh air? Competition: when an organization truly lives for its purpose there is no competition. Competition: Patagonia is famous for having run full page ads which read: don't buy this jacket. The ads were part of its common thread partnership. The common thread partnership takes a serious stab at reducing repairing and reusing clothes as well as recycling them. Sensing: a transformative experience happened for me when I nearly crashed an airplane. I was a student pilot and shortly into my solo flight my low voltage light came on. Every other instrument was telling me all is well so I just ignored it, just like we do in organizational life all the time, when one loan instrument a human sense senses something that no one else does. Ignoring a key instrument proved to be a very bad decision when flying an airplane and helped catalyze my search for organizational approaches that don't suffer from the same blindness: how can an organization fully harness each of its human instruments without outvoting the low voltage light? beauty: solution: when I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful I know it is wrong . Richard buckminster Fuller Planning: agile: in an emergent world we can no longer stand at the end of something we visualize in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our intent with a willingness to be involved in discovery. The world asks that we focus less on how we can coerce something to make it conform to our decisions and focus more on how we can engage with one another, how we can enter into the experience then notice what comes forth. It asks that we participate more than plan. Agile: meetings: roles and responsibilities: clients can participate in workshops to listen in to the purpose: all hands meetings can be streamed live over the Internet or like Patagonia, companies can choose to film their key production processes and publish them online. Holacracyone has developed an Internet type software called glass frog that captures people's roles accountabilities, the structure of the organization meeting notes an metrics. Traditionally this kind of data is deemed sensitive and restricted to employees of the organization. Holacracyone has chosen to put everything on line. Anybody from the outside can look at who holds what responsibility, reading the last meeting notes or take a peek at the company's internal numbers. changing the system: Can a middle manager put teal practices in place for the Department he is responsible for? When I'm asked this question as much as I would like to believe the opposite, I tell people not to waste their energy trying. Experience shows the efforts to bring teal practices into subsets of organizations bear fruit, at best, only for a short while. If the CEO and the top leadership see the world through Amber orange lenses, they will consider the teal experiment frivolous if not outright dangerous. rules systems policies procedures: whenever something goes wrong, whenever a colleague makes stupid decision or abuses the system, there will be loud cries to put control mechanisms in place to prevent the problem from happening again. And for that reason, overtime most large organizations end up with expense policies, travel guidelines, dress codes, company car policies, client entertainment policies, supply agreement procedures, vacation policies, mobile phone and information technology policies, email and Internet usage policies etc etc Boldness: whatever do you or dream you can do begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it. Johan Wolfgang von goethe. new consciousness: A practical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the western mechanistic paradigm. Stanislav grof change: examine all that you have been told , dismiss that which insults your soul. Walt Whitman management structures: so much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work. Peter Drucker gross domestic product: GDP: at present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP. Paul hawken Purpose: vision: it's conceivable that in the future the evolutionary purpose, rather than the organization, will become the entity around which people gather. A specific purpose will attract people and organisations and fluid and changing constellations, according to the need of the moment. ...more |
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Mar 12, 2021
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Mar 29, 2021
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Mar 12, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 1422102823
| 9781422102824
| 1422102823
| 3.92
| 2,650
| Dec 01, 2004
| Oct 01, 2006
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it was amazing
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I really like this book. The very basic premise is around the concept which asks you to question what would precipitate or emerge if you took two or t
I really like this book. The very basic premise is around the concept which asks you to question what would precipitate or emerge if you took two or three or four or many completely disperate ideas and scrunched them into one. Hence the front page of the book which shows the little mosquito standing next to a giant elephant. Lots of really good examples in the book and some of the best bits I've listed below: The name I have given this phenomenon, the Medici effect , comes from the remarkable burst of creativity in 15th century Italy. The medici's were a banking family in Florence who funded creators from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures. Together they forged a new world based on new ideas, what became known as the Renaissance. As a result the city became the epicenter of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day. Innovators often tend to be self taught. They tend to be the types that educate themselves intensely. And they often have a broad learning experience, having excelled in one field and learned another. Broad education and self education, then appeared to be 2 keys to learn differently. Thomas Kuhn points out in his Seminal book the structures of scientific revolutions that almost always the men who achieve fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they changed. Forcing a breakdown of associative barriers means directing the minds to take unusual paths while thinking about a situation, issue or problem. One of the most effective ways of accomplishing that is to perform an assumption reversal. By reversing assumptions the mind is encouraged to view a situation from a completely different perspective , clearing the path to the intersection. The intersection is this one place where the different diverse ideas can be scrunched together to create something beautiful. renaissance man is someone that can see trends and patterns and integrate what he knows. To me the modern renaissance man is curious, interested in different things. You have to be willing to waste time on things that are not directly relevant to your work because you are curious. But then you are able to sometimes unconsciously, integrate them back into your work. he believes that such insights can come from fields other than just business. for instance he reads close to 100 books a year and none of them are about business. A few months back a group of engineers were looking for ways to safely and efficiently remove ice from power lines during ice storms but they were stonewalled. They decided to take a thought walk around the hotel. One of the engineers came back with a jar of honey he had purchased in a gift shop. He suggested putting honey pots on top of each pole. He said that this would attract bears. The bears would climb the poles to get the honey and their climate would cause the poles to sway and the ice would vibrate off the wires. Working with the principle of a vibration they got the idea of bringing in helicopters to hover over the lines. There hovering vibrated the ice off the lines. Charles Darwin after having proposed the groundbreaking theory of evolution , he developed the dead wrong theory of pangenesis, which suggested that acquired traits, such as stronger muscles, could be passed on to offspring. Or look at Sabeer Bathia. He founded the email service Hotmail, which became successful because of a novel marketing device: a signup link sent automatically with each email. Taking notes in a car is a bit more problematic. Nevertheless some of the best ideas strike us while we are driving alone. Try using a tape recorder. Most important than keeping notebooks handy is actually using them. Getting used to recording ideas, thoughts and insights requires commitment. Once you develop this habit, though, you will wonder how you ever made it through the day without it. Sunny: a powerful way to galvanise intersectional ideas is to get two people from two different professions to meet and discuss how they can help problems from each others jobs using learnings from their own. The key to winning is to stay disciplined. Make sure to bet big when you have good cards and stay low when you don't. Because it is all about winning when you win and losing less when you lose. What does it mean to acknowledge fear? For starters you have to come to terms with what is at stake it admit that you might lose it. Often this means that you must be comfortable enough to know that if everything is lost you can still move on. ...more |
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Jan 16, 2021
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Feb 13, 2021
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Jan 16, 2021
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| 0071410945
| 0639785381914
| 0071410945
| 4.05
| 4,978
| 1940
| Feb 11, 2003
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it was amazing
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Pound for pound and page for page this has got to be probably one of the best books I've ever read in terms of insights and ideas that it's generated
Pound for pound and page for page this has got to be probably one of the best books I've ever read in terms of insights and ideas that it's generated for me. I often mark with a dot on the top right of the top left corner of a page an interesting point which I read on that page. And although this is a very small book this book was practically littered with dots and underlined sections. The book is essentially about the process with which we can go about producing ideas. In a nutshell James Webb young talks about having a very diverse universe with which too collide and contrast and compare and crunch ideas together , another book calls it the Medici effect, but essentially a platform where you're able to hold desperate ideas and let those ideas brew together in a juicy hot Stew. Once you give those ideas time it's important to be able to set up a system that allows you to capture the key insights from them but also be able to go back to those key insights with ease and start to make correlations. The next bit is interesting in that it suggests and encourages us to step away from the idea and let our subconscious take over. One thing I've always found absolutely fascinating is the tendency I have to generate ideas when I'm reading some boring book which doesn't really interest me and my subconscious starts working away and starts to create connections and starts to ferment the ideas. Once that Eureka moment happens and those connections are made you essentially have the idea in principle and then it's about activating and really bringing that idea to life with some sort of pragmatic and practical implementation of it. One of the truly fascinating realizations in the book is the example of the kaleidoscope which James Webb young introduces. He simply says that a kaleidoscope is like this hothouse of idea production. You put a kaleidoscope spoke to your eyes and twist a couple of times and the different colored chips of see through plastic and glass inside form beautiful new patterns. Essentially that's what new ideas are. A re framing and a re formatting of previously existing patterns of chips but see now through a different point of view and a different lens. I thought this is an absolutely astonishing and beautiful analogy to describe the production of ideas. Anyway enough talking for me here are some of the best bits from the book: The speculator is the speculative type of person. And the distinguishing characteristic of this type according to pereto, is that he is constantly preoccupied with the possibilities of new combinations. Particular bits of knowledge or nothing. They are made up of what doctor Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything. An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements. To a mind which is quick to see relationships several ideas will occur, fruitful for advertising, about this use of words as symbols. Is this then, why the change of one word in a headline can make as much as 50% difference in advertising response? Consequently the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas. That by no possibility can one of them be taken before the proceeding was completed, if an idea is to be produced. The first of these steps is for the mind to gather its raw material. In advertising an idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people with general knowledge about life and events. The construction of an advertisement is the construction of a new pattern in this kaleidoscopic world in which we live. The more of the elements of that world which are stored away in that pattern making machine, the mind, the more the chances are increased for the production of new and striking combinations or ideas. And her a strange element comes in . This is that fact sometimes yield up there meaning quicker when you do not scan them to directly, too literally, . You remember the winged Messenger whose wings could only be seen when glanced at obliquely? It is like that. In fact it is almost like listening for the meaning instead of looking at it. When creative people are in this stage of the process they get their reputation for absent mindedness. As you go through this part of the process two things will happen. First little tentative or partial ideas will come to. Put these down on paper immediately. The mind to has a second wind. In the third stage you make absolutely no effort of any direct nature. You drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can. And it was while I was folding up that copy of the eagle and putting it away for later reading that something came into my mind. I have had this happen before: I can puzzle over a thing until I am in a state of utter confusion, give it up and then suddenly have the answer leap into my mind without any apparent reason at all. In summary here the five stages of the book. First the gathering of the raw materials both the materials of your immediate problem and the materials which come from a constant enrichment of your store of general knowledge. Second the working over of these materials in your mind. Third the incubating stage where you let something beside the conscious mind do the work of synthesis. 4th the actual birth of the idea, the eureka I have at stage. And finally 5th the final shaping and development of the idea to practical usefulness. but you can also enormously expand your experience vicariously. It was the author of Saad Harker I believe who had never been to South America yet wrote a good adventure book about it. I'm convinced however that you gather this vicarious experience best not when you are boning up for it for an immediate purpose, but when you're pursuing it as an end in itself. still another point I might elaborate on a little is about words. We tend to forget that words are themselves ideas. They might be called ideas in a state of suspended animation. When the words are mastered the ideas tend to come alive again. ...more |
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Dec 27, 2020
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Feb 05, 2021
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Dec 27, 2020
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| 0071450130
| 9780071450133
| 0071450130
| 3.94
| 250
| Dec 11, 2002
| Jan 18, 2005
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really liked it
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Pretty impressive book about a culture that has been created within the Navy seals who are relatively well known and recognised as legend and I guess
Pretty impressive book about a culture that has been created within the Navy seals who are relatively well known and recognised as legend and I guess there must be a lot of myth that surrounds them but who knows what the reality is behind how some of their operations are executed. This book deep dives into some of the cultural and organisational facets and structure of the seal organisation as a whole but also what it takes to become an elite seal member at an individual level. At a fundamental level it clearly involves a great deal of discipline, self negotiation with fear, self introspection, a never say die attitude, the ability to work things out no matter what, teamwork, incredible endurance and ultimately a mental superiority that I guess a very few individuals, but the elite in the world, possess. Here are some of the best bits from the book: I was in the Middle East with a platoon when the platoon commander came into my tent with some bad news. We don't have all the ammunition were supposed to have, he told me. Some of it that was supposed to come in on the flight that morning never arrived. I was concerned but he interrupted me. I've already called the unit that was supposed to send it he continued. I have two of my guys going to the airstrip in case it was accidentally sent. In the meantime, the special forces company in town can lend us what we need. In either case we should know where our ammo is shortly. And we will still have what we need in case we get tasked with the mission. There it was. There was no complaining. No simply dumping of a problem. What my platoon commander was really doing was informing me that he was taking care of a problem. And there is no better indicator of leadership than someone who's willing to solve a problem. Deciding not to move because it's the best choice is not the same thing as doing nothing out of fear. It still a decision. How do you reach such a decision? Try to anticipate these situations. Make the decision before the situation actually happens. Then when the situation does happen, remember what you had already decided to do. And trust that what you had previously decided to do was correct. The importance of visualisation. Finally, each participant must know that there is a process in place to evaluate each participants contribution to the overall success or failure of the mission. Again this doesn't mean encouraging personal achievement at the expense of the mission : it means making sure that each team member knows that if another member isn't doing his or her part to achieve the missions goal, the slacker will be held accountable. These conditions can exist only if a structure has been put in place that, on the one hand that gives its members responsibility for achieving the missions / goals and on the other hand enforces accountability. The SEAL organisation promotes a culture that emphasises the needs to aggressively search for and test new solutions and to adapt to and overcome new environments. But if you want to be a great leader in a great organisation, the kind that makes things happen, you'll soon learn that the first thing you need to do is to develop a team that is accountable, capable, and motivated. The seals to rely on supremely effective teams and masterful leadership to build their teams and accomplished their teams. Do the same in your organisation. Less structure and more communication doesn't necessarily add up to success. They often add up to just the opposite: a mess. Communication is the transfer of information. And information is valuable only if it can be processed. The fact that several US intelligence agencies had information that might have implied that September 11th was about to occur but weren't able to process the mountain of data in time to act is unfortunate evidence of that Maxim. The more authority you assume, the more you need someone who is assigned to tell you the truth. This is because the more important you become the more others are apt to tell you what you want to hear. Yes Sir. Cinderblocks.com sounds like a real money maker. No Sir. Everyone completely understands why slashing their pay checks by 10% is completely unrelated to your new BMW purchase. Find a tough soul who will stick it to you; tell him he is your monitor on how things are going. ...more |
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Oct 15, 2020
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Oct 27, 2020
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Oct 15, 2020
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Paperback
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| 0316256579
| 9780316256575
| 0316256579
| 3.90
| 18,149
| Nov 03, 2015
| Dec 22, 2015
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it was amazing
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Yes excellent book about the importance of body language and posture and how that can have positive beneficial effects on your mindset and ultimately
Yes excellent book about the importance of body language and posture and how that can have positive beneficial effects on your mindset and ultimately your behaviour also. I'm going to link this into a new concept which I'm thinking of developing which I think is critical for teams around the importance of presence. One aspect that I've learned from this book is the importance of body language. Another key part of this “presence” methodology will be the importance of being able to focus on the power of now and not be either too remorseful about what's happened in the past or too anxious about what's going to happen in the future. I don't think there will be any surprise if you found that some of the best teams show visibly the type of presence that Amy cuddy speaks about in this books in terms of body language but also the type of mind presence. They are fully and mentally there “now”. Anyway enough of my rambling, here are some of the best bits from the book: In most situations I find there is an opening if we are attentive enough to see it. But it is also too easy for us to miss. I have been in so many negotiations where one side signals an opening or even makes a concession and the other side does not see it simply because they are not really paying attention. Whether it is a marital argument or a budget disagreement in the office, it is so easy for us to be distracted, to be thinking about the past or worrying about the future. Yet it is only in the present moment when we can intentionally change the direction of the conversation towards an agreement. The concept of abstract thinking is itself abstract and the benefits of being a good abstract thinker may not be clear. But let me put this into a social evaluative context. In a stressful negotiation you are required to listen to and integrate multiple ideas and opinions, some of which you've never heard before, and effectively respond to them. Taking in various divergent chunks of information, extracting their essence and integrating them in a way that makes sense, quickly, is absolutely a fundamental element of presence under pressure, from the classroom to the boardroom and everywhere in between. Our primary mode of relinquishing presence is by leaving the body and retreating into the mind: that ever calculating self evaluating seething cauldron of thoughts predictions anxieties, judgements and incessant repeat of experiences about experience itself. Introverts tend to have qualities that very effectively facilitate leadership and entrepreneurship such as the capacity to focus for long periods of time. The people who have written about personal values that matter to them have had significantly lower levels of the hormone then the other group. In fact the self-affirmation group experienced no increase in cortisol at all. Affirming what we might call their authentic selves: reminding themselves of their most valued strengths, protected them from anxiety. When you do engage your authentic best self, it pays off and organisations can play a critical role in making it safe for employees to do just that. In a study conducted by professors Dan Cable, Francesca Gino, and Bradley Staats, participants were encouraged to begin a series of work tasks by thinking about their individualities. When they did that, they felt more strongly that they could be who they really are. As a result they gained more satisfaction from the tasks and also performed more effectively and made fewer errors. The link between anxiety and self absorption is bi-directional: they cause each other. In a review of more than 200 studies, researchers concluded that the more self focused we are, the more anxious: and also the more depressed and generally negative we become. What psychologists refer to a steepling or finger tenting is a sign of confidence. It may be subtle but it's still spatially expensive compared to how we typically hold our hands. In fact former FBI agent and body language experts say: steepling communicates that we are one with our thoughts, we are not wavering, we are not facilitating. And that precise moment when we steeple, we are communicating that we are confident in our thoughts and beliefs, short in our affirmation, trusting of ourselves. But at a certain point she changed her approach. After a mixed record of successes and failures and my teacher told me that at some point I just had to decide to stay on board the surf board. It was astonishing to experience how great a difference simply making that decision and being tenacious about it made. Where I'd been falling most of the time, I began to catch every wave. Pleasure built upon pleasure, the certainty of my ability amplifying with each new trial. In a famous 1988 paper Fitz Strack, Leonard Martin and Sabine Stepper went even further describing the results of a study that tested what had by then come to be known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Without explaining why they instructed participants to hold a pen in their mouths in a way that engaged the muscles typically associated with smiling. Basically in between their Teeth. Other randomly selected participants were told to hold a pen in their mouths in a way that inhibited the smile muscles: in between their lips. All participants were then given cartoons to read. People in the smile condition found the cartoons much funnier than the people who were unable to smile. That finding has been replicated in Japan and Ghana and extended through the use of different methods and the analysis of different outcomes. For example in other experiments people whose muscles were made to smile showed less racial bias. In a study led by a team in Japan where experimenter's directed water into subjects cheeks near the tear ducts these subjects felt much sadder than those who had been randomly assigned to no crying conditions. In other studies researchers forced participants to furrow their brows either by applying stretched adhesive bandages to their faces or by simply asking them to push their eyebrows together which induced increases in self reported feelings of sadness anger and disgust. The way you carry yourself is a source of personal power the kind of power that is the key to presence. This is the key that allows you to unlock yourself, your abilities your creativity your courage and even your generosity. It doesn't give you skills or talents you don't already have. It helps you to share the ones you do have. It doesn't make you smarter or better informed: it makes you more resilient and open. It doesn't change who you are: it allows you to be who you are. It might be because East Asians tend to express their physical expansiveness on a vertical axes whereas westerners express it on a horizontal axis. East Asians power postures are reflected for example in their decisions about whether to sit or stand, how high to raise a glass during a toast or not and so on. Cultural psychologists found that in some parts of Myanmar, children are expected to keep their heads below those of their elders. A child in Myanmar remained seated on the floor until his parents have gotten out of bed in the morning. When a monk enters the house and sits in a chair, children and adults are expected to sit on the floor. The average head weighs around 12 pounds which is about 5.4 kilogrammes and that's the load on the neck when our heads are balanced directly above the shoulders. But when we bend our necks forward only 60 degrees to use our phones the effective weight goes up to 27 kg. This is demonstrated with a broomstick. Balance a broomstick vertically on your outstretched palm. Not difficult. Doesn't take much effort. Then grasp the non bristled end of the broomstick and hold the stick out at 60 degrees. The balancing act takes an enormous amount of effort. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 13, 2020
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Sep 06, 2020
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Aug 13, 2020
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| 4.69
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it was amazing
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Sep 16, 2024
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Jul 21, 2024
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| 3.65
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it was amazing
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Sep 19, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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| 3.72
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not set
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Feb 28, 2024
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| 3.61
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not set
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Jan 24, 2024
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| 3.38
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it was amazing
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Jul 08, 2023
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Jun 30, 2023
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| 3.50
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it was amazing
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Jun 24, 2023
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May 29, 2023
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Jun 02, 2023
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Apr 04, 2023
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| 3.93
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it was amazing
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Apr 2023
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Mar 09, 2023
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| 4.07
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it was amazing
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Mar 10, 2023
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Dec 16, 2022
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| 4.23
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it was amazing
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Dec 21, 2022
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Nov 27, 2022
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| 4.00
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it was amazing
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Oct 04, 2022
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Sep 19, 2022
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| 4.00
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it was amazing
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Apr 16, 2022
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Feb 03, 2022
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Apr 16, 2022
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Jan 24, 2022
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| 3.93
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2021
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May 30, 2021
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| 3.99
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really liked it
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Jul 10, 2021
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Apr 17, 2021
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| 4.21
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it was amazing
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Mar 29, 2021
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Mar 12, 2021
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| 3.92
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it was amazing
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Feb 13, 2021
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Jan 16, 2021
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| 4.05
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it was amazing
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Feb 05, 2021
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Dec 27, 2020
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| 3.94
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really liked it
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Oct 27, 2020
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Oct 15, 2020
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| 3.90
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it was amazing
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Sep 06, 2020
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Aug 13, 2020
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