Good Work - Creative, Efficient, Focused, In the Moment, Vison of Future

http://blogs.forbes.com/work-in-progress/2010/03/29/hard-work-isnt-the-only-virtue-for-a-small-business/
Work in Progress
Career talk for women
Hard Work’ isn’t the only Virtue for a Small Business
ar. 29 2010 - 11:06 am
Posted by Linda Smith

My parents came from a generation where the virtue in doing your job, whether as an employee or the owner of the business, was in hard work. It seemed that if you worked hard you would succeed. For my dad success was measured in:

* providing food, shelter and transportation for his family
* an annual vacation – when I was young, it was a family trip to Oregon to visit relatives and when my parents were “empty nest-ers” it meant they could travel


My dad worked for a sugar beet refining manufacturing plant in the Central Valley of California. He was a shift manager and was proud of his job and did indeed work very hard. My mom owned her business – she started a bookkeeping and payroll service. At first she worked from our dining room table; later her business grew profitable enough to lease office space downtown. She, too, believed that her success was due to the virtue of hard work.
Hard work is a good thing. But I wonder if there are other virtues worth even more? For the thousands…if not millions…of tiny solo-preneur businesses around the world I think it takes more than hard work to achieve success.
Here are other virtues:

* Working efficiently


Efficiency means that (a) little is wasted and (b) much is maximized. Organized use of all available resources is a means of working efficiently. Understanding what resources are needed and then allocating those resources according the tasks needing to be done is one way to achieve efficiency. There is also the idea of competency here. Know everything about the task at hand, organize and plan to achieve the task with the least waste in time and other resources is an efficient way to work. This can be as great a virtue as working hard.

* Working creatively


Change, in some past generations of workers, was seen as a non-virtue. Doing a task the way it has always been done was the accepted method of doing good work. Change, innovation, thinking creatively is a far greater virtue than hard work alone. Change is a fact of life and if a business doesn’t change it will stagnate and die.
There are two sides to Working Creatively. One side is that of planning and organizing. This comes in the form and practice of the business plan. A business plan is an organic, living document meant to be revisited monthly, quarterly and annually. Why? Because change happens and as a business owner you have to be able to adapt, correct your course and re-evaluate. The other side of Working Creatively is that the very process means you aren’t constantly looking within, you are instead looking out. Looking out means you are open to new ideas and able to recognize opportunities. In this way, you become the change agent to your business.
I think a better way to think about working hard is to:

* think of it as working purposefully
* be fully in the moment with a vision to the future
* accept that change is as necessary to your success as your business plan
* think of your business as something to be enjoyed…an adventure


Linda C Smith, http://www.intlnat.com

Spiritual -Bishop Hickman: Leadership, have more love, patience, willing heart

Spiritual - Leadership, have more love, patience, willing heart

Bishop Hickman shared to following scripture in Ward Council today:

D&C 64: 29, 33, 34 --
29 Wherefore, as ye are agents, ye are on the Lord’s errand; and whatever ye do according to the will of the Lord is the Lord’s business.
31 And behold, I, the Lord, declare unto you, and my words are sure and shall not fail, that they shall obtain it.
32 But all things must come to pass in their time.
33 Wherefore, be not weary in well-doing, for ye are laying the foundation of a great work. And out of small things proceedeth that which is great.
34 Behold, the Lord requireth the heart and a willing mind; and the willing and obedient shall eat the good of the land of Zion in these last days.

Bishop Hickman stated that we are on the Lords errand, He cares about our people. The Spirit will guide us in time as we ponder and prepare to find those whom are ready. Be patient. Trust the Lord. Bishop Hickman stated it is crucial we ponder regarding our calling (Quentin Cook conference talk, April 2010). Sister Fogleman stated a quote from Elder Dallin Oaks: We should prepare for prayer by filling our hearts with gratitude for the blessings we have. Then we are in a state of spiritual receptivity for our prayers to be guided to the Lord's will.

Bishop Hickman would like us to develop ward goals for the Ward Council that will engage each member to do the Lords work of Redeem, Proclaim, and Perfect the Saints.

Organization & Efficiency 101: Write Things Down

You can save yourself time from disassociating from you've forgot you have to get done simply by writing things down.

You can retain key information and complicated ideas, if you write them down.

Take notes, carry a notepad, write it down. Post it on a blog, a to do sheet, sort out the junk, but write down valuable information you'll need later.

Once you stop forgetting to do stuff you should remember to do, you can go on to higher levels of organization and leadership. You will be more reliable and others will have confidence you will get things done. You will be more calm despite having more to do because it is written down, and you don't have to recall everything.

Define Your Leadershop Brand

www.hbr.org

Define Your Personal Leadership Brand in Five Steps

11:07 AM Monday March 29, 2010
by Norm Smallwood | Comments (10)


You probably already have a personal leadership brand. But do you have the right one?

The question is not trivial. A leadership brand conveys your identity and distinctiveness as a leader. It communicates the value you offer. If you have the wrong leadership brand for the position you have, or the position you want, then your work is not having the impact it could. A strong personal leadership brand allows all that's powerful and effective about your leadership to become known to your colleagues, enabling you to generate maximum value.

What's more, choosing a leadership brand can help give you focus. When you clearly identify what you want to be known for, it is easier to let go of the tasks and projects that do not let you deliver on that brand. Instead, you can concentrate on the activities that do.

So how do you build a leadership brand? My co-author Dave Ulrich and I came up with these five steps.

1. What results do you want to achieve in the next year?

The first thing you should do is ask yourself, "In the next 12 months, what are the major results I want to deliver at work?" Take into account the interests of these four groups:

* Customers
* Investors
* Employees
* The organization

Dave and I once worked with a very talented and hardworking executive we'll call Tricia. Her successful performance in several varied roles at her organization — she'd been an auditor, a process engineer and a customer-service manager — earned her a promotion into a general manager position, charging her with running one of the company's largest businesses. To succeed at her first large-scale leadership position and meet the complex set of expectations she would encounter in it, she knew she needed to become more deliberate about the way she led others. In short, she knew she needed a new leadership brand, and asked us for help in forging it.

We advised Tricia to begin by focusing on the expectations of those she was working to serve, rather than on what she identified as her personal strengths. Leadership brand is outward focused; it is about delivering results. While identifying innate strengths is an important part of defining your leadership brand, the starting point is clarifying what is expected of you.

2. What do you wish to be known for?

Tricia knew she was seen as technically proficient and hardworking, but somewhat aloof. These traits, she realized, added up to a leadership brand that would not take her very far in her new role.

With that in mind, Tricia picked six descriptors that balanced the qualities that came naturally to her with those that would be critical in her new position. She then tested her choices by sharing them with her boss, her peers, and some of her most trusted subordinates. She simply asked them, "Are these the traits that someone in this general manager role should exhibit?" Their responses helped her refine her list to ultimately include the following traits:

* Collaborative
* Deliberate
* Independent
* Innovative
* Results-oriented
* Strategic

3. Define your identity

The next step is to combine these six words into three two-word phrases that reflect your desired identity. This exercise allows you to build a deeper, more complex description: not only what you want to be known for, but how you will probably have to act to get there. For example, calmly driven differs from tirelessly driven. Experimenting with the many combinations that you can make from your six chosen words helps you crystallize your personal leadership brand.

Tricia combined the six descriptors into the following three phrases:

* Independently innovative
* Deliberately collaborative
* Strategically results-oriented

She tested this with several colleagues, neatly pulled together what came easily to Tricia ("independently innovative" and "strategically results-oriented") with what she could accomplish through disciplined effort ("deliberately collaborative"). Tricia was satisfied that it aptly described both the kind of leader she was and the kind of leader she was becoming.

4. Construct your leadership brand statement, then test it.

In this step, you pull everything together in a leadership brand statement that makes a "so that" connection between what you want to be known for (Steps 2 and 3) and your desired results (Step 1). Fill in the blanks:

"I want to be known for being ______________ so that I can deliver __________."

Tricia's leadership brand statement read: "I want to be known for being independently innovative, deliberately collaborative and strategically results-oriented so that I can deliver superior financial outcomes for my business."

With your leadership brand statement drafted, ask the following three questions to see if it needs to be refined:

* Is this the brand identity that best represents who I am and what I can do?
* Is this brand identity something that creates value in the eyes of my organization and key stakeholders?
* What risks am I taking by exhibiting this brand? Can I live this brand?

After going through this exercise, Tricia was satisfied that she had crafted a personal leadership brand that was appropriate for her new role and within her power to live and make real.

5. Make your brand identity real

Espoused-but-unlived brands create cynicism because they promise what they do not deliver. To ensure that the leadership brand you advertise is embodied in your day-to-day work, check in with those around you. Do they see you as you wish to be seen? If you say you are flexible and approachable, do others find you so?

After Tricia defined her personal leadership brand, she shared it with others. She let people know that she was evolving as a leader and invited their feedback, especially on her efforts at working collaboratively.

The exercise of forging a leadership brand and the day-to-day discipline of making it real, Tricia said, helped her stay focused on the most important challenges of her new role.

To be sure, your leadership brand isn't static; it should evolve in response to the different expectations you face at different times in your career. In our work, we have seen that leaders with the self-awareness and drive to evolve their leadership brands are more likely to be successful over the long term — and to enjoy the journey more.

Norm Smallwood is co-founder of The RBL Group, a strategic HR and leadership systems advisory firm. He is author, with Dave Ulrich and Kate Sweetman, of the 2009 Harvard Business Press title, The Leadership Code: Five Rules to Lead By and with Dave Ulrich on the 2007 title, Leadership Brand: Developing Customer-Focused Leaders to Drive Performance and Build Lasting Value (Harvard Business School Press, 2007).

James Cameron 'Avatar' Leadership and Managment Style

Firing Is Too Merciful: How James Cameron Leads

10:25 AM Friday March 5, 2010
by Rebecca Keegan | www.HBR.org

If you sat through the endless list of credits for Avatar, you saw that it took about 3,000 people to make the CGI epic, which has now grossed more than $2.5 billion worldwide, shattering box office records, earning nine Oscar nominations and reinventing cinema for the digital age. The boss of all those people was director James Cameron.

While researching my book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron, I watched the director's often controversial management style up close. One of Hollywood's most innovative filmmakers, Cameron is also one of its toughest taskmasters, a man who ran notoriously grueling sets for movies like The Terminator, Aliens and Titanic. After Titanic, Cameron spent years away from the movie business indulging a lifelong passion--deep ocean exploration. The experiences he had leading groups on the open sea tempered the director's management style. But working for Cameron is still roughing it by Hollywood standards. From my seat on the Avatar set, these are the rules he manages by:

Break New Ground
"It's Avatar, dude, nothing works the first time," read a whiteboard in the spare Los Angeles warehouse that served as the sci fi film's motion capture soundstage. Breaking new ground is Cameron's raison d'être — nothing interests this man unless it's hard to do. But innovation has also become a way of bonding his teams, both on Avatar and on his deep sea expeditions. "We're out in the wilderness working far beyond the borders of the known," Cameron says, comparing his CG and undersea projects. "We're doing extraordinary things that outsiders would not even understand." For Cameron, a sense of exploration isn't just personally enriching, it's a crucial tool for motivating and uniting his teams.

Firing Is Too Merciful
Everyone who has been part of Cameron's cast and crew has bitter war stories about working for him, and yet they all seem to forget them when they're clutching Oscars and cashing checks. Many Cameron alumni will share a story from their first film with him, a day they were sure they were going to be fired, almost hoped for it. But Cameron rarely fires people. "Firing is too merciful," he says. Instead he tests their endurance for long hours, hard tasks, and harsh criticism. Survivors tend to surprise themselves by turning in the best work of their careers, and signing on for Cameron's next project.

Lead from the Front
Cameron is almost comically hands-on. He does things elite directors don't do — hold the camera, man the editing console, sketch the creatures, apply the makeup. The truth is, he would do nearly every job on a movie himself if he could. But any film, much less one as ambitious as Avatar, relies on collaboration. Forced to lean on others, Cameron sets the pace. Among his 3000-strong stable of artists and engineers, he's the first to try a new challenge, the last to quit at the end of the day, and the hardest to please.

Good Enough Isn't
Avatar took more than twice as long to make as an average film. Much of that added time was due to the film's Herculean design demands and its reliance on untested technologies, but some of it was thanks to Cameron's perfectionism. Hours were spent on the smallest details, like getting alien sap to drip precisely right. A column in one special effects shot annoyed Cameron. After 15 minutes debating its placement while teleconferencing with weary Weta Digital artists in New Zealand, he declared, "That column is worth $50 million of the domestic gross!" shaking his head at his own obsessiveness. It's hard to argue with Cameron's nitpicky style, however, when audiences thrill to immerse themselves in the richly detailed worlds he creates.

Hire People People
Aware that he can be a hard man to work for, Cameron wisely surrounds himself with amiable deputies. "I have my bad days, and on my best days I'm no Ron Howard," he admits. Cameron's closest associates, his producer, Jon Landau, and the head of his production company, Rae Sanchini, are management savants. They know when an exhausted crew needs a pep talk, when a wounded artist's ego needs soothing, when an anxious studio executive needs reassurance. And — a talent never to be underestimated — they know when to order the pizza, and tell the boss to quit for dinner.

Rebecca Keegan is the author of The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron.

Safety, Quality, then Volume: Toyota 2010

Too Big to Succeed

As Toyota and Hummer have learned, growing too fast can be a dangerous thing.

From easily exploding cars to killer spinach and lead-laced toys, a look at products that we could have lived without.

By Daniel Gross | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Feb 25, 2010

From its origins, success in the auto industry has been about scale. In the early decades of the 20th century, Henry Ford was able to democratize the car and dominate the early auto industry because he built, and then continually tinkered with, an assembly line that could churn out huge numbers of cars in a short amount of time. Bigger was always better.

But two items from yesterday's dispatch in the ongoing car dramas indicate why that's not always true.

Item No. 1: The Toyota debacle. The mass failings of Toyota's legendary quality-control efforts are now on full display in the hearings that have subjected CEO Akio Toyoda to a ritualized set of apologies and humiliations. In recent years Toyota rode its efficiency and better financial management—it didn't have to contend with the onerous pension and health-care benefits that sandbagged the Big Three—to large gains in market share and significant growth. In 2007 Toyota surpassed GM as the largest carmaker in the world.

But something got lost in the process. As Toyoda acknowledged on Wednesday: "I fear the pace at which we have grown may have been too quick. I would like to point out here that Toyota's priority has traditionally been: first, safety; second, quality; and third, volume. These priorities became confused." In other words, Toyoda seemed to admit, the company went astray by moving size—i.e., volume—to the front of the line.

Item No. 2: After a series of failed efforts to sell it, GM announced that its Hummer brand would be wound down. Hummer had a different problem with bigness than Toyota has. It wasn't that its production volumes were too high. In 2008 only 2,710 Hummers were sold. Rather, the outsize Hummer was simply too big—too inefficient, too out of step with the times—to succeed in a marketplace in which oil spiked to $150 per barrel and seems to have settled at a plateau above $70 a barrel. As the economy tanked, energy prices rose, and the zeitgeist shifted in favor of conservation, the gas-guzzling Hummer faced a double whammy: consumers had difficulty affording the vehicle's high sticker price as well as difficulty affording its high operating price.

HBR.org: John Baldone, How to face your critics

How to Face Your Critics

10:49 AM Wednesday February 3, 2010 | Comments (10)

When people criticize you, what's the best thing to do? Show up and face the music.

President Barack Obama did just that when he met with Republican House members at their party conference last week in Baltimore. He met face-to-face with some of his sharpest critics, and in the process, demonstrated what it means to lead under fire.

In doing so, the President, whether you like or dislike him, provided a template for leaders to use when they need to face critics. Here's what we can learn.

Show up. Let your critics see you for the leader who you are. Adopting a "hide in the bunker" attitude only plays to them. It gives them free rein to paint you however they like — demon, demagogue, or do-nothing. By showing up you demonstrate that you are not afraid.

Be open. President Obama invited the media; you can shoot video of your meeting and broadcast it over a controlled-access website. In doing so, you demonstrate transparency and show your willingness to engage those who disagree with you. Videotaping also challenges people to be on their best behavior because they are being recorded.

Be cool. When people criticize you to your face, breathe deeply. As an opponent's voice rises, lower yours. Speak deliberately and with a sense of calm. The more control you have of your emotions, the stronger you will appear.

Acknowledge your shortcomings. Standing up to criticism is an opportunity to admit your own failings. Do it with a sense of earnestness, that is, demonstrate through words and passion that you have done what you think is best. At the same time, do not be defensive. Act with honest confidence, even when you admit mistakes.

Criticize gently. The spotlight may be on you, but the heat is also on your critics. Give as good as you get, but do it with a sense of diplomacy. A good-natured jibe here or there is good for you as well as others. It reveals your humanity.

Smile frequently. Lighten things up by relaxing your facial muscles. This demonstrates that you are in control. Smile when appropriate, but never smirk. Don't let them see you sweat, either. Smiling keeps you on a more even keel.

Leave them wanting more. Know when to close the engagement. You can ruin a good thing by hanging around on stage. It may be appropriate to meet and mingle off stage, in fact that's a great idea, but know when to get off the stage and let others talk.

When the heat is on, showing your face to your sharpest critics is a great way to demonstrate that you are in control of yourself as well as your message. Standing up to those who oppose you is a strong measure of demonstrating that you have what it takes to lead.