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.

2 Minute Stories Help You Lead

by Stew Friedman
HRB.org
How a 2-Minute Story Helps You Lead

3:53 PM Tuesday August 4, 2009 | Comments (31)


Leaders gain trust and teach people what's important to them by telling stories. But these days there's so much to attend to — now! — coming at us so fast. You might be tempted to let slide your soft skills, like how to tell a useful story. Just get to the point and move on to the next thing on the list. No time for fluff.

Even President Obama, who masterfully demonstrated his storytelling skills in the campaign, was recently described as shuffling from one crucial issue to the next, like an iPod listener flits from song to song. No time for albums. Trying to do too much, too fast, and on too many fronts can be risky, yet today's environment requires that we get better at doing so.

All the more reason, then, for giving attention to how you get others to pay attention. The trick is to show movement on the issues that matter while, for each issue, helping your key stakeholders grasp the meaning of what you're aiming to achieve — why the goal matters to the team or the organization and how we're going to get from here to there.

So don't give up on honing your storytelling skills; instead, learn how to move faster among your different narratives. Through practice and feedback, improve your ability to connect through stories — while keeping them short to hold beleaguered attention spans. For even as the digital age compels us to develop ever-increasing capacities for a switch-your-focus-but-remain-present state of mind, as a leader you still have to be able to convey a narrative that resonates with your people and inspires them to move with you in the right direction.

A good leadership story has the power to engage hearts and minds. It has these six crucial elements:

1. Draws on your real past and lessons you've learned from it.
2. Resonates emotionally with your audience because it's relevant to them.
3. Inspires your audience because it's fueled by your passion.
4. Shows the struggle between your goal and the obstacles you faced in pursuing it.
5. Illustrates with a vivid example.
6. Teaches an important lesson.

Leaders at all levels and in all walks of life can improve their skill in telling a good, fast leadership story. Here's how: think of a story that meets these six criteria and convey it to someone — anyone who you'd like to teach — in less than two minutes. Then ask them what impact the hearing of your tale had on them. Where they moved? Did they learn what you wanted to convey? Next, repeat with someone else — but do it faster. Then again, faster still.

Let us know what you discover.

Fire Yourself: Act as a new hire to fix the company

Maybe You're the Reason Your Job Is Boring
by Susan Cramm HRB.org
4:20 PM Thursday January 7, 2010

If you are finding your job a little boring, you aren't alone. There are many who feel trapped in their current jobs since the economy has removed a few of the seats in the corporate game of musical chairs. But I challenge you to see that it's actually you, not the job, that's boring. First, see if you recognize any of these hard truths:

1. You're on autopilot.
When bored, our brains shift into autopilot. This isn't a good thing for you or your company. Unfortunately, shifting into autopilot is what our brains do best. Our past experiences create the neural pathways upon which our survival depends. The brain interprets current reality and responds to similar situations using behaviors that have served us well in the past. These shortcuts help us save time, but can also sap our interest.

2. Your energy level is less than impressive.
When we are bored, our energy level dissipates and we lose the focus and purpose so necessary to excel at the job at hand. Our brains no longer work for us and actually start working against us.

3. You've become a conformist.
It's not unusual for leaders to start sleeping on the job once they hit year three or four. At this point, they have molded the organization in their own image. They know their people, processes, and technology aren't perfect, but have adjusted to their imperfections and lose sight of the opportunities for improvement. Every day brings the same set of problems and the same responses. From a performance perspective, the sharp "blacks" and "whites" so obvious on Day 1 become indistinguishable shades of gray. "I can't believe what's going on here!" slowly but surely becomes "I can't believe how tired I am!"



So what's the solution?

Wake yourself up by renewing your leadership agenda. Re-engage by mentally firing yourself and spending the next few weeks acting as if you just joined the company. This entails assessing the current situation anew with the help of key stakeholders. Make it a disciplined process.

This isn't as easy as it sounds. Although you are bored, you are also extremely busy. Your only choice is to extract yourself from day-to-day operations while you redefine your organization's future. It's time to delegate or defer and make sure that the "First 90 Days" activities take priority in your calendar. Activities such as clarifying strengths and opportunities, confirming the mandate for change, and determining how to better allocate existing resources.

This approach is uncomfortable and definitely not boring. Take heart that your organization can operate just fine (for a while) without you and it's far better to fire yourself mentally today rather than wait for your organization to do so — for real.

Leadership Malpractice Susan Cramm

Susan Cramm
HRB.org Jan 2010

There's only one kind of leadership malpractice: wasting the lives of those we lead.

Consider this multiple offender (sent to me in response to my last blog concerning compassion in leadership):

"I'm to show these fools some kind of compassion? For what? So they can go back to their cubicle or cubicles and sit at their decks and talk on their cell phones to their friends and look at porn on the computer that I paid for? I don't think so. More than a few have been fired for just that reason. I do not give a damn about the hired help. You are there to make me a profit, just that simple. If you don't like it, hit the street."

Most leaders aren't this angry — or this clueless. But every leader makes errors in judgment that steal precious moments from the lives of others. A few examples:

* Sponsoring a project that isn't ready for prime time. Innovation is good, but must be approached in a way that is consistent with the organization's readiness for change. Asking a talented leader to go where no man has gone before, only to die in the process, derails careers and creates change cynics, not change agents.
* Overloading the star performer. Stars make it look easy. So easy, that it's tempting to keep on throwing balls in their direction, assuming that they will push back when they have too many in the air. Problem is, many times, overachievers don't know their limits. It's likely that the only feedback you'll hear is when the balls start dropping and people start complaining.
* Managing jobs rather than careers. A series of assignments doesn't a career make. Leaders are responsible for helping people manage their careers by challenging them to articulate longer-range objectives and formulate plans to close the gap. Failure to do so can lead to cul-de-sac careers in which the only way forward is to go back (which becomes ever more difficult as the years go by).
* Negatively labeling others. Good or bad, leaders get what they expect. In the words of Ori and Rom Brafman, authors of the fascinating book, Sway, "when we brand or label people, they take on the characteristics of the diagnosis." There's no doubt that the angry leader ranting above has an underperforming staff. Her expectations have become a self-fulfilling prophecy and, as a result, her people are acting out rather than acting right.
* Refusing to address performance issues. It's a fact that some people are better at their jobs than others. If one of your people is struggling, something is wrong. And, if you know it, so do they. Avoid the tyranny of unfulfilled expectations and get together with them — the sooner the better — to figure out what's going on:

1. Do they want to do the job? Do they understand and buy-in to the objectives or approach and are they personally interested in the assignment?
2. Do they have the time to do the job? Is the job doable given the current support, resources, and priorities?
3. Do they know how to do the job? Do they have the necessary skills, knowledge and abilities to get the job done?

Work together to remediate the issues identified. Once you have done all you can, if performance doesn't improve, make a change. Act prudently but quickly — for their sake and the sake of the people who work with them and for them.

In the stress of the day-to-day, it's relatively easy to commit leadership malpractice. Leaders carry a heavy burden and, in many organizations, the short-term rules over the long-term and the ends justify the means.

However difficult, leaders have an ethical responsibility to get the work done in a way that enriches the organization and the people within it. As you examine your beliefs and behaviors, try this exercise: Visualize one of your people coming home after a long day. As they enter the door, their loved one looks up and asks them about their day.

Now decide. What do you want them to say?

Clayton Mathile, Aileron Consultants

Rebuilding America
Billionaire Teaches Others How To Get Rich
Steven Bertoni, 01.21.10, 12:20 PM EST
Forbes Magazine dated February 08, 2010
Mathile's $130 million bet on small business.


Clayton L. Mathile is an entrepreneur who built a billion-dollar fortune in pet food. He sold the Iams Co. to Procter & Gamble ( PG - news - people ) in 1999 for $2.3 billion. Like many of his ilk, he turned his energies to teaching others the craft of entrepreneurship. For the $130 million he's already spent on that goal, Mathile could have simply stuck his name on a new building at Harvard Business School or Wharton and called it a day. Instead, he started a new kind of school for the betterment of the small business owner.

Mathile's project is called Aileron, which started in 1996 offering management classes at community colleges. Some 1,500 businesses have taken its seminars. In April 2008 Mathile cut the ribbon on its permanent home, an airy 70,000-square-foot building of glass, wood and stone on a bucolic campus outside Dayton, Ohio.
Article Controls

A Forbes 400 Profile on Clayton Mathile

The "clients," as the small business owners are called, are a different breed from what's usually found wandering the halls of Ivy League business schools. These are owners of roofing, landscaping and metal-stamping firms too wrapped up in the grind to focus on internal controls and long-term strategy.

"We're dealing with day-to-day, gut-wrenching problems, and the universities aren't really set up to deal with that," says Mathile, 69. He initially toyed with the idea of funding an entrepreneur school at a university, but after speaking to unhappy donors who had backed such programs, he decided to create Aileron with a chunk of his estimated $1.7 billion fortune.

Fewer than half of Aileron's clients have formal business training. "There's dirt under their fingernails, they probably don't use the best English or have the best table manners, but they have 10 to 20 employees," Mathile says. Aileron covers 95% of the costs; clients pay the rest so they have something invested in the courses. The Course for Presidents costs $800 for a two-day seminar. Similar offerings by the American Management Association run $2,450. The $800, moreover, includes a consultant, drawn from a pool of successful entrepreneurs and executives, for as long as you need one.

Great article. He's giving real entrepreneurs the structure taught at B-schools. That is so much more than setting up another school teaching students with no real entrepreneurial experience/intent....

Mathile wanted a nontraditional setting for learning and got it. Architect Lee H. Skolnick, who designed several children's museums, installed a floor-mounted video monitor in the building's "Risk Corridor" so that visitors could walk over images of a raging fire. Down another hall a touchscreen lets clients interact with a digital Mathile. The real Mathile is around a lot, too. After a guest lecture 30 clients cornered Mathile to get him to sign copies of his book Dream No Little Dreams, to talk strategy and to offer thanks.

Wesley Gipe, chief of technology services firm Agil it, is using Aileron consultants to switch to performance-based pay and shed customers to focus on the health care market. The consultants, he says, "can be brutal, and that's just what I need."

Eric Rich II, an Aileron client who heads Rich Roofing in Troy, Ohio, implemented more clearly defined roles and performance reviews. He suffered a staff turnover of 90% but enjoyed a sales bump in 2009 of 14% to $3.5 million despite the recession. Rich's quality of life improved, too: "I can take my family on vacation without spending the whole time on the phone."

Mathile wants to take his Dayton experiment national and branch out using social networking and the Web. "If every business adopts effective management and is successful, then you won't need this place," Mathile says. "We'll just rent it out as a bed-and-breakfast."

Facebook entry: Coach Gelwix and Highland Rugby

Q&A With Anthony Cannon: Coach Gelwix Taught Us Never To Give Up

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 11:21am

Anthony Cannon played under coach Larry Gelwix on the Highland Rugby team for four years.

What motivated you to play for Coach Gelwix?

I was introduced to HR at an early age. My brother was playing for the team, while I was in Elementary school. He had such a good experience that it made me want to play. But something else happened while my brother was playing, our dad passed away, it was a tragic event. I remember that Larry came over to our house several times to meet with my brother to talk with him, and find out how he was doing. As I little boy I saw that, how he was coming to check in and take care of him, find out how things were going though a difficult time. While it meant a lot to my brother it also meant a lot to me. Someone was taking an interest, not just in my older brother, but in our family.

Larry treated me kindly and even gave me a t-shirt. He invited me to come play for them. When I wore that shirt to school, I felt important; I was being recruited at such an early age to come play Highland Rugby. So when I did reach high school, I was excited to go play for Larry, to play for the rugby team. I was excited to experience this team that I had heard about, and finally have my own experiences in.

What made Highland Rugby different than other sport teams you played with?

Larry had a way to teach principals to the players. I remember feeling there was a greater sense of unity for this team, compared to other teams I had played for. Larry’s leadership was different than I was used it. He would call on players at the end of practice to say how they thought the teams overall performance was. It wasn’t just team captains he would call on, he just wanted everyone to have the chance to stand up and speak to the team. It meant a lot to me, because I could see how boys would take ownership of the team when they had a chance to stand up and share their opinions.

Going to Nationals and your experience working as a team?

My junior year, I was captain on the team. We had a difficult time coming together that year. We were a small team. We didn’t have as many boys who were big and strong, as we had in years past. We had lost a lot of the talent from the previous year. We were having a difficult year coming together and playing well. And this was not typical for the Highland team, who has a reputation for having a good team with plenty of talent, who works hard and perform well on the field. We did make it to finals that year, struggling through the season, but made it to the finals. At our first game in the National Tournament, we struggled performance wise. We just couldn’t come together well. We made it though the game but it was ugly. Larry let us know that it was ugly, and that we needed to make a decision as a team. If we were going to come out and play as a team, because it was do or die. We were either going to be sent home ashamed or we were going to turn around and step up and meet the tradition that Highland has set. Larry encouraged us to work together on our own. We talked our problems out and tried to figure out what we were doing wrong. That was a turning point in our season; we came back for the next game, the semi-finals in the tournament and played as the Highland team should play. We turned it up; it was a great feeling. We felt like we were fighting for one another. Like we were playing for our brothers. We made it though that game, and then faced our archival in the Championship game. We came out and went head to head with them and it was one of the greatest matches I have ever participated in. The people from Rugby Today said it was one of the greatest games for High School rugby they have ever seen. We ended up winning that game, but more than that we found what we were missing that year. It was our brotherhood, our feeling of tradition and responsibility that was handed down through the years from past players. It was incredibly rewarding experience. I think about that often and reflect on being disciplined and committed to a common purpose, and developed to unity on the team.

What did you learn playing on Highland that helped you to serve a mission?

One thing I always remember Larry teaching us at practice was that it didn’t matter how tired we get; we still have a job to do. We aren’t going to give up till we finish what we are going to accomplish. That was a principal that helped me as I served a mission; I am going to work hard regardless of how I feel and I am going to not give up until I get the job done. One of the team motto’s is never give up, that stuck with me. One other thing that I learned was accountability; at times at practice, Larry would call on random players to give account of their personal running program. I remember being a freshman and being terrified to be called on to report. It taught me that I needed to be ready to give account for what my responsibilities are. At the time, we needed to be able to stand and tell the coach and team that they went out and did our running. Larry never would have yelled at you for not doing it. Rather he would have been disappointed in you, and that disappointment was worse than any kind of yelling or swearing storm he could have done. When I went on my mission, I knew I was accountable for my time and my efforts.

What do ou personally think of Coach, and his character?

Larry is a tremendous guy. I was impressed with him from the get go. And playing on the team allowed me to get to know him personally everyday. He valued other people’s opinion. He said that you can tell the value of a person by how he treats others he doesn’t need. He compared this to a senior on the team, how he would treat a freshman, or someone he didn’t need. Larry practiced this by asking the team how we were doing, it didn’t matter their position. He asked what he thought we could do better as a team and that he could do better as a coach. I remember being taken back at the question. I didn’t think he needed to do better, but I was impressed that he would have that idea to ask my opinion of how he was doing as a coach.

Tell us about the interaction with your grandfather, Elder Worthlin, and playing for a World Championship in South Africa?

In 1998 Highland Rugby went to South Africa. I had an older brother and a cousin playing that year, so I went to the airport to see them off. My grandfather, Elder Worthlin, went as well. That meant a lot to Larry and the boys. It meant a lot that he showed support for the Highland Rugby team. My grandfather, Elder Worthlin, became a supporter of the Highland Rugby team because he had four grandsons who played for Coach Gelwix. I remember when my grandfather would come to my games; it was a special thing, that he was showing that much support for us. Larry adopted the practice of the having the boys coming up after to shake my grandfathers hand. I know the boys enjoyed it, and my grandfather felt privileged to have some part in the Highland Rugby program. My grandfather would often tell me that it was a great experience to be associated with that team. I remember whether I was in season or not, he would ask how the rugby team was doing. I said, that were doing well and starting practice in a month. He would do his characteristic head nod and say, “It’s a great program and that’s a great coach. He has done some amazing things”. I remember thinking that it was an amazing thing that my grandfather was aware of what I was doing, but he was endorsing my involvement with Highland Rugby.

I remember even after my time at Highland Rugby was finished, in 2007, I attended the National championship as a spectator watching Highland Rugby play in the championship. I remember looking over in the stand and seeing my grandfather there with my aunt. I was impressed that he was not just showing his support while I was there, but was showing his support even now when he didn’t have a grandson on the team. I still remember Larry bringing my grandfather down on the field after Highland had won and the boys coming up one by one shaking his hand. I remember thinking this was a great thing that he could be part of this story and give the boys this memory as well.

Every season, Larry would get a group of boys together and take them up to my grandfather’s office down town. That was a special visit for all of us as we got to sit in the office, shake his hand, and listen to the council and experiences he shared with us. He would share lessons that he learned from playing football for the University of Utah, and how those later helped him on his mission to Germany and Switzerland. Then he would tell us that we needed to believe in the lessons that Coach Gelwix was teaching us. He instructed that there was no better way to prepare than for working hard and being dedicated to the Highland Rugby team.

What was it like being a team captain for two years?

When I was a junior, I was elected to be captain. It was a frightening experience for me because usually it was the seniors who were captains on the team. I remember being uncertain if I could live up to both the culture and tradition of Highland Rugby. I remember Coach taking me under his wing and teaching me how to be a captain. It was basically pretty simple; you have to be the part. Larry taught me that I needed to be a “doer” and that was the best way to be a captain on the team. That year was a hard time coming together as a team. And it was a difficult time for us as a team, so we had to fight together as a group of boys to live up to what we had been given by previous players for the Highland Rugby team.

I think the best experience I had being captain, was not just one experience but rather the culmination of lessons being there taught by coach Coach. He taught me the principals of discipline, hard work, honesty, commitment, and not doing anything to embarrass yourself, your family, or our church. These are principals that I was able to carry on my mission, that have helped me since that time. I think about them often as I am placed in positions of influence or when I am placed in organizations where I have influence.

Tell us an experience where you used these leadership skills?

I think the number one principal that stands out in my mind, was the principal of not giving up. It was demonstrated on the team when I played by just working our tails off. That was something I took into the mission field - where you are working hard every day and sometimes feel like you want to go in and call it a day. But remembering what my experiences were on the rugby team, helped me to work hard and be Forever Strong. And that was a way that I was able to apply those into my mission experience.

Coach Gelwix and Highland Rugby: "Build Quality Boys"

Rugby Forever Strong: "Build Quality Boys"

Coach Gelwix 30 year tradition of leadership was dramatized in the movie, "Forever Strong". As a leader of boys highschool Rugby team in Highland Utah, Coach Gelwix used the opportunity to make a difference in boys lives.

Quality is on the inside. Strength from the team comes from each persons commitment to honor and listen to what is right, live clean, and never do anything to embarrass oneself, one's team, or one's family. Honor, Spirit, and Tradition (BYU Football, no?) provide a sense of duty to do one's best and honor those who have gone before.

The boy in the movie, "Rick Penny" is raised in a pretty heartless fashion by his father who blames his old Rugby coach for an ACL injury his senior year. The boy gets in trouble with the law, and ends up in Juvenile Detention where he can be released early if he plays well for the Highland Rugby team. Along the way he learns true friendship, putting the team first, that one cannot truly win without honesty, honor, clean living, and doing one's best.

Coach Gelwix wants each boy to do his personal best. When they lose, they did not play their best and he focuses on their efforts to improve themselves. He cares deeply about each one of the boys, and knows a quality rugby team will naturally result when quality comes from the inside of each of the boys.

This movie taught me that leadership is about also caring for your team members and wanting their success; realizing they can only attain it by not cheating themselves, and committing themselves to the highest principles possible. "Never embarass yourself, your team, or your family" is a key lesson for each player. "I am not building a quality team, I build quality boys" is the leaders lesson. This applies to my organizational efforts at work by caring about the person on the team first.

Peter Drucker: Managing Knowledge

Managing Knowledge Means Managing Oneself

by Peter F. Drucker

Leader To Leader, No.16, Spring 2000

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time -- literally -- substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it.

Throughout history, practically nobody had choices. Until about 1900, even in the most highly developed countries, the overwhelming majority followed their father's line of work -- if they were lucky. If your father was a peasant farmer, you were a peasant farmer. If he was a craftsman, you were a craftsman. There was only downward mobility; there was no upward mobility.

Now suddenly a large number of people have choices. What is more, they will have more than one career, because the working life span of people is now close to 60 years -- three times what it was in 1900. People in my executive management program (who are 45 years old on average and very successful) tell me, to a person, "I do not expect to end my career where I am working now."

Abundance of Choices

Knowledge gives choice. It also explains why we suddenly have women in the same jobs as men. Historically, men and women have always had equal participation in the labor force -- the idea of the idle housewife is a 19th-century delusion. Men and women simply did different jobs. There's no civilization in which the two genders did the same work. However, knowledge work knows no gender; men and women do the same jobs. This, too, is a major change in the human condition.

To succeed in this new world, we will have to learn, first, who we are. Few people, even highly successful people, can answer the questions, Do you know what you're good at? Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths? Few have even asked themselves these questions.

On the contrary, most are proud of their ignorance. There are human resource people who are proud of the fact that they can't read a balance sheet. Yet if you want to be effective today, you have to be able to read one. On the other hand, there are accountants who are equally proud of the fact that they cannot get along with people! That, of course, is nothing to be proud of, because anyone can learn to work smoothly with others. It is not hard, after all, to learn manners -- and manners are what allow people to get along.

Knowing Yourself

Throughout human history, it was the super achievers -- and only the super achievers -- who knew when to say "No." They always knew what to reach for. They knew where to place themselves. Now all of us will have to learn that. It's not very difficult. The key to it -- what Leonardo da Vinci and Mozart did -- is to record the results of our decisions.

Every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen. The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only recently, has begun to ask, "If we assign this general to lead this base, what do we expect him to accomplish?" Three years later they look back at what they had written. They have now reached a point where 40 percent of their decisions work out.

The Roman Catholic Church is just beginning to ask the same question about bishops. "Why do we put the bishop into the diocese? What do we expect?" And the Church finds that a great majority of appointments do not fulfill expectations, because they get no feedback on their performance.

Building on Strengths

It's easy to understand our strengths by tracking our results. Yet most of us underestimate our own strengths. We take them for granted. What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be very good. As a result, we don't know our strengths, and we don't know how we can build on them.

We also seldom know what gifts we are not endowed with. We will have to learn where we belong, what we have to learn to get the full benefit from our strengths, where our weaknesses lie, what our values are. We also have to know ourselves temperamentally: "Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? What am I committed to? And what is my contribution?" Unfortunately, nobody teaches us these things. In the next 30 years most educated people will have to learn to place themselves, in work and in life.

Improving Productivity

Understanding

our strengths, articulating our values, knowing where we belong -- these are also essential to addressing one of the great challenges of organizations: improving the abysmally low productivity of knowledge workers. The productivity of teachers, for instance, has not improved, and may in fact have shrunk, in the past 70 years. (Of course teachers in the 1920s enjoyed the advantage of not having faculty meetings to attend.) And nurses and sales workers are only two-thirds as productive as their counterparts 70 years ago.

Yet we know that hospitals can improve productivity by asking their nurses two simple questions: What are you being paid for, and how much time do you spend doing that? Typically, nurses say they are paid to provide patient care, or to keep the doctors happy. Both are good answers; the problem is that they have no time to do either job. One hospital more than doubled its nurses' productivity simply by asking them these two questions, and then hiring clerks to do the paperwork that prevented nurses from doing their real job.

Effective organizations put people in jobs in which they can do the most good. They place people -- and allow people to place themselves -- according to their strengths.

The historic shift to self-management offers organizations four ways to best develop and motivate knowledge workers:

• Know people's strengths.
• Place them where they can make the greatest contributions.
• Treat them as associates.
• Expose them to challenges.

The greatest competitive advantage of the United States is that it attracts top knowledge workers from around the world -- not just because they earn more money but because they are treated as colleagues, not as subordinates. Knowledge workers don't believe they are paid to work 9 to 5; they believe they're paid to be effective. Organizations that understand this -- and strip away everything that gets in their knowledge workers' way -- will be able to attract, hold, and motivate the best performers. That will be the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years.

Role of the Social Sector

I take a dim view of most of the programs companies create to develop their people. The real development I've seen of people in organizations, especially in big ones, comes from their being volunteers in a nonprofit organization -- where you have responsibility, you see results, and you quickly learn what your values are. There is no better way to understand your strengths and discover where you belong than to volunteer in a nonprofit. That is probably the great opportunity for the social sector -- and especially in its relationship to business.

We talk today of the social responsibilities of business. I hope we will soon begin to talk about the nonprofit organization as the great social opportunity for business. It is the opportunity for business to develop managers far more effectively than any company or university can. It is one of the unique benefits that the social sector can offer -- to provide a place where the knowledge worker can actually discover who he or she is and can actually learn to manage him- or herself.

Forbes Article on Peter Drucker, Manageing Oneself: Sept 2009

A vital milestone in becoming an effective leader is the ability to manage oneself. It is on this subject we come upon one of Drucker's classic pieces, "Managing Oneself."

http://academy.clevelandclinic.org/Portals/40/managingoneself.pdf

The piece, originally published in 1999, was republished in the January 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review. Drucker died in November that year, eight days short of his 96th birthday. (The essay was also part of a Drucker book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century.)

In his characteristically crisp style, Drucker poses a number questions as the starting point for reflection. Among them:

What Are My Strengths?

How Do I Perform?

What Are My Values?

Where Do I Belong?

What Should I Contribute?

His conclusion puts the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of each and every one of us: "The challenges of managing oneself may seem obvious, if not elementary. And the answers may seem self-evident to the point of appearing naive. But managing oneself requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker."

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Innovation of rapid Innovation

The New, Faster Face of Innovation

Thanks to technology, change has never been so easy—or so cheap

• 
  

By ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON And MICHAEL SCHRAGE

Call it innovation on steroids. Or innovation at warp speed. Or just the innovation of rapid innovation.

The Journal Report

See the complete Business Insight report.

But the essential point remains: Technology is transforming innovation at its core, allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds—and prices—that were unimaginable even a decade ago. They can stick features on Web sites and tell within hours how customers respond. They can see results from in-store promotions, or efforts to boost process productivity, almost as quickly.

The result? Innovation initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents.

And that makes innovation, the lifeblood of growth, more efficient and cheaper. Companies are able to get a much better idea of how their customers behave and what they want. This gives new offerings and marketing efforts a better shot at success.

Harry Campbell

Companies will also be willing to try new things, because the price of failure is so much lower. That will bring big changes for corporate culture—making it easier to challenge accepted wisdom, for instance, and forcing managers to give more employees a say in the innovation process.

There will be even better payoffs for customers: Their likes and dislikes will have much more impact on companies' decisions. In globally competitive markets, they will ultimately end up getting products and services better tailored to their needs.

Already, this powerful new capability is changing the way some of the biggest companies in the world do business, inspiring new strategies and revolutionizing the research-and-development process.

"In the U.S., we do the vast majority of our concept testing online, which has created truly substantial savings in money and time," says Joan Lewis, global consumer and market knowledge officer at Procter & Gamble Co.

What does all of this experimentation look like in practice?

Consider Google Inc., which runs 50 to 200 search experiments at any given time. In one case, Google asked selected users how many search results they would like to see on a single screen. More, said the users, many more. So Google ran an experiment that tripled the number of search results per screen to 30. The company found that traffic declined.

What happened? On average it took about a third of a second longer for search results to appear—a seemingly insignificant delay that nonetheless upset many of the users. The greater number of results also made it more likely that a user would click on a page that did not have the information he or she was seeking.

In an environment where experimentation is this quick and efficient, many traditional practices make less economic sense. For instance, current research-and-development efforts are often driven by considerations that the company's technicians think are important but customers really don't care about. Mobile-phone companies, for one, had a reputation for piling on features that added more cost and complexity than value.

But it's not just Web-based companies that are taking advantage of technology to run crucial experiments.

Even retailers—who might seem to have tremendous logistical challenges implementing rapid experiments across lots of stores—can tap this new approach, thanks to the rise of sophisticated tracking systems that make measuring customer behavior more agile and less expensive.

These systems—which track everything from purchases at the cash register to how products move through the supply chain—allow stores to cheaply collect terabytes of data on their customer interactions, the performance of products in the field, employee productivity and other factors. Traditionally, companies have simply rooted through all of that data to look for patterns and trends; they've mined their data. But some retailers are beginning to realize that they can get much better results by using their digital systems to run experiments.

Michael Schrage talks with the Journal’s Erin White about how managers can strike the right balance in giving employees guidance on innovation—avoiding being too restrictive on the one hand or allowing a free-for-all on the other.

Take Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which frequently runs comparative in-store experiments with signage, displays and shelf layouts to see what influences shopper decisions. Wal-Mart can test different arrangements in a number of stores for a week or so to see which approach boosts sales the most. If different sign colors or unusual merchandise juxtapositions increase—or depress—relative sales, the stores can quickly share the information and implement the same plan. That said, store managers also have the ability to make decisions at their store to meet individual customer needs.

Other companies, meanwhile, have blended digital technologies and conventional systems to test out ideas. For instance, Harrah's Entertainment Inc. uses advanced information systems to analyze data from its Total Reward Card and field experiments throughout its casino and hotel network.

The Speed of Change

• The Evolution: Technology is allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds—and prices—that were unimaginable even a decade ago.
• The Effect: Innovation, the lifeblood of growth, is growing more efficient and cheaper.
• What's Ahead: Innovative companies will shift away from traditional research-and-development methods. Managers will change the way they solicit ideas. And much, much more.

Gary Loveman, the chief executive who brought the experimentation mindset to 70-year-old Harrah's, quips, "There are two ways to get fired from Harrah's: stealing from the company, or failing to include a proper control group in your business experiment."

Where will all this lead? Experiments will become far more pervasive and persuasive as information technology improves and testing grows faster and cheaper. More companies—and more enterprising individuals who work in them—will recognize that experiments don't have to be time-consuming and expensive, and they will propose more tests that exploit those economies.

Increasingly, the more innovative companies—the Googles and Harrah's of tomorrow—will shift away from traditional research-and-development methods. Five years ago, for instance, a leadership team might have reviewed two or three "big" innovation proposals from consulting gurus; executive teams today might compare the outcomes of 50 or 60 real-world experiments to decide which ones to act upon.

For Further Reading

See these related articles from MIT Sloan Management Review.

• The Era of Open Innovation
  By Henry W. Chesbrough (Spring 2003)
  Companies are increasingly rethinking the fundamental ways in which they generate ideas and bring them to market—harnessing external ideas while leveraging their in-house R&D outside their current operations.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/4435
• Institutionalizing Innovation
  By Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson and Joseph V. Sinfield (Winter 2008)
  Building an engine that produces a steady stream of innovative growth businesses is difficult, but companies that are able to do it differentiate themselves from competitors.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/49216
• An Inside View of IBM's 'Innovation Jam'
  By Osvald M. Bjelland and Robert Chapman Wood (Fall 2008)
  IBM brought 150,000 employees and stakeholders together to help move its latest technologies to market. Both the difficulties it faced and the successes it achieved provide important lessons.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/50101
• The 12 Different Ways for Companies to Innovate
  By Mohanbir Sawhney, Robert C. Wolcott and Inigo Arroniz (Spring 2006)
  Companies with a restricted view of innovation can miss opportunities. A new framework called the "innovation radar" helps avoid that.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47314
• Creating New Markets Through Service Innovation
  By Leonard L. Berry, Venkatesh Shankar, Janet Turner Parish, Susan Cadwallader and Thomas Dotzel (Winter 2006)
  Many companies make incremental improvements to their service offerings, but few succeed in creating service innovations that generate new markets or reshape existing ones.
  http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47213

All of which guarantees huge changes for corporate cultures. Challenging conventional wisdom, for one thing, becomes immeasurably faster, cheaper and easier. And there's a subtle shift in how people view innovation. People don't talk about running experiments months into the future—they're into immediacy, because they see that they can test ideas right away, and the company culture starts to actively encourage speed. A provocative hypothesis proposed during a morning meeting might graduate into a full-blown experiment by day's end.

Even if a test doesn't produce a workable idea, there's usually something important to be gleaned from it. "Genius is born from a thousand failures," says Greg Linden, an entrepreneur who has been an innovator at both Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. "In each failed test, you learn something that helps you find something that will work. Constant, continuous, ubiquitous experimentation is the most important thing."

This new environment also has big implications for managers. Simply put, bosses must be prepared to give up some control. With testing so cheap, easy and accessible, there's less need to ration it as they have in the past. Managers used to directing the company's innovation efforts must give their workers the freedom to come up with ideas on their own and pursue them without lots of red tape.

Some of the best experiments come from outside the chain of command. At Amazon, for instance, innovators initially developed the company's recommendations feature—which suggests other products customers might want—without explicit approval from higher-ups.

Not only do we expect managers to solicit and welcome more ideas from lower down in the ranks, we expect that lots more people will be invited to review experiments and make changes. Customer-service and maintenance people, say, might chime in on experiments proposed by manufacturing or distribution.

That might seem hard to believe, given the turf battles that can arise over new ideas. But when experiments become more abundant—and easy and inexpensive to change—those proprietary issues won't come up as much. Think of the difference between improving and sharing presentations back in the day of transparencies and 35mm slides versus PowerPoint presentations, which can be modified with a few clicks of a mouse.

Harry Campbell

As more people get involved in experimentation, companies will also need to change their focus in education and training efforts for innovation. Instead of just getting workers to creatively interpret large volumes of data, companies will need to help them develop the skills to rapidly design provocative experiments. Passive analysis will be subordinate to active experimentation.

Another crucial development down the road will be "scaling." Digital technology, as we have seen, allows companies to test new ideas quickly and easily. But the technology also lets companies easily scale those ideas—or implement them rapidly and cheaply throughout the whole business. We predict that as companies realize the power of this idea, they will focus on experiments that not only can be tested rapidly but also can be put into wide effect just as quickly.

The most obvious example of scaling is a Web site. Companies can test out a new feature with a quick bit of programming and see how users respond. The change can then be replicated on billions of customer screens.

But that kind of scaling becomes rapidly possible in the bricks-and-mortar world, too, as more business processes become digital—supply-chain management, customer-relationship management and so forth. When a retailer identifies a better process for screening new employees, the company can embed the process in its human-resource-management software and have thousands of locations implementing the new plan the next morning.

We think the future of innovation and the future of experimentation will continue to evolve, thanks to the improving economics of digital technologies. As a result, the next decade of innovation in the global marketplace will be even more tumultuous than the last. That's a great opportunity for innovators—and even better news for customers and consumers world-wide.

--Dr. Brynjolfsson is a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Mr. Schrage is a research fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business. They can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

Leading Clever People, Forbes Aug 2009

Leadership

The Odd Clever People Every Organization Needs

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, 08.13.09, 04:45 PM EDT

Here's how to identify them and lead them.

As we ponder how the Western economies can navigate their way out of the recession, we might easily make the harsh judgment that clever people got us into it and we'll need clever people to get us out of it. The investment banks at the heart of the current financial malaise were full of clever people. So what went wrong? Is it possible we didn't really understand how to lead them?

The truth is that organizations need a particular kind of clever employees--people with a propensity for innovation and even iconoclasm. People who happily tread on organizational sacred ground while seeking new ways to produce sustained economic growth. They can add disproportionate amounts of value, and they become more productive when they are well led. They are people like Will Wright of Electronic Arts ( ERTS - news - people ), the originator of "Sim City" and "Spore." They need teams--teams that have their own high-octane dynamics. To develop such teams, businesses must become clever organizations, magnets for these people who can sustain innovation over long periods.

How do we identify such people?The first and most obvious point to make is that they are not simply those with the highest IQs or most impressive academic qualifications (although many of them do meet those standards). Our conversations and observations have led us to develop a simple definition:

Clever people are highly talented individuals who have the potential to create disproportionate amounts of value from the resources that an organization makes available to them.

When we first set out to research these smart and powerful, yet often recalcitrant clever people, we thought they would be consultants, lawyers, investment bankers, research-and-development wizards and other similar smart professionals. Many of them were, but we also found value-creating brilliance in a huge variety of places--in schools, in hospitals, in fast-moving consumer-goods businesses, in breweries and not just in those institutions' R&D departments. Clever people can be schoolteachers, university and hospital administrators, museum curators. But as disparate as they are, they are all capable of creating huge amounts of value for organizations.

Many highly talented individuals are capable of producing remarkable results on their own, outside of any organization. Such standalone clever people include most famous artists and solo musicians. But those aren't the people we're talking about. We specifically mean talented individuals who need an organization to achieve their full potential. The brilliant engineers at Cisco ( CSCO - news - people ) need the organization and their colleagues as they seek to revolutionize the way we work, learn and play.

In the U.S., we know, being clever carries connotations of being ostentatiously smart and difficult. We prefer the English meaning, being skilled and talented, with the understanding that being smart usually comes with a few rough edges. The truth is that these people are both talented and difficult.

Why must they be difficult? Because they all share these qualities:

--They know their worth (their skills are not easily replicated).

--They ask difficult questions.

--They are organizationally savvy.

--They are not impressed by corporate hierarchy.

--They expect instant access to decision makers.

--They are well connected outside of their organizations.

--Their passion is for what they do, not for who they work for.

--Even if you lead them well, they won't thank you.

How do you spot the clevers who really make a positive difference? In recent years organizations have been obsessed with identifying talent. Most large organizations have singled out what are often called "talent pools" and "high potentials." We would sound a note of caution: Look more for past outcomes than for potential. Clever people develop track records of organizational success.

Once you have identified them, how do you lead them? The conventional wisdom is that you should act as a benevolent guardian. Explain rather than tell, give space and resources, provide recognition, protect from organizational noise, connect with other clevers and so on. This may be necessary, but it is insufficient.

In the clever organization, benevolence is balanced with discipline. Clever people are most productive when they're given boundaries. As much as they need autonomy, they also need structure. Creating the right sort of space--large enough to allow clevers to express themselves, but also with systems and structures to help them focus their efforts--is vital. One without the other is dangerous and ultimately unproductive.

Cleverness thrives in response to real-world challenges with real-world constraints. This is exemplified by the careers of the world-renowned consulting engineers Ove Arup & Partners. They responded to the peculiarities of their assignments by producing the Beijing cube swimming pool and the Sydney Opera House.

It is sometimes suggested that people can be energized to achieve goals by leaders encouraging them that everything is possible. That kind of optimism often doesn't work with clever people. They seem to prefer the reverse. Tell them something isn't possible and they'll be highly motivated to prove you wrong. The world needs them to be right.

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones are the co-authors of Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People. Rob Goffee is a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School. Gareth Jones is a fellow of the Centre for Management Development at London Business School and a visiting professor at INSEAD.

Know-How by Ram Charan

Know-How : The 8 skills that separate people who perform from those that don't
by Ram Charan

What the book meant to me:

Know-How to me is a giant skill, that combines leadership qualities (have the vision where the group should go, singular clarity on the single most important concept necessary to get there, picks the hedge-hog concept, etc.) with the skills of great management (reads peoples passions, skills, strengths accurately and matches them to a job they will succeed in, plays chess with future needs and human resources, captures efficiency by delegating a task to a specialist in the group, etc.)

So, if Know-How is the combination of great leadership and management, then it is the link between Buckinghams "One Thing You Need to Know to Succeed" and Jim Collins "Good to Great" Hedgehog leadership clarity.

Know-How is someone who reads the current market and future conditions accurrately, translates that to a "Where can we win?" question, and rebuilds everything to produce the next level of change needed: the social system, reporting and communcition, culture of being candid, openness in groups to new ideas, accountability. Success of the company is the most important thing, and other considerations take a back seat (egos, personal fear of failure, unnobtainable goals, group fears of change, etc.)

The beauty of this book is the way Charan explains that a group decision can be better than any single individual when solving an internal problem. External problems are probably best read by the CEO doing in depth research, investigation, probing, market watching, and setting up systems to follow key metrics, etc. Internal change is bought into when the right people are in the right seats in your 1st level group. You have evaluated them and placed them in positions of their strengths for their own and your groups success.

These key people together can solve their problems when they know everything the leader knows about how the future outlook appears and how the company can win. Realism, experience, and previous repositioning successes can help you gain credibility and opportunity to make these assessments. The group candidly, regularly, and under the tutelage of the leader forges the solutions.


The Eight Know-Hows
1. Positioning and Repositioning: Finding a central idea for business that meets customer demands and that makes money

2. Pinpointing external change: Detecting patterns in a complex world to put the business on the offensive.

3. Leading the Social System: Getting the right people together with the right behaviors and the right information to make better, faster decisions and achieve business results.

4. Judging People: Calibrating people based on their actions, decisions, and behaviors and matching them to the non-negotiables of the job.

5. Molding a Team: Getting highly competent, high-ego leaders to coordinate seamlessly.

6. Setting Goasl: Determining the set of goals that balances what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve.

7. Setting Laser-Sharp Priorities: Defining the path and aligning resources, actions, and energy to accomplish the goals.

8. Deatling with Forces Beyond the Market: Anticipating and responding to societal pressures you don't control but that can affect your business.


Personal Traits that can help or interfere with the know-hows:
Ambition: to accomplish something noteworthy BUT NOT win at all costs.
Drive and Tenacity: to search, persist, and follow-through BUT NOT hold on too long.
Self-confidence: to overcome the fear of failure, fear of response, or the need to be liked and use power judiciouisly BUT NOT become arrogant and narcissistic.
Psychological Openness: to bre receptive to new and different ideas AND NOT shut other peopel down
Realism: to see what can actually be accomplished AND NOT gloss over porblems or assume the worst.
Appetite for Learning: to continue to grow and improve the Know-Hows AND NOT repeat the same mistakes

Cognitive Traits that improve the Know-Hows
A wide range of Altitudes: to transition from the conceptual to the specific
A Broad Cognitive Bandwidth: to take in a broad range of input and see the big picture
Ability to Reframe: to see things from different perspectives.