Learning not to be a jerk

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Following is a fun excerpt from OutThink…enjoy!

school-bus-stop-colorI have a confession. I used to be a tyrant in the morning. Tyrant might be an exaggeration (or not), but my recollection is that while getting the kids ready for school I spent all of my energy cajoling, prodding, pleading, scolding, and sometimes ranting at my kids to get ready – to put on their shoes, eat their breakfast, brush their teeth, get dressed, put their lunch in their backpacks…, because the bus is coming! My wife has a different, and more effective style, but on my mornings to handle bus time I would conduct diatribes on the inevitability of the bus, and harangue them that unlike procrastinating getting in the car, the bus is coming at an appointed time and they needed to hurry up!

One evening after berating myself again for being an ogre of a parent, I decided that the next morning I just wasn’t going to behave that way again. I resolved that regardless of whether they missed the bus or not, I simply was not going to be a jerk to my kids. While a nice idea, it did require I try something else.

I decided I would simply advise them of the time and ask them what the next steps were. So instead of, “Get your lunch in your bag!” I might say, “Looks like we have about 14 minutes. Is your bag ready?” Or if Annie asked me to play Taylor Swift songs on the kitchen iPod stereo, I might say “Well, we have about 20 minutes, do you think we have time?” Sometimes she decided we did have time to listen to Taylor Swift, sometimes not.

It really worked. We had a few close calls, the first few days, but it worked. I would simply point out the time, and almost immediately they learned to watch the clock and developed an awareness of when the bus would arrive (our bus is quite punctual). My whole demeanor changed from dictatorial bus baron to simply asking what was left on their check list in the next X minutes. I would ask if they brushed their teeth or packed their homework, but in an inquisitive way, not as a command. I’m also convinced this morning behavior shift worked because I truly didn’t care if they missed the bus. I was completely prepared to drive them, but I never admitted it out loud. I kept up the shared expectation that we always ride the bus, I just shifted the accountability from me to them. Making the bus became their responsibility; I was just there to help the process.

Believe me, we don’t claim to be model parents, and I find it almost impossible to manage the logistics of our lives these days (last night I missed a soccer meeting by an hour…), but now in the morning we have four kids successfully making two different bus times and very rarely miss it. They watch the clock, punch the list, and make the bus.

According to a study at Duke University, almost 45 percent of our daily activity is habitual. It wasn’t easy to stop barking orders at my kids. It had become an ingrained habit.

In equal parts we have to selectively abandon past behavior, carry on with what works, and pick up new habits and actions.

Conjure hope. Change the world

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“A good leader inspires others with confidence in him; a great leader inspires them with confidence in themselves. ”

RobertDesnosNick Morgan told me this story.  In 1944 Robert Desnos, born 1900 in Paris, had become a poet and member of the French Resistance and subsequently arrested by the Gestapo.  While interred in Auschwitz he and his companions and friends watched over the weeks as their fellow inmates were gathered in groups on trains to be taken away.  The Gestapo said nothing of their fates but everyone knew, as no one returned, that they were being sent to die.  One day the guards came to gather Robert and a few hundred others into the trains.

Everyone knew with sullen despondency what was to happen and the train was silent with loss, and fear.  In a flash of impulse Robert reached to the man next to him and grabbed his hand.  “I will read your fortune!” he said.  And told the man he would live a long life, with marriage and children.  He grabbed the next man’s hand and read a fortune of wealth and entrepreneurship and joy, and again and again he grabbed each man’s hand and conjured a fortune full of life and joy and expectation.  In each case throughout the train he offered a reading of hope and long life and joy.

The Gestapo became disoriented and unsure of their charge to execute the men and stopped the train.  The guards became tentative and unsure of how to proceed in the face of this jubilation and turned the train around.  No one died that day.  As Susan Griffin writes, “Through the power of imagination, he saved his own life and the lives of others.”

A beautiful story indeed, and imagine how this vision of joy might translate to your work, to your life.  As John Hope Bryant says: there are only two things in the world, love and fear.  At the point of greatest despair, if you can conjure hope, it will resonate around you and change the world.

Getting Lost and Bending the Map

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It’s summertime, and a nice time to immerse in a good book. It turns out that any book outside of our realm of work, particularly fiction, is valuable to our mental flexibility and creativity.

This past weekend I read Laurence Gonzales’ Deep Survival: Who Live, Who Dies, and Why. The book is studying the traits and behaviors of those who manage to survive calamities – plane crashes, lost-at-sea epics, mountain climbing disasters … – yet there is a strong metaphor for the types of behaviors among organizational leaders which allow them to rise up, with resilience, and survive economic and market storms, or maybe just company politics.

Maybe something goes wrong in a product roll-out. Like the introduction of Febreze, in which P&G banked on a market bonanza based on their unique and proprietary product, which they were certain would be a success. Then Febreze bombed. The folks at P&G created a new playbook which resurrected Febreze and made it the $1 billion dollar brand it is today. Their marketing and development group brought Febreze back from the brink of product extinction. But it doesn’t always go that way.

Gonzales identifies five stages survivors typically go through before turning the corner and building an action plan that allows survival:

  1. Denial – the first instinct people have is to deny the position they are in and stick with the mental maps they have built in the planning and early execution phases.  We each have a mental map we are following and if things don’t go to plan, we ‘bend the map.’  That is: re-create was is actually happening to fit into the mental construct we created originally. We deny the realities emerging around us, and instead reframe what is happening to match the original plan.
  2. Panic – Truth starts to set in, but there is no plan B. This is the stage in which people typically succumb to the rising sense of panic within and exhaust energy and resources.  People lost will often sprint to false peaks, dash in directions that fit the map they have ‘bent’ in their head.  The beginning of the end can start here if disastrously they break a leg, lose food, abondon gear, etc…Those in the late stages of critical hypothermia will often take off their clothes, falsely believing they are too hot.
  3. Adherence to an invented plan – what happens next is people create self-imposed rules.  Conditions changed, they feel isolated and try to create predictable rules to follow. The problem is, often these self-imposed rules are created in a vacuum. You are already on the precipice of disaster and the rules created have less to do with actual environmental circumstances, and more to do with creating a false sense of control. He cites the example of a firefighter lost in the Tetons who won’t make a fire to generate warmth and dry his clothes because open fires are banned in the National Park.  Or the example of 11 survivors of a plane crash who believe, falsely, that help will find them if they stay put.  A seventeen year old girl separated during the crash knows no such group-think and follows her instincts to civilization.  At this point, there clearly is no ‘plan’ and it’s the inventive and creative who figure novel ways to adapt and survive.
  4. Deterioration – by this point those lost are desperate and have squandered valuable resources and can lose the ability and willingness to make gainful efforts to survive, find help, and build strength.
  5. Resignation – finally once options are depleted the lost can lose resolve and will.  Those that survive at this point are often carried forth by the draw of someone waiting: a loved one, or an unrealized dream. If you have read Unbroken by Laura Hillebrand, Louie survives the Japanese prison camps, in part, for his deep love and longing to be reunited with family and friends back home.

Fantastically, often when people are lost in the wilderness very few will retrace known steps back to the car or point of departure even when the path they took is clearly understood.  Even when we know the five mile path back where we came from will lead to the car, we think, “just up ahead, around the next bend or over that river, there must be a shortcut back to the car.”

Interestingly, those who possess great survival instincts typically early on in the dilemma show very sharp mental acuity – Steve Callahan‘s boat sank abruptly in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, at night, with no warning, and yet in the first minutes he quickly gathered survival gear, deployed his lifeboat, and took a second to marvel at the clarity of the stars and the weather.  Steve even found humor to offset the deluge of panic rising. All in less than a couple minutes. Awoken from a dead sleep. In the dark.

Possibly above all other attributes including ingenuity, clarity, focus, etc… Gonzales points to Resolve as the defining characteristic of survivors.

The following quote from the book is taken from Joe Simpson’s account of descending Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes with his partner Simon Yates. Simpson suffers a broken leg and slides over a cliff into a crevasse. Believing his partner to be beyond reach and dead, Yates abandons his partner.

“Still hanging on his rope, Simpson began to experience a sense of wonder and even joy at his environment, that same spiritual and mystical transformation reported by many other survivors. It is always followed by a certainty of survival and a renewed commitment. With dawn came light, and with light came revelation: ‘A pillar of gold light beamed diagonally from a small hole in the roof, spraying bright reflections off the far wall of the crevasse. I was mesmerized by this beam of sunlight burning through the vaulted ceiling from the real world outside… I was going to reach that sunbeam. I knew it then with absolute certainty.”

There it is again. Weird works.

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fosburyIn 1968 Dick Fosbury astonished the world at the Mexico City Olympic Games by clearing 7′ 4″ 1/4 inches in the high jump. His efforts before 80,000 people were an aberration – an anomaly in track and field events. Dick was a gangly 6’3″ athlete who hadn’t excelled at any event in track and field at his Medford, OR high school and he unveiled a maneuver to set a world record. More remarkably, his competitors failed to recognize and adopt his innovative style and lost – not only on that occasion, but for years to come because they couldn’t acknowledge the power of his innovation.

Fosbury’s own coach, who didn’t care for the move at all, called it “a shortcut to mediocrity.”

But it wasn’t, in fact, “unseen before.” Fosbury had been working on perfecting the technique for a couple years. Not only that, another athlete, the Canadian Debbie Brill, had developed an identical style she called the “Brill Bend.”

So how in the world did the lesser athlete Dick Fosbury not only develop a technique to best his rivals, but do so quite publicly while his competitors failed to recognize and adopt the innovation to excel?

The day Fosbury actually unveiled this new technique was five years earlier at a track meet in which he beat his own personal best by a foot and a half. Eighteen inches. High jump improvements are typically measured in inches – or fractions of inches. People should have been paying closer attention instead of ridiculing him. But why? Because it was new, because it was different, because it looked weird, and because no one else had the discipline to bother.

There it is again…curiosity, experimentation and persistence as keys to excellence.

Fake It Until You Become It

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Success_is

“The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.”
– Jim Collins

Earlier this week I met Amy Cuddy. If you’re not familiar, she has a signature expression in her talk: “fake it until you become it.” Moving the discussion beyond “fake it ’til you make it”, she means to convey that whenever we try something new, attempt a new skill, or otherwise leap into the unknown in an act of bravery, there is always a part of us that feels like an impostor. Because it’s not about just “making it”, it’s about showing up, consistently, until we fully inhabit – fully become – the new persona we envision ourselves to be.

When we join a new sport, begin playing a musical instrument, pick up yoga, or take on a new job, there is always that little voice of doubt in our mind that says, “You don’t belong here. You don’t know what you’re doing. They’re going to find out you’re a charlatan.” Amy says she spent years of her life feeling like this as she constantly took on new challenges and slowly recovered from a debilitating injury.

I once had a conversation with Vince Poscente, who at age 26 decided he wanted to be an Olympic skier. Just like that. While at the time a fairly middling recreational skier, Vince dedicated four years of constant training, crashes and injuries, to make the Olympic team and compete in the 1992 Olympics in Albertville, France. He didn’t win, but he showed up, every day and locked into his skis to train.

It’s marvelous to watch kids attempt new things naturally, unselfconsciously. Kids will regularly cast themselves into the unknown of new sports, or art, or other acts of joyous bravery. If we bring forth what is within us, with consistency, and sometimes a touch of bravery, we can slowly and surely develop new skills. And over time, hone those skills into real expertise.

The Dividends of Giving

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helping-handsIn the wake of hurricane Katrina, numerous people throughout the gulf coast area had lost homes, and were in need of basic food, shelter and care. With sporadic electricity available in the region, cash became critical to sustaining people’s lives.

Serving customers from Texas to Florida, Hancock Bank was one of the primary banking providers in the region. But without power at their banks or ATM facilities there was no way their customers could get access to funds to buy basic needs like clothing, food and shelter. Even if some of their branch locations were able to open, often either the customer had lost their identification in the storm or the bank itself and had power and access to people’s account information.

A few of the managers at Hancock Bank did something remarkable. Reminded of the original charter of the bank to serve communities first, profits second, they established makeshift human-powered ATMs. They decided to provide $200 cash to anyone who asked for it. That’s right. Without either proof of identification or verification of account information, Hancock Bank gave up to $200 to anyone who asked for it in exchange for a written IOU.

During those critical weeks following Katrina, Hancock Bank employees literally laundered money from destroyed ATM machines and gave out millions in increments of several hundred dollars each. Of the millions they gave out, asking only written promissory notes in return, less than $300,000 (1%) was not returned. And in the months that followed the disaster, their cash deposits from existing and new customers ballooned 40% as customers repaid the loan and new customers joined. Andrew Zolli tells the story here.

Shortly after that Hancock Bank Chairman George Schloegel was elected Mayor of Gulfport, MS with over 90% of the vote.

Lead with Your Footprints

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footprints-in-the-sand

The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.
– Warren Buffett

Jim Collins has popularized the notion of the “stop-doing list.” Equally as important as your do-list, he argues we need to make room for innovation and growth by ceasing some of the repetitive, mindless, or ineffective activities that can become habitual, but might not be leading us in constructive directions. In a recent presentation, I suggested the “stop-doing” mantra. Afterward someone approached me and said, “OK, stop doing…like, what?”

Fair enough. Here are ten mindless-doing traps we can often engage in, that you might try stopping. For more great ideas to add to your stop-doing list, Joe Calloway has some good advice.

  1. Stop replying to all, and pick up the phone
  2. Stop waiting for someone else to decide, and gather those who are willing to help decide
  3. Stop trying to do everything yourself, others can and want to help
  4. Stop focusing on what you can’t control (see #2)
  5. Stop needing to be right
  6. Stop waiting to talk, and start listening
  7. Stop wishing someone else will change, and accept them
  8. Stop trying to make it perfect. The world needs to see it.
  9. Stop muting conference calls while you do other things (like throw emails around)
  10. Stop having the same conversations with the same people. Comfort conversations are good but try reaching out to a dormant contact and ping someone you haven’t interacted with in a while. When you do, start by giving without expectation.

You might read these and think, “Right! [insert name] constantly does these things.” But here is the killer application of these ideas. The only reliable way to ripple effect these behaviors is to model them. People around you are far more likely to follow your footprints than to follow your advice. I too, am trying to let go of what I can’t control. That, and stop drinking coffee after noon.

Where’s Your Woodshed?

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CharlieParkerWoodshedding is an old jazz expression – it means to go deep in isolation to build your chops, get your groove on, master your instrument. As the legend goes, in 1937, when he was only 17 years old, young Charlie Parker – before he became the great “Bird” Parker – would go down to the High Hat Club, also known as “the cutting room” to play with the great session musicians of the day.

One night, after young Parker ran out of breath and ran dry of new ideas in the middle of his solo, the great session drummer Jo Jones unscrewed his cymbal and threw it with a crash at Charlie Parker’s feet. The gesture was clear. Take a hike kid. You’re cut.

The same thing happened to Parker just a couple years earlier, when he was only 14 years old. And when he was that young, he didn’t know what he didn’t know. He was so humiliated then that he quit the instrument for three months and refused to play. But this time he had a different reaction. He was indeed humiliated being cut from the stage, but this time around Parker worked even harder at the instrument. That summer he secluded himself at a resort in the Ozark Mountains to work on his playing. He joined a house band to pay for his roof and bread. But what he was really doing was wood-shedding and playing alone hour after hour each day to develop his virtuosity.

He emerged from that self-imposed seclusion and presented the world with an astonishing contribution to a new developing form of jazz known as bebop.

Here’s what I believe: The key to developing innovation and excellence starts by having the courage to develop our own niche mastery, and to understand and know that our actions make a difference.

First Reach In: Find your most compelling signal in the noise that surrounds us. Find the intersection of your passion and talent, and with perseverance, tenacity, grit, hard work and pluck, take it to the woodshed. In the constant din of noise that surrounds us, we need to understand the power of a mute button to silence the static while we focus.

Next Reach out: to a teammate, friend, colleague, or loved one, with encouragement and accountability enrich them to do the same. Multiply that excellence in others. For remember, a rising tide lifts all boats

Do the Right Thing

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the-hard-thing-is-the-right-thingIt never really occured to me. It didn’t occur to my wife. Candy never thought of it either. The morning when Annie and I got in the car, it did cross my mind, but only briefly enough to send a quick text to Candy asking, “Do you think it’s OK if I bring Annie?” It never seemed such a concern that I should call in advance or question it. Although alas, that decision changed the day.

Our team decided a year ago to have a group event and volunteer our time and energy giving back to communities. We picked a GoodWill Center. Candy arranged the time and volunteer effort with the center, and at the last minute I decided to include my five year old daughter in this wonderful exercise of giving. She’s just in kindergarten, and well shucks, what better education than to include her in a day to giving back to those in need?

Annie and I drove the hour from Portland Maine to the GoodWill center and presented ourselves, along with the clothes and toys we had gathered that morning to donate. We were greeted by a floor supervisor who led us to the assigned task of the day. In the warehouse he brought batches of newly donated goods which we were to sort into bins to later be placed on the floor and sold to needing families. Annie thought it was awesome! digging through interesting clothes and sorting them into bins for the WoodWill center to sell.

While we set up shop and prepared to attack the task, the supervisor person re-emerged and declared that we could not stay because Annie was in violation of their safety regulations. It wasn’t a kind dismissal, but delivered more in the tone of “well rules-are-rules” sort of way.

Well, I understand following policy but still asked to talk to the manager who decided this. This was the same decider who was still hiding in her office. Annie and I walked to the closed office of the GoodWill site manager to politely inquire. My intention was just to build rapport and understand her concern. Well, immediately it was clear she was adamant – five year olds cannot be on the “sorting floor”. Ok, I get that but we’re just throwing clothes into big boxes and Annie would love it. She would, in fact, be awesome at it. We were never asked to sign any type of release and obviously I’m there as her parent responsible for her behavior and actions.

Nope, not a chance. Perhaps we could distribute the sorted clothes on the floor in the showroom? Nope, not in the policy. My daughter started to cry, and I knew there was no negotiating. It would only make things more difficult for her. We left, had a nice lunch and I tried to get Annie to forget about the unyeilding people at GoodWill.

Here’s the thing – consistently the best places to work communicate clearly that they trust their people. W.L. Gore, Umpqua Bank, NetApp, and many others have, for example, have adopted travel policies of “do the right thing.” GoodWill has a chance to communicate clearly to their people in the field that they have an opportunity to “do the right thing” as well. Or at the very least be human when delivering sad news.

Day-glo 80’s ski tricks, Border Smashers, and Dinner Rolls

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Before Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile, a group of runners had been working on it for a decade and many, including scientists, considered the four minute barrier physically impossible. But once the world saw Roger do it in May of 1954, within weeks his record 3:59 was beaten by John Landy of Australia. And then the floodgates opened and a quick string of runners beat the four-minute barrier after that. Today a talented collegiate runner can break a 4-minute mile. When we see the possible, it can become inevitable

My son’s ski coach is a former U.S. Ski Team moguls champ. When I mention his name to people on the mountain, they say to me incredulously, “Have you seen him ski!!?” Yes, he rocks. And few sports have had the amazing amount of fast ingenuity and innovation that moguls and freestyle skiing has.

Here’s that I mean. Jonny Moseley won Olympic Gold in 1998 in Nagano Japan in moguls skiing. Fast and fluid and best in the world, but basically incrementally improving on what everyone already knew. He didn’t do anything remarkably different. He just executed the best on known skills and tricks – what my son calls “day-glo 80’s tricks”. For example, here is Travis Cabral a year afterward, winning a U.S. Championship in 1999 doing much the same tricks that had been repeated over the past few decades.

 

Then Jonny Moseley invents the “Dinner Roll” – an off-axis double rotation trick, the likes the world had never seen. He created the trick for the 1999 X-Games, perfected it, and then performed it in Olympic competition in 2002 in Salt Lake City. The judges didn’t like it, and scored it the same as more simple tricks, because they didn’t know what else to do with it. And because he spent more time in the air executing this trick, he was slower on the course. He got fourth in the 2002 Olympics, but the crowd went completely nuts. In the eyes of the world, he crushed. Here it is in slow motion (with a hilarious commentator):

 

 

Jonny Moseley’s “Dinner Roll” is now known, among those who speak the language, as a “Cork 7” – short for “corkscrew 720” and it’s a fairly basic trick these days for anyone in competition. Here’s a 12 year old doing one (fast-forward to 1:35).

Over the past ten years since Moseley smashed that border, there has been a whole new dimension of tricks and an explosion of ingenuity. Here’s Mikael Kingsbury winning the World Championship last month, March 2013.

 

Here’s the thing about Moseley’s irreverent ingenuity. He knew, going into the 2002 Olympics, that he wasn’t going to win with the Dinner Roll. The judges, his coaches, his teammates all reminded him he would gain nothing in points for his somewhat smart-ass trick. And he did it anyway. And because he did it anyway, he cleared the way for invention in the sport. Within six months of presenting the Dinner Roll in 2002 Olympic competition, the rules were changed to allow, and reward, inverted and off-axis rotation in the air.

Sure he would have liked to win. But pushing the boundaries of the sport was more important. Jonny Moseley said of the 2002 Olympics:

“There’s no question I was making a point; I was making a statement. I had hoped to be able to both make a statement and win, but in the end I probably sacrificed a gold for a statement. I hate to sound like I did everything for the good of the sport. I just personally couldn’t swallow the idea of going up there and doing what every single other person was doing. It wasn’t worth abandoning innovation and abandoning what is possible.”