Archive for the ‘philosophy of work’ Category
To My 19-Year-Old Self: Embrace the Timer
This Permission Tool Will Calm and Kick You
Look—I know you get all fidgety about the stuff you’ve got to do: the papers to write, the group projects to complete, the hours at work and the woman you’re trying to work up the nerve to ask out. Finals coming—have you even read the chapters? Plus all the pressure to assemble a plan for the rest of your life. Get on that! (Ha! Here’s a hint: your plans will scatter like water on a hot skillet. Again and again. But you still have to plan.)
That’s why I’m writing, lo from across these many decades.
Behold: the timer.
Like an egg timer only with more time and without the eggs.
The timer is a permission tool you can employ today. The timer will grant you focus and peace of mind. The timer will calm your fidgety, anxious self. The timer puts an end to the ridiculous argument that you can do several things at once. You may find this hard to believe, but in the decades to come people routinely kill others while driving and opt out of deep life-changing conversations because they “multitask” (big word in twenty years). Wacky, right?
Here’s how the timer works:
You’re not gonna believe the free stuff on this thing Al Gore invented called the “Internet.” Oh: buy Apple stock.
- Look at the big pile of stuff you’ve got to do.
- Pick the most important thing. Just one thing.
- Set the timer for 60 minutes.
- Start the timer.
- Do that one thing.
- Do that thing for 60 minutes. Don’t get coffee. Don’t talk to your roommates. Don’t daydream about that beautiful woman. Don’t stare out the window. Do the one thing.
- When the timer rings, get up and do all that other stuff.
- In fifteen minutes, pick the next thing, set the timer and repeat the process.
Sound simple? It is!
Listen, Mr. 19-year-old Kirkistan: this is how you are going to get stuff done for the rest of your life. Even enormous projects tremble when the timer shows up. Almost everything in life can be broken into manageable segments.
And this: You emerge a happier person when the timer goes off. Because you actually did something.
I think you have a timer on that big plastic watch of yours.
Try it.
Now.
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When will Your Mission become Mutiny?
Look Boss: It is Written
One of my favorite bosses, when privately presented with a wallet-sized card imprinted with the corporate mission and asked what he thought of it, pretended to use it to wipe his derriere.
Was my boss in open rebellion?
Not in the least.
My boss was responding to a ridiculous communication tool. At that point in the history of that particular medical device company, it was all mission and everyone knew it. Patients and physicians were front and center and no one needed reminding. We were all directly involved in the mission and to think otherwise was to dismiss the conscious and vocal choices people made to work there.
Then again, perhaps the communication tool was a bit prophetic. It wouldn’t be long before many in the firm started taking their eyes off the mission to focus instead on quarterly profit goals to the exclusion of patients, physicians and common sense. These things happen when big bonuses are at stake.
But it need not be that way and you may well be the one to say so.
Unless you simply wanted a job and any job would do, you likely joined your firm because of mission. You found yourself in some level of agreement with the firm’s vision and wanted to help move this thing forward. For many of us, the mission is a motivating and ennobling force, even if we may not think of it constantly.
We know that even the best-intentioned organizations stray from their intended goals and go rogue with evil intent. This happens at high and public levels. It also happens at day-to-day levels, in quick decisions and in small furtive meetings among colleagues. For-profit companies do it. Non-profits do it. Churches do it. Hobby clubs are also capable of it.
That’s when any of us needs to come back to the mission and openly ask whether this quick decision or that furtive meeting is accomplishing our shared mission. Sometimes our best and smartest move is to reprise the mission openly, verbally and with gusto. We all need reminding of our purpose and mission from time to time.
If you care about your organization’s mission, you may need to lead a mutiny today. You’ll want to count the cost, of course, because mutiny can be very expensive.
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The Problem with Collaboration: Can’t Touch This
You talk. We listen. (Not so) Simple.
Let’s trace social technologies backwards and watch them infiltrate the organizations that launched them. Social technologies carry with them an implicit demand to be heard—if not an outright demand for action.
That demand, from those voices, will—sooner or later—run smack into the command and control mentality: the top dogs who always delivered the monologues. The higher-ups and muckity-mucks who get their way.
This is a problem.
Is this a problem?
Because this problem may be the starting line for any company culture that wants to change. It won’t be pleasant. Because the kind of people that help facilitate the change are a different sort than the ones willing to tell everybody else what to do. There’s a happy move today, currently gaining cultural muscle, to identify the boss-bully in the corner office and make them play nice. This even as people throughout organizations are getting a vision for collaboration vs. command and control.
Letting employees and customers (and possibly congregants and constituents) into the smoke-filled rooms where big decisions are made. What a concept.
Groundswell offered the example of Salesforce.com, their Idea-Exchange and the grass-root effort to excise an annoying banner that always appeared. The company denied themselves, kept listening, and eventually removed the banner they loved and their customers hated.
Bravo!
The problem with collaboration is really an opportunity to become adept at identifying the things that cannot/must not change and holding the rest with an open hand.
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Collaborate Starts S l o w
Catch me if you can
One must slow down to understand.
Way back: I’m thinking back to a statistics class in college. The theater-seating room in the Psychology building at UW-Madison was packed with well over 200 people. And at the last possible minute the professor would make a grand entrance, rushing down the side of the room with flowing scarf, his cologne preceeding him and wafting across the room. Then he talked nonstop for the next 50 or 75 or 100 minutes. In my mind a bell rang at the end, but I may have imagined that. He took no questions. His purposes were served to assume everyone was with him.
Few were, naturally.
Teaching assistants did the actual work of slowly going through the ideas and problems sets. They were the ones taking the time to tee up concept after concept and watch as some statistics-averse philosophy student slowly worked it out. That’s how a multi-layered idea passes between people: slowly.
Today: Sometimes Mrs. Kirkistan will ask how teaching went today. I consider teaching a success when we have had a robust discussion about the central concept for the day. When people bring in stories and draw connections—usually there is laughter—that is what engagement looks like. It is satisfying. Once upon a time I thought if I got through my slides in time that was success. Today I believe slides are the least important thing—because delivering slides to an audience largely absent is one of the more vacuous activities on the planet.
Tomorrow: My smelly, scarf-toting statistics professor from way back didn’t care about engagement. But that attitude won’t get anyone very far in a culture pivoting toward collaboration. Broadcasting an aroma and putting on a costume scarf doesn’t actually carry all that much weight for those interested in slicing and dicing a subject. What does carry weight is passion for a topic that slows and shares enough to bring others up to speed. Collaboration takes time while we each catch up and synchronize our language. But slowing to a human scale of understanding is worth the effort.
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Create a Conversation Zone Today in 3 Steps
Make Talk Work at Work
If it’s been a while since you’ve had a truly collaborative conversation at work, take some steps toward that today. Collaboration is starting to register on the radar of many leaders in organizations. Collaboration is the love-child of the free speech we tout in social media and the world of work. Collaboration is freed speech working its way backwards through organizations.
Create a conversation zone in 3 easy steps:
- Acknowledge the human in front of you. “What?” you may say. “That’s pretty obvious stuff.” Not so fast: how many times a day does your mind go dark when the janitor says something, or the clerk—or the boss? It’s the automatic assumptions that run ahead of those conversations that poison the water. Start with this basic thought and you may be able to strip away some of the power distance that ruins conversations before they even begin
- Listen with your eyes. Eyeball to eyeball. No listening happens when my eyes are focused on my Samsung Note II. Don’t fool yourself that you are listening—you aren’t. Not really. Multitasking does not count when it comes to human relationships. I’ve taught enough college students to know instantly who is paying attention, and 93.2% of that is eye contact (6.8% of students have mastered the art of eye contact while entirely absent).
- Expose yourself. Really: tell what you honestly don’t know and what you wonder. Stupidity is endearing when offered without guile. Be the stupid guy. Ask the dumb question. Let it be known that you don’t know.
Good things will happen if you take these three steps today.
Oh, and report back, will you? What happened in your conversation today?
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Hey: Where did that voice come from?
Don’t be stung by inauthenticity
Some in my class are English majors and don’t mind wading into the waters of how words work. So when Content Rules (Handley and Chapman) talked about voice, a close reading ensued. Handley and Chapman lobby for authenticity in voice: voice is your own way of corralling point of view and word choice and rhythm (meter?) and pressing it all into service. Voice is making language work to express your words in your way. Voice is what you sound like when you talk (and we’re aiming for conversational writing in this class, so writing and talking sort of blend).
But voice is also something that gets companies and organizations all hepped up. To give your brand a personality by adopting a particular point of view (which leads to word choices/meter and etc.) is what companies and organizations seek these days. Voice helps a brand stand out from the crowd.
And one must stand out.
But this:
How can you write with an authentic voice when you are adopting the voice of the brand?
Good question, English-major-friend. Two answers come to mind:
- Sometimes we use voice in the service of some larger purpose. So we might submit our voice to the larger brand purposes and adopt as best we can the machinations of the brand voice. Some people may naturally embody a brand voice. The rest of us have to work at it. This adding and adopting is part of serving the larger goal you believe in (at best. At worst: you adopt voice to make coin for rent). This is the collision of craft, faith and service.
- If you find yourself stinging with inauthenticity as you write for your brand—look for a different job.
I’ve maintained all along that when people add their voice to a project, new things happen. Sometimes a new voice provides new electricity and a new approach to a time-worn topic. Even old-timers can learn stuff from new voices.
Of course, people must voice up.
If you don’t say what you’re thinking, the new thing just around the corner will sit there in silence—just around the corner.
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Image credit: red-lipstick via 2headedsnake
Working Together: A Final Frontier
Talk Inc. Buries the BS Meter
Collaboration is hard for a lot of reasons. One reason is the power distance between people in a company. How can I say what I really think when I know my boss disagrees? Can I have a real conversation with an automaton who spouts corporate messaging and controls my salary?
Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power their Organizations by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind starts with good intentions: to lay out this new challenge of interacting with employees as if they had something worthwhile to say.
But I should back up: old styles of management were about command and control: I’m boss so I’ll tell you what to do. And you’ll do it. New ways of thinking about the work of leadership and managing tout a more generous and collaborative approach to personal relationships. But these collaborative ways still have a hard time sifting down through the ranks of gatekeeping managers who intuitively see their mission as that of controlling others.
Talk, Inc. has a terrific vision, but the first section (three chapters on intimacy) is off-putting in that it quotes CEOs and VPs and various bosses at length, each talking about all they are doing to encourage collaboration. 
But Groysberg and Slind may have done better to start at the other end: giving voice to employees who have been given a voice. As it stands, the first three chapters are a difficult slog because anyone who has spent time in a corporation will recognize the smarmy PR tone of the program-of-the-quarter. My corporate BS meter kept pinging into the red.
The book gets better, but all the way through I struggled with the “trusted leaders” part of the subtitle. For a book that intends to talk about the power of conversation, there is still an awful lot of command and control monologue. Whether it was the suits from Cisco or Hindustan Oil talking, it was hard to take their comments seriously.
Talk, Inc. is, however, smartly organized into four sections (Intimacy, Interactivity, Inclusion and Intentionality). Each section has a chapter that plays out the vision, followed by a chapter that shows a company trying to carry out that particular part of the vision, followed by a “Talking Points” summary that helps the reader play it forward. The Inclusion and Intentionality sections offer more thoughtful reasoning and vision-casting for changing corporate culture so real conversation can happen. Groysberg and Slind offer solid examples of organizations that work hard at listening. But this is a story that really needs to be told from the “newly-voiced” perspective.
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Image credit: Bill Domonkos via 2headedsnake
Taking Direction from Clem Fandango
A Year of Great Clients
I’m counting my blessings these days because I’ve had a year of clients who have been a joy to work with. Which is to say: they let me alone to do the work we’ve agreed on. And then we come together, talk parts through and make the work better.
All in all, there’s been very little Clem-Fandangoing.
And for that I am grateful.
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Via Sell!Sell!Blog
Groundswell Plus: Please Write a Plus-Sized Book about Today’s Social Media Opportunities
Beyond Li & Bernoff’s Groundswell
Groundswell was published by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in 2008 (Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing). I’ve used it a couple times to frame this new opportunity and give social media marketing students a sense of the possibilities of communication beyond liking a snarky comment, link or photo on Facebook. I’ll use the text again but I’m also prowling about for newer texts.
Groundswell is a grandfatherly text by today’s standards. Published (counting fingers: 9-10-11-12) more than five years ago and much has changed. I like the book for the authors’ optimism about building and maintaining communities. And that is precisely where it is starting to wear thin. It turns out building communities is a much more complicated endeavor that works best when flesh and blood people talk with flesh and blood people. The social media piece is a nice and useful add-on, but students need to see a larger picture.
I’ve got other texts that give details about best practices and content strategy. We’ll certainly discuss the disciplines of editorial calendars and fine-tuning their understanding of their audience and tightly defining what their audiences need/want. And, as always, we’ll write and share and write and share and learn what works for ourselves.
Groundswell is firmly focused on taking full advantage of business opportunities. That’s why I first started reading it and it may be why I end up with something else next time. My students tend to be a devoted bunch: they attend this Christian college and their writing (most are English students with a professional writing focus, plus a few journalism and business majors) bubbles up from deep theological streams. Many will say they have no interest in business right up to the point where they realize they actually have to pay off their school loans. That realization attenuates their post-college work vision. One my teaching goals is to help students start to see just how much those deep theological streams can pour through the world of work with all sorts of happy results (an income comes to mind, but also making a difference in real life).
What I’d really like is a Groundswell Plus. I’d like a version of Groundswell that paints a larger picture of the community-building opportunities. Perhaps Groundswell Plus tells stories from the Arab Spring (for instance) or Ai Weiwei and points readers toward organizing for social change. Maybe this plus-sized version of Groundswell could point readers toward unearthing social problems (along with business opportunities) that might respond to collaborative energies.
Because in the end, students want to give themselves to things that matter.
Just like the rest of us.
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It’s Better to Have the Conversation Than Not
Assumptions are a cul-de-sac. Admissions, an autobahn.
A fast-moving project I’m on pits the changing need of the client with the frantic response of the agency. I’m writing copy and providing strategic direction for a moving target, which has (literally) kept me up nights.
One truth that has proven itself to me several times over the past few weeks is that it is simply better to have a conversation than to not. That may seem obvious to you. But it’s taken me years to come to understand this. I’m too easily put off by the gruff manner or the fly-off-the-handle personality. It’s too tempting to put my head down and just do the work. But the way forward—especially when the task and deliverables are murky—is to talk together about what we understand. Naturally it is embarrassing to admit I know only this much (thumb and forefinger stretched) when I imagine those who wrote the scope of work know this much (from here to the wall, say).
But admit I must.
It is the only way forward. And sometimes it is the only way to get to the place where you can put your head down and do the work. Admitting what I know is also the best way forward: anything I can do to get the team on the same page, whether that means showing my rough draft copy or my quick dumb sketch of what I think the interactive designer just said. And by admitting what I know, others can feel free to admit what they know. That’s usually when I come to find out someone heading up the whole thing is just as baffled. But when we talk openly about what we know and especially what we don’t, a measured response can emerge and we assemble our next steps. At least until the next client meeting.
There is something of an art to getting people on the same page. Some personalities fall into this easier than others. Getting open discussion is aided by vulnerability: the admission. The confession. I suppose the question is: how badly do you want to move forward?
See also Seth Godin’s commentary about fearing the fear vs. feeling the fear. It may give you courage for your task.
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Image Credit: Mark Brooks via 2headedsnake
conversation is an engine 