Why facing up to your besetting sins is the only way to make positive life and career changes

What’s a besetting sin? It’s a failing or type of bad behavior that has become so ingrained and typical that it has gained control of someone’s life and actions. He or she is becoming — or maybe has already become —the kind of person defined by the sin. If your besetting sin is pride, you are on the road to becoming an arrogant person. If it is anger, you are way down the track to becoming the kind of irritable, red-faced bully who always seems to be in a fury about something.

I’m not talking about ’sin’ in any religious sense. I am neither a religious person, nor believe in that concept of sin. ‘Besetting sins’ is, for me, simply a short, convenient phrase to use to describe habitual — and typically unconscious — behavior that offends against the fundamentals of relating to others in a civilized society. When we act in this habitually dysfunctional way, we limit our chances of achieving what we want. When we inflict our besetting sins on others, we diminish their enjoyment of life as well as our own.

The Ancient Greek word translated in modern-day bibles as “sin” meant to miss what you aimed at, like an archer missing the target. It’s a mistake, not something inherent in being human. Like all mistakes, therefore, it can be corrected with a little effort and clear-headedness. Read the full story

Handing out relatively small amounts of cash won’t provide more than a temporary upswing — if it does anything at all. What we need is a radical change of attitude towards work.

According to U.S. Department of Labor figures, people in the US economy work 9.1 hours on average each working day — and that doesn’t take into account what they take home or work on over the weekend. Given this amount of human input, the economy ought to be zipping along. It isn’t because a good many of those hours are wasted, and because most of the rest are viewed as time given over to financially-induced drudgery.

Why have we fallen into a mess of shady financial dealings and risky get-rich-quick schemes?

Mostly, I suggest, because work has shifted from doing something worthwhile that you can be proud of — the attitude of the craftsman — to a way of making as much cash as you can by whatever means, honest or not — the attitude of the huckster. And for those who have neither the stomach for selling snake oil, nor the brazen effrontery to cheat the rest of us out of our money via risky investment deals, work has settled down into the same kind of mindless drudgery that once characterized medieval peasants.

The disengaged multitudes

According to Towers Perrin, less than 1 in 7 employees calls themselves “truly engaged” in what they do.

Let’s think about that. Six out of seven people are spending their working time (around 45 office-based hours per week — that’s about half their waking hours) in an activity that they do more or less solely to bring in an income; a job that doesn’t even interest them that much, let alone provide them with a sense of purpose for their lives. It’s a kind of respectable prostitution: selling your physical presence in activities you find somewhere between distasteful and outright unpleasant. Read the full story

Losing, perhaps frequently and badly, could be one of the most important steps in taking the lead in business and in life

Just about everyone has experienced failure and defeat, and none of us like it when that happens. Yet losing may be an essential precursor to winning. In a world where change is the only constant, those who believe they are already well ahead of the rest have little incentive to question what they do — let alone change it. The result is complacency. People cling to what they know — what brought them success in the past — long past the point where it ceases to be the basis for future achievements.

I started along this train of thought when I read an article in last Friday’s New York Times business section entitled “For Americans, a Bit of the Swagger Is Gone.” The writer was lamenting recent figures that suggest America’s national self-confidence is slipping badly, perhaps due to foreign policy setbacks and the gradual realization that America is far from popular in many parts of the world — even amongst past and present allies.

What the writer, Floyd Norris, focused on was the world of finance and financial engineering. Charting past periods when American self-confidence fell to low levels, Norris elaborated on the theme of political uncertainty and national dissension, coupled with economic problems, as the basis for peoples’ failing belief in American leadership.

It is not just the decline in home prices and the increase in mortgage defaults. Nor is the seemingly interminable war in Iraq the major cause, although it, too, is probably playing a role. Instead, it is evidence that America is no longer a leader, or perhaps even competent, in one area in which we believed it excelled.

That area is finance. Only months ago, American financial institutions were pre-eminent in the world economy. We were the country that invented all the new financial products and that made lots of money from them. It was our investment banks that were called upon to advise companies and governments in other countries, and then to arrange the financing they needed.

Now that reputation lies in tatters.

Read the full story

Facing the truth about what you are doing is the only way to avoid predictable — and often nasty — consequences

Conservatism may be the chosen political stance of many people in business, but it’s a poor way to create a better future. If you want to build a stronger business, a better and more satisfying career, or a more satisfying life, you won’t do it by sticking with the way you think and act today; nor by looking only to the immediate future.

The current orthodoxy is to deal primarily with the short-term and focus on the results for the next quarter; but we’re already seeing the nasty consequences of that throughout the financial sector of the economy. A conservative mindset is not your friend if you want to thrive in a world of constant change; especially not if you want your life to change in significant way. The major drawback to a short-term, conservative, risk-averse mindset is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s static.

Cause and effect 101

It’s amazing how little attention people pay to the processes of cause and effect. Causes produce effects; same causes produce same effects. There’s an old saying that the best definition of insanity is doing something again and again, while expecting the outcome to change. If there’s any link between an action and a corresponding result, repeating the action is extremely likely to repeat the result.

When the connection is positive and short-term — so people see a certain action quickly produces an outcome they like — they seem fully aware of the link and follow it consciously. But when the outcome is negative and occurs some time in the future — behaving in a certain way is very likely to lead to unpleasant long-term consequences — they seem to find the link harder to grasp, especially if the action is pleasant or comforting in the short term.

Facing up to the truth

Smoking provides a good example of how people ignore reality to focus instead on what they would like reality to be.

The negative consequences of smoking are well known and factual. Yet millions still smoke. Logically, being aware of the health consequences of smoking should make any sane person give it up, if they smoke already; or refuse to start an addictive habit they are very likely to regret.

It doesn’t happen like that. Instead, people admit to the insanity of smoking, then go on doing it. The reason has to be that the pleasure is real and here today, while the threat seems more theoretical and far off in the future, if it ever happens at all. Many smokers admit the danger, then quickly point to someone they know, or have heard of, who smoked heavily all his or her life and lived to be 90. You could equally logically point to someone who smoked for a week and contracted lung cancer. When you’re dealing with probabilities, any single instance is statistically irrelevant.

The thinking, habits, consequences equation

What has this to do with business life, work and self-development? The answer can be expressed in a simple equation: Old Habits + Old Thinking + Short-term Viewpoint = Predictable Consequences.

If you stick with habits and thoughts that are comfortable and undemanding, and don’t look much further ahead that next month or next quarter, expecting any different outcome from what you’ve experienced up till now is so illogical it can be described as form of insanity.

Changing slowly

To produce slow, measured change you could try changing one, or perhaps two, of the terms in front of the equals sign. For example: Old Habits + Old Thinking + Longer-term Viewpoint = Potential for Different Consequences.

I say “potential” because those old habits and thinking will hold much of your life in place until the longer-term viewpoint starts — very slowly — to change them. The same would be true if you changed the habits, but kept your current ways of thinking and short-term outlook. There would be some change, but your old-style, short-term thinking would keep pulling you back towards the way you’ve always reacted to events until now.

Speeding up changes

To make major changes, you must change habits and thinking and viewpoint at the same time: New Habits + New Thinking + Longer-term Viewpoint = New Consequences.

If you do that, the laws of cause and effect will ensure fresh outcomes and paths through life. When people have some life-changing experience, they often describe it as having turned their lives upside down. They can’t even think as they did before; nor can they bring themselves to fall back on their old habits or see the world in the old way.

That’s how you can create your life-changing experiences. Open your mind to new thoughts, lengthen and broaden your outlook and try new ways of behaving. You can definitely expect different results to come about if you do that.

To change externals, change inside first

When you choose to alter your life in this way, inner change precedes outer change. You change yourself in the way you choose and new consequences arise as a result. When outer change forces inner change on you, it’s nearly always due to some traumatic life event.

That’s what happens when you stay fat, dumb and happy until the universe forces you to make a major course correction. It’s likely to be painful. Wouldn’t it be better to choose change than be compelled to experience it through an unexpected and life-altering trauma?

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Loyalists, whether to people or ideas, do themselves and their idols few favors. More non-conformists would help.

We all need doubt. It’s the driving force behind change, creativity, and independence of thought of every kind. Authoritarians and conformists — no surprises here — much prefer faith in fixed dogmas, including those of management: all the “truths” taught in MBA programs and hallowed by years of mindless repetition. As circumstances become more complex and challenging, the temptation is to fall back on supposed certainties. Yet that is exactly the time greater doubt becomes most essential.

Political mythology of all kinds tends to distort reality. The same is true of many of today’s management myths. The worst of these is the assumption that, when it comes to running successful businesses, our leaders pretty much know all the answers. All we need to do is to apply their ideas with determination and unwavering focus on “the basics.” Life — including business life — is simple. Complications arise only when people start thinking for themselves too much.

You can understand the urge politicians feel to claim that all problems are due to “nothing more than” the mistakes of the other party, or the incompetence of those currently in power. By over-simplifying and ignoring anything that doesn’t support their cause, they hope to keep attention on what suits them — and obscure the likelihood that their own solutions will almost certainly contain as many problems — albeit different ones — as the ones currently being used.

Producing a cult of personality around any leader is also a constant temptation. How much simpler it would be if there were someone who knew all the answers; who could tell us what to do for the best with unerring accuracy. We could relax and stop worrying, secure in the belief that someone knew the answers to at least the majority of life’s troubling questions.

Sadly, it just ain’t so.

Clinging to a belief in known, simple answers is naive at best

Many of today’s conventional management styles suffer from the belief in simplistic answers to complex problems. Macho, Hamburger Management tries to claim that sticking to whatever is quickest, cheapest, simplest, and most likely to turn a quick profit, regardless of whether it is any good in the longer term, is the only practical response to global competition. Authoritarian executives — who are still in the majority — constantly stress loyalty and conformity. They need people around them who assume that doing what the boss says is going to be better than thinking for themselves.

Ideas also develop authoritarian ways. Heresy — individual questioning of established dogma — is sometimes punished as ruthlessly as disloyalty to the most demanding dictatorship. The notion is spread that ordinary people should not presume to question what “experts” say; that they are too stupid, too poorly qualified, too amateur in their understanding, or too gullible to think for themselves. Like children, they need to be protected from their inexperience and lead by the hand in whatever direction their “betters” have chosen.

This is such an obviously convenient idea for all established leaders that I am amazed so few others seem to question it. Is it really true that people are generally too lazy to form their own opinions; that they need to be told what to do because they won’t take the trouble to work it out for themselves? That you couldn’t trust them to come up with anything sensible if they did?

Lack of trust is the root cause of authoritarianism

It is a basic belief of Slow Leadership that most people truly want to do good work. Sure, there are some lazy bums, but they are far from being that common. Good work is satisfying, interesting, and makes you feel happy when you have finished it. That’s why being forced into cutting corners and skimping on quality demeans everyone involved.

Over time, organizations build up “scar tissue” from botched attempts to deal with mistakes and problems. As a result, there are so many rules and procedures around from all these past hurts that the organization becomes stiff and rigid. So sweep all the unnecessary rules away! Easier said than done, because there are two powerful — and linked — groups of people in nearly all corporations who work hard to retain them: conformists and authoritarians.

Conformists feel safe being told what to do. Authoritarians feel big when they can do the telling. Niether can bring themselves to trust anyone else.

Is your organization suffering from hardening of its arteries? Is the life blood of open communication and personal freedom to do one’s job unmolested becoming clotted and clogged as it tries to move through the veins of the business? Don’t just blame the authoritarians in positions of power. Blame those below them who accept the constant imposition of petty rules, and substitute compliance for true performance. The problem is lack of trust. The bosses don’t trust those lower down — so impose more and mroe rules on them. The conformists accept the situation because they’ve been taught not to trust their own minds.

What’s the answer?

Firstly doubt, in all its forms, should be fostered and nurtured wherever it can be found. Secondly, it should be understood that the worst place to look for creativity and new ideas is at the top of the organization.

Those who have made it that far typically have no doubt about the value of preserving current system. After all, it brought them to the top, didn’t it? It must be good. The best place to look for creativity is in the usually despised and neglected ranks of middle managers.

These good people are not yet heavily invested in any system. They are much closer to the real needs of the organization. They haven’t given up their doubts about what is done today (nor about the supposed infallible wisdom of their bosses’ ways of doing things). Best of all, they have enough experience to see what needs to be done and direct their creativity to the right spots.

We are suffering from an epidemic of leadership that focuses on simplistic answers: what is cheap, quick, and generates most short-term profit is always best; following established ideas will give all the answers; questioning is simple disloyalty. The result is shoddy business, shoddy goods and services, and shoddy conditions for those who must work in these businesses.

Because of the emphasis on doing things quickly — and never sparing the time to doubt or think things through properly — such organizations suffer from hardening of their arteries and a build up of ill-thought-out, hastily-imposed solutions dreamed up in a hurry when things go wrong. Their management ranks become dominated by authoritarians and conformists, each group needing the other to operate.

We need to encourage more doubt and creative doubters. In many ways, these are the true loyalists, helping those in power to keep checking that they are still on track. The guys at the top can be just as lazy — mentally and intellectually — as the lowliest, least educated employee. They are not exempt from choosing the simplest answer just because it causes them least trouble to think about and implement.

The true signs of a vibrant, healthy organization are the constant questioning of the status quo and frequent production of fresh, creative ideas; the same signs that point to a healthy democracy. Let’s hope it’s not too late in either case.

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Most of the present economic and financial problems have been caused primarily by a single flaw: an almost total failure of leadership

The most obvious lesson of the so-called “credit crunch,” and all the financial and economic problems that flow from it, is going to be the hardest one of all for organizations to swallow. Their over-paid and over-esteemed leaders made the most obvious mistake of every amateur: they invested heavily in things they didn’t remotely understand — “collateralized debt obligations,” “credit default swaps,” and “auction-rated bonds” — and then went on doing it, even after problems began to emerge.

Why? Because those weird financial widgets were fashionable, everyone else was doing the same, and other people told them to.

Like the most amateur of investors, they jumped on the bandwagon as wiser heads were getting off. They listened to “experts” and nodded their agreement, even though they had no idea what the experts were talking about. In their arrogance and greed, they imagined themselves to be far more knowledgeable and competent that was true.

But these people are not supposed to be amateurs. They’re paid big bucks because they claim to be skilled professionals.

Leaders lead. Over-promoted managers screwed up

How did we get into this mess? How did we end up with top executives who have proved to have no idea what is happening in the organizations they are supposed to be controlling? Who followed every fashion and missed every indication that trouble was dead ahead?

It may be the financial institutions and banks in the firing line today, but let’s not forget the Enrons and Adelphis of just a few years ago. Arrogance and incompetence flourish in boardrooms far beyond banking. What we have today is just the latest result of a long-term crisis in leadership throughout business, government, and the regulatory authorities.

• As organizations grew and multiplied, demand for leaders far outstripped supply. Organizations expected every paltry management role to require a leader to fill it — never mind that its duties contained not a trace of true leadership activities: the setting of long-term strategy and vision, then creating the motivating force that would persuade others to follow it.
• In an effort to bridge the gap, leaders have been trained to a formula, not given the time and discipline needed to develop into a true leadership role. It has been yet another in a long and dismal series of quick fixes.
• As organizations focus more and more closely on the shortest of short-term goals, the actual need for leadership has shrunk, not expanded. Even as they were crying out for more leaders, organizations really needed fewer, since leadership is essentially a long-term activity and they no longer paid attention to much beyond the next quarter’s results.
• Universities responded by churning out hoards of “instant” leaders, all trained in formulaic leadership approaches. But formulas can only ever be based on what seemed to work in the past — that’s the only source of the “certainties’ needed to build academic formulae. Given the necessary time-lags in the education system, that “past” is often quite a long time ago.
• In place of seasoned leaders, trained much more by experience than theory, organizations were flooded by people who had little to offer save the theories they had learned in business school. When these proved inadequate to cope with reality — as most did in a few months — these “instant” leaders fell back on the only other source of formulae: rules-of-thumb, management myths, fashionable panaceas, imitation, and folk-tales.
• As circumstances in the world changed, the formulaic leaders drifted further and further away from current realities. Few had either the ability, or the understanding, to do more than parrot the formulae they were taught, so they had to stick with those, however poorly they fitted the needs of the times. They were in plentiful company. In a situation where all the candidates for leadership were much the same — all taught to the same limited, short-term, and formulaic standards — promotion choices were made on extraneous factors, such as whether the person looked and dressed like leaders are imagined to; whether he or she had the right contacts; and whether the chosen candidate would fit in with the current people at the top. It became a self-perpetuating system.

The result has been a generation of supposed leaders who have proven to be incompetent to fill any kind of leadership position — let alone the lofty ones they have reached through office politics, schmoozing, and the “good ol’ boy” network. As current events have shown, on both sides of the Atlantic, a good many leaders have been wildly over-promoted; not just to their level of incompetence, but way beyond it.

In the times of boom, no one noticed. The rising tide of economic growth — based in reality on little more than a massive expansion of cheap and easy credit — raised all the “ships” — competent and otherwise. Executives became convinced of their own brilliance. So when bad times returned, they were slow to grasp the new reality, still relying on those same formulae that they credited with causing their previous success. It has taken a real mess to drive home the truth: that far too many “brilliant” careers were founded on nothing but dumb luck.

These are the burning questions we all need to ask

• Why do we need so many leaders? True leadership positions are quite few: they are only those concerned with setting long-term direction. Most executive roles are managerial or even administrative.
• How can we return to an adequate supply of true leaders and ease out those who have been so grossly over-promoted?
• What should be the training regime for future leaders? It makes more sense to plan for a lengthy apprenticeship than rely on paper qualifications. Like so much else, leadership has been warped by the cult of instant gratification. It takes decades to train and season a top leader, not two or three years in some fashionable business school.
• How can we get back to the point where leaders have to prove themselves before getting responsibility, not just look and sound good or have powerful backers?

I wonder if we can even afford to allow the current generation of leaders to see out their time. They are liabilities waiting to cause future problems. Most have shown that they have no idea what is actually going on in their organizations (see Société Generale, for only the latest example). Few have any true leadership ability. The past decade has seen a series of economic bubbles and crashes, all caused by essentially the same process: arrogant leaders and financiers whose true ability fell far short of their imagined brilliance. How can we quickly get rid of the worst ones and corral the rest?

Leaving the market to its own devices has failed miserably. It can hardly do otherwise, since it allows fashions to rise and fall without any concern for their effects on ordinary working people. The bosses rarely suffer much for their mistakes — they have attorneys to make sure their wealth is protected and most have already amassed enough to allow them to live in luxury until they die. It’s the middle and junior managers, the technical professionals, and the ordinary workers who pay the price of the bosses’ failures in pink slips and lost wages; while in the worst cases, taxpayers — that means all of us — have to pick up the tab.

What we need urgently is a system of sensible regulation that won’t stifle future initiative and produce yet another layer of (mostly incompetent) leadership. The trouble is, it will take true leaders to devise such a thing; and we know how rare those are today.

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Why the “change industry” is a curse and a waste of resources

Browsing through the Amazon.com site recently, I tripped over an interesting statistic. I discovered that there almost sixty thousand titles on change in the business section of Amazon alone. And of those, nearly forty thousand titles have to do with Change Management. (This contrasts, if you’re interested, with only about twenty-five thousand for the Theory of Relativity. Is changing organizations so much more complicated and difficult than understanding Einstein’s theories of the Universe? What’s going on here? )

Change, as represented in the literature, is a vast and heroic undertaking, needing supermen to bring it about, in the face of indifference and opposition from vested interests, and promising to save entire organizations from imminent annihilation.

Change as described in innumerable books

Change, in this view, is not organic, or evolutionary, or even necessarily rational. Change is not introduced; rather a new breed of heroes and “champions” is required to “drive it through.” (I don’t fully understand the metaphor, but I presume it has little to do with driving through MacDonald’s, for example.)

Change is more like a war, in which the enemy are your own employees. Those employees, in turn are expected just to “Work Harder,” like the horse Boxer in George Orwells’s Animal Farm, and to faithfully implement the decisions of the last management meeting — as well, of course, as doing their actual jobs.

What utter, absolute rubbish! Where did all this come from?

Change in real life

In real life, organizations change all the time, if they are any good, subtly adapting themselves to changing circumstances and likely challenges. If sudden radical and violent change is actually needed, it usually means one of two things:

• There has been some sudden, unpredictable and overwhelming alteration in external circumstances; or
• The organization is run by idiots who failed to see how the world was going.

I leave you to decide which is more likely.

An Ideology of Change

What is going on, beneath all this rhetorical garbage, is the arrival over the last twenty years or so of a veritable Ideology of Change. All of it is negative, but nothing about it is more dangerous, more intellectually slovenly, and more needlessly arrogant than the phrase “there’s always resistance to change.” This is an (unfortunately effective) way of deflecting questions and opposition, no matter how well founded, and dismissing any dissent on ideological grounds, even before it is articulated.

The Ideology of Change strengthens the short-term thinker over the long-term planner; the slash-and-burn merchant against the careful thinker; the superficial, aggressive personality against the manager who cares for his staff and the organization. It corrupts how we think and how we speak, with results that George Orwell would have recognized. (The inventor of the term “stakeholder buy-in” deserves death, but that’s not really a sufficient punishment for this kind of ideological atrocity, which reduces employees to the level of people holding sharp pieces of wood. )

Nevertheless, in spite of all this effort, all this bullying —all this intellectual corruption — the evidence suggests that most “change programs” fail — a number because they are badly implemented, but most because they incompetently conceived in the first place. So even if, as Joseph Goebbels remarked to Heinrich Himmler in 1934, there’s always resistance to change, those who resist are statistically most likely to be right.

Return to reality

What, if anything, can be done? Some of the remedies are generic — a move to longer-term thinking; a generation of managers in the Anglo-Saxon world who are properly trained and less frightened; a greater self-confidence in organizations themselves; less worshipping of transient fashion.

That’s already quite a long list, and one which you might think is impossible to bring about anyway. But there are three things that any sensible organization could, and maybe should, do, if only out of self-protection.

• Recognize that most organizations work well enough most of the time, when people who know what they are doing are left to get on with the job.
• Understand that major change is a rare event in the outside world, and that, by contrast, internal change is often de-motivating, time-consuming, and dangerous. People work best in stable and predictable environments.
• Accept that organizations have their own wisdom; and that asking people who actually do the work what changes need to be made is often the most productive way forward.

All this, of course, will be unpopular with the “Change Industry,” with insecure and incompetent managers, with shareholders hoping for miraculous increases in profits, and with business pundits looking for something to write about. They won’t like it at all.

But then, “there’s always resistance to Change.”

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How to profit by making better use of your mental “peripheral vision”

Regular readers will know that I’m a birder and sometimes draw analogies between what I’ve learned from watching birds and the topics I write about here.

This time it’s peripheral vision: literally seeing things out of the corner of your eye. At work, you can use your mental “peripheral vision” to be aware of things others will miss. To spot trends and unexpected movements in events. To notice developing patterns and links between items that don’t immediately appear connected.

What will this do for you? It will make you far sharper and quicker to home in on what really matters. It will help you to see what others miss; or see it earlier, before most people are even aware of it. Best of all, it will make you much more aware of the possibilities — especially the creative ones — in any situation.

All it takes is to slow down and be more aware of what you don’t see in an instant snapshot of the situation — which is all that most people have time for today.

Understanding how peripheral vision works

You may not have noticed this consciously, but your eyes can only hold a small area in sharp focus. Try looking now at a point about 10 or 15 feet away. Don’t move your eyes. How much is in sharp focus? Typically, it’s a circle maybe a yard in diameter. If you want to see a larger area clearly, you’ll have to move your eyes or your head.

When I’m out birding, I’m trying to be aware of birds that might be anywhere in a large area all around me. Listening helps enormously. Experienced birders use their ears as much as their eyes. By hearing a bird, you can begin to work out where it might be. Even so, you may only know the call is coming from somewhere on your left. That could include many large trees, deep thickets — or, where I live, a hillside covered in cactus and mesquite.

If you try to search the area visually (and everyone does that), that small circle of sharp focus must be moved back and forth all the time. The bird may move while you’re looking somewhere else. You may miss it even if it sits still (especially then). That’s where peripheral vision helps. You may not be able to focus clearly outside a small area at one time, but Nature has given you something just as useful: the ability to be aware of movement just about anywhere in your visual field.

Watch a group of birders in action and you’ll see people who are primarily looking for movement. Because you can register movement throughout your visual area, it gives you a much wider perspective. Birds, especially small and vulnerable ones, tend to move a great deal. They’re afraid they’ll make a good target for hawks if they stay still. The skillful birder spots the movement out of the corner of her eye and immediately swings her circle of sharp focus to that spot.

Inexperienced birders look in specific places for clearly recognizable birds and miss most of them as a result. Their more experienced colleagues look for anything that moves. They don’t just see more birds, they see butterflies, bugs, squirrels, lizards, deer and heaven knows what else.

Applying the same principle to work

At work, you can use your mental “peripheral vision” to be aware of things others will miss. The key is the same: to be aware of movement. For example, a change in sales figures, or production output, or customer returns can alert you to something you should investigate.

Never mind which direction the change takes, up or down. A change from what’s usual is always worth investigating. If customers change their buying behavior, focus in right away. If competitors seem to be shifting their positions, make sure you take notice. If a subordinate’s or colleague’s behavior changes, take a look. Good birders stay alert, focused, and notice as much as possible around them. Good managers do the same.

Today’s typical devotee of Hamburger Management has no time to wait and watch for movement or changes. He or she takes a quick look at a situation, mentally fits it into some pre-determined pigeon-hole or category of events, and jumps right into action.

Resisting the temptation to jump to conclusions

If what is there doesn’t fit into those preconceived categories, all it takes is to ignore the “awkward bits” and force a fit. See event, fit it into existing set of ideas, jump directly to stock response. Quick, simple, easy . . . and deadly. Perhaps someone should have pointed this out to the executives of Société 3.

As a way of operating, Hamburger Management makes everyone into a beginner. There’s no time to spot what isn’t immediately obvious. Looking for trends is left to computer algorithms (and you only have to be a user of Amazon.com to know what odd results even the most sophisticated software can throw up in predicting something relatively simple, like what books you might buy next). Creativity is so crippled as to become virtually useless.

All that’s left is “monkey see, monkey do” as a way of life.

As you walk through your working day, how much do you see . . . or miss?

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Technorati Tags: mental “peripheral vision”, peripheral vision, be aware of things others will miss, be aware of movement, change, preconceived categories, Hamburger Management, trends,

(This is a guest post by John Fletcher. John is an Englishman now resident in Europe, with a long career in the public sector in several countries. He has spent a good deal of time in working environments outside the Anglo-Saxon world, and has written and lectured on organizational issues.)

Tactics: good and bad

 
In the first part of this article I looked at a major cause of unhappiness at work — lying to yourself about what you really think or want, so that you “fit in” — letting others pull your strings. In this second part, I look at some strategies, good and bad, for resolving the problem.

Tactics that do more harm than good

The worst tactic is to play the Superficial Rebel. We’ve all met the kind of person in a large organization who likes to say “of course I’m known as a bit of a rebel” or “let me give you my views on this subject — strictly personally, of course,” before launching into an almost note-perfect rendition of the organizational line on the same issue.

In the end, such sad beat people fool only themselves, but they are unconsciously trying to resolve a fundamental internal conflict in western, especially Anglo-Saxon, organizations. Unlike cultures which value and reward conformity — some in Asia for example — the cultures of most of the English-speaking world exalt the tough, heroic, individualist, at the same time as organizations demand mindless conformity from their workforces.

The Total Cynic has given up, switched off, and does nothing but complain incessantly. Such people are often quite competent, especially at middle and lower levels of organizations, and are tolerated so long as they don’t overdo it. But ultimately, they spread poison around the system without doing themselves any good. Ultimately they would do better simply to leave.

Then there’s the Out and Out Rebel, whose brief passage through an organization illustrates that truth we were all told when we were young; that you can’t beat the system.

What works

But you can beat the system if you act as a Subversive. Unlike the Rebel, the Subversive lives and prospers in the system by undermining it from within — not for the sake of it, not to destroy the system, but to ensure that it meets their needs.

For some people, this need may be as simple as money — not in the pathological sense that people pursue money these days, but just enough money to enable them to pursue their interests and hobbies and to feel secure. Many people have consuming passions outside work which they cannot, or do not want to, turn into a job: what they want is enough time and money to pursue these interests privately.

Others may want, more than anything, to set their own work patterns, or to become an acknowledged specialist in an area. They may turn down promotion, knowing that senior people in organizations often have very little control over their time and can never become true experts.

Some may genuinely dislike managing others, and refuse promotion for that reason. Some may value freedom and autonomy above all, and may be happy as a local representative or a regional manager.

But as well as these negative factors there are also positive ones — how can I influence the system and those I work with so that it is more to my liking, and a better place to work? What can I do to prevent the system doing silly or negative things?

Ultimately, there’s nothing more tragic than the Next Monday Syndrome: the faithful organizational warrior who retires or leaves after a long career of doing the right thing, having the right opinions, licking the right posteriors, taking the right jobs, and it’s thank you very much, goodbye. The next Monday morning there’s another man or woman in a suit in the same chair, probably with the same opinions, maybe even with the same suit, and it’s as if our loyal employee had never existed.

You don’t want to wind up like that, do you? It’s better to ask yourself, when you finally leave, not what the organization has done to you, but what you have done to the organization.

Just what difference has your time with the organization actually made?

If someone is pulling your strings, shouldn’t it be you?

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Technorati Tags: career choice, finding your own way, avoiding career traps, being happy at work, following your best interests

Getting out of the post-holiday blues

This guest posting is by Karen Senteio, Business and Life Coach and President of VERVE. You can read more about her and her business here.

Something is bothering you. You can’t quite put your finger on it. It’s like a dull ache deep in the pit of your stomach. You know it’s been there for a while, but you ignored it as you would a new bad sound coming from the engine of an old car. Something is there and each day the noise is sounding more like a word.

Mo . . .

Mo . . .

Mo . . .

Then one morning you’re sitting at your desk, sipping your coffee and staring at the cloth walls of your box struggling to come up with an “out of the box” thought, and you start to wonder. When did this get so hard? Why is it such a struggle?

Finally, with alarming clarity, the noise in your stomach speaks to you. Mo . . . Mojo. Mojo. That’s it! Mojo. Your mojo has gone! Your get up and go; your ability to string together creative and gratifying thoughts has somehow got away from you.

Where did your mojo go?

The beauty about mojo is that it never really goes away; it just lays dormant. It hides and waits patiently for you to recognize it’s there, still ready to serve you. And, while it waits, it keeps on working in secret, percolating fresh ideas that will pour out into a fantastic cup of premium grade mojo, once you decide it is time to get it back.

Mojo is in your heart and your head. You’ll know when it is back. Your stride will be different; your words will dance; ideas will be fresh and new. You will attract positive people and experiences and live in the moment, enjoying every second of it.

How do you get it back?

You decide to call it out; to bring it into existence. You regenerate it by learning a new dance; writing in a journal; starting a new job; releasing whatever holds you back; pursuing your passion; attracting edifying relationships; or calling new and bold career opportunities into existence.

You bring it back to life by recognizing it was temporarily buried — knowing you have the ability to recapture it again.

Then the twinge you feel in your stomach will not be your missing mojo. It will be sore muscles from that belly dance class.

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Technorati Tags: post-holiday blues, Mojo, fresh ideas, positive people and experiences, creative thinking, energy

Photo credit: Gudrun Holde-Ortner