Sometimes following the easy way isn’t what is needed

Since coming onto the scene in 1982 (yes, 1982!), Madonna Louise Ciccone (a.k.a. Madonna) has achieved accomplishments unrivaled by any other artists in the music industry — ever. She has sold over 200 million albums, conducted the highest grossing concert tour by a female artist, become the top earning female singer in the world (with a net worth in the hundreds of millions), currently holds the record for top 10 hits, and been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And these are only some her industry-leading achievements.

All of this success hasn’t been achieved by taking the easy way either. Madonna has stirred controversy after controversy with her use of sexuality, religion and fashion. She has reinvented herself time and again to remain relevant to the current global music audience. As a result, for over 25 years Madonna has captured the attention, adoration and wallets of fans across the globe.

There is a great deal that leaders can learn from Madonna and her incredible ways, including:

• How to deal with innovation as fashions and customer demands shift.
• Effective techniques to reinvent a persona and profile.
• How to bring a management team along with you, even as you face controversy.
• How to capitalize on success for the benefit of larger causes.

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Boredom may be a common part of most people’s lives, but it can also be full of possibilities

“I’m bored” is a constant refrain from irritated children the world over. Parents tend to hope — and often pray — that they’ll one day grow out of it. The truth is, though, that none of us ever do. From university students, through working people to the elderly, boredom in one form of another is just about always with us.

In our hyper-active, work- and achievement-obsessed culture, admitting that you’re bored is a little like admitting you’re constantly fantasizing about kinky sex, or that you haven’t much sense of purpose — extremely common, vaguely shameful and likely to provoke a swift response along the lines that it’s high time you pulled yourself together and found something useful to do instead.

One of our society’s besetting sins is filling every waking moment with activity — and forcing our children to do the same. Maybe it comes from the old-fashioned notion expressed in the saying: “The Devil makes work for idle hands.” Maybe it’s a fear that anyone who isn’t constantly ‘on the go’ will grow up to be a loser. Maybe it’s a notion that to be bored is also to be diminished in some way; to be in a state of temporary uselessness.

But what if being bored is useful? What if it’s even close to essential for provoking you into more innovative and creative ways of thinking? What if human beings need to be bored some of the time for the health of their brains? Read the full story

The fundamental flaws of the conventional approach to getting things done

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The conventional way to achieve success, in your life or in a work project, is to start with careful planning. First you build your plan, then you track progress against it. If you’re in a business setting, you’ll add a detailed budget. Corporations especially measure someone’s success by how closely their results match the original budget and plan. The plan becomes a straitjacket on later action.

Don’t do this!

Using such an approach commits you to a path you almost certainly can’t follow. Events rarely, if ever, work out as you planned. Then you must either stick to the plan — and stray further and further from reality — or abandon the previous plan and put action on hold while you start planning again.

Detailed planning too easily forces you into dangerous actions, like remaining rigid in the face of life’s natural fluidity, or ignoring warning signs and trying to force reality into the path you planned for it. It blocks you from responding creatively to whatever comes along. You become an actor following a script, instead of responding freely to the ebb and flow of events; you judge progress against the plan itself, not against how well you’re moving towards to your final objective.

Even the best plans are only thoughts about what to do if things go as you imagine. Forecasting the future is a risky game with a miserable chance of success. Trying to make the future conform to your plans is downright foolish, since you have no control whatever over what will happen. Reality will run you over like a railroad train hitting a gnat. Read the full story

Photo credit: Kevin Rosseel

When people get mad with you, they often tell you to “grow up.” Well, you have no real choice in the matter. Each day you are a day older — a day more more ‘adult’ — whether you want that to happen or not. But is being an adult always such a great thing?

Children have most of the fun. They’re encouraged to play and to learn, two of the greatest sources of excitement and pleasure that there are. Adults are expected to give up play in favor of ’serious things’ like work — which usually means doing things they don’t want to do, at times when they don’t want to do them, for people they don’t much like, in return for a level of payment they don’t believe is adequate. Read the full story

The most precious times in life may be those that jolt you out of your normal way of seeing the world

Most people value creativity and look to it to help them change. Yet change is more often about letting go of old ideas than finding new ones.

The main difficulty with change comes from being sufficiently happy with the way things are that you see no need to alter anything. Life may not be perfect, but it’s good enough; the effort and uncertainty change brings look too great to be worth it.

That’s why those moments when you’re fully open to change are so precious. Miss them and the possibility of renewal goes on indefinite hold.

Robert Thurman, Buddhist scholar and friend of The Dalai Lama, describes such times as ‘teachable moments’ — times when you recognize your current ways of thinking and coping aren’t adequate for what’s in front of you; times when life serves up something you can’t handle, at least with the approaches you’ve used before. Read the full story

Why the most creative people usually fare worst under pressure from greedy bosses

In the fable by Aesop, a man and his wife had a goose which laid an egg of solid gold every day. After a while, they became too impatient to wait 24 hours for the next egg, and wondered how they could get more gold faster. “Where does the gold for the eggs come from?” the wife asked. “What if we could find the source of all that gold?”

So, imagining the bird must have an inexhaustible source of gold inside it, they decided to kill it and cut it open. Of course, there was no gold and they lost the daily egg as well.

I suspect almost every child in the developed world had this story read to them at some time, yet its moral seems to have been completely lost on our business leaders. Greed and impatience destroyed the couple’s source of wealth. The same two processes are destroying the wealth of millions today, especially in industries that rely on creative people. Read the full story

What is the commonest problem we face today? Too much efficiency and not enough effectiveness.

Efficiency is based on doing what you already do — only faster and cheaper. Effectiveness comes from doing whatever you need to do to be a success. Since that is often something new and different, you’re usually not that efficient (at least at first). That’s why efficiency is what keeps dying businesses (and careers) afloat, while effectiveness is what launches new ones into the stratosphere.

Macho management is all about efficiency. Successful management is derived from effectiveness. Efficiency is rigid, repetitive, conventional, and typically based on imitation. Effectiveness is creative, often unconventional, and always responsive to change. Read the full story

Slowing down is essential to any kind of creativity — even if it makes you unfocused, inefficient, undisciplined, or unsystematic too

I don’t often write about creativity — largely because there are already more than enough articles on this topic and they mostly say more or less the same things. Still, since one of the most obvious benefits of slowing down is a quick increase in creativity, it’s probably worth reminding everyone how and why this comes about.

Efficiency kills creativity

The quickest and most efficient way to do anything, from thinking to running a business, is to stick firmly to what has been done before. I don’t say it’s the most effective — and certainly not the best — but it’s undoubtedly the most efficient. You don’t waste time working out what to do; you already know how to do everything this approach takes; and you can jump right into action.

Of course, do this often enough and you’ll no longer be able to take any other course. Like a river that’s cut itself into a deep gorge, only two directions remain possible, forward or back — and even forward can only be wherever the water has been before.

You’ve bought efficiency, but only so long as the past course stays viable. When circumstances change, as they always do in time, you won’t easily be able to get out of the rut you’ve dug for yourself. So many organizations die this way, you’d think the rest would have noticed by now.

Speed denies you any chance to think

Add speed to the efficiency and you’ve created a double problem. Thinking — especially creative thinking — takes time. If you’re in a rush, as nearly everyone is today, there’s not enough time to think. That’s why organizations — and people — rush blindly into problems they ought to have seen coming. They’re so obsessed with quick action they don’t give themselves time to have second thoughts.

Creative thinking is even slower. First, it doesn’t come when you call it; then your first ideas nearly always have to be thrown away — often the second and third ones too.

Systems, by definition, throttle innovation

A system is a set of actions that you establish, then repeat as often as you want. What do they achieve? Consistency, mostly. By repeating a system, you ensure pretty much the same result every time, whether it’s a production system, a marketing system, or a quality-control system.

Nothing wrong with that, so long as consistency is what you want. But innovation can’t be consistent. If it is, it isn’t innovation, it’s repetition.

Our fashion for “management by numbers” may produce consistency, but it leads to mediocrity as well. Why do small companies often find it easier to be creative than big ones? Because they have few, if any, systems.

A firm, disciplined focus stops people going off on tangents — which is where most creative ideas will be found.

The more disciplined and focused the corporation, the less it will tolerate people wandering off in unexpected directions, merely to satisfy their curiosity. Without curiosity, there can be no creativity. Keep everyone firmly on a known track and you’ll deny them the “fuel” innovation needs.

Where do major innovations come from? Usually from someone wandering off to “play’ with an idea, doing something out of curiosity — only to discover its potential later, or simply “noodling around” with no idea of making anything useful.

Cutting costs often cuts out innovation too

What are the first elements in any organization to be removed by cost-cutting? Training, research, long-term projects, activities with no clear link to the “bottom line” in the immediate future — all the places where creativity will be found.

Besides, creativity can be expensive. All those wrong turnings and false starts swallow money and seem to have nothing to show for it. Of course, they’re essential to produce any eventual breakthrough, but it doesn’t look like that at the time.

If you want to get a reputation for “running a tight ship,” remove anything that isn’t rigorously practical against current understanding. Never mind that you’ll be destroying any chance of finding new ideas.

Cutting your own (creative) throat

Fast, efficient, focused, and systematic. Have you heard that somewhere before? Macho management is all of those things — plus short-term, demanding, narrow-minded, and simplistic.

Can it produce creativity? I don’t see how. Will it stifle any that exists? Most certainly.

And before you become smug about the foolishness of organizations and their leaders, take a look at your own life. Do you do things in a rush? Feel guilty if you’re not busy doing something “practical” every moment? Value action over thinking — especially “blue-skies” thinking? Constantly try to make your life more systematic, more focused, more organized for “getting things done?”

If so, you too may be slowly but steadily killing your creativity, while digging your life into a rut it will be tough for you to escape, even if you want to. Think about it. It may not be too late to slow down and give your creative potential the chance it needs to transform your future.

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Human beings are the only species that thinks, reflects, questions, wonders, daydreams, imagines, and allows for curiosity. We can reflect on the past and ponder the future. Yet, in an age of 15-second sound bites, 24-hour in-your-face news, and the constant bombardment by electronic devices, many folks are spending less and less time actually thinking.

This raises some interesting questions, not the least of which are: “Why do we seem to be doing less and less thinking? and “What are we allowing to get in the way of thinking?”

With so many people living their lives at a constant 90 miles an hour, we have less and less time to think, really think, as opposed to reacting. That’s maybe why we find ourselves always doing, doing, doing, without thinking about what we do.

Making time to think again

In your workplace, how often do you take time to think? How often are you encouraged to stop and reflect? How often do you encourage your direct reports to be curious about something and take the time required to pursue their wonderment?

Sadly, our over-emphasis (really, an obsession in our Western culture) on efficiency and productivity has not resulted in wiser choices, better solutions, or greater insights. It certainly hasn’t led to improved relationships and deeper and greater passion and engagement in our work. What is has produced instead is simply doing whatever we do in less time. — drone-like. We’re in danger of becoming simply faster robots.

Why does it matter?

What are we sacrificing to gain speed and efficiency by avoiding thinking and reacting instead throughout most of each workday? All species react. What of our humanness are we jettisoning in this “live reactively” approach to life at work?

Of course, to answer a question like this you have to think, which is maybe why it’s rarely even considered.

What if you did spend more time thinking at work? Would that even be a plus in your workplace? You may work in a not-invented-here type of work culture where thinking creatively, reflecting and imagining upset the apple cart, threatening the “business as usual” culture, and challenging the status-quo. If that’s the case, others might view you as dangerous. Being known as a thinker could be dangerous to your workplace health, which is why some people stop doing it.

What will it take to put things right?

For many folks, “act, don’t think” has become the ubiquitous workplace mantra. In a world of macho management, ideas and action don’t mix, like oil and water. Do we take enough time out to delve below the surface, explore, and allow our curiosity to discover something new and unexpected? Do we dare to take the risk of thinking at work?

As Bob Dylan wrote, in It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding): “He not busy being born Is busy dying.”

Thinking equates to being born, being alive, growing, and self actualizing. Simply “doing” equates to withering on the vine.

Now that’s something to think about!

This week’s food for thought questions

• How often do you really, really think, about your relationships with colleagues at work (let alone your spouse, your children and others)? Are these relationships improving, worsening, matter-of-fact, evaporating?
• Do you allow enough time for curiosity? Do you take the time to “drill down” to engage in discovery and exploration; or do you simply live your life on the surface of things?
• Have you spent any time reflecting on what upsets, frustrates, or angers you? Have you thought deeply enough about what’s underneath any habitual reactivity (doing without thinking)?
• Are you encouraged to think at work? Do you spend a majority of your working hours attached to an “electronic leash” — plugged into everything, everywhere, but your deeper self and creative potential?
• Do you foster a thinking climate and culture in your team or department? If not, why not?
• Do you take time out for yourself — to walk, be still, reflect, muse, wonder, and breathe deeply into your experiences? If not, why not?
• What one baby step could you take next week to allow for more thinking and reflective time?
• What do you think about thinking? Do you have (can you make) the time to even think about that?

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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.

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