We all like to think that we can have our cake and eat it too.
 

Whatever you aim to do in life, there are real choices in how you can go about accomplishing it. Be sure to assess the needs of each situation and decide what is most important before taking your first steps. There’s an expression that comes to my mind about this: “There is never enough time to do something correct the first time, but there is always time to do it over again.”

In business, few leaders have the luxury of doing without tough choices regarding preferences or priorities. A simple example might be speed versus accuracy. Obviously, we’d love to get things both fast and right. However, there are most definitely times where we must choose between the two. Even in this example, it is not always clear cut which choice must be made. As you can imagine, accuracy is highly desirable in anything we do, be it for business or personal purposes. However, sometimes getting something 100% accurate is overkill. It sort of follows the 80-20 rule. Sometimes getting to 80% is good enough because the ‘cost’ associated with the final 20% may not be worth it, but generally I am of the philosophy of “I’d rather have it right than fast”.

In a recent entry on the Harvard Business Blog site, Freek Vermeulen writes about this issue in a piece entitled “Slow and Steady Wins the Growth Rate.”

His piece resonates with me as he uses his own experience of learning to play the cello as an analogy for his point about ‘time compression dis-economies’—a term coined by professors Dierickx and Cool from INSEAD. I studied violin and played for many years, beginning when I was nine years old. His piece highlights a very important point—three hours does not always equal three hours. The point being that doing something for a half an hour 6 times is not the same as doing that same activity for one three hour period. Think about exercise. We all likely realize that exercising 6 days a week for 30 minutes each session is much better for our long-term health than exercising once a week for 3 hours.

Rushing to accomplish something very rarely works out as well as we’d like.

Growing a business faster by hiring more and more employees, without allowing the business to properly take on board and acclimate these hires, will not achieve the desired results. Rather, it will likely lead to challenging times with leaders scratching their heads in wonder and then commencing the downsizing that inevitably will follow. Patience, or “slow and steady” as Vermeulen says, is necessary in order to achieve sustainable success. Taking the time to “do it right” will ensure a better outcome versus scrambling to get it done as quickly as possible. Vermeulen’s own study of multinational companies demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach by showing that “growing at a moderate-yet-steady pace increased profitability much more than did short outburst of rapid expansion–almost twice as much.”

On a very simplistic level, we all understand this. How many of us would be comfortable to learn that our doctor’s office is measured on “patient throughput”? Ouch! When I have to see a doctor, I want to know for sure that they are interested in “getting it right” not getting me in and out fast. Businesses must balance these oft-competing objectives in order to strike the proper, sustainable result – and it is we, as leaders, who must make those decisions and set the priorities.

Technorati Tags: prioritizing, choice, slowing down, using time wisely, getting it right first time, making time for what matters

In his latest blog, Freek Vermeulen writes about the Greek myth of Icarus. Icarus’ father, Daedalus, made them both wings from feathers and wax so that they could escape from imprisonment the island of Crete. All went well, until Icarus flew so high that the heat of the sun melted the wax in his wings, sending him to his death in the Aegean Sea below.

The Icarus Paradox, the danger of letting yourself get carried away by your own successes and inventions, is one that we should all be aware of. As Professor Vermeulen writes:

“The same thing that had made Icarus successful is what led to his downfall. In his overconfidence, he had become blind to the dangers of flying too close to the sun. And this is what we often see very successful companies do too: they become successful doing something, but this makes them overconfident and blind to the dangers that other developments pose to them. This behavior often leads to their downfall.”

Of course, the paradox doesn’t apply only to companies. A good many highly successful managers and leaders suffer the same tendency to become convinced of their own superiority; ofte to the point where what was once a strength then becomes a weakness. I think it was Mae West who said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”—but she wasn’t talking about corporate life. Too much of even the greatest personal strength in the world of work always poses a danger. That’s why slowing down can make the difference between keeping your head and staying balanced, and getting swept away to the point where you cause your success to come to an abrupt end.

One ‘trick’ that has served me well (when I have remembered to stick to it) is always to interpose a delay between making a decision and implementing it—even with such minor matters as responding to e-mails or accepting invitations. There are very, very few decisions that cannot wait 24 or 48 hours before action. The main reason for haste is usually only your own eagerness to get started or get a problem over with.

That small time gap can be just enough to allow for second thoughts. Responding quickly to someone who makes you angry means your response will be driven entirely by the emotion of the moment—without space for considering what that might do to a long-term relationship important to you both. Jumping to implement a course of action easily causes you to become committed. By the time you see your choice is not quite as good as you thought, it’s too late to pull out.

The majority of managers and leaders—maybe you also—dislike going back on a decision or statement once it has been made public. The more macho the leader, the less (in my experience) he or she is even willing to admit to having the smallest of second thoughts. Mix this with The Icarus Paradox and, as Professor Vermeulen points out, you have most of the ingredients for the appalling mess corporations like AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup got themselves into. It also goes a long way to explain why their seemingly intelligent, experienced and hitherto successful leaders walked into crazy situations with their eyes wide shut.

Don’t let it happen to you.

Technorati Tags: leadership, Icarus Paradox, going too far, arrogance, executive failure, turning a strength into a weakness

Here’s another article by Professor Freek Vermeulen that it’s well worth thinking carefully about (“Slow and Steady Wins the Growth Race”).

In it, he points out that the human brain needs time to digest new information and be able to put it to good use. Six hours spent studying a topic over a week, with gaps in between, will be far more effective that six uninterrupted hours at the last minute. Both learning and thought, let alone creativity, are much less effective if you don’t allow time for some rest and changes of focus in between periods of directed activity.

Here’s how he relates this to business:

“. . . as an adult examining corporate strategies, I see that firms often fall into the same trap. In order to catch up with competitors, for instance, they enter new markets at double the speed, undertake twice as many acquisitions, or hire double the number of employees. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Just like me practicing the cello [his own example earlier in the article], organizations need rest and time in between growth spurts to recuperate and digest the effort. Trying twice as hard does not mean you’ll get twice the benefits. There are limits to how fast you can grow, without starting to suffer from it.”

This rings very true to me. The faster people try to do things and the harder they work over concentrated periods, the less return they usually get for all that effort. The human brain is a long-distance runner, not a sprinter. It quickly gets tired and loses a good deal of its power and flexibility.

Professor Vermeulen writes that he examined the growth strategies of 25 multinational companies and found that strategies based on growing at a moderate-yet-steady pace increased profitability almost twice as much as those based on short bursts of rapid expansion. I suspect that’s even more true of individuals. Throwing yourself headlong into some process until exhaustion is reached, then expecting to see significant progress, is a very poor idea.

Slow and steady is more effective than fast and erratic. Save yourself some grief and frustration. Slow down, take sensible periods of rest and allow your mind to wander onto something else from time to time. I think you’ll be happier and healthier—and ultimately wiser and more productive—if you do.

Technorati Tags: productivity, creativity, getting things done, pace of work, slowing down

If you don’t enjoy your day at work, you may need to look inward for a solution
 

There’s a lot of concentration today, quite correctly, on the need for organizations to provide a more humane working environment. But good working environments don’t make happy workers all by themselves. You can lead a horse to the water, open its mouth and force its nose below the surface, but you can’t make it swallow.

I am not saying that people actually want to be unhappy at work, but employees are not blank slates to be written on; they bring their emotional and intellectual baggage with them to work, just as they take it home again.

Let’s take a simple example; you’re a middle-level employee of a large organization, arriving at work on a Monday morning. What do we get if we open up your head and look inside? First, there’s the row you had with your spouse last night; you have an uncomfortable feeling it might start again when you get home. Parking the car, you remember that it has a problem you really must get fixed this week. Hope it’s not as expensive as last time; you really can’t afford another bill like that. Going through the door, your stomach tightens as you also remember you have an objective-setting meeting with your new boss later in the morning. That sort of meeting is never fun. Finally, you arrive at your floor and see Smith, a person you dislike rather a lot, smugly admiring his new office suite. You can’t understand why he ever got that promotion, but the word is that he’s popular with senior management and will go far. You might even wind up working for him. What then? Should you leave? Who would employ you? And the first email message you come across is to call someone in the HR department as a matter of urgency—someone you’ve never heard of. Oh dear, what can that possibly be about?

Understanding your ego

So it goes on. In a way you are probably half-unconscious of, you’re tired, irritable and worried and you haven’t yet done a stroke of work; or rather, it’s not you who are worried. It’s your ego. In Latin, ‘ego’ simply meant ‘I’. It was taken over as a way of translating Sigmund Freud’s expression “Das Ich” into English. It means essentially the conscious, rational mind—the sense of self and individualism. It’s used in a rather vaguer sense in popular psychology, and in Buddhism it’s the thing that causes all our trouble and unhappiness.

Don’t be nervous or leave this article now. Buddhism is actually just a highly-sophisticated system of mental training, developed by practical people over thousands of years. What Buddhists say, is that your ego doesn’t really exist. What you think of as yourself—the person who is angry, upset, disappointed, hopeful, uncertain—is just a collection of noises in your head, patterns others have imprinted on you, and fears and fantasies about things that haven’t happened yet and probably won’t.

It’s not really you who are upset about Smith’s promotion, it’s your ego. You’re not really worried about answering questions on your expenses—your ego remembers the humiliation of being told off when you were a child. If you can still the chatter of what Buddhists call the “monkey mind,” you will find the real you underneath all that. Until you can, all this debate about multi-tasking is rather beside the point. You are probably ‘doing’ twenty things at once in your head, at a minimum, almost all of them negative and useless.

Are you here, or somewhere in the future or the past?

Notice that none of the events I’ve listed is happening right now. In fact, we are usually so obsessed with resentment of the past and fears about the future, that we forget that life is only a series of present moments. Unfortunately, the mind does not distinguish very well between things that are happening right now, and things that happened in the past or might happen in the future. So we relive events and anticipate events not only emotionally, but physically as well. In your head, you start running through what you are going to say to your boss and your throat tightens as though you were really there.

There is a simple cure for this; every time you have a though about the past or the future, if it’s negative, say to yourself: “I’m glad that’s not happening now”. Try it. You’ll be surprised. There are a few other things you can do also to still the chatter of the monkey mind, all extremely banal and none requiring any special equipment.

How to deal with your ‘monkey mind’

Sit still in your office chair for two minutes. I bet you can’t do it. Your mind is full of thoughts which have physical consequences. You start to think of Smith’s promotion and your jaw begins to clench and naturally you sit forward in your chair. If you can manage it though, your mind will be quieter when you have finished.

Take a document, any document, and read it through without your mind wandering. If your mind wanders, notice where it goes to. “It’s a report by so-and-so. Pompous idiot. I remember that meeting—or was it somebody else; wait, I think I’ve still got a record of that meeting in my notebook . . .”

Train yourself to sit motionless for five seconds when new e-mail arrives. E-mail exists for you, not the other way round. Slowly, the hormones of fear and excitement that your body naturally secretes, and you are only vaguely conscious of, will start to be produced less often.

Buddhists have always known that you can’t repress thoughts, and you can’t think of nothing. All the Zen arts, from archery to the tea ceremony, are designed to still and calm the mind and teach concentration by focusing on one thing. So think of one thing, and you will not think of many things.

Let’s take the most banal example imaginable; lunch. Do you eat a sandwich at your desk? Then notice the sandwich. What’s in it, what the texture is, what it tastes like, how many bites it took you to finish it. It’s not enlightenment, necessarily, but it’s a start.

When you give up the incessant mental chatter, when you learn to concentrate, you’ll not only work better, you’ll be happier.

Technorati Tags: focus, concentration, being in the now, stilling the mind, Buddhism in the office, learning to concentrate

Success often hinges on avoiding unforced errors. Here’s how to do it.

Photo: indi.ca

What’s the cause of unforced errors in life and work? Not stopping to think. Going so fast that you don’t see the looming pothole until you hit it. When asked why they did something stupid, the commonest thing people say is: “It seemed like such a good idea at the time.” It did — because all they saw were their dreams of success, and they didn’t slow down enough to notice the risks that went along with them.

Today’s leadership role models tend to be aggressive by nature. They prefer the spectacular win over any series of small gains, even if it comes with far more risk. They want to be known as ‘winners’, not people who play safe. And, like all who have the power to recruit others, they tend to choose people in their own image: people whose strengths and weaknesses are very like their own. You can think of this like the emphasis on successful stock-picking that flew around before the dot-com bust. The supposed masters of this art were widely imitated, even though all the evidence is that even the most dedicated and professional of them cannot beat the market over the long term.

The truth is far more prosaic: in nearly every human activity, success depends more on avoiding unforced errors than flashes of brilliance. The one who doesn’t mess up, wins. The brilliant risk-taker produces occasional miracles, but they’re often out-weighed by all the mistakes that come along with that approach. Look back on your own career for a moment. Some of the bad times certainly won’t have been your fault; chance plays a huge part in events, personal and organizational. But how many times did you make some mistake that you know was perfectly avoidable — if only you’d seen it in time? How many unforced errors have caused you embarrassment, loss of credibility, or even more serious career set-backs? Read the full story

Six Ways to Boost Your Long-term Prospects for Success and Happiness, Starting Today

Photo credit: Gabriella Fabbri (www.i-pix.it)

The US government is giving away millions of dollars in handouts in an attempt to stimulate economic activity. Fine. We all like to get money from Uncle Sam, but even a handout on this scale cannot provide more than a temporary sense of satisfaction. What each of us needs is to put together our own, long-term stimulus package, made up of actions that will add to our potential for enjoying life far into the future.

Here are six suggestions to include in your personal ’stimulus package’ — six simple ways boost your prospects for career success, enjoyment of life, and personal happiness.

1. Long-term success and satisfaction are nearly always best found in doing work that you love. It’s not always easy to discover what that may be, but it’s well worth the effort to try. Take the time to think about what is most enjoyable in your life; what you look forward to in whatever you do today; and what you maybe day-dream about doing, if only it were possible. Then make a firm effort to find ways to incorporate as many of these sources of enjoyment as possible into your life on a regular basis; some through work, some through things outside of work. If nothing succeeds like success, nothing produces success like loving what you do.
2. Many platitudes have been wasted on looking for greater satisfaction from your life. I suspect the best answer is the simplest: you’ll get most satisfaction from spending your time on things that make you feel good about yourself and what you have produced. Giving the quality of your life a boost will raise your spirits and improve your well-being. And quality of life doesn’t always depend on money. Sometimes the richest people have lives full of wealth, yet seriously deficient in true quality. Real quality of life comes from living according to your deepest values. Do that and you cannot go far wrong.
3. Your mind is a precious asset that needs stimulus to keep it vibrant and alive. If you let it become slack or dull, you cannot hope to be happy and successful. Your personal stimulus package should therefore contain ways to keep your mind alert and your thinking fresh and powerful. Reading is one of the best approaches, along with learning additional skills and adding to your knowledge on any topic that interests you. Don’t just enjoy things passively; get involved, research, explore, become a minor expert. If you find yourself slumped in front of the television, numbing your brain with the mental equivalent of the worst junk food, get off your butt and start giving that mind a work-out. Few things will pay you back more handsomely.
4. In your package, you should also include ways to stimulate your creativity. Ask questions. Try new things. Explore the unknown. Challenge yourself to come up with your own answers, instead of accepting what others tell you, no matter how expert they are or how much authority they are said to have. The truth can stand up to any amount of challenge, while half-truths, myths, and downright deceptions will all crumble sooner or later.
5. Plenty of evidence exists to prove that physical fitness plays a major role in personal well-being. You don’t have to become a fitness fanatic, or spend hours at the gym. Just get sufficient exercise appropriate to your age and circumstances; add enough sleep (many people are chronically sleep-deprived); and don’t make your physical state worse through drink, drugs, or constantly over-eating.
6. Last, but far from least, slow down and make time for the little things of life than can transform any day. Take the time to admire the beauty all around you. Spend quality time with friends and loved ones. Learn to appreciate art, or music, or nature. Make something beautiful. No life can be satisfying if it is lived in such a headlong rush that you are scarcely able to notice what happens between waking up and falling back into bed, exhausted, at the end of the day. Are you in such a hurry to meet death that you cannot spare time while you are alive to enjoy to the full whatever life has to offer you?

There you are. Six simple elements of a stimulus package you can give yourself — a package that will provide a massive, long-term boost to your life, success, and career satisfaction. What better way could there be to beat today’s economic gloom?

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The assumptions that faster is better and “time is money” may turn out to be false — especially when it comes to benefits for anyone outside the executive suite.

photo © Darren Hester for openphoto.net (CC: Attribution-NonCommercial)

There are some assumptions in business nobody thinks to challenge. One of the commonest is that saving time means saving money. Benjamin Franklin seems to be to blame for the phrase “time is money.” It first appears in his book “Advice to a Young Tradesman” in 1748. Since then, it has become one of those automatic assumptions of the world of business. Perhaps it’s time to see what, if anything, it might mean today.

“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.” (Will Rogers, in a letter to The New York Times, 1930)

When you save time, what exactly are you saving?

For a start, time cannot be saved. You can’t put it in a bottle to use later. You can’t pile it up, like a miser piling up gold coins, and gloat over your hoard. Time goes on at its own pace. You can spend less of it doing something. You can give up doing something and, in theory, make the time it would have taken available for something else. But you cannot, whatever you do, put that time aside and use it later.

So what are you saving? Read the full story

I came across this picture on the web recently. I think it shows the perfect attitude to take to working on the computer. It can also be seen as a perfect example of sleeping on a problem.

A bit of nonsense, I know, but sometimes it’s worth it to relax a little. Animals are what they are. They don’t fret about it. Only humans seem to get hung up in what the rest of the world thinks about them and start posturing as a result.

That’s what lies at the root of today’s epidemic of macho management: a continual worrying about appearance and conforming to the fashion for obsessive, short-term action.

Perhaps we should all lie back and forget about the world’s preoccupations a little more often.

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Technorati Tags: right attitudes, taking life easy, relaxing, enjoying work, sleeping on problems, being what you are

Slowing down isn’t about giving things up. It’s making time first for the things in your life that matter most

Zen Habits has an excellent post on making time in your life for your personal needs and goals.

In our action-obsessed, “get it done” culture, it’s all too easy to become convinced that the more goals you have — especially tough career and work goals — the better your life will be.

This is wrong. As in so much else in life, quality in goals matters far more than quantity. Setting yourself too many goals makes it certain that you won’t accomplish more than a tiny fraction of them — and won’t have time to enjoy whatever you do manage to bring to a successful conclusion.

Losing focus on what matters most

Whether you’re talking about work or broader life goals, having just a few, important, quality goals will always produce a better result than overwhelming yourself with more goals than you can handle — or certainly handle well.

As the Zen habits article says:

Often the problem is that we try to take on too many goals at once. We have a list of things we want to accomplish, spanning the spectrum from gardening to learning Italian to getting in shape. It can be overwhelming, and because of that we never start. Or instead, perhaps we start with a head full of steam, but then run out of steam quickly, because it’s extremely difficult to maintain focus and energy (the two key ingredients in accomplishing a goal) for too many goals at once.

Slow Leadership, like slow living, means focusing on what matters most and giving yourself the time you need to accomplish it — and do it well.

Do first what matters most. Do it well and enjoy it fully. Then, and only then, turn to whatever else you have sufficient time to tackle properly.

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Murphy’s Law (that whatever can go wrong, will) is the natural result of organizations and their leaders rushing headlong into situations of negligible visibility

When Napoleon still ruled most of Europe, a Prussian general called Carl von Clausewitz wrote a book entitled “On War” — one of the all-time, classic books on warfare and strategy, still studied in military academies worldwide. In it, he coined the term “friction” to mean all the things that fail in the chaos of battle conditions. It’s better known in business as Murphy’s Law: that whatever can go wrong, probably will.

In another chapter of the same book, “Intelligence in War,” he discussed the problems of getting accurate information in the middle of a military engagement: a situation later summed up by others as “the fog of war.”

These two aspects of battle, fog and friction, account for most of the mistakes and fumbling that characterize all military campaigns. On paper, the strategy is clear. Once battle starts, people lose their way, communications become garbled, and no one is sure who is doing what where and to whom. The result is a series of unforced errors that can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Business, like warfare, is messy and uncertain

Despite all our electronic wizardry and battalions of analysts, what von Clausewitz wrote holds true on both the battlefield and in the boardroom. As soon as people move from the calm of planning meetings to the messiness of action, fog obscures the vision and friction confounds preparation. While actions fail to work as planned (friction), accurate information is missed, lost, or mangled (fog).

The ensuing confusion, tension, adrenaline, and anxiety brings in Murphy’s Law to govern events. If you create “battle” pressures in an organization — by competitiveness, under-staffing, overwork, fear of dismissal, pressure to win no matter what, and despotic management — you’ll get what real battles bring: chaos, confusion, constant breakdowns, frantic levels of anxiety, and many unnecessary losses. All that hurry, stress, competition, anxiety, in-fighting, and pressure to meet near-impossible deadlines increases fog and friction a thousand-fold.

Business friction

Machines that run at high speed demand constant and abundant lubrication to prevent friction between the parts. Slower-speed machines need less. Running a machine, or a business, faster than it should go is the perfect recipe for provoking the maximum number of breakdowns.

That’s even more true when an organization is being forced to run faster and harder that it was designed or intended to do. Taking organizations and whipping them into a frenzy of activity has become a favorite pastime of consultants and gurus of all kinds. It looks good on paper, and in the short-term costs fall and profits soar, but mature organizations are rarely able to jump back into the rapid growth of their youth without paying a huge penalty: the build-up of friction as component parts wear out and systems designed for methodical use collapse under the strain. Starbucks is only the latest example of a business that has learned that excessive growth comes at a price.

The fog machine in the executive suite

Do you remember the game children used to play called “Chinese Whispers?” How you sat in a ring, whispering a message to the next person, who had to pass it on right away, whether it made sense or not? That’s the state of internal communications in many companies today. It’s no wonder garbage comes out, whatever was put in at the start.

Too much haste is the prime cause of mistakes and omissions in corporate communication. A person under pressure hasn’t the time to check they’ve explained clearly and the other person has fully understood. Someone listening when all around them is frantic is very likely to mishear the message or grasp only an incomplete form. If it doesn’t seem to make sense, they’ll try to remedy the nonsense using the best guess they can. No time to check back or ask for clarification.

The corporate grapevine is often a better, more accurate source of information than official channels simply because everyone takes their time when relaying gossip.

Coping with fog and friction

Fog and friction are the prime causes of loss and wastage in organizational settings — wastage of money, time, effort, manpower, and resources of every kind. They turn opportunities into fiascos and cause excellent plans to fail. The world is a turbulent place; you can’t change that. It makes no sense to add to your problems through self-inflicted and unnecessary time pressure.

The best way to avoid both the effects of Murphy’s Law and messed up communications is simple: slow down. Give yourself time to react properly when things go wrong — for they surely will sometimes, whatever you do. Instead of switching into panic mode, take a deep breath, stand back, and look at the problem without the turbulent effects of emotion. If you’re wise, you’ll have expected failures and snarl-ups, so you won’t be surprised.

Slow down. Relax. Take time to let the fog clear and the dust settle. Most situations are less pressing and critical than you think. Success in business rarely depends on split-second decisions; that’s just ego and hype.

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