Be careful where you place your focus and attention. Whatever you focus on will grow more prominent and more present to your mind.

If, like many people, you focus mostly on what you haven’t got, what you haven’t done, and how your life doesn’t match your hopes and dreams, those negatives can easily come to dominate your thinking. Not only will this depress you, it will block your way towards all the things you do want to achieve.

Some people believe you ‘program’ your unconscious mind to concentrate on ways to bring you more of whatever you’re focusing on most. I’m very unsure about this as an actual mechanism, but it certainly reflects the way things can seem. More likely, amidst the mass of more or less random events that come along, your mind is trained to pick out the ones that match the areas where you habitually pay most attention. If you’ve developed a deficit-based outlook (what you don’t have or do), that’s what you’ll notice first. Then, to the extent that your words and actions produce consequences, these will be negative as well. Read the full story

A remarkably long way, it seems, but don’t rely on society alone to make things right for you

Statue of Boudicca on London’s Embankment
She was the British Queen who fought the Romans

I read an interesting quote today that highlights just how much progress we have made in our collective thinking about women in leadership positions. The quote, from a rather interesting source was in regard to the consideration of the appointment of a woman to the Supreme Court of the United States. The respondent, our 37th U.S. president, Richard M. Nixon, said the following: ”To play an awful long shot, is there a woman yet? That would be a hell of a thing if we could do it.”

Although it appeared as though Nixon well understood the political advantages of such a move, he also said: ”I’m not for women in any job. I don’t want any of them around. Thank God we don’t have any in the cabinet.” To top off these comments, he added: “’I don’t think a woman should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don’t. The reason why I do is mainly because they are erratic. And emotional. Men are erratic and emotional, too, but the point is a woman is more likely to be.” These comments were captured on audiotapes in 1971, 37 years ago, and later made public through a Freedom of Information Act request. Read the full story

Thoughts on bravery from a (partially) confirmed coward

Photo: qmnonic via Flickr

The past few months of work, health and renovation struggles have been ones I’ll be more than eager to wave goodbye when the ‘Better Be Great 2008′ year rolls to an end. One thing I have learned this year throughout all of the trials and tribulations, is that I veer more wildly than Britney Spears on the road to Starbucks when it comes to being brave.

When forced to deal with relatively minor things, I’ve got less backbone than a rubber chicken. For instance, a local arts journalists invited me to come over and meet her in person when visiting her workplace to pick up some CDs for reviewing. And yet, when I got there, the reception area was unattended and the distant sounds of a busy bunch of people working behind the partition was clearly evident. The desk had that standard little bell thingy to summon up the receptionist, but I have never, ever dinged a reception bell. I’m always afraid that when the person arrives and realises that it is merely me, their annoyance and disappointment in my assumption that I thought I was important enough to ding a bell for service would be too crushing to bear.

On the other hand, I can fight like a taunted Tasmanian devil if my job/career path/ability to pay a share of the mortgage/reputation is unfairly threatened. To be able to confidently yell down a phone, “I don’t give a FAT RAT’S CLACKER what your boss is going to think about the inconvenience of setting things right!” immediately transcends any fear I might have had when warily picking up the receiver with a squeaked-out “hellooooo?” Read the full story

Questions to ask yourself about how you communicate upwards

 
‘Boss-ology,’ is the process of giving your boss what he or she wants and needs in a way that suits you best and makes you look as good as well. Much of the skill involved comes from using communication effectively: choosing your time, choosing the context, choosing the approach and choosing the words. It’s also very much about listening. You don’t need to be eloquent or cunning or a good salesperson. You need to listen to the boss, so you can adjust your approach to make it register as important and useful.

It’s a truism of communication generally, not just communication upwards, that you must start by listening. Many people with good ideas fail to get their boss to listen to them because they don’t listen themselves. They jump in with the details of what they want to say — only it’s the wrong time, the wrong context, the wrong approach and the wrong words. The boss either ignores them, sends them away, or even gets angry at being interrupted with what seems to him or her to be some irrelevant chatter from an over-eager subordinate.

There isn’t some magic approach that is going to work every time — bosses are too varied for that — but there are some principles that can make a big difference to getting all the elements of communication right more often than not. Like all useful principles, they come as questions. It’s up to you to think about them and find the answers in your own situation, Read the full story

Some thoughts about one of today’s fetishes: setting clear life and career goals.

The conventional wisdom is that we all need clear and challenging goals for our lives; that life without goals is leads to failure and dissatisfaction. I wonder if this is correct? After all, many people give up on the goals they have set themselves. From New Year’s resolutions to ‘new me’ decisions, it’s goal setting that seems to lead to failure more often than to success.

Why should this be? Why should people find that giving themselves something to aim at leads to being in a worse position than when they started? Setting goals seems to be such a simple process. You take a look at yourself, decide what you want to change most, think about how to get started, then do it. What is it that goes wrong?

Here are some thoughts about potential pitfalls. They don’t happen to everyone, but they are definitely common enough to be worth avoiding. Read the full story

Why you need to become a ‘boss-whisperer’ — and where to start

‘Boss-ology,’ you’ll recall, is the process of giving your boss what he or she wants and needs in the way that suits you best and makes your actions look as good as possible. And a ‘boss-whisperer’ is like a horse-whisperer for bosses: someone who can get the boss to do what he or she wants without any fuss, dishonesty or dirty tricks.

Why bother? Why take the time and effort to manage your boss? He or she is paid more than you are and is supposed to be leading you, right? Let the boss make the decisions and face the consequences if they’re wrong. You were just following orders.

This is a short-sighted view. “I was only following orders” is a defense that rarely works and always makes you look like an incompetent idiot. Assuming that the boss knows best — and will unfailing choose the right course for you both — is naïve to the point of foolishness. The boss needs your help and you need help in return if you are both to make successful careers. You’re a team, like it or not. You know things the boss doesn’t and vice versa. Only by pooling that knowledge can you find the right way forward. Read the full story

How even the most famous executives hand success to the competition

Roger Federer at Wimbledon (Photo: Wikimedia)

In our household, the end of June means the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. My wife watches progress on the television. My interest is, at best, lukewarm. But I am always struck by an area of correspondence between tennis and organizational life: the extent to which the outcome of the competition is decided by the number of unforced errors.

It is not always the best player who wins the match or the tournament. Sometimes a relative unknown seems inspired, while the established champion appears lack-luster and awkward. When someone is playing well, he or she makes few unforced errors. When they have a bad day, the number increases rapidly. Even during a match, some small lapse of concentration often leads to a series of unforced errors that can lose that player valuable points.

In tennis, an unforced error is a mistake or bad shot made by a player without any reason other than his or her lack of skill or composure. Serving a double fault is an example. The point is lost, though the opponent never touched the ball. The player who does this too often will lose the match, even if their opponent plays no better than competently. When a champion loses to a weaker opponent, it is often because the champion has made enough unforced errors to lose, not because their opponent has played well enough to win.

Forced errors occur only for one reason: your opponent is playing better than you are. Their superior skill, speed or tactical sense puts pressure on you that causes mistakes. To translate this to the business world, forced errors occur when the competition has a better business model, better product, better service or better strategy. They outplay you. As you struggle to keep up, you make even more mistakes because of the extra pressure.

Unforced errors are the ones you make regardless of the actions or skill of your competition. They’re the ones that result from taking too many risks, trying to do things too quickly, cutting costs to the point where you harm your own prospects, focusing on short-term wins and ignoring the consequences, and sticking to old habits when external circumstances have already changed enough to make them useless. Read the full story

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

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

Why blurring the boundaries between the managerial and theatrical lies behind many of the problems businesses are facing today.

The media have invaded the boardroom and brought with them many of the characteristics of melodrama: the continual sense of crisis, the stereotyped behaviors, the tendency to hype and overstatement, and the tricks that turn illusions into reality. It’s not just programs like The Apprentice that are to blame for this; nor the media and its thirst for continual confrontation and cliff-hanging dramas. When CEOs are treated like rock stars, the temptation is strong to play up to all the publicity and come to believe in your own hype. But losing a sense of the dull reality of most business situations is precisely what leads people into reckless and irrational decisions.

The theater, whether on stage or in movies, is a world based on make-believe; a world in which illusion is everywhere and the actors speak lines prescribed for them by someone else. In theater, a stage in downtown Chicago can become, for a while, a city in medieval Tuscany or the Australian outback. A back-lot in Burbank can be transformed — at least on screen — into Moscow, Manhattan, or Mars. Thanks to computer technology, people can fly, animals can talk, and huge battles can be fought without a single drop of real blood.

That’s the power of illusion to create a world as we want it to be. And that’s the power that has been allowing leaders to believe huge returns can be made without risk, costs can be cut indefinitely, and profits can rise to whatever figure they care to dream up to excite Wall Street.

Illusion is only a grand name for trickery

When a magician presents an act in which things disappear, people are sawn in half alive, and heavy objects levitate, you know that none of it is true; that what you are seeing is trickery, pure and simple. You stand amazed and applaud the skill by which it is done, but know it is still an illusion — an honest illusion, since there is no claim that it is anything else.

When a management team makes profits appear out of thin air, levitates dull performance in defiance of the circumstances, and starts claiming that they have altogether changed the laws of the business universe as we know it, trickery is at work too. The “dot com” boom was supposed to have re-shaped the face of accepted market behavior for ever. The housing bubble was supposed to have allowed loans to be so structured that risk became negligible, however marginal the credit-worthiness of the borrower. We now know, of course, that both of these were illusions every bit as clever and technically advanced as the illusions produced by the greatest stage magicians.

Were they honest illusions? Was it always made clear that we were watching a piece of theater? Sadly, no. These were illusions presented as truths — at least for as long as they lasted. These were the tricks of the huckster, not the stage illusionist.

Management has learned too many of the tricks of the theater

The paraphernalia of PR people and spin-doctors has become commonplace in executive suites. So have many of the skills used by actors and performers to delight us and cause us to suspend our disbelief for the duration of their time on stage:

• Tricks of sleight-of-hand to make risks seem to evaporate and money appear from nowhere.
• Ways to create the appearance of competence and ability where little or none truly exists.
• Stories and statistics to dazzle regulatory bodies, while manipulating the hopes and fears of consumers through the trickery of misleading advertising.
• The technology to make things look bigger, more solid, stronger, and more real than they are, whether that applies to profits or assets; all the while, of course, making “nasty” things — problems, risks, doubtful data, or inconvenient truths — shrink until they disappear.

Individual managers become actors, playing pre-set parts

It’s not just the large things that are changed from real into make-believe and enhanced with computer-generated graphics. Individual behavior has to be shifted too, to preserve the illusion.

• Managers become actors playing roles written for them by others; not independent, skilled agents coping with real situations.
• Many — perhaps a majority — of those roles become stereotypes: the tough-guy manager, the heroic leader, the financial wizard, the salesperson able to sell snow at the South Pole. Most links with reality are lost in the process.
• Over-acting is everywhere. Tough-guys strive to “out-tough” John Wayne and heroes perform death-defying feats of combat on a hourly basis.
• Everything becomes simplified and emotionally over-charged. In the small, brief world of a theatrical performance, you have to strip to essentials and heighten the drama. No audience will endure to sit through anything as boring and slow as real life.
• Whatever is complex is reduced to the simplest patterns: good versus evil, love versus hate, and victory versus defeat. There can be no room for anyone but winners and losers — no shades of gray — since no stage is big enough, or performance long enough, to cope with the compromises and ambiguities of actual life.

It’s time we got back to reality, especially as managers and leaders. In stories, you can write the ending to the script in the way that you want it to turn out. In life, the Seventh Cavalry may well not come over the hill in the nick of time to save you from being scalped.

We cannot survive on make-believe, however skillfully performed. Business is not theater. The hurt suffer real pain and the dead die for good; they don’t get up and take a break before the next performance. And life includes all the delays, diversions, and dull bits left out of plays and stories. Winning in the theater is often a matter of heroics and grand gestures. Winning in life is more likely to depend on patience, a capacity for boredom — and sheer, dumb luck.

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