Follow Through

Seth tackles the follow through.

Slamming your six iron into the ground, yelling at yourself, cursing out your staff, second-guessing, berating bystanders—there are plenty of ways we demonstrate our frustration that our best didn't work this time.

But is it helpful?

Learning from a failure is critical. Connecting effort with failure at an emotional level is crippling. After all, we've already agreed you did your best.

Early in our careers, we're encouraged to avoid failure, and one way we do that is by building up a set of emotions around failure, emotions we try to avoid, and emotions that we associate with the effort of people who fail. It turns out that this is precisely the opposite of the approach of people who end up succeeding.

If you believe that righteous effort leads to the shame of personal failure, you'll seek to avoid righteous effort.

Successful people analytically figure out what didn't work and redefine what their best work will be in the future. And then they get back to work.

Time Travel

Scientists have discovered the neutrinos travel faster than light. Travel faster than light is a prerequisite of time travel. Ergo it is possible at some time in the future that time travel will be commonplace.

Forget all that, if you want to time travel visit a restaurant, deli or some other place where sights, sounds and smells remind you of a time long ago. This aspect connection is lost on most people who operate these venues. To them it is another day in the salt mine. To  the customer it is the creation or the reliving of a treasured memory.

Go back in time today and enjoy.

Fill in the blank

Seth offers a simple fill in the blank;

"I was pleased that I got what I paid for, that the food was properly cooked, that they honored their contract, that the roller coaster worked, that there was no trash on the ground and that the staff looked me in the eye. But what really blew me away was _____"

Non - TV section

We need a section in restaurants that is free from the noise of TV's. We did it with smoke, let's remove TV's from restaurants now. Who is with me?

Th elephant in the economy

To ameliorate pain, feel it. What you resist you will persist

Brett Arends lays out the case for national defaults

It’s tempting to say, “if someone borrows money, they should repay it.” Generally speaking, I agree. I pay all my debts. But while that makes sense when applied to any individual, it doesn’t work so well when it’s applied to everyone. 

We have tens of millions who cannot repay their debts. But they are all trying to. That sucks huge amounts of money out of the economy. And that means these people cannot function properly as consumers or workers. That’s the reason people aren’t coming into your restaurant. It’s the reason people aren’t taking your yoga class. It’s the reason they haven’t hired you to redo the kitchen.

And so tens or hundreds of millions of perfectly responsible business owners and employees are also suffering from this slump. That’s the reason we have a shortage of demand. That’s the reason no one is hiring. 

Even worse: People who are underwater on their mortgage, but who do not want to default, cannot move to where the jobs are either. They are stuck with their home.

Org Chart that makes sense

John Moore has the essential org chart for every organization

Missed Opportunity

It is 10:55am. Outside your door which officially opens at 11:00am are an elderly women and her daughter. They have frequented your cafe before, you recognize their face. The sun and the humidity are beating down on them. They knock on your door.

A) do you show them your wrist watch and point at the time?

B) Walk over and tell them that you can not let them in because it is 5 minutes until the time you open

C)  Walk over, let them in and tell them that they can stay inside where it is cool, however you will not be able to serve them.

D)  Serve them!

Aspirational v reality

Dave Logan has a great insight into struggle

Connecting these two worlds is not actually that hard (more on that in a moment), but these worlds require such different skills and thinking that often people are good at inhabiting one but not the other. In fact, people usually think their preferred world is better.  Most visionary leaders, masters of the aspirational realm, can’t think about a profit-and-loss statement.  Scientists, engineers, and accountants-people who live in the world of reality-think most visions, values, and mission statements are a complete waste of time.

Before I explain how you create this kind of bridge, it’s important to grasp the difference between the aspirational world and the ‘real’ one. ” In the aspirational world, the more you give things away, the more you have.  The lingua franca of this world are ideas and emotions–hope, pride, esteem. Candidate Obama has masterfully dealt in the aspirational world, creating and growing the aspirations of hope and change.

The other world is “reality,” and it is composed of finite resources that cannot be manufactured, like oil, gold, money and time.  Give away some of your time, or money, and you have less time or money.  Perhaps someday, technology will be able to make these things, but for now, there’s only so much of them.  When they’re gone, they’re gone.

...

Getting back to Obama, he can follow these three steps by first rebooting his hope and change engine.  It’ll be harder this time, because people feel let down.  But even with a small glimmer of optimism, he can then focus us all on real-world accomplishments that are measureable.  The truth is that jobs, money, innovation, and wealth sit on the border between aspirations and reality, not unlike microchips and buildings at USC.  Focus purely on reality, and they look unmovable.  Look just at aspirations and people get excited and then crushed. The aspirations-reality-aspirations cycle described in this blog post can produce jobs, income, and wealth on a level our country has never seen.

Toward more specialized skills and greater interdependence

Nicholas Carr has an interesting prospective here 

Skills are gained through effort.

Automation relieves effort.

There's always a tradeoff, but because the relief comes immediately whereas the loss of skills manifests itself slowly, we rarely question the pursuit of ever greater degrees of automation.

Taken further specialization of labor does lead to individuals or nation states for that matter being totally interdependent on everyone else for survival. Is that not the goal though? How do we balance the control we cede to machines to the advantage of having less drudgery in our work or lives?

Summer lease has all to short a date.

“Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own
adventures are what make a summer.”		Robertson Davies

How did this happen. Only a moment ago we were enjoying the Memorial Day parade and feeling excited about the start of Summer. Now the leaves are already beginning their annual colorful dance, youth's are opening schoolbooks and hopefully their minds and footballs spiral across late summer skies. 

It would be very good to remember that adventure is what makes summer and never lose that sense of wonder.

Likeability

Success in any endeavor requires engagement and relationships with others. One of the primary factors which helps those interactions is Likeability.

Martin Zwilling highlights a new book by Michele Tills Lederman

1. Be your authentic self. Don’t try to be someone that you are not. Other people quickly see through this façade, and lose respect. Find the good in difficult situations or personalities. Work on improving the real you, rather than building a better façade.
2. You have to like yourself first. Don’t expect others to like you if you have a bad self-image. Practice positive self-talk using genuine accomplishments to pave the way for authentic productivity and success. Absorb the new approach and make it real.
3. Perception is reality. How you perceive others is your reality about them, and the same is true for them of you. It is far easier to make a good first impression than to change a bad one. Likability is leaving people with positive perceptions.
4. Exude energy in all your actions. What you give off is what you get back, and your own output can energize other people or deflate them. Channel your authentic energy to be genuine and likable, even when faced with difficulties and challenges.
5. Curiosity never killed a conversation. Showing genuine curiosity about a person’s job, life, interests, opinions, or needs is the best way to start a conversation, keep it going, and make you likable. Check for matching needs for help rather than demanding help.
6. Practice listening to understand. If you want others to understand and like you, you have to understand them by truly listening to what they are communicating. Don’t forget that good listening is done with you eyes and other body language, as well as your ears.
7. Show people how you are like them. Look for common interests and backgrounds, shared experiences and beliefs, to find similarities that can help you build connections with other people. People like people who are like them.
8. Create positive mood memories for other people. People are more apt to remember how you made them feel than what you said. It’s hard to be likeable when you intimidate people, practice insensitivity, or otherwise make them feel uncomfortable.
9. Stay in touch and remember connections. Showing genuine curiosity about a person’s job, life, interests, opinions, or needs is the best way to start a conversation, keep it going, and make you likable. Stay in someone’s mind to make them comfortable.
10. Give something without expecting a return. There are countless ways to give freely to others, including making introductions, sharing resources, doing favors, and giving advice. What goes around comes around.
11. Have patience, don’t expect benefits from every contact. Likeable people don’t demand value from every interaction. Stay open to the possibility that results may take time, and come in ways not obvious today.

Congress should pass a U S History test before being sworn into office

It is very clear that the many current members of the Senate and House of Representatives have no knowledge of United States history. Even a cursory read of history clearly places blame for the Great Depression on the inability of government to create jobs from 1929 - 1933. Further reads clearly link job creation with stability and growth in the mid thirties and place the recession of 1937 at the feet of a Congress looking for austerity in budget.


How about effective immediately every member of Congress and the Executive Branch must pass a United States history test before assuming the duties of their office?

Take it apart and put it back together differently

Seth's post on the leap offers some timeless wisdom that I have often ignored at my peril.

Every now and then, a creative act comes out of nowhere, a giant leap, a new way of thinking apparently woven out of a brand new material.

Most of the the time, though, creativity is the act of reassembling many elements that are already known. That's why domain knowledge is so critical.

It's not enough to be aware of the domain you're working in, you need to understand it. Noticing things and being curious about how they work is the single most common trait I see in creative people. Once you can break the components down, you can put them back together into something brand new.

More times than I can recall I set out to reinvent the proverbial wheel without considering all the elements and there interconnection.

Lesser might become Greatest

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

James Joyce

The Lesser Depression is starting to morph into the Greatest Depression. The gridlock in D.C., the selloff in the equity markets worldwide this past week, the continuing train wreck in housing and the human toll of this economic malise.


All of this has implications for your business. You have re-engineered your business model, you have engaged your customers, you provide an unmatched experience and that has gotten you here. What is the next step?

Lesser Depression is still a depression

Somewhere along the way the Great Recession became the Lesser Depression. No one asked for my help on these naming conventions.This seems relentless. Asset classes are repricing downward, input prices are rising and you are not able to pass the increases to your customers. Paul Krugman offers this which nicely summarizes the last five years:

But the upshot is terrible: more and more, this really does look like the Lesser Depression, a prolonged era of disastrous economic performance.

Stop the texting madness

I am told that I will stare at my phone at any provocation. However, no one has ever said that I have kept a client or customer waiting while I update my Twitter feed, Facebook page or send a text. There is an epidemic of texting and phone updating madness. You can no longer go to restaurant, retail store, heck even a place of worship without servers, workers, even managers and clergy checking their phones and sharing their thoughts with the world.

We have been able to stop workplace smoke, now we need to stop workplace texting and phone checking.

12:16 CDST - Summer

Take out the beach wear, put your feet in the sand, it is officially Summer. There are only two seasons in life really. Summer and not Summer. Enjoy Summer!

Social media pushback

Business owners as a rule tend to be a shoot from hip, wear their emotions on their sleeve bunch. Social media has the capability of taking simple vents or rants and destroying your brand or business overnight.

Tweeting is not like sounding off to your friends in a bar. It feels that way, however your drunken stupor rants will be interpreted  quite differently by the instant access of the web.

Business owners must maintain their professional persona's 24/7 in every communication channel.


 

How to insure greater accountability from individuals

Kimberly Weisul explains a reframing of the question

But the researchers did find one very effective way to promote honest behavior: Simply ask filers to sign the statement of ethics at the beginning of the form-before it’s been filled out-rather than the end. As the researchers write:

“…simply moving the signature line from the end to the beginning of a form will bring one’s moral standards into focus, right before it is most needed… When signing at the end of a form, the “damage” has already been done; by the time individuals have filled out the form, they have already engaged in various mental tricks and justifications that allow them to maintain a positive self-image despite having cheated.