MIRROR MIRROR IN MY FRIEND
Friday, May 4, 2012 § Leave a comment
Friends and colleagues provide us with a constant stream of explicit and implicit feedback on ourselves. Like a cabinet of distortion mirrors, different people play different images back to us.
One friend is like a beautification mirror. It stretches us into a nice shape and maybe bronzes us a little bit, ensuring us that we look fabulous, no matter if we have just lost or gained 50 lbs. Just like our looks our character improves in the reflection, telling us that we are awesome no matter if we have just behaved kindly or like an asshole.
Another friend is the opposite: their feedback makes us look ugly and bad.
Then there is the category of honest mirrors – they more or less accurately reflect us. Amongst these are two very different types of people: a. those that reflect us honestly, but see us as static and stuck; b. those that see our potential.
1. The beautification mirrors are fun, but provide no value. The boost to our ego in the form of false compliments likely will stop us from pursuing growth. “Great friends are those that challenge us!” – that’s not these friends.
2. The making-us-look-shitty-mirrors are uncomfortable, but they can provide value to us. When we recognize someone as a shitty-mirror, we can disregard the value and insight of their feedback. We can nevertheless learn from our reaction – why does one thing really get to us and another doesn’t stick at all?
3. The honest mirrors that see us as static are helpful in giving us a good account of where we are. But their expectation is that we won’t change and grow, so they are not good company for our journey.
4. The honest mirrors that see our potential: that’s what great friends are made of.
ROOTED IN EFFORT
Wednesday, May 2, 2012 § Leave a comment
Does the second CEO call Oprah? Hell yes! But calling Oprah is not a strategy. The strategy is to create a sexy enough proposition that Oprah might bite.
When we obsess about what we cannot control (Oprah’s response) our experience of the world swings between manic and depressive moments and meanwhile, we waste our time unproductively.
When we focus on what we control, our experience of the world is rooted in our effort and we are constructive and productive.
It’s easy to see what incidentally has the higher chance of success with Oprah.
SUCCESS IN EVERY MOMENT
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 § Leave a comment
Seeking success and practicing success are not the same.
Please see previous post for context.
A CEO might say, “Once we have received the venture capital investment, we can build the technology platform that will satisfy our users and we will be successful.”
Or, “Once we get featured on Oprah, our sales will take off and we will be successful.”
Or, “Once we are through this recession, demand will pick up again and we will be successful.”
(For the CEO these stories will often go hand-in-hand with stories about waiting for personal happiness and life balance – “And once we are more successful I will work less and pay more attention to my partner, kids, friends, health, etc.”)
Just as with seeking personal happiness, achieving success this way can prove elusive:
A. Hoping for external circumstances to work out in your favor is not a strategy for success, it’s just a gamble.
B. The market gives it and the market takes it – maybe today you get lucky with Oprah or the VC and the day after it’s your competitor.
Buying lottery tickets can pay-off big time, but it’s not what value creation is made of. Focusing on external milestones can be a big distraction for the CEO and a drain for the organization. It distracts from value creation that you can control.
What if you define success by the values with which your team works and interacts, the conduct of your organization, the courage with which you make strategic decisions and pursue a new solution, the value you build for the customer, the way you align the organization with the impact it seeks?
The CEO/manager that focuses on these questions can have a successful day every day.
CEO seeking success
Honey: “Honey, how was your day?”
CEO: “Crappy. Oprah that bitch still hasn’t called us back about being on her show!”
CEO practicing success
Honey: “Honey, how was your day?”
CEO: “Excellent. The team is gelling, we had a great conversation about the feature set and we committed to drop the upgrade in favor of the earlier beta-launch.”
Please consider where your business strategy includes statements of hope about how your circumstances will align and change. Strike those out. Your successful strategy is made up of how you respond to circumstances, not how they form you.
HAPPILY EVER AFTER IN THE MOMENT
Monday, April 30, 2012 § 1 Comment
Seeking happiness and practicing happiness are not the same.
People pursue happiness in their own ways. Some seek it in wealth, in beauty, in fame, or in power. Some feel they have recognized those goals as false promises. Instead they seek happiness in making the world better in their own garden or in the global community. Others seek it in the creation of a harmonious family or community. Another seeks it in achieving excellence in meditation or yoga.
The language of goals that need to be achieved to finally be happy and content repeats itself; just the goals themselves are exchanged: “I will be happy and content, once I have a million dollars/ created an NGO that stops the killing of whales/ have three kids/ can hold downward dog with no hands.”
Mostly the stories are more intricate and often not articulated – but there are images: “once I get the promotion, I can move into a slightly nicer apartment and work a little less to be able to do some sports. I will lose a bit of weight and feel better about myself, be sexy and get a great partner and be happily ever after.” Or: “I always feel good after doing yoga. Once I get my yoga-teacher-certificate, I can be in that state of mind all the time and be happily ever after.”
From the outside looking in, we can see with all those storylines, happiness will be elusive. Sometimes life’s a bitch and the first million Dollars is hard to come by. And worse, once the first million dollars is there, we will want the second. Once we can sit in lotus, we find it unsatisfying that we cannot levitate.
“Nothing makes us as unhappy as the constant pursuit of happiness.”
Buddha suggested that happiness is a state mind, not a situation. While circumstances have an influence on our state of mind, they don’t control it. Practicing happiness is the practice of our attitude in response to all circumstances. It’s inside, not outside; it’s right now, not projected into the future.
The revelation that we are waiting for something to fall into place to be happy often hides in a story of plausible conditions and correlations. “Well, I am just waiting for X, so I can do Y.” is often the beginning of that story. If you hear yourself saying sentences like that, please ask yourself the question: “why am I waiting?”
THE LIMITING FACTOR RIGHT NOW
Tuesday, April 24, 2012 § Leave a comment
The limiting factor for us to act wisely is mindfulness. Not age, not experience, not hair-color, not opportunity, not education, not religious affiliation, not title and authority, not luck, not gender, not skin-color, not yoga certifications, not how little or much we’ve been hurt in the past.
“There is no path to wisdom, wisdom is the path.” Siddhartha Gautama, a.k.a. the Buddha.
In every moment we choose our response to our circumstances. Wisdom is not a stage we can get to and then hang out in it as if lying in a hammock. It’s an every moment practice. No need to wait for different circumstances, resources or power. Nor do we need to wait to develop into a more mature and better person. In this moment you choose not to click on the stupid-ass link on Huffington Post about Jennifer Anniston wearing a very short dress – those never live up to my expectations, but instead you are reading this supremely nourishing blog. It requires our attention, right now!
ON BEING AN ARTIST
Monday, April 23, 2012 § Leave a comment
Malvina Reynolds sings about the ticky-tacky professionals, who all look just the same.
I suspect that her distance from them lets her miss the point. You don’t need a guitar to sing your song.
The musician battles the same two choices as the sales-executive every day: risk averse and conforming to expectations vs. emotionally courageous self-expression. Ticky-tacky is as ticky-tacky does. It’s not in the profession that we occupy; it’s in how we express ourselves in our profession.
For the singer, as much as for the lawyer, art begins beyond the “notes:” when we care.
ON BEAUTY AND LOVE
Friday, April 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
When we look long enough, our fear of the different dissolves, we recognize each other and then “understanding is love.”
ARE YOU WORTH IT?
Thursday, April 19, 2012 § Leave a comment
Everything that is true for the briefing business – see post below – is true for personal relationships as well. It’s no good to get all huffy puffy about disappointed expectations that were never articulated in the first place.
You act and feel like a douche/bitch though if you set-out your demands on what needs to happen for you to be satisfied and happy.
“Jump up from the sofa when I come home and look at me admiringly!”
“Buy me expensive things for my birthday!”
“I am your best lover ever! In fact, forget that you ever were with someone else.”
“If push came to shove, I could take him.”
“Never tell your stupid shrimp joke when we are with my friends.” (Lady is coming out of the grocery store, two big shopping bags in her hands. A man in a trench-coat steps out in front of her. He opens his coat and is completely naked underneath. She stops in her tracks and says, ‘Oh! I forgot the shrimp.’)
“Never wear socks in bed!” (if you are not German, you might not have heard that one.)
The business briefing (see post below) that sets all sorts of rules is useless if it doesn’t also address the emotional subtext of the task. The same is true for articulating personal expectations. The example demands above are a cop-out. If you want your emotional needs met, you need to bare exactly those needs, not some stand-in behavior rules.
Baring emotional needs is a scary business. It requires you to inspect your insecurities and then to share them. If you find friends and partners that respond positively, you’ve got yourself a keeper and are building a rewarding relationship. If you don’t invest that vulnerability, you are wasting your time.
DELIVERING ON THE BRIEFING
Wednesday, April 18, 2012 § 1 Comment
It’s easy to give a general direction to your staff member and then be disappointed with the results. “If only my staff would be better, but they just don’t produce up to my expectations,” you might hear a manager say. That’s not an acceptable response.
Sitting down and putting in writing what you expect from a staff-member or supplier takes time and effort. Your staff cannot deliver on a briefing, if there is no briefing.
There are standard things that a brief needs to cover (objectives, resources, constraints, etc.). Crucial though is your soul-searching on what you really want, what you are willing to give and what you are willing to see happen.
The task exists because you want some innovation/change. That means some things that are in place must be torn down and new things need to be built. The task exists because it is not clear what exactly needs to happen – the briefing is not an instruction. To innovate, your staff member needs to get an understanding of the radicalness with which to approach the task and what sacred cows to stay clear of. In most cases there is a bunch of organizational baggage and history attached to what can and cannot be changed.
Those taboos in the organization and in yourself are tough to acknowledge. It takes honest reflection and courage to express them and to commit to what’s allowed to happen.
Delivering that briefing is hard work. That’s what leadership is.
Business Buddhism 