Month: March 2022

A wise mentor told me that we should guard ourselves carefully from the people who rush to the microphones and TV cameras the moment news breaks.  “Are they giving you confirmed facts or leading off with their first impressions?” he asked.

A few truisms about news:

Most news is the same things of history happening to different people. 

It’s nigh impossible to know the whole story.  The idea that multi-faceted events can be accurately described in a 4 min feature news segment or one newspaper article is preposterous, let alone a tweet or headline.

All sources of information operate from a perspective with some inherent bias.  Then pile on the fact that people have self-interests in driving some narratives over others.  Significant events always have competing narratives.

We filter information through our personal frames of reference and experience grids.  We are often compelled to fill fact-gaps with stories and speculation.

We obsess over points in time events and systematically underweight the currents and trends of the decades which brought us to those points in time.  This is easy to see when people blame whoever is “in charge” at the moment for events which unfolded after years of decisions and action & reaction by multiple stakeholders.

Anecdotes are genuine, but the plural of anecdotes is not data.

This blog isn’t going to address current events as a rule because I’ve grown to recognize the limits of my opinions and interpretations.  I’m aiming for more timeless commentary and discussion. 

…

I’ve been guilty many times of offering my opinion and perspective before I’ve studied an issue.  Sometimes I got away with spouting nonsense, and more often someone ‘corrected’ me.

The book of Job has some insights for us.  Elihu is the fourth and youngest man to confront Job.  He burned with passion and anger.  Elihu’s criticism of Job are some the harshest in the story!  It’s fascinating to me that at the end of the story God rebukes Job’s three friends and says nothing to Elihu!  Does Elihu get a pass because of his youthfulness and lack of perspective?  Perhaps.  I doubt I’ll get a pass for “youthful ignorance” at my age!

I don’t hold myself ‘above’ the opinion-wonks.  There are smart, savvy people worth learning from. 

How can we best live in an opinion-saturated world, fueled by 24 hour news, further bolstered by a seemingly infinite number of podcasts and social media options? 

Perhaps a good guideline is to give our focused attention to those who have studied a subject at least 100 hours in depth to understand it.  I should probably only offer my opinion on subjects where I’ve read at least 10 books and crafted by view over 100+ hours of thinking, and still hold it loosely.

You need to collaborate with and get support from people in other groups, in particular:

Functional groups like IT, Finance, HR, Legal inside your company

Third party support groups under contract, including consulting firms

Employees who have specific expertise not in your group

All groups inherently have a range of talent, from the excellent to the mediocre (and hopefully not) to the incompetent.

Do what you can to ensure you get to work with the excellent people in these groups.  You’ll get 5X more with 5X less effort, compared to working with the mediocre-skilled/experienced people.  

You can’t always control this, but there are two consistent ways to influence situations in your favor:

1.  Develop good relationships with the people leading these groups.  You want to be on good terms with them.  You should be able to just pick up the phone or message them and they’ll be happy to respond to you.  
2. Provide feedback about your contact’s performance to these leaders.  Make it plain where you’re pleased, where there are opportunities for improvement, and what’s been unacceptable.

I used to think that when I uttered the magic words  “I don’t know” my team would think “Glenn is honest and authentic” and “Ok, I’ll relax until someone tells me what I want to know.”

Fool! They might have considered me authentic, but they aren’t impressed and are unlikely to let it go.

Your best approach is to say  “I don’t know, we’ll work through it and figure it out together.”  Or “I don’t know but here is what I will do to find out and report back to you.” 

Next, keep your word.

Communication is one of the core crafts of leadership.  [A craft is a combination of learnable skills and art used to produce something beautiful and useful.]

Leaders need to communicate to groups.  I encourage you to shift your mindset from “I’m talking with a group” to “I’m talking with a series of individuals.”  You know how to talk with a single person, right?  Ok, do that!  Start with one person, then shift your attention to the next person, and so on.  The whole group hears your conversation as you’re going person to person.

Writing a message?  Same mindset – you’re writing to representative people in that distribution list. One of the reasons the typical corporate memo sounds bland is they’re writing to a faceless, non-person named “DL-BigGroupofPeopleIDon’tKnow1234.”

Make your communication to groups more personal and you’ll connect better.  We’re always communicating, so the question is whether you’re connecting.

Personal story:

Some years ago I was asked to be on a panel discussion at the end of a supervisor training session. I scooted into the conference room just in time and took my designated seat at the front of the room. 

The first question that came to me was from a younger lady: “How do you motivate people?” I replied simply, “You can’t.” 

There were a few chuckles, and then the laugher spread. I noticed the HR facilitator at the back of the room put her hand over her mouth. The young lady smiled and pointed at a spot over my head.

I turned to look behind me and realized I was sitting directly underneath a big poster titled “How to Motivate People.”

I laughed and explained my view:

“All motivation is intrinsic. You can’t affect something intrinsic in person directly. You can provide new information. You can give them an alternative frame of reference. You can create incentives for behaviors you prefer, and disincentives for behaviors you don’t prefer. These are all indirect means of influence. Their motivation is 100% their decision. The best leaders tap into their pre-existing motivation. It’s like stepping in front of a parade and helping the parade make turns and go a bit faster.”

Observation:  Few things drown creativity faster than self-censorship.  

I don’t mean that we’re free to say whatever comes to mind, or do what we like regardless of the consequences.  We often think silly thoughts and act in foolish ways. We should be self-disciplined and restrained in our speech and actions.  That’s maturity working in context.  

Self-censorship is the fearful editor that squelches our expression of our convictions.  Self-censorship weighs the opinions of “those people” above all else.  Self-censorship is moral cowardice. 

Hedgehog and Fox is an old and useful concept for strategy and time/effort allocation.  

The first recorded instance is from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus:  “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.”  This cryptic comment inspired Erasmus’ “Adagia”, Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” and Jim Collins wrote a chapter about it in in his excellent book “Good to Great.”   

Most of our days naturally fit the fox model – many things, leaping from one to another, managing the unexpected and unplanned but necessary stuff of the day. 

The key is to plan for hedgehog days:  Intense focus on one big thing.  That kind of day doesn’t happen by default, it must be planned.  It must be guarded. 

Practical reality is that with all our obligations we’ll need to do more than just one thing during an entire day.  Don’t let that be your excuse. Go hedgehog on a 4-hour block of focused time and accomplish those big things!    

Inflation is a genuine problem, with many fathers.   Fewer people are paying attention to the drivers of deflation.  For example, these technology platforms (which drive enormous business models) are fundamentally deflationary: 

DNA sequencing 

Robotics 

Sensors 

Machine learning & algorithms  

Blockchain  

By deflationary I mean that these technologies become cheaper rapidly and require less and less human labor to generate disproportionately large economic gains.   Said another way, jobs don’t grow at the same rate as economic gain when organizations use these technologies in their business models.  GDP grows through productivity gains while the hours worked declines. This amplifies the “wealth divide,” particularly when our education systems are still optimized to turn out worker drones rather than entrepreneurs and self-directed learners.  

There are no simple or straightforward “solutions” to these trends.  Neither inflation nor deflation are uniform; there is a distribution of impact severity over peoples and time.   Multiple powerful incentives drive the changes. Riding this tiger is fun until it isn’t, and the dismount is downright scary. 

I suggest we use two lenses to assess options and consider our paths forward: 

1. Meaningful work which supports families.  There is a correlation between addictions – opioid overdoses killed more than 100,000 Americans in the last 12 months — and lack of meaningful work.  Work is good for us.  Work that supports families is good for our social fabric. 
2. Willingness to sacrifice today for a better future.  There is effectively zero willingness in our political discourse today.  Deferred gratification is no less critical for countries than it is for individual citizens.   

I suggest these because they’re integrated lenses requiring maturity and tradeoffs.  There are those among us who are called to work on foundational and underlying issues – healthy masculinity and femininity, education in an era of exponential technology, practicing forgiveness and citizenship, discernment, rediscovering the value of connecting the divine and the ‘secular,’ and so on.  Yet we still need some way to integrate our efforts, a mechanism that supports conscious optimism.  We choose X even though it’s inconvenient or less valuable to some, because it leads to a better overall outcome.  (In math terms, a global optimum rather than a local optimum.)  The “we” here is important, too.  History is replete with example of the poor choices of a few who were powerful or influential.  The best choices will align with trustworthy revelation, not just what our flawed guts tell us in the moment.

I call on adults to lead.  Eugene Peterson’s translation of Ephesians 4:14-16 show us the way:

No prolonged infancies among us, please. We’ll not tolerate babes in the woods, small children who are easy prey for predators. God wants us to grow up, to know the whole truth and tell it in love—like Christ in everything. We take our lead from Christ, who is the source of everything we do. He keeps us in step with each other. His very breath and blood flow through us, nourishing us so that we will grow up healthy in God, robust in love.

So much project work gets stretched out over days and weeks and months!  Concentrated time to finish a deliverable is powerful.  You’re often better off not working on a small project at all for three or five weeks if you can engineer time for the right people to come together to finish the project with a few hours or days of focused effort.  

I remind you of Leonard Bernstein’s insight: “To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”  

Do everything you can to squeeze out chronological days.  The return on speed is exponential, not linear.   Efficient execution begets more and better results. This pattern of work will set you apart as a powerful contributor.  

Strengths are things which we’re naturally good at, and things where we’ve achieved some level of mastery.  Uniqueness is the intersection of strengths and life experiences.  Many people have great strengths in an athletic endeavor, but every athlete is unique because no two people have precisely the same experiences.  Many people have become great fathers and mothers, but even though all parents have some common experiences with children, no two parents have precisely the same life experiences.

Key questions: What are your strengths? What life experiences amplify those (or weaken them)?

When I ask someone about weaknesses, they can rattle on for 10 minutes or write 2 pages quickly.  (In my experience narcissists struggle with that.  It’s a tell.)  Most people have more difficulty homing in on their strengths. Think about both what you know as well as what you can do easily compared with others. 

• What work tasks do you gravitate to because they’re easier?
• When you have an unexpectedly free 5 minutes, what’s your first thought about what to do?
• Who comes to you for help and why?
• When do people say “Wow!”?
• List areas of interest where you’ve read more than 3 books, attended conferences, spent more than $2000 in the last year, subscribed to email lists, commented in online forums, been part of a group for more than 6 months, etc….
• What formal degrees and certifications do you have? 
• What subjects from school can you still use and teach to others who don’t know it as well as you do?
• What machines can you run?  Maintain?  Build?
• Where do you have expertise to distinguish professional work from a somewhat competent hobbyist?
• What movies can you quote from, or tell people the entire plot, start to finish?  Which songs do you have memorized?
• When do you quickly decide you need to get someone else to do X because you’re not good at it?  What things do you resist delegating even if you know you should because “it’s easy” for you?

Let’s think about your experiences:

• Where have your lived and what’s it like there?  Favorite and least-favorite memories?
• Where have you vacationed or traveled to?  What do you remember?  What lessons did you take away?
• What jobs have you held where someone paid you?  How and why did you progress from one job to another?
• What volunteer positions have you held for more than 6 weeks or 6 months?
• What do you recognize as big milestones in your life?  (And would others also say they are big milestones?)  Think again, can you think of others?
• What activities tend to leave you more energized?  Which activities do you do as a duty but are draining?

Finally, let’s consider relationships.  (I don’t want to get into a therapy session, but this is a useful way to think about your strengths and experiences.)

• Where are their relationship joys (even silly and memorable moments) with your family members?
• Where do your relationship scars come from?  How visible are those scars to others?  How have those scars made you today?
• Who can you call at 2am and they won’t think less of you?
• Who is in your closest circle of friends?  (Friends, not Facebook “friends.”)  And in the next circle?  If you haven’t talked with one of these friends in two years, which ones can you pick up a good conversation with immediately, and what does that tell you?
• Who do you consult when you need the kind of advice that a Google search can’t give you?  Who would you never ask for this kind of advice?
• Which local or regional leaders can you contact and expect they’ll listen because of their relationship with you?
• Where does your heart ache for deeper relationships? 

… This exercise is worth an investment of time.  The outcome has ROI!  Make some notes, let it ferment in your mind, and come back to over a few days.