I love books. Really, I do. I love searching the web for information. I’m wired to synthesize information from fire hoses of input.

Occasionally this gets me into trouble.

The other morning I felt I was getting nowhere while praying. Felt awful, constrained, artificial, perfunctory. Useless. Thought popped into my mind: “I should find a new book on prayer and read it.”

Later that day I was stuck in writing an article. My outline was right there in front of me and I couldn’t craft two decent sentences. Thought popped into my mind: “I should Google for articles about getting past writer’s block. Or install that new software I heard about from WriteorDie.com.”

Nope.

I am not missing information. I do not need additional distractions. It’s time to simply recommit to praying, and continuing to practice praying as conversation. I just need the self-discipline to quiet my inner critic, crank out a few sentences (no matter how blecky) and come back another time to edit.
I don’t have a ‘knowing’ problem, but a ‘doing’ problem.

The Internet has so much information that a dedicated individual could be self-taught on almost any subject or craft, at least enough to be employable. I have no plumbing or electrical skills – but there is so much on YouTube and home repair web sites that I could apply myself and learn the basics.

For free.

MIT has their entire engineering curriculum online. For free.

Khan Academy has outstanding math, science, and economics classes in short, consumable bites. For free.

World class professors teach classes online in many colleges and universities. Many of those are recorded, and freely available.

Here’s the kicker: how many people are actually taking advantage of this? Hardly anyone. The statistics from online-only college degree programs are underwhelming; relatively few students who begin actually finish.

Why? What does this tell us about ourselves, and our culture? Does this tell us anything about our expectations of institutional certification? I am still pondering this question. (What do you think?)

Two facts are clear:
(1) Going forward, there are few limits to self-education opportunities.
(2) We’re going to need those opportunities, given the fast-changing complexity of our world.

Some years ago I interviewed a young man without a college degree, from Pakistan. He had systematically studied all the MIT engineering class videos online, and felt he had the equivalent of a degree from MIT. I wonder how long before corporations are smart enough to hire this kind of young man? Or will they continue to risk competing against him as a start-up engineer/entrepreneur?

Here’s another line of thought. Historically socialists and communists have painted a picture where everyone would have access to the finest education, all for free, and live up to their full potential. In practical terms this level of education has become available via the Internet. What do the large majority of people use the Internet for? Streaming entertainment, gaming, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, porn. I think this experiment tells us that the reason why socialism won’t work is because people are not uniformly good and idealistic and self-disciplined enough to make that system work the way it aspires to.

Critical test: What percentage of a society will take advantage of all that is available to them and fulfill their potential? Historically it’s probably less than 5%.

I recommend this 4 min exercise:  Take your compensation sheet for last year, and calculate your average wage/hour.  (For example, Salary divided by [49 weeks * X hours/week].)
 
This number will probably be higher than you had thought.  Feel good about this. You present considerable future value to the organization.
 
The organization needs to get significant value from your average hourly wage, or else it becomes logical to find ways to get equal or better value from a lower wage, or non-human automation.  No coasting!  What “Good enough” in the past will fall short in the future.  
 
Not every hour is equal, of course. Applying a power law function, you would expect about 2 weeks of the year, perhaps 100 hours, as the base for more than half your delivered value.  Though it is difficult to consistently predict which 100 hours are best, you can focus on specific activities most likely to yield the highest value results.
 
Next time you think “it’s just 30 minutes” or “I can do that in a few days” do a recheck on your wages.  This may make it easier to decline meetings, suggest someone else do some work, find another solution, etc.  It’s also why solutions which provide lasting value and/or prevent problems in the future are worth your focused attention. 
 
Meetings need to be productive!  Ask “What’s worth this high number of salaried hours?”  Good communication is worth extra effort up front because it scales better and reduces problems later on.
 
You can calculate this for your direct reports, too.  This will help you consider their best assignments.  You can also translate x amount of work into a dollar figure.  I’ve been able to ask clients in the past, “Would you pay $10,000” for that solution?  Because that’s about what the developer salaries will add up to.”  You can have a good dialogue with better data.
 
All this is much easier to do when systems are working well, there is time/effort margin you can leverage, and relationships are healthy.  With systems that are built on wet sand, overloaded people, and bitterness in a team, you’ll find you are drawn into a downward spiral of focus on the less productive and less valuable work. 

We’re all hopeful for a vaccine against Covid-10.  Anti-vaccine sentiment is strong in segments of our populations, particularly in the prosperous West. An even larger segment of the population behaves as if life must be 100% risk free, and tradeoffs are unacceptable.  Vaccines are not 100% perfect, and there are some risks.  This is a situation of tradeoffs.   

An insight I picked up from an older man about the current “we insist on zero risk” mentality:  These people have no living memory of what everyday life was like before the big surge of vaccine availability in the 1940’s-1970’s, and antibiotics in the 1920’s.  Infant and childhood mortality was common.  Many people knew family members and neighbors who died or permanently scarred from scarlet fever, polio, the mumps, etc.  There were national conversations about how to build enough iron lungs to treat all the polio victims.  People living with that reality could reasonably consider the tradeoff value of sparing millions of people death and disfigurement vs. the reality that a very small fraction of people would be hurt by the vaccine.

The tradeoff risks were movingly illustrated in this clip from the HBO series “John Adams.”

Life is not risk-free. 

One my mentors in the past used code words with me.  He could say one word, and it would unroll a complex idea or question. 

For example, he would ask me periodically, “Pruning?”  which I knew expanded to “How goes the pruning process, so that you’re only working on the fruit-bearing work that matters most?

Want more tomatoes, apples, roses?  You have to prune.  At first it seems shockingly harsh.  Pinch off the suckers. Apples are only produced on new growth, so a pruned apple orchard looks like a hacked-off collection of stumpy, thick branches. Cut back the rosebushes to a fraction of their size.  I remember watching my grandfather cut back the roses near their farmhouse in Lumberport, West Virginia.  He saw my expression and said, “If you ask the roses, they don’t like to be pruned.”

If you don’t prune you might still have lots of leaves and branches, but you’ll have less of the valuable fruit.  Pruning focuses the energy of the plant on fruit-bearing stems and branches.

What’s in your workflow now which could be pruned?  What work creates pretty leaves and no lasting fruit?  What is the biggest and best fruit you should be producing?  What about the work done by your team, your organization?   If you’re having difficulty imagining what could be pruned, begin with this question: “What does my customer – the person who writes the check – value?” 

Note: Pruning is different than delegating work to someone else.  Don’t delegate non-value-add work to others just to get it off your list. 

I’m not one of these people who likes music playing all the time, nor do I have any musical talent whatsoever. 

Music with words makes it difficult for me to concentrate, though it’s great when I’m doing something that doesn’t take a lot of attention, like housework or exercise. 

I advocate either classical music (Beethoven, Vivaldi, and Mozart especially; Brahms if I’m tense and need to relax) or good instrumental soundtracks to help with writing, problem-solving, and most forms of knowledge-work.  I’m particularly fond of the soundtracks from

Last of the Mohicans  (I used this on repeat for the big pushes on my last 2 books!)

The Lord of the Rings

The Mission

The Road to Perdition

A great source is YouTube.  Search for “study music” and “music for focus” and “ambient study music”) and you’ll find excellent videos that go for hours. 

The other benefit of playing these when working from home is that it masks noises from other activities in the house! 

Find what works for you and use it. 

Our beloved dog Watson has loads of terrier in his mixed genetics, so he’s consumed with all things rodent and rabbit on the ground and under the ground.  He has an instinctive intensity when he catches a whiff of something interesting.  Watson has often been so focused on an old rabbit scent that he doesn’t see the rabbit 8 feet upwind.   I’ve witnessed him oblivious to squirrels darting across the sidewalk just ahead because he’s head down trying to inhale a vole from its hole. 

This is not Watson, but this is a common scene on our morning walks:

People have these tendencies, too.  We can become intensely focused on one thing and miss the larger perspective, which includes both threats and opportunities. 

This becomes a leadership issue in several dimensions:

• Occasionally we must remind a person to sharpen their focus, rather than frequent task-switching and head-swiveling without delivering a result.  A sustained hard focus generates results.

• More often we need to help people to change their focal point, to look up and out.  There’s a larger world of information.  There may be a new priority for their focused attention.  Leaders should frequently use the opportunity to help people connect immediate work with grand purposes.

• Good leaders arrange for their subordinates to do more of the focused work, and spend more time in situational awareness and anticipating the next thing.  They don’t do someone’s work for them, apart from extraordinary circumstances.  That energy is better spent by leaders to expand the radius of their watch-zone.

In practical business situations, leadership is a both-and challenge of selectively focusing while maintaining a soft focus situational awareness, and more dedicated time in larger picture view.  I’ve coached myself and others to book time on their calendars, weekly and monthly, for the explicit purpose for looking up and out.   Want to move faster? Increase the frequency of those times.

There’s an old saying about the critical decision meeting:  “If you’re not at that table, you’re on the menu.”

If you can, be at the table – if not in person, at least with well-articulated ideas and reputation known to the people in the room. 

Your interactions and deliverables are deposits in your credibility account.  Consciously build up a healthy balance. 

My observation is that strong skills are a big factor in personnel decisions.  Leaders want results.  However, interpersonal behaviors can be the deciding factor.  A skilled asshole is still an asshole that people aren’t thrilled to have around. 

My coal-mining grandfather told me when I was a boy, “It’s a small world.  Remember that before you piss in somebody’s corn flakes.”

It takes wisdom to know how to disagree, how to push for a different agenda, how to stand for what is best and right, and not leave a lasting negative impression.  A big part of this is avoiding an issue becoming personal.  Challenge ideas and plans without demeaning people.  As Oprah says, “They will never forget how you made them feel.” 

Our organizations confer titles upon us:

Chief ____. 

Senior ______. 

Director of ______.

 ____ Manager

____ Associate

Etc.

I often say to work colleagues, “Thanks for your professionalism” out of a desire to see professionalism be our high standard.

What title do you take for yourself?  Especially, what’s your REAL means of contributing?

It may depend on context.  Most of us have multiple roles – parent, spouse, chief lawn mower or garbage-taker-outer, etc., but these aren’t always titles.

Megan Macedo writes: “[N]aming ourselves and our work is an important, powerful part of the whole process. I am a firm believer that we must first and foremost use the language that means something to us, before we ever think about how the outside world may understand – or misunderstand – it. But I do not claim it to be an easy thing to do.”

Accept the mantle of title(s) conferred on you as a leader, but don’t let that be the only possible name for yourself.  Those titles will evaporate into history long before you do.

Leaders wish these two fantasies were true:

• Everything will be happy-happy-joy-joy while I’m the leader
• Every challenge withers in the face of “being authentic”

When I see a young leader acting as though the organization owes them a happy experience, all the time, the most charitable thought I muster is “They haven’t been doing this very long.”

I suspect all of you reading this understand the truth.  The world is complex.  People are complex. Organizational dynamics and business models are complex.  Therefore, it’s hard. 

But we hear so much today about “being authentic” that I want to speak to another framing of it.

Authenticity matters, at least 80% of the time.  It’s something people expect (though they often willingly misinterpret clever acting for authenticity).  I advocate truthfulness over lies, genuine expressions over manipulative acting, and serving others over using power for selfish exploitation.

Yet there are situations where reaching the objective requires a different approach.  You cannot be fully transparent; you must selectively adopt a posture which drives the direction.  You must have steely courage that does not waver in the face of opposition, confusion, weariness, and frustration. 

When is this necessary?  Circumstances like these:

• Leading an organization through a very significant change, big enough that not everyone can make the transition
• Effectively dealing with a peer who won’t be satisfied with anything less than your destruction
• Fending off a competitor or usurper
• Executing a large budget cut
• Letting poor performers go
• Executing a strategic direction you didn’t pick and don’t favor
• When you realize you are not the right person in your role

Perhaps the best characterization of this is the Chinese phrase, “Thick face, black heart.”  These are odd words.  What does this mean? It has nothing to do with skin density, and black heart does not mean “evil” in this context.  This is a good translation:

Opaqueness to the outside world, plus

Deep resolve to see it through

That opaqueness might be deceit and subterfuge (especially in times of war) but in most organizations it’s enough that you consistently wear your warrior face.  Don’t allow people to creep inside.  Don’t be swayed by “friends” or cajolers.  Let people wonder what’s going on in your head, but don’t tell them.

Once your objective is fixed, the resolve to see it through is essential.  You can’t quit partway, no matter how tempting.  The resolve is your fuel to push past all resistance.  There is no plan B.

This “Thick face, black heart” concept is a good description of a 1800’s surgeon who knows the shattered leg needs to be amputated, and finishes sawing through the bone even as the patient is screaming. 

“Thick face, black heart” is not appropriate all the time.  It’s a strategic posture which can be abused, and abusive.  But it is an important strategy in the leader’s toolbox. 

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Personal note – Several of my critics point to my emphasis on Western Civilization (the synthesis of ideas from Athens and Jerusalem).  What few people know is how deeply I studied Asian philosophy in high school and college.  The librarians at the Carnegie library in Parkersburg WV had to bring in books from other libraries because they didn’t have the treatises on Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hindu Vedic texts that I requested, and biographies of Asian leaders.  I practiced Taoism for several years, which helped take the edge off my ferocious anger.  I won’t say that I plumbed the depths of Asian philosophy but do have a reasonable grounding.