"Helping hands are happy hands." -Timber Jim Serrill
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#lifehack
Paying attention. Looking at the data and patterns. Facing the reality. Drawing conclusions. That is when insights happen.
"It's easier to be brave when you are not alone." -Amy Poehler, comedian, actor, best-selling author, and mother (who knows her share of terrifying situations)
The passage below was first written in 1955 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her book “Gift from the Sea.” They were brought to my mind recently in the horrors of this past week.
As a bit of context, Anne was born in 1906, and was married to Charles Lindbergh, was herself an aviator, acclaimed author, and mother. This would put her grandmother’s era (which she referenced below) in the late 1800s.
She writes:
“The world is rumbling and erupting in ever-widening circles around us. The tensions, conflicts, and sufferings even in the outermost circle touch us all, reverberate in all of us. We cannot avoid these vibrations.
But just how far we can implement this planetal awareness? We are asked today to feel compassionately for everyone in the world, to digest intellectually all the information spread out in the public print, and to implement in action every ethical impulse aroused by our hearts and minds. The interrelatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold. Or rather – for I believe the heart is infinite – modern communication loads us with more problems than a human frame can carry. It is good, I think, for our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to be stretched, but body, nerve, endurance, and life-span are not elastic. My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds. I cannot marry all of them, or bear them all as children, or care for them as I would my parents in illness or old age. Our grandmothers, and even – with some scrambling – our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in that tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.”
I can not speak for my great-great-grandmother, but I wonder if her trials and that of her immediate circle were more manageable and more actionable than what we face today, as Anne supposed. Today, we have the world's tragedies pitted against the same body, nerve, endurance, and life-span that could shoulder a lesser load, but crumble under the weight of today's news cycles and headlines. Or at least that is how I have felt this week.
In times like this, I want to go back to my immediate circle. Where actions can be taken and progress felt. Start there and fan out again, as I have strength. My compassion is strong. My conscious is pricked. My empathy is stirred. And my weakness is revealed.
If you are a start-up, how do you talk about your business? Are you building a company? Hatching a company? Founding a company? Planting a business? Disrupting an industry? What does this say about where you are focusing your time and energy?
If you are in a more established company, what language do you use? Are you growing a company? Managing a company? Leading a company? Transforming a company? Leading a turn-around? Scaling a company? Leading a team? Building a sustainable business? Are you creating wealth for shareholders?
If you are exiting a company or business, how do you describe that? Are you divesting? Are you stepping back? Are you stepping away? Are you implanting an exit plan? Are you just not showing up anymore?
The words you use matter. Think about how you describe your business and what that says about you.
This weekend, some of our friends were having car trouble. They had ruled out a dead battery or a low gas tank and they resigned themselves to call roadside assistance. The tow truck arrived and before it was hitched up, the technician did some trouble-shooting. He then shimmied under the car and tapped the starter with a hammer. It started right up. If they had gotten a bill for this service incidence, the invoice might have read:
$1 – hammer tapping
$499 – knowing where to tap the hammer
Never undervalue experience.
Each of us have had similar experiences when bringing in an expert has made all the difference. Costs avoided. Disasters averted. Downtime reduced. Customers delighted.
And yet, we all romanticize the do-it-yourselfer. Those Pinterest-fueled upstarts who can tackle professional-grade projects and make it look easy. There are television networks to celebrate their accomplishments. These shows give us confidence. Maybe even over-confidence. After all, we are seeing huge transformations in a 30 minute show. A few time lapse videos between the opening credits and the big reveal. That is certainly true in the personal world.
But it is also true in the professional world. Sometimes executives find it tempting to think they can do marketing, business development or even legal work, without trained experts. It is an all-too-common scenario to over estimate our own abilities and our time and to experience “Pinterest fail” type experiences in the work world.
So, when do you call in an expert?
1. When the risk of being wrong is extreme.
This obviously applies to litigation or regulatory compliance issues or any area where specialty knowledge is required, but it also applies to areas where the strategic risk is high. If you can experiment with little impact, then, by all means, feel free to do so. When you need a decision that is warranted or that requires technical expertise, call in the guru.
2. When time is of the essence.
Do you have a limited market window to get a product to market before big competitors sabotage your chances? Then you might want a professional sales and marketing team with industry experience who can hit the ground running. If you want to avoid delays in getting your product certified, setting up an efficient assembly line, or launching a new website, find someone who has done the work before and has a proven track record.
3. When you are better suited for other priorities.
My grandpa, who has a contractor, told a story about how a doctor client of his took vacation time to paint his own house instead of hiring someone. If he had worked that week, he could have paid a painter and had money left over, plus ended up spending more time than a professional. “It’s hard to beat a man at his own craft,” he would say. Each one of us has things that we are great at and the more time we can spend doing those things, instead of doing a mediocre job, that others could do. Know what you are good at focus your time there.
This article was featured on LinkedIn Pulse.
"Don’t say 'yes,' just because saying 'no' is scary."
- Isabelle Roughol talking about Volkswagon engineering cars to cheat emissions test instead of admit that they fell short of their public emissions goals
“Unable to reach the lofty PR goal, engineering chose to lie rather than disappoint the boss, which is how every other corporate disaster begins,” she continues.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is all the rage today with companies like Salesforce.com racking up huge profits and trading multiples, and companies like Microsoft introducing their own versions of the same. The same is true with people turning data insights into a business model (data-as-a-service or analytics-as-a-service). But the “as-a-service” business model isn’t new. Here are some examples of other products that have been sold as a service.
Alcohol-as-a-Service (AaaS): a bar
Food-as-a-Service (FaaS): a restaurant
Equipment-as-a-Service (EaaS): equipment rental and staging
Personal-hygiene-as-a-Service (PHaaS): beauty salons and barber shops
Reading-as-a-service (RaaS): story time at the library
Exit-as-a-Servce (EaaS): what a doorman does when you leave the hotel
Wayfinding-as-a-Service (WaaS): what the hostess does when she shows you to your table
Shelter-as-a-Service (SaaS): a hotel or even Airbnb
Investors and advertisers love networks that have captive audiences. They love that fuel dispenser toppers catch people when they are tethered to a gas station with an 8 foot hose. They love that people waiting for a movie to start in a cinema have to watch something when the lights are down and their cell phones are put away. The captive audience that can’t escape the message you are trying to deliver.
But, think about it from the user’s perspective. Who wants to be captive? “I want to be a captive audience,” said no one ever.
People want to be captivated, not captive. It’s a higher calling that we should all strive for.
We don't care about diversity because it's in vogue. We care about it because we like winning." - Mike Gamson, SVP Global Solutions, LinkedIn
"Some moments are meant to be forgotten. You can't dance at weddings anymore." -Jared Ficklin
I know it’s true. And you can join me in blaming the internet. I am nearly 100% sure you have never actually read the Terms and Conditions to which you just agreed.
I recently heard Heather Andrew from NeuroInsights speak at a conference. She explained how our brains are separated into right and left sections. Emotions are on the right, but language is on the left. So, to express your feelings is to pass them between the two lobes of the brain.
This has several implications. First, it can be difficult for some, as men, for instance, have less pathways between the lobes. And secondly, the act of putting emotions into words, changes them. Makes them more rational. Our anger, becomes righteous anger or defensiveness. Our shame becomes blame. Our irrationalities and impulses get sanitized when they get communicated.
Perhaps instead of speaking our emotions (and passing them to language on the left), we should instead use our right brains to sing them, paint them, or act them out in dance. Or perhaps, that is precisely what the performing arts already do?
It has long been said that if you really want to learn something, you should teach it. But research shows that the same can be said for tweeting. When NeuroInsights ran focus groups with consumers who were shown programming and told they would need to tweet about it, paid more attention and retained the information better than those in the control group. So, instead of “pay attention, it might be on the test” perhaps we should say “pay attention, it might be in a tweet.”
#CreatorsRule
Start-ups are the laboratories of the economy. Doing things that established companies don’t do, won’t do, or can’t do.
Who designed the now ubiquitous wireless logo? The one with three curved bars above a dot. You know the one. Someone surely was the first to sit down in Illustrator or with a pen and paper and draw out the picture. The ones that the world now uses. One of our most powerful and universal icons and it’s anonymous and unowned. Perhaps that is a metaphor for some of the new, powerful technologies and ideas that will be as disruptive as wireless internet.
I wrote recently about Google’s efforts to provide the whole product in my article Y is for You: Google's Alphebet and Personal Branding. I learned recently that one of the founding father’s pioneered some of these strategies himself: Ben Franklin
Ben wanted to be a printer. His biographer (Isaacson) talks about the lengths to which he went to procure a printing press from Europe. He wanted to own a communication machine.
He started printing things for his friends and customers.
So, to use the machine, he started a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. If one flyer was good, then having a weekly or daily publication was even better. Those who wouldn’t afford to print a flyer, could afford an advertisement in a larger publication.
He printed books. The most popular book was the Bible. But most people only bought one of those in their lifetime, so how could he get people to want to buy a book every year. He started the Poor Richard’s Almanac which would have repeat customers every year.
Then he began to think bigger. He wanted people to read his books and magazines, but many people were far sighted and had trouble reading. So he invented bifocals.
He noticed that in the cold New England winters, people weren’t reading as much, so he invented the Franklin Stove.
He wanted to broaden his distribution channel to allow people outside of Philadelphia or the region to read his books and publications. So, he championed the US Postal System.
And realizing that it was inefficient to print things in Philly and move them around the country, he franchised and shipped the plates to a friend in the Carolinas so she (yes, she) could build a business serving that community.
A man with Ben’s broad curiosities and diverse background pursued these and many other ideas in service of his main themes and principles. What are your main themes and principles that are worthy of the height of your creativity, enthusiasm and focus?