accomplishment
Trident in the Storm
“There is opportunity in every storm”, is a phrase I often use. Storms disrupt, are not completely predictable, and affect many of us simultaneously and uniquely, since there is only one of each of us and the effects to us are different than for any other. We experience storms directly and indirectly. In all cases we get outcomes, some that are not evident, need to develop, and then emerge. Some are awful and some are wonderful, for businesses, enterprises, families, people, societies, economies, lots more.
The English benefited greatly when the Spanish Armada was destroyed in a storm, none too soon since attack was imminent. Winds from a storm and great strategy enabled the Athenian fleet to destroy the Persians during the Battle of Salamis in the second Persian Wars (that’s the one that involved the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae …) The outcomes from each have profound effects on what the world is today and even the fact that you’re reading this at all and specifically in English. Storms, opportunities and outcomes and inextricably linked with an every shifting mix of deterministic and random effects. What we do before, during and after these storms will drive outcomes, just like what others do create outcomes that we experience. Inaction and action drive outcomes. Spectators to a storm are impacted, but perhaps with a lesser influence on opportunities.
For many of us the economic storms of the last 18 months have created havoc, redirection, disorientation, and many positive opportunities as well. We’ve learned much about ourselves and even more about others we know and many we’ve trusted. Disappointments may make us wiser and wisdom may make us wealthier in work and life choices. At our shop, we have taken the linkage between storms and opportunities to heart and action. We are delighted to announce that our enterprise, Trident Leverage, is continuing its growth and is now Trident Leverage Group. We are now a full partnership of Kevin Bazinet, Dave Dippre, and me as the Managing Partners. With our growing consulting and business development team, we are excitedly addressing the opportunities that only these storms could have provided.
We believe that our choices matter, particularly during storms. We’re excited at what’s ahead and invite you to join us in making 2010 the year where nightmares become dreams and dreams become reality.
I Have a Dream
When was the last time you dreamed? Not the go-to-sleep dream, but the dream that has a future that is really attractive, one we wanted to be part of? Is that dream still alive? In the universal words of kids in the back seat of the car, “Are we there yet?” Has the dream taken a detour, stuck in traffic, parked in the remote lot, or crushed in a junkyard, fodder for recycling? In this dream, were we the driver, passenger, or someone on the curb watching traffic go by?
The current calamities have, for so many, turned dreams into nightmares. For organizations, value has been destroyed, visions have blurred, and scarcity and survival have replaced abundance and growth. But, maybe it’s time we dreamed again. There is incredible power in effective leadership. I have believed for many years that the best leaders are the masters of delivering and creating optimism. Great leaders, be they captains of nations, captains of industry, or captains of their lives see light and create visions that pull us into the future. Visions can create the possibilities we dream about and great leaders energize collective motivations into plans and execution.
Growing up, my favorite leaders were defined by adversity, Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln to name just two. They manifested an eloquence that gave, to so many, the courage to hope and the will to endure and strive. The adversity and nightmares around them did not defeat them, but rather inspired them to dream, focus, create a vision and motivate the delivery of a better future. It’s possible, not easy, but doable. Without the adversity, the greatness within these leaders may have been buried under the blanket of comfort and success. Adversity defined Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, even the business giants like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford. Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is timeless, the message creating and motivating a visionary power to fuel capacity, a capacity to move forward through adversity fostered by what is worst in people and enable millions to reach within and find what is best in people.
Adversity creates opportunity. Adversity energizes leaders and innovators. Adversity is what problem solvers dream about. The Great Depression was a fountain of new business creation, stoking the engines of creativity and diversification. It’s not easy, but doable again.
We approach a season redefined by prosperity. Be it the traditions of giving thanks or the tsunamis of buying presents, they have trappings of what abundance could look like and what “merry” or “happy” would look like. This year may not look as abundant. Maybe it’s the time to dream again, create new visions and challenge the leaders within us to embrace adversity and bring light to others.
Great leaders are judged by what they enabled others to accomplish, because others followed, sacrificed, endured, persisted and overcame adversities. Opportunities are always infinite. What we haven’t considered is always infinite. Only what we’ve accomplished so far is finite, memory is finite, scarcity is finite, even fear is finite.
“Hope is a waking dream.” Aristotle
“One Thing …”
It’s really great to be surprised, particularly when it’s a good one. For close to two decades I’ve been ranting about three rules, the only three rules we need to execute, improve, or accomplish close to everything. There are many attributes that contribute to success, brains for example, but those are not what this is about. The three rules are focus, discipline, and follow-through. They are applicable to better golf, getting a prom date, getting through school, and an endless list of goals to meet or ends to achieve. I have found that trying to get “there” and stay “there” without following all three is unlikely, geniuses included. What most of us call luck in the successes of others may have the hand of randomness, but more likely you’ll find the rules behind the “luck.” I’m pretty sure that by now some have figured out that “luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”
My surprise came at a conference this past week, one dedicated to performance improvement. These conferences almost always have gems and nuggets of insight and success stories, and this last one had a real humdinger. My first inkling that this was going to be good came when the presenter turned out to be the President and CEO of the organization. You typically don’t see folks from the C-suite presenting a story about performance improvement to a room full of professionals, consultants, gurus and geeks. With his story, Robert Weiner of PAS Technologies need never fear. I will leave the details out, but available to those with enough initiative to hunt him down and request a copy of the presentation. Those in the aerospace industry should jump on this, like now! It has ample examples of the three rules and lots of brains to boot. The three rules were evident and brilliantly executed. I can’t say that often, sadly.
There are two gems that stand out and can serve as benchmarks for those seeking to transform. Transform can apply from self to enterprises and everything in between. The first application has to do with understanding that fitness, typically governed by the laws of physics, is a precursor to exceptional business performance, typically governed by the laws of economics. Obese enterprises will not win races and sustain leads. Business fitness makes winning possible. The second part has to do with how to measure success and when to change focus, discipline, and follow-through. Robert Weiner got it right. As a consequence, his team was able to snatch success from the jaws of failure. If you want folks to get aligned, then they need transparency into what matters. If you want them to improve, they need the means to build capability that is measurable and scalable. If you really want this to work, focus on the essential. Then make sure all the consequences match. It’s hard to “walk the talk” when the signals “stumble the mumble.”
The coolest surprise came when he described the transformation that was executed with only one metric for fitness, then, and only after fitness was achieved, he shifted to only one metric for winning. Yep, one metric for each phase and that’s for the entire enterprise. It worked and will work. But this is not for the faint of heart or feeble in resolve. Many will moan that their metric is not there or that certain metrics belong for correctness and balance. Get the presentation from Mr. Weiner, read and weep. It is good stuff. When we pick the right one, the secondary stuff finds its place and aligns to contribute, rather than distract. Fitness requires all the systems to work in sync with clarity of purpose and outcome. It is hard and is likely to hurt, and that is good.
As Curly, the crusty cowboy in City Slickers said, “Do you know what the secret of life is? … One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean …” we know the word …..
“Who Cares?”
“Who cares?” … “What’s the point?” … “What possible difference could I make?”… “I’m not sure it’s worth the effort!”… “Why should I help?”
Do these sound remotely familiar? Do we know individuals who don’t believe that their actions matter for much? Do we or they subscribe that we’re all in a purely random journey through life or work? Do we believe that we do not have a big accomplishment to be remembered for? Do we make a difference?
Have we ever met someone, by chance, who made a big difference in the direction of our careers, life, insight, choices, who we have become, even the direction of big events? Random as that meeting or event appeared, it was a consequence of choices made, a bunch of choices that included theirs and yours. Why did that person take time to invest in you or for you? What if they had not, had ignored us or that opportunity, perhaps like we might sometimes do? I’m not talking about butterflies in Africa precipitating the damage from Katrina, but rather the importance of our choices and actions.
The challenge for many of us centers on how to make choices, particularly those choices that do not appear to have explicitly foreseeable benefits to ourselves or loved ones. Yet, these choices are made all the time and all over the world by countless individuals. These choices encompass the innumerable, from charitable acts to ultimate sacrifices.
It’s a tough nut to crack sometimes. Imagine helping Bob solve a tough problem at work and then watch him become world renowned for an invention that revolutionized this or that, cured this disease, etc. Bob got all that credit and our contribution was never mentioned or likely ever be remembered. Do we feel undervalued, lost, ignored?
A really fascinating aspect of history has to do with the world-changing impact that personal choices and decisions made. We read about the obvious big ones, particularly those made affecting the big wars, big bets and gambles, and many other recorded significant outcomes. Revisionism adds a fair amount of post event “must have been” determinism, but so what? Choices did matter and the overwhelming millions of good and great ones are and remain unknown to us. That is a big deal though.
Do we know who Cristobal de Olea was? He had a big impact on what life is like today in the Western Hemisphere, particularly shaping the struggles with illegal immigration, demographic redistributions, and even why the Mariachi Bands have very French roots. This man’s choice, unknown to many and unmentioned in most history books, changed the world. During a very critical moment in the conquest of what is now Mexico City, Cristobal de Olea chose to come between a spear and Hernan Cortes, perishing in the act. We can surely read about Cortes and all that followed. Had the spear immolated Cortes, killing him, this world would be remarkably different, including the absence of Taco Bell. I don’t believe that Cristobal de Olea weighed credit or fame when making what he believed to be a good choice.
Okay, I’m not suggesting we begin taking bullets as our point, but rather that there are always bigger things at play that hinge or are affected by our choices. We make a bigger difference, often unseen to others or unknown to us, than can be discerned at the moment of choice.
Here’s the interesting part. A choice we can make today, for personal or business reasons, can transform our likelihood of making better choices!
- We can invest in developing and behaving in accordance with a set of positive values.
- We can search for, discover, develop, or choose a purpose to our lives, profession, work, goals and actions.
- This is as applicable to organizations.
Choices today reduce or eliminate some future randomness. They change the direction of future decisions and increase the likelihood that we will take meaningful, possibly life altering actions, changed by our values and purpose. Right now, we may be persuaded that there may be merit in these thoughts, even experiencing tummy warming.
- Is that enough? Will it be easy or hard do what is necessary to direct the course of our future choices and actions?
- What will it take? At what point does our “choices scale” reach the balance point and then the tipping point, between where we are to where we could be?
- Does developing a means to make better choices seem like a good investment of our time?
- Do we do better when we react, or respond with forethought?
“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) U.S. poet, essayist and lecturer.
“How Aren’t You Doing?”
How aren’t you doing? That’s right, how are you at what you’re not doing? Have you ever been asked that question? I hope so! How well do we choose what to do and what to measure?
The answers to the questions tell much about how we think about work, prioritize and, most importantly, focus. Are we conditioned by our business systems and rewards for accomplishment such that we spend much of our time discussing, measuring, and reporting what was accomplished and done well, that is, what we are doing that we should have done. Could we perhaps be in the grips of the “more is better” paradigm? More is better has many dangerous consequences, across many dimensions, including the lethal supersizing of fast foods. More is better leads to business execution and reporting obesity. Business obesity is a big killer.
When putting together the yearly set of goals and objectives, do we develop a list of three or four that are truly critical to business? Or are we more likely to “brainstorm” a list of thirteen or fourteen? Upon review of our list, how many were really big deal items? How many were in the bag already? How many were anxieties driven, perhaps, to push off a nagging issue into the next cycle? When submitting the long list of items, are we confident that we’ve made great choices and we have a means to always do the critical first and the trivial last?
How do we decide what to measure? When reviewing our performance data, how much of it reports what got done? How much reports what did not get done? How should we spend our leadership and management time when reviewing performance data? Do we spend our time on what is going well or what is not? By the way, how much do we consume in resources measuring, compiling, reporting and reviewing all the data around what is OK? Are we generating noise that masks the signals we want to hear?
We may be doing and measuring too much and far too little at the same time. Yep, we may be creating an overabundance of activity and data that hides the real scarcity of attention on the critical to success.
- First, does our planning have a bias towards “covering our parts” with enough objectives so that we are not criticized for overlooking something? Does that lead us to put the trivial many on equal footing with the significant few? Does that lead to resource and funding obesity? Does that make prioritization more difficult, complex, and political? Hmmm?
- Does measuring the positive obscure or blur out the dangerous negatives? Where do we want our attention? Do we want it on what is supposed to happen and is happening? Why? Would we better served on focusing on what was supposed to happen and didn’t and what was not supposed to happen and did?
Say we’re investing time and money with our physician for yearly physicals and quarterly check-ups.
- Lots of important stuff gets measured for the yearly “planning and strategy” session around achieving our strategy, the one about healthy and lengthy living. What do we want out of the session? What do we want to know and what do we expect from the physician in terms of action items for the coming year? Do we want a plan with fourteen objectives, or four?
- During the quarterly sessions, how much attention do we want on the items that doing well and how much on the stuff that may be killing us? What do we want our physician to talk about during our limited time together?
- How is practicing focus, discipline and follow-through with our personal health different than practicing them for our enterprises?
So, how aren’t you doing today?
