Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

It's the beginning of a new month and my goal of trying to publish a post every day came with mixed results.  Even though I managed to crank out 30 posts in 30 days, I wasn't able to do it consistently day after day.  Some days I had to write two in the same day.  Coming down the home stretch included getting three posts in within 48 hours.  June also included a 4 day vacation to the beach. I'm going to give myself props for getting through that weekend.  After going through the exercise, here is what I've learned: It's possible to be more productive. If you have a goal, you will find ways to meet it. I used  Hootlet  on multiple occasions to schedule the distribution of posts.  My quality incrementally improved. I still make the same grammatical errors, but I feel that by choosing a theme for each week, it was easier to focus on what to write.  The habit of writing happened. I read that it takes 21 days to develop a habit. May...

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In my stellar career of management, I've had a couple of memorable quotes from my team members.  I had one direct report tell me, "Don't manage me!"  I had another one say, "Leave me the f*ck alone!" (Acronym of the title of this post.)  Ben Horowtiz has WFIO (We're f*cked, it's over).  I have LMTFA.   Many organizations today have created a LMFTA environment.  Or, maybe it's not the organization, but the employees that view the company they work for as a means to provide for things like benefits , or work/life balanc e, or a paycheck .  If that's the case, then it should be no surprise that apathy and indifference are in abundance in the workplace.  God forbid people work to make an impact or doing work that matters.   Whose responsibility is it to create a job or career that's enjoyable?  Yours or your employer?  That's probably a discussion for another post and one wher...

In Seth Godin's startup school , a lady asks whether consultants are or can be entrepreneurs.  Godin, after clarifying the question, says that almost always consultants are freelancers.  According to Godin, the return on equity is low in the consulting industry. Per one of my previous posts, consultants also trade time for money (see Donkey Strategy .) In addition, the only way to scale is by adding more people which in the long run is sustainable with A LOT of work.  A some point in a management consultant's career, he or she will get what I'll call the "itch."  Whether it's the itch to hang out your own shingle, or the itch to see if you can build a product yourself -- a consultant will get the itch because 1.) He gets tired of telling clients how to do things better without them listening; or 2.) She's just tired of serving two masters-- I'm sure there are many other reasons as well. If / when you get the itch, remember that the gap betwee...

A few definitions.  cult -  1. a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object. culture - 1. (third bullet) the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group. tribe - 1. a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader. I've worked for a couple of smaller professional services firms and have experienced a dichotomy. In the first company, the "culture" was very "cult-like." The office represented and revolved around a particular figure. In the second, the "culture" is ambiguous. In fact, I'm not even sure if one exists-- there might actually be specific pockets of culture.  There's the owner and then there's everyone else.  It follows the Les McKeown ...

The status quo is a formidable entity. The reason that you are not challenging it is because you have been trained not to.  When you join an organization, you figure out what the rules of the game are, play the game, and progress, collecting your salary as you pass GO . After all, that's what many years of education has trained you to do. The person that questions, "why," is the first to get shut down. Just look at how you treat a toddler when he or she asks "why" one too many times.  This all may sound a little Seth Godin , but the truth is that sometimes the status quo is not the status quo at all; it's a broken process or system that's been accepted. And instead of being praised for calling out how broken it is, you just ended up being put on a proverbial black list.  If you feel like something is wrong with the status quo, take a chance. Question it. Make a stink about it. Do something about it.  The worse thing you can do is nothing an...

There are a number of employee / employer relationship types.  Adversarial - "I am exerting my power over you."  Transactional - "You do this for me. I pay you something in return." Trust-based and collaborative- "I like you and I trust you. Let's work together to build something meaningful. " I remember when I left a big Firm to go to a smaller company, I asked for equity.  After all, I'd established a reputation in the business and inflated my ego -- I deserved a percentage of the company that I was joining.  "Ah the naivete." Instead, the counteroffer was an hourly wage. I might as well been the union worker in the tire plant that I worked for right out of college, except that I had no union representative to help me file a grievance.  The hourly wage is what defines the mechanical turk.  (Read anything Seth Godin to fully appreciate what this means.) Don't sell yourself short and accept that you are a cog in you...

I think there are a lot of people out there that are trying to find meaning in their work.  Does that status report and workplan you are spending time on really matter?  Is the client that is getting on your last nerve really going to appreciate what you've done to make his or her life easier?  In a large corporation, does what you do make an impact on the bottom line? Or are you absorbed in a line item within the company's operational expense column? The motivational person would say to you, "Your job is what you make of it." Tony Robbins would say, "See the work for what it is and not worse than it is." (Something like that.) Your best friend would say, "You need to get the f*ck out of what you are doing." And the reason your friend would say that is because you've described your job to him or her as the worst thing ever.  I would tell you that the reason you are doing sh*tty work is because you feel that there is a gap in w...

"I've come to realize that, in the face of a significant change initiative, emotional reactions fitting a standard bell curve will likely never create lasting change. You need the energy from the edges, not the middle." - Richard Sheridan, Author of Joy, Inc. I first read about 'edges' in Seth Godin's post on Edgecraft instead of brainstorming. In all honesty, I sort of got it and I think the gist is to not be afraid of pushing the envelope- don't be constrained by the limited beliefs of the organization, or the lizard brain as he calls it. Incremental improvements are okay - but it's not how you become legendary. That's how I'm going to interpret the whole concept of edges. The people that are going to make changes in an organization are not the ones that fall in the middle of a bell curve. They are the ones that sit on either end. I'm not talking about the performance review curve. I'm talking about the attitude and employee...

Burr Puzzle For one of our Krypton classes, I had an idea of bringing in pieces of a puzzle, handing them out to each member, and before every meeting, having everyone put their piece in to create the puzzle. The idea was to 1.) Enforce commitment from each team member to attend; and 2.) Send a message that all of us together was stronger than the whole.  So I bought a Burr Puzzle.  The rest of the story is that the Burr Puzzle took an ungodly amount of time to put together and I could see the group spending more time trying to put the puzzle together rather than focusing on getting insight out of the content.  And then two people pretty much dropped out which would have made the whole point of using the puzzle fruitless.  Let's take the puzzle analogy a bit further. Each one of those puzzle pieces not only fits, but it  belongs in a specific location.  Many of us put on a persona to try and fit within the groups, organizations, and socia...