Accelerated Urgency

Pleasures lull us.

Routines engulf us.

Crises consume us.

Sufferings suppress us.

Whether in comfort or in chaos, life of individuals and organizations run on an 'autopilot system' based of a series of HIDDEN assumptions (like characters in the movie - The Matrix).

Is there anything worse?

Well, yes! And, that is - Running on an 'autopilot system' based on a series of assumptions that you clearly KNOW to be false, BUT you do not have the time to TAKE NECESSARY ACTION.

You are so busy driving your car that you do not have time to stop for fuel. How long will that car run?

In the movie (The Matrix), the protagonist takes a RED PILL to know the truth (and abruptly wakes up in a pod, with his body connected by wires to a tower...).

You do not have that option.

So, how to break your zombie-like (self-)hypnotized state (in whichever aspect your life or work, you are stuck in undesirable patterns)?

The classic Time Management Grid tells us that we spend our time in four ways:

1. Firefighting (Crisis Management)
   
2. Creating Quality (Creation)
   
3. Getting Distracted (Interruptions)
   
4. Wasting (Trivia)
   

Most of the time is spent in Quadrants 1,3 & 4, which takes us away from our vision and mission.

Quadrant 2 times are rare. Where is the time for creating Quality of life?

How to break free from this bounded entity (which thrives in Quadrants 1,3 & 4 due to fear and short-sightedness)?

Heidegger says "any ontological interpretation which sets itself the goal of EXHIBITING the phenomena in their primordiality should CAPTURE the being of of this entity".

So, the BEING needs to be transformed.

How?

Heidegger continues "by doing violence [Gewaltsamkeit], whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquilized obviousness".

And, how do we continuously CAUSE this violence?

There are many ways, depending on what has lulled or suppressed or engulfed or consumed you.

One way is to bring in "Accelerated Urgency" every day.

John Kotter says:

The real solution to the complacency problem is a true sense of urgency. This set of thoughts, feelings, and actions is never associated with an endless list of exhausting activities. It has nothing to do with anxious running from meeting to meeting. It's not supported by an adrenalin rush that cannot be sustained over time.

True urgency focuses on critical issues, not agendas overstuffed with the important and the trivial. True urgency is driven by a deep determination to win, not anxiety about losing. With an attitude of true urgency, you try to accomplish something important each day, never leaving yourself with a heart-attack-producing task of running one thousand miles in the last week of the race.

He recommends:

• Use crises as potential opportunities
• Crises do not automatically reduce complacency
  
• To use a crisis to reduce complacency, make sure it is visible, unambiguous, related to real business problems... be exceptionally proactive in assessing how people will react, in developing specific plans for action, and in implementing the plans swiftly.
• Plans and actions should always focus on others' hearts as much or more than their minds. Behaving with passion, conviction, optimism, urgency, and a steely determination will trump an analytically brilliant memo every time.
• If urgency is low, never patiently wait for a crisis (which may never come) to solve your problems. Bring the outside in. Act with urgency every day.

This is very different from REACTING to urgent situations everyday. Take a simple quiz here to determine your "reactive" Urgency Index.

"Accelerated Urgency" expands your Quadrant 2 - Important but not urgent ACTIVITIES: Self-Development, Relationship building, Envisioning your future, Preparation/Planning/Organizing, Exercise/Recreation.

Ready to press the accelerator?

Be-Do-Have or Be-Have-Do?

Many Gurus talk about Be-Do-Have and Be-Have-Do paradigms to inspire people to move away from what most people on this earth follow :Do-Have-Be (When I DO those things to get the results I desire then I will HAVE something which would allow me to BE happy - it is like a dog trying to catch its tail).

How do you live your life?

Be-Have-Do may be looked like this:

BE Your Highest Vision Now
HAVE All Your Goals in your mind clearly articulated
DO - (With abouve two taken care of - life becomes) EFFORTLESS FLOW!

A slight variation is BE - DO - HAVE principle used by MyVisionMyMission.com, which provides you with a way to plan your life so that you can achieve your life purpose :

-Define and refine your life purpose

-Realize your life purpose

-What you will have as a result of your life purpose

You can expand this to:

* My Day Plan - A reminder of the things that you DO every day
* My Journal - A personal Journal and measurement tool for your evolution
* Shared Questions - What do you need to know to achieve your Life Purpose?
* Shared Stories - Share your success stories and read stories from others
* Shared Missions - Share your Life Mission and get and give feedback

Another great site to LIST YOUR GOALS and, optionally, share them and get (and give) cheers and support is 43things.com.

The "So, What?" technique of Pitching

The famous Lawyer joke goes like this:

Question: How can you tell if a lawyer is lying?
Answer: His lips are moving.

In his book "The Art of The Start", Guy Kawasaki does a spoof on this one for entrepreneurs:

Question: How can you tell if an entrepreneur is pitching?
Answer: His lips are moving.

Guy shares a story about Bill Joos, who, during his career at IBM, was trained to imagine there was a little man sitting on his shoulder during presentations. Everytime Bill said something, the little man would whisper, "So What?" to him.

Guy suggests that every entrepreneur should carry this little man and listen to him. He further recommends : After you answer the question, follow with the two most powerful words in a pitch "For Instance..." and then discuss a real-world use or scenario of a feature of your product or service.

Now, if you say, "So What?" then Guy's answer is "The significance of what you are saying is not always self-evident, let alone shocking and awe-inspiring".

So What?

So, keep revising you pitch till you develop a pitch that is shocking or awe-inspiring!

The Freedom to Perform

Artists love the word "performance", and so do sports champions!

However, whisper the word "performance" among a group of employees and you are sure to find yourself in a heated debate. Many employees are not comfortable with the word "performance". A questioner writes in pain, "I always thought the word 'service' should be used to exemplify the voluntary intentions of a worker to choose in helping get tasks accomplished. Performance always seems to knock a worker down a notch, and is used to control people in my opinion."

Etymology expert Carol Pozefsky answers with empathy:

The verb 'parfourmen' meaning to do, to carry out or to render, first appears in English in about 1300. It's seen again some seventy years later as 'performen', borrowed from the Old French 'parfornir'. The French meaning was much the same as the English, to do, or to carry out. The noun performance crops up in the early 1500's meaning ,simply, a thing performed. It's not until 1709 that we encounter the word performance in the sense of a public exhibition or entertainment. It appears in an article by Steele in the Tatler. As it is currently used, the word performance, as least to me, calls to mind a performing seal, or a 7 year old tap dancer.

Many resist being treated like a performing "machine", but at the other end, we have artists and sportspersons taking pride in being "Great Performers".

The questioner (mentioned above) seems confused, but he his on the right track when talks about "volunary intentions". The more FREE you are in your job, the more you "volunteer" towards accomplishments. No wonder, Peak Performers are associated with words like "proactive", "initiative", and "ownership".

Employers who know this have the "key" to enable more peak performers. Katzenbach, in his book "Peak Performance: Aligning the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees", starts off with his first meeting with Steve Messana, senior vice president of Human Resources at The Home Depot, who captures the power of frontline commitment by his statement:

We encourage all of our people to come up with their own ideas to capture the customer's attention, and to try them out—there's no need for approval here. Sure, we get some lousy ideas along the way that we would rather not have had; but that's the price we are willing to pay for the widespread individual initiative that makes this place unique.

Dr. André A. de Waal conducted a comprehensive study on "The Characteristics of High Performance Organization". The study says that the first neccessary characteristic for a High Performing organizational "culture" is:

Empower people and give them FREEDOM to decide and act.

Of course, this needs to be backed with a strategy to "define a strong vision that excites and challenges" (strategy characteristic #1 in the study) and "design a good and fair reward and incentive structure" (process characteristic #1).

So, how free are people in your organization?

Your expertise is not what you do !

Someone in my Linkedin network asked me this question

when i ask my questions, i do not seek answers
instead i seek to expand awareness, both with myself and with other people
i enjoy the responses, not only one by one, but as a flow, a wave of group thought
when too many people respond in one way, the next person will choose a different angle. in this way, i experience the law of large numbers - i do not know who will take the position of expressing the opposite of what has been said before, i only know that someone will stand up to defend the other side
so this is about my reasons to ask questions on linkedin

about niche
i find that by asking questions, i remodel my brain neurology. my goal is to have more fun in life today than i had yesterday. fun means i dont know how to have fun, i dont know what fun is, i am just having fun without really knowing what fun is.
i hope this makes sense

when i remodel my brain neurology, by adapting a new belief for a while to see if believing something will bring me new experiences, and then dropping the belief in order to make room for a new belief, and so on ... so when i remodel my brain neurology, i in fact reshape the "pink glasses" through which i see the world

i dont believe there is such a thing as a niche. your expertise is not what you do, your expertise is the way you look at the world. and this is a totally unique way, that took you your whole unique life to develop. you see, the more proud you are about your uniqueness, and the more you agree with the fact that this vision is found nowhere else in the world but within you, the less you feel you have to do. At the same time, you start to realize how important it is to further develop this totally unique vision into something even more concentrated than it was before.

the exchange office between unique vision and value creation (money) becomes thus independent of what you do. consider your view like a book you wrote - people want to read your book, then they come to you and ask you : "look, i found something in your book, now i want you to see my world with your eyes and tell me what you see." so the true value is in your unique vision, the vision that helps someone else to see yet another aspect of their own world.

best regards, Ron

Thank God It's Monday!

More often than not, when a large CHANGE is planned in an organization, there is an exodus of people!

"During Organizational Change (read downsizing, re-engineering, merger, and so on)", Kenneth Cloke and Goldsmith asked, "Why is the human side of the change process THE LAST ELEMENT... thought out?

And, they came up with 14 Values "We Need to Humanize the Way We Work" in their book Thank God It's Monday!

They believe that these fourteen values will humanize organizations, empower workers, reduce conflict and increase employee satisfaction. A snapshot:

1. INCLUSION - involve everyone in the process
2. COLLABORATION - work together for consensus, not compromise
3. TEAMS and NETWORKS - small work teams
4. VISION - toward something better and worthwhile
5. CELEBRATION of DIVERSITY - diversity valued as a source of richness, vitality and strength
6. PROCESS AWARENESS - the value of process (listening, ability to work with others, ...) more then technical ability
7. OPEN and HONEST COMMUNICATION - and how destructive poor information sharing can be to an organization's health
8. RISK TAKING- and the need to trust those we work with
9. INDIVIDUAL and TEAM OWNERSHIP of RESULTS
10. PARADOXICAL PROBLEM SOLVING - willingness to solve problems with outside the box solutions that are not necessarily consistent with popular notions of the problem
11. EVERYONE is a LEADER - shift from a leader to everyone playing a role in decision making
12. PERSONAL GROWTH SATISFACTION - seek to make work personally and emotionally rewarding for employees
13. SEE CONFLICT as an OPPORTUNITY - the positive value of conflict
14. EMBRACE CHANGE

Whether or not you are embroiled in a CHANGE, it could be good idea to send this list to your CEO!

Toughest Business Questions!

Jack & Suzy Welch traveled all over the world for three years and spoke to hundreds of thousands of people about their work, career, and life challenges।

They wanted to create a treatise and a how-to manual on fundamental business principles. They went on to publish a book called "Winning" in April 2005 to "pretty much wrap up what had felt like a great, extended conversation".

However, the authors soon found out that the response to the book was - "just the opposite!". During their book tour across various business schools and business groups, people started throwing "Hey, wait a minute, what about_____" kind of questions.

For example, people agree with Winning's message that candor makes business (and life) immensely better, but wondered how can it be made to work in situations like dealing with very old seniors or with some of the polite cultures of Asia.

Out of the several thousand questions they encountered, they chose 74 questions in their next book - "Winning - The Answers": Confronting 74 of the Toughest Questions in Business Today!

A sampler: How to turn a company into a "preferred employer"?

Their take:

1. Demonstrate a real commitment to continuous learning.
2. Be a Meritocracy - Rigorous appraisals and pay/promotion linked to performance.
3. Allow people to take risks - celebrate those who do and don't shoot those who fail trying.
4. Be diverse and global in outlook and environmentally sensitive.
5. Tight hiring standards.
6. Grow and be profitable.

Another one: Does executive coaching work?

Their take:
Generally, yes, depending on the quality of the coach. Good executive coaches can look you in the eye and tell you what no else will, especially if you are the boss. The challenge for you is to listen and the ultimate value of executive coaching depends on your ability to receive it.

Read about "Taking on China . . . and Everyone Else" in an excerpt.

This time, the authors conclude:

"Like life, the conversation about work will go on and on. It has to. Economies rise and fall. Competitive dynamics never stop changing. Careers move zig and zag. And so, questions will keep coming. We look forward to listening to them all".