Five “Laws of the Mind”: Words of Wisdom from the Past

By Joyce Friel

Andrew Carneige’s impact on the US is still evident in many ways today. In particular, the great buildings he provided for cultural advancement as a way of giving back to the community. He had 5 ‘laws of the mind’  he used to guide his focus and, consequently, drive his results. They are just as appropriate today as they were in Carneige’s time.

They are:

1. Fix your goal firmly and precisely in your mind. Precision is key.

2. Determine what you intend to give in return for reaching your objective. In his case, it was often buildings and public works. So clearly giving back was a key ingredient to his success, it wasn’t just a nice thing to do with his wealth. When you give back, others continue to use your services and products so a self-fulfilling prophecy gets established.

 3. Establish specific dates when you intend to have achieved your goal.

4. Create a definite plan and commit it to writing.

5. Read your plan twice a day. Keep it top of mind. What you focus on is what you get.

Great words to live. And there is tremendous evidence that Carneige’s formula works. What is the goal you want to achieve.  How about using this 5-step plan to make it become a reality!

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America’s management practices: Remember…you can’t change organizational behavior without changing human behavior!

The mainstream seems to be finally catching on… After decades of unchanging business management practices that American businesses have, by habit, been repeating, (layoffs, performance reviews etc.) we see now that these methods are at best unhelpful, and at worst, destructive to employee motivation.  What changes organizations?  Changing human behavior!

An interesting list of 13 common, habitual practices our nation’s management uses that don’t work:

From Business Week, by Aubrey C Daniels, to read full article go here: http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/aug2009/ca20090811_861931.htm

With executives under fire for driving their companies into the ground—and taking the economy with them—it’s time for a managerial paradigm shift that focuses on the root of all booms and busts: individual behavior. Many time-honored management practices, such as layoffs, yearend bonuses, and automatic pay raises, actually reward employees’ bad habits and punish good behavior, often with devastating results.

These practices stem from theories of performance that have little to do with the science of learning. As such, they result in many mistakes initiated by senior leadership at great cost. They’re endorsed for the best of reasons but fail to lead to the desired result.

So why do so many organizations continue to embrace faulty practices? My 30 years of experience with Corporate America have led me to believe most business leaders are trained in the math of balance sheets, not the science of human behavior. They don’t understand that you can’t change organizational behavior without changing human behavior. Only when managers understand the basic principles of behavioral science and apply them skillfully will they realize the full potential of their employees and their organizations.

A Chance for Change

While management in general is proving challenging today, there is a silver lining to this current economic crisis: It provides a rare opportunity for managers to rethink and reform the way they run their organizations, using an approach grounded in science and research rather than in dubious habits. Businesses have been wasting time, funds, and resources on the same tired approaches for years. This crisis can actually provide us with a chance to start fresh and set in motion a sea change in the way we manage behavior and performance.

Please see a slide show featuring 13 universally used, but ultimately ineffective, management practices—and prescriptions for how to change them.

What lessons can we learn from Ted Kennedy’s leadership style?

We came across this great article posted by Rosabeth Moss Kanter on her blog http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/kanter/ and we wanted to share.  From Kennedy’s life we can take away some significant leadership lessons:  leading with a purpose, making a difference, perseverance, staying true to roots and family: these qualities in leadership truly matter and are worth cultivating in our own quests and lives.

Ted Kennedy’s Leadership Lessons By Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose loss America is mourning, was no darling of the traditional big business community. He fought for the little guy, for children, for the poor and disadvantaged, sometimes against establishments and elites.

But as a leader, he was greatly admired across the political spectrum. Even those who disagreed with his politics can draw inspiration from his life. From knowing and observing him, I choose four leadership lessons I hope executives will take to heart.

Remember that performance is everything. No one is entitled to a position. When Ted Kennedy won his Senate seat for the first time during the Presidency of his brother, Jack Kennedy, critics said that he inherited his position in the family business and bought his way into the Senate through favoritism. Critics dismissed him as a weak younger brother who would be merely a celebrity Senator. How wrong they were. Ted Kennedy’s route to the Senate stopped mattering once he began performing for his constituents and collaborating with his colleagues.

Kennedy did not rely on dynasty as destiny. He rolled up his sleeves and mastered the details, and he kept studying and learning as the issues changed. No one is entitled to a top executive position; everyone has to earn it through his or her deeds, and each is only as good as his or her command of the issues. When Mitt Romney challenged Kennedy for his Senate seat in 1994, the pivotal moment of their debate — which probably won Kennedy re-election — involved Kennedy pressing Romney for specifics on his health care plan, with Romney finally admitting he hadn’t worked out all the details. “Well that’s what you have to do with legislation,” the Senator replied. Kennedy knew the job. His career rewards followed from his service. His career rewards followed from his service.

Even when Kennedy could not move the needle forward on really big change (health care reform), he supported incremental improvements (children’s health insurance), which meant that he survived in office long enough for his big agenda to come close to being enacted.

Find a higher purpose. Think values first, and suspend ego.Ted Kennedy believed in public service as an honorable profession and in government as a vehicle for helping all citizens get their chance for high quality of life. Once he found his core mission (after losses and setbacks), it was clear where he stood and who he stood for — other people who needed a voice because they couldn’t always speak for themselves.

This was not about Ted Kennedy or his ego. He was known for humility, graciousness, and geniality in the Senate; he was not engaged in partisan contests to win for the sake of winning. The goals were so important that he was willing to work with political opponents to reach agreement on measures that served the people. His work with Republican Senator Orrin Hatch was a model for collaboration that transcended ideological disagreements. He supported President Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation for school reform; the cause of children was so important that he would rather compromise and get a little something done than prevent any action. Negotiating by calling on higher principles made him effective with principled members of the other party.

Business leaders who operate from a sense of values and purpose — a theme of my new book SuperCorp — are similarly able to win adherents and negotiate better deals, because they suspend ego in support of a cause larger than themselves. By working for others rather than scrambling for career advantage, they enhance their own reputations. And the work is more important than title or position. Ted Kennedy will go down in history as the Lion of the Senate and one of the most important figures of our time, although he was not the President, nor even the “CEO” of the Senate or his party. His mission gave him moral power as important as position power.

Keep going. Ted Kennedy faced numerous public crises, any one of which could have destroyed him, yet he proved resilient and able to learn. Through strong efforts on behalf of the greater good, he restored confidence in his leadership. The still-mysterious incident at Chappaquiddick in which a young woman drowned nearly drowned his career, too; far from showing courage, he ducked accountability. But Kennedy bounced back by redoubling his efforts to do his job well. He fumbled in his bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1980, but recovered by devoting even more energy and passion to his work in the Senate.

Never forget family. The hard-working Kennedy was a model for executive dads. De facto father to several touch-football-game’s worth of children (his own and those of his late brothers and formidable sisters), he organized weekend outings to Civil War battlefields and made sure they studied their history lessons. Family was at the center of his satisfaction in life. At the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, which I toured with him, he showed pictures of the late President John F. Kennedy and late Attorney General Robert Kennedy and talked of them as if still alive. The consummate professional whose greatness grew every year was still, at heart, a family man. His concern for relationships, and the love that guided his family through numerous tragedies, gave him the strength to take on tough challenges.

Business leaders should heed that lesson above all: Performance, mission, and endurance are possible because the people we support and care about also support us.

212 Degrees to Boiling

We wanted to pass along this very short inspirational movie/video… at 211 degrees water is HOT, but add one degree, and at 212 degrees, water boils, produces steam and can produce enough energy to run a train!  This is worth watching… it takes EFFORT, ENERGY and WORK to be great, produce results,  make a difference… to change your life!

http://www.the212movie.com/

Learning to Lead

Leaders learn through experience.

One of the key characteristics of leaders is that they are learners.  This can be readily discerned when interviewing an espoused leader by asking the question, “Tell me about a time you failed as a leader and what you learned from it?” 

If they can’t identify a time, be cautious.  The reality of their leadership capability may be only in their mind and not exhibited in their behaviors.

Experienced leaders who have been tested in the crucible and made it through can easily remember examples of where they have not been effective or failed in their leadership.  And, they can share with you what they have intentionally done or changed to adjust for the failure based on their learning.  These changes will usually be in their beliefs about people or in their behaviors when leading people.

I well recall an instance when I first started in supervision and had a group where significant change was required to expand the departments capacity for work.  I was to lead this change and managed to get through it although I lost the department’s best performer.  I attributed this lose to her lack of interest in using the new technology we had implemented.

Months after the change a friend of mine suggested that people in this department felt I was not fair, too pushy and caused the person to leave based on the unfair expectations I had placed on her for work output.  This feeling was still being harbored in the group today.

In short, I asked the group to hang around after work one evening and asked them their thoughts regarding what I had heard.  What a great learning experience!  I had been a lousy leader, even though I got the job done.

I called the person who left and apologized for my poor behavior, and she agreed to come back to work for us.  From that point on, I led in a much more open, involving and trusting manner where people were asked for input, allowed to volunteer for assignments, could suggest better ways to accomplish tasks, etc.

Never again did I think I knew all the answers, and never again did I take advantage of top performers by overloading them with work. 

Looking back, it doesn’t seem like much, but today, I know it has shaped my leadership style and techniques as much as any failure I have had since that time.

What leadership failures have you learned from?  (BTW – this could be called failing forward if it helps as a memory tickler)

Chad

How you respond to the economy is a CHOICE

I believe there are three key measurements for today’s uncertain economic environment.

1. Accelerating pace of change.

2. Our key response is fear, anxiety, insecurity, which according to Bright Side’s research and interviews is increasing.

3. The key sustainable advantage is our expanded capacity to learn/unlearn/relearn in the moment every moment.

Today’s recession reminds me of experiences I had over 25 years ago when I developed Bright Side’s personal change-leader model to expand my own capacity and the capacity of others, their teams, their organizations to be more equipped to lead toward the future dreams and desired business outcomes. My past experiences, both my past positive experiences and my past negative experiences continue to be triggered for me today and could limit or minimize the impact that I personally can and want to have and Bright Side can and wants to have.

And how I respond to those triggers is a choice: Yes, the recession is knocking on my door and I am choosing to not answer it.

The personal leader model is as relevant today as when I lost my job in the machine tool industry during the early 1980’s. Not only did I lose my job, I watched an entire industry collapse. I, along with many other Americans, was stuck in a view of arrogance, ‘Ohio is the machine tools capitol of the world, other countries make junk.’ After traveling to Japan in 1981, working with the Father of Quality, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, I began to wonder, have an insight, that perhaps I was experiencing the early side of a trend and I could ignore it or learn about it and take action to embrace and lead from that trend. 

That failure became the impetus for the Bright Side model…

The Strength and Leadership of Women

This is an excerpt from a workshop presentation I recently gave at a Senior Executive Women’s Event for a Fortune 50 company…. here’s just the beginning…   Donna Rae

 “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows’, composed by Helen Keller, more than 50 years ago has inspired me throughout my life.

Helen Keller, encumbered with an inability to speak, see or hear, become one of the world’s most inspirational voices – and most heard voices.

Helen Keller, a voice of courage, ensuring her voice was heard.

Like each and every woman today, Keller realized amazing accomplishments. To be here, we all have accomplished much, aspire to go beyond, and perhaps we have daring dreams. Yes, we have come along way by overcoming barriers and still confronting barriers today.

I believe the world needs women, the voices of women, and the intrinsic strengths of women more today than ever before. Our intrinsic strengths of connecting, collaborating, open & transparent risk taking, learning from our failures, our insightfulness, deep intuition, and our capacity to be voices of persuasion with the utmost of integrity.

And today provides an opportunity, a personal leadership experience, for our presence, our voices, and our natural strengths as women to be heard.

During today’s  session, I will provide you with interactive experiences and tools to expand your personal leadership capability in new and different ways. I will also provide you with a personal leader development model that you will be able to immediately take into action once the session ends.  

Even though you do not know how the next two hours are designed, I would like you to reflect on what would make this event meaningful for you personally. And for you to have that meaningful outcome, what are you willing to do to make that happen? What are you willing to do, think, say, ask – that is different – and is a stretch for you?…”