How to achieve your dreams

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I came across the incredible story of Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie-Mellon and pioneer in the field of virtual reality who is dying of cancer.
Even though he appears incredibly healthy, he has numerous liver tumors, was given no more than 3-6 months to live but still manages to do one-armed pushups.
He called his lecture 'The Last Lecture' and discusses his childhood dreams, how he achieved some of them, and some not.

Most importantly, he discusses the lessons he learned throughout his life and how rewarding it is to help others to achieve their dreams.

In short, the lessons are:

1. Brick walls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things.
2. Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
3. Never lose the child-like wonder.
4. If we do something which is pioneering, we will get arrows in the back. But at the end of the day, a whole lot of people will have a whole lot of fun.
5. Be good at something; it makes you valuable.
6. If you live your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, and the dreams will come to you.

It's a long lecture but a lecture that will inspire and move you. And that should be worth your time. If you just want to see a short version, watch below



Via Businessweek

How to kill innovative ideas

It's one of those weekly meetings, the usual suspects in the room, except for the new hire. And the eager employee comes up with an idea that interrupts the flow of your meeting. Unfortunately, most new hires will encounter one of the following answers:

"We tried this before. The client doesn't go for it."

"I don't think we can handle this."

Why is this?

Especially weekly meetings are a breeding ground for unneeded efficicencies and re-establishing order. And, at the same time, kill ideas and demotivate everybody in the room.
Yes, you had time to go through your whole agenda and didn't waste anybody's time.
But you might have killed the spirit of a new hire and made sure that an idea (potentially good or potentially bad) was killed.

Instead of dismissing an idea, why not build your new relationship on these ideas?
Maybe this idea will not work out and you used 5 minutes of your time to think it through? But you showed interest in the ideas of your employee and started a conversation that will last throughout your relationship.
Is there even a choice?

Monday Morning Inspiration

Steve Farber is preident of Extreme Leadership, Inc., a leadership consulting company. Below are some remarks he made on the occasion of publishing his recent book, The Radical Leap: A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership (2004).

Ultimately, the motivator of a leader is love. It comes down to the heart. It's love of something or someone. Love of the cause, of the principle, of the idea, of the future that you're trying to create, love of the people you're serving and the people that you're working with. That's really where the energy comes from.

On the subject of love, one of the characters in the book...says the the ideal is, "Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do." That covers everything as far as I'm concerned.

The first part "do what you love", is your own connection to your work. That's where you get your energy. How can you expect your customers to love doing business with you if you don't love your business yourself? People have a pretty sophisticated bullshit meter and they know when you're faking it. I'm not talking about the metaphysical "do what you love and the money will follow" hoo-ha stuff. If you're in love with your work you're going to bring more energy and imagination and creativity to it. And you're going to have the juice to work through the obstacles. But it's not doing what you love just because. The ethical context or moral context, or whatever you want to call it, is "in the service of the people."

Leaders should see themselves as being in the service of the people that they're leading. You're creating the best possible environment for them to do the best possible work. And it's also in the service of the people that you're selling to, essentially, and those people should "love what you do." That doesn't mean go out and only do business with the people who already love you. It should be at the core of everything that you're trying to create.

When you walk into the reception area of a company you've never visited before, you can tell within 30 seconds whether or not the place is exciting and cool, whether they're doing interesting work, or whether it's a morgue.
As an Extreme Leader, it's your job to generate energy in the environment and in the people around you.
There are people that get very energetic about - from the outside looking in - seemingly mundane things. There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal a number of years ago about how Gillette has managed to create an environment that's entirely energetic about razor blades. They are completely stoked about...shaving!
To hear people talk about the product of developing great shaving technology and how they get so excited about it is really inspiring.

"Extreme Leadership" is a redundant phase, because if somebody's really leading, what they're doing is already extreme. Leadership is the act of transformation. Taking nothing and turning it into something.

My favorite quote: "Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do." Truer words have never been spoken. There are so many leaders out there working for other leaders that don't love what they do. Time to move on, if that's the case. Underappreciation is the #1 reason for leaders to move on. Not salary. Not title. Not bonus. Underappreciation.

What drives us

I read a presentation from a corporate psychologist the other day. He said, "You can't motivate your employees. You can only use their existing motivations to get what you want."
Then he gave this example.

Say you want to teach your dog to sit and you begin the instruction. You stand in front of your dog and say, "sit." The dog stares. You repeat the word again and again. If the dog makes the slightest move in the right direction, then you give it a treat. If the dog sits (perhaps he's just tired) you give him another treat. Eventually, responding to the treats, the dog begins to sit on command.

Who was motivated to sit?

The truth is, the owner, not the dog was motivated for the dog to sit. The dog was always, only motivated by food. But the owner used the dogs existing motivation (food) to encourage the desired behavior (sitting).

Consumers act when the action we propose through marketing leads to rewards they wanted in the first place. You can build awareness all day long if you don't align yourself with the consumer's existing motivations.

Are insights enough?

It seems that Insights is the new buzzword replacing the outdated sounding 'market research'. But for some reason it seems true gems of insight are hard to find.

So what is the point about insights? You can take a starting point in anything, to help guide a problem-solving process - but you could say there is value to be had in understanding how to better meet consumers' needs. That in itself may not actually be something you can find out by asking consumers themselves. It is down to you to collect information, process it, digest it, sleep on it, combine it with other things and collectively emerge smarter by having a more compete understanding of the multi-faceted picture, which is the reality for us all these days.

The danger with what people perceive as insights (consumer research) is that they can be easily confused with people's opinion on things. Opinions can change very quickly and aren't really fundamentally useful for anything long-term, as they hold truth only for short periods of time. This means that although you can have a quite healthy turnover and a bunch of seemingly happy customers, they may only stay with you until there is a better alternative around the corner. Their opinions are thus next to useless in telling you what you should be developing next.

A more useful area for insights is understanding people's lifestyles. These change too, but not too often, maybe 5 times in our entire lifetime - when we we are children, teens, life after university and before children, life with children, life after children have flown the nest - the lifestyles at these different life stages are quite different and they tend to last for a few years at least, before there is a significant change. The downside is that the change can be quite radical and both opinions and preferences held whilst in the previous life-stage, may change radically as a result of moving into a new lifestyle.

The most interesting area for insights are values. These change hardly at all. Children up to the age of 12 tend to mirror their parents' values almost exactly, whereas ages of 12-25 are characterized by the deliberate experimentation with and independent (from parents) search for your own values. After your 25th birthday you are very unlikely to change your fundamental values on things, and thus - gaining insights of these will be much more useful long-term than anything else you can find out there. One could argue that this very fact is what creates mid-life crises in people as earlier years of life and career may be linked to highly extrinsic motivations (proving to the world you have made it), whereas lasting happiness in life comes from satisfying your intrinsic motivation.

Transforming insights into innovation is another hurdle in its' own right - on one hand it is about finding those golden nuggets, then it's about defining and creating accessible platforms where innovation can happen - areas where there is growth potential, where your company can bring something unique to the mix and which is in-line with where your company wants to go and its brand. After identifying these areas you almost have to start all over again - sifting through your existing body of research to work out what is relevant in the light of the platforms you have identified for innovation. Some will add more depth and relevance to what you have already identified, others will highlight areas where you need to find out more and lastly, any new concept based on these platforms may themselves end up generating more insights in the process of being developed and tested.

But in many cases we are not there yet - the community specializing in insights and research are often not the people charged with implementing activities based on the insights identified, change is hard to digest among these specialists and being put in charge of it is even harder for many. Thus we still end up in the same dilemma as before: we may know what is right, but are we capable of acting upon it?