The potential in failure

Failure is part of any success.

Fear of failure will inhibit anyone from attempting anything, while embracing it in your search for success will guide your way towards more optimal, efficient and innovative solutions.

Advice to my young very shy son, when he pressures me to ask the store clerk to ask for the Playstation he has been paining for, for the past 6 months. Failure to ask for what you so much desire guarantees the most feared result : rejection, failure. So, by asking, you increase your chances astronomically.

This same advice applies in business. By over-analyzing and justifying failure to attempt a new, rizky venture you are guaranteed of your biggest fear : failure. By launching an attempt, any attempt you drastically improve your chances. You might have to try a number of times, but not trying guarantees failure...

100%...

Do it. Now

The "3X" Theorem

Communicate!
Communicate!
Communicate!

Over-communicate!
Over-communicate!
Over-communicate!

Whatever amounts to "sensible communication," triple it!

Immediate "command":

Play back the last 24 or 48 hours. Is there an instance where you have
failed to Fully Inform a client, or other stakeholder, of a delay (wee
or grand) or glitch (wee or grand)? If your answer is "nope, all is
well"—you are a liar. (Sorry, it just slipped out of the keyboard.)

Fix it.
Now.
Make the call.
(And if you have, in fact, good for you, let someone know about a glitch
... call 'em again to update the status of the fix, or relay the sad but
honest news that the fix is more complex than first imagined.)

Quoted from Tom Peters

What Firefox says about you

A quick glimpse at just about any profession shows you that the vast

majority of people who succeed professionally also went to college.

This could be because college teaches you a lot.

Or it could be because the kind of person that puts the effort into
getting into and completing college is also the kind of person who
succeeds at other things.

Firefox is similar.

Example: 25% of the visitors we track at Squidoo use Firefox, which is
not surprising. But 50% of the people who actually build pages on the
site are Firefox users. /Twice/ as many.

This is true of bloggers, of Twitter users, of Flickr users...
everywhere you look, if someone is using Firefox, they're way more
likely to be using other power tools online. The reasoning: In order to
use Firefox, you need to be confident enough to download and use a
browser that wasn't the default when you first turned on your computer.

That's an empowering thing to do. It isolates you as a different kind of
web user.

If I ran Firefox, I'd be hard at work promoting extensions and power
tools (I love the search add-ons) and all manner of online interactions.
Think of all the things colleges do to amplify the original choice of
their students and to increase their impact as alumni.

And if I ran your site, I'd treat Firefox visitors as a totally
different group of people than everyone else. They're a self-selected
group of clickers and sneezers and power users.

In the lingo of Nancy Reagan, Firefox is a gateway drug.

Quoted from Seth Godin's Blog

The Essence of success

I (Tom Peters) was lucky to get to London for the Tom event yesterday.

Repeating his message from this blog post Tom told the
story about Conrad Hilton, founder of Hilton hotels. At a gala
celebrating his life, he was asked, "What was the most important lesson you've learned in your long and distinguished career?" His reply was,
"Remember to tuck the shower curtain inside the bathtub."

At first glance, one may think, that's it? But, think about it ...
paying attention to detail makes all the difference when we are trying
to achieve excellence. When we miss the little things, we miss the
opportunity to achieve excellence; we fall just short of it.

My question of the day is, "What shower curtain do you need to tuck in?"

Quoted from Tom Peters

Snippets you remember

/Too whom it may concern:/

That's the way the letter of reference started off. I confess, I didn't
make it to the second sentence.

And that store with the really loud electronica music? I left.

But I still remember that kid I met a year ago. I can't tell you what
grade he was in, but the energy in his face and his enthusiasm was
enough to get my full attention.

The facts:
Too many choices.
Too little time.

The response:
Quick decisions based on the smallest scraps of data.

It's not fair but it's true. Your blog, your outfit, the typeface you
choose, the tone of your voice, the expression on your face, the
location of your office, the way you rank on a Google search, the look
of your Facebook page...

We all jump to conclusions and we do it every day.

Where do you want me to jump?

Quoted from Seth Godin

Ideas spread when they are remembered

Yesterday, I visited my friend Tara's place and noticed that she put a large piece of paper on her bedroom wall, next to where she slept.

On it was written some quotations and general life principles. Tara
wanted to remind herself of these words when she woke up everyday and before she went to bed. It's a self-improvement trick to overcome negativity and focus on the important things.

So I got curious and read what she wrote. After I came home, I tried recalling what I read but could only come up with two lines. The rest
were a blur.

If it was up to me, I would split the large piece of paper into little
post-it notes, each with one message and paste them all on the wall or
different parts of her room, perhaps one in the closet, two on the
bookshelf.

I think they'll have more impact than a large piece of paper, crammed to the brink with powerful lines. *Ideas spread when they are remembered*. And they stick in the mind better when they stand alone, without competition from other opposing ideas.

A persuasive blog post or sales letter argues one point and accentuates it thoroughly with analogies, metaphors, examples and references. Just one point, because too many and you'll not only lose your own focus but *the attention of your audience*. You don't want to distract them from taking action.

Too many statements and important points can be an obstacle. When you want your audience to remember a message, make it clutter-free and uncomplicated. Good marketing campaigns condense the entire event, website or product into one slogan, a few buzzwords and a tagline. And it works marvelously well.

If you can't sum up your business in one sentence, if your visitors can't figure out the purpose of your website in 10 seconds, you're not communicating. You're not sticking in their head. And that doesn't help your ideas or brand to spread.

Quoted from doshdosh.com

Hug Your People

Some of you may recall Jack Mitchell's last book, Hug Your Customers. In it he discussed how to nurture and maintain customer relationships using his "hug" method. In his new offering, Mitchell's embrace of his customer base has been expanded to his employees. He noticed that if there is not praise or recognition for a job well done, there isn't the same incentive to try again--even when one maintains the monetary comfort from the job.

It is not complicated to comprehend that people are happy and content when they are rewarded in humane ways, but people often forget that they are dealing with, well, other people. Mitchell stresses that we shouldn't lose the humanity in business relations and that everyone needs a hug. A random hug in this day and age may result in sexual harassment, so hugs can and should take on different forms. He suggests many ways to do this, from using a nickname, to a quick email recognizing a good job or an unexpected little token/gift from a superior or co-worker.

The Mitchell Blueprint to hugging your employees has five principles: Nice, Trust, Pride, Include and Recognize. He goes into all these aspects in the book, giving examples of each principle. In the Nice chapter, for instance, he explains how important it is to just be nice to people, and how easy it can be. He shows how easy it can be to forget this as well. One simple way companies stay "Nice" is by getting "Nice" employees. Mitchell suggests different ways to notice these traits, many in an interview--the handshake, meeting eyes, the way they sit--and offers open ended questions to use in this situation such as "Share the nicest thing you've done to another person" or "Who is the nicest person you know."

Mitchell also talks about the importance of maintaining a fun working atmosphere. Sure, business has to get done, but like his son Bob tells his people during a meeting, "Let's all make twenty customer calls today, but let's have fun doing it." It is in this atmosphere that the Trust Principle comes into play. People that work for a "fun" place also have to take responsibility for their actions and how they affect others.

The Mitchell Blueprint, with its five principles, helps companies develop ways they can incorporate "hugs" in their company. Each principle makes up a part of the book, and each part contains a study guide. This may seem elementary to a lot of business people (and it should) but it is a great reminder that people like to be assured, patted on the back and given a hug once in awhile, and this book reminds us all of that.

Hug Your People: The Proven Way to Hire, Inspire and Recognize Your Employees and Achieve Remarkable Results, by Jack Mitchell, Hyperion, 288 pages, $19.95, Hardcover, March 2008, ISBN 9781401322373

Quoted from : http://800ceoread.com/blog/

The Go-Giver

Bob Burg and John David Mann have written an interesting parable around the life of "Joe," a highly ambitious guy who comes to a dead end when he can't create the two things he needs to succeed: clout and leverage. In his pursuit of obtaining these things, he meets "Pindar," a smart, kind, and extremely wealthy man who seems to have everything Joe wants. After meeting with Pindar, Joe realizes that he's on a much bigger quest than he anticipated, and learns through Pindar and his associates that the most optimal way to receive is to give. By learning and practicing Pindar's "Five Laws," Joe obtains not only clout and leverage, but a life fulfilled far beyond the old goals he used to have.

The process is much more complicated than he expected though. In fact, a constant shift in perspective, a breaking of usual habits, and an adoption of seemingly illogical business practices had to take place. In his meetings with Pindar and associates, Joe examines such things as why people crowd into restaurants with good food while tables sit empty at places with excellent food; he sees meeting rooms with executives using finger paints as part of their creative process; and he learns about creating a huge network of influence by placing other people's interests first.

Each lesson is themed with the idea that the more you put other people first, and the more you provide for them, the more you'll be able to receive. The book states, "Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment." In business, it is typical to focus on what we are going to get and how we are going to get it. The Go-Giver reminds us to focus on the important point of what we are going to give to people. As shown throughout the book, this focus turns business from a 50/50 proposition to a 100% success.

The Go-Giver: A Little Story about a Powerful Business Idea, by Bob Burg and John David Mann, Portfolio, 112 pages, $19.95, Hardcover, December 2007, ISBN 9781591842002

Quoted from : http://800ceoread.com/blog/

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam.

"You see, Freddie," I said, "Lots of people these days are very worried and confused about how to create a useful website. But the way I think about it, there are really only three things that we need to define. The first is the brand itself. The other two are the content and the function." Then I drew in two more circles and labeled them appropriately, then continued, "If we can determine what to put in these three circles, then we can build any site to serve any audience."
"The question is: how do we know what these three should contain. The answer is this." I drew a little smiley face next to each circle and wrote a caption for each. "What people want to DO (or what we want them to do) determines function; what people want to KNOW (or what we want them to know) determines content; and what we want them to REMEMBER determines the brand."

Quoted from : 800CEOread blog

The drive for mediocrity

Maybe it should be, "the forces for mediocrity"...

There's a myth that all you need to do is outline your vision and prove it's right—then, quite suddenly, people will line up and support you.

In fact, the opposite is true. Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths... whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it's over.

If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it's unlikely it would be worth the
journey. Persist.

Quoted from Seth Godin

New interactions, not just moved interactions

By Seth Godin

eBay is basically an auction online. It's a great idea, I wish I'd had
it, but it's still an auction, same kind we've had for a million years.

Jeff Jarvis points us to a new feature
<http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2008/02/stop-sharing-spreadsheets-start.html>
in Google Docs. Think this through for a moment:
You send an email to your permission list. It points to a spreadsheet
online. People can fill it out without logging in. You get the
summarized data back, and can present it as a chart, a graph or just run
with the numbers themselves. The depth of analysis you can generate is
far deeper than a simple poll. My guess is that 99% of the people who
use it will do a simple one dimensional poll. It's more powerful than that.

Now, what else do we need?

How about a simple system that lets you run a new kind of auction for an
event with limited seating? Say you want 200 people to come to a
networking event, the sort of thing that's no fun if only a dozen or two
show up... Instead of charging $50 a ticket, why not charge $1 for the
first five tickets, $2 for the next five, and on to $500 for the last
ten? You'll earn just as much (if not more) but reward the brave who
sign up early. (The folks who like to wait until the last minute 'to be
sure' end up paying for the privilege). It's easy to imagine a simple
interface to set up whatever graduated pricing model you'd like.

Or, how about a geography-based system for pricing? Many services are
sold by a flat fee, but add a zip code and a map and it could completely
change the pricing model.

Why don't airlines have tools in place to make it easy to integrate
charter flights with conventions so flights run when (and where) people
are going? Flights for passengers instead of passengers for flights...

There was a lot of this discussed 9 years ago. The world wasn't ready.
It is now.

I guess my point is that this is just the beginning of using internet
tools to change the world we interact with, as opposed to trying to make
it easy to interact with the standard world using the Internet.

Quoted from Seth Godin's Blog

Fear, hope and love: the three marketing levers

By Seth Godin

Where does love come from? Brand love?

The TSA is in the fear business. Every time they get you take off your shoes, they're using fear (of the unknown or perhaps of missing your plane) to get you take action.

Chanel is in the hope business. How else to get you to spend $5,000 a gallon for perfume?

Hope can be something as trivial as convenience. I hope that this smaller size of yogurt will save me time or get a smile out of my teenager...

And love? Love gets you to support a candidate even when he screws up or changes his mind on a position or disagrees with you on another one. Love incites you to protest when they change the formula for Coke, or to cry out in delight when you see someone at the market wearing a Google t-shirt.

People take action (mostly) based on one of three emotions:

Fear
Hope
Love

Every successful marketer (including politicians) takes advantage of at least one of these basic needs.

Forbes Magazine, for example, is for people who hope to make more money.

Rudy Giuliani was the fear candidate. He tried to turn fear into love, but failed.

Few products or services succeed out of love. People are too selfish for an emotion that selfless, most of the time.

It's interesting to think about the way certain categories gravitate to various emotions. Doctors selling check ups, of course, are in the fear business (while oncologists certainly sell hope). Restaurants have had a hard time selling fear (healthy places don't do so well). Singles bars certainly thrive on selling hope.

Google, amazingly quickly, became a beloved brand, something many people see as bigger than themselves, something bigger than hope. Apple lives in this arena as well. I think if you deliver hope for a long time (and deliver on it sometimes) you can graduate to love. Ronald Reagan was beloved, even when he was making significant long-term errors. So was JFK. Hillary may be respected, but Obama is loved.

I don't think love is often a one way street, either. Brands that are loved usually start the process by loving their customers in advance.

The easiest way to build a brand is to sell fear. The best way, though, may be to deliver on hope while aiming for love...

Quoted from Seth's Blog

Ambition and Productivity

Tom Peters

Last week the Associated Press reported that "Worker productivity, the
key factor in rising living standards, slowed sharply in the final three
months of the year while wage pressures increased." This drop in
productivity coupled with the news that the service sector shrank for
the first time in five years has many economists talking about how big
the impending recession will be rather than debating whether one will occur.

At tpc we have long advocated enabling IT efforts and structures to
increase organizational productivity. Many of you are familiar with
Tom's rants on the white collar revolution and the advent of white
collar robots. We also believe there is another, powerful mechanism for
improving productivity. People will become more productive when they
want to become more productive! And they want to when their output is
moving the organization closer to a compelling shared purpose, vision,
or what we call "Ambition" in our Future Shape of the Winner model.

Many of us have probably known someone in the workforce who was going
through the motions, fulfilling their job duties with no particular
zeal, and sometimes even beginning their retirement while they were
still on the payroll. And yet this same person may be a hardworking
volunteer for a charitable organization they believe in. The difference
is having a purpose that has real meaning. Being part of something that
really matters! And improving the return for investors (although the
lifeblood of a successful business) is not compelling enough to pull out
that voluntary discretionary effort we all have available. It has to be
a statement of the common cause for the common good.

That is why we advise our clients to start with ambition. Who do we
intend to be and what part might the individual members play? Why does
it matter? When it is important, it becomes a "want to" driver, rather
than the "have to" necessities of my job. And the work we perform when
we want to is always more productive than the work we do because we have to.

What do you think? Agree or disagree that it's the place to start in
your strategic plan? Can that raise productivity? Do you have any ideas
for building passion through purpose?

<http://www.tompeters.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=10263>Posted
by Mike Neiss for Tom Peters

It's good to talk

There has been a lot of talk on this blog lately about how an
organisation's structure and infrastructure (which, in Future Shape of
the Winnerparlance, we call its Architecture) can affect the ability of
its people to innovate, or even just to get things done. For many of our
clients there is a limit to what they can do to change organization
structure or infrastructure, and yet, if they want to release the
potential of their people, we believe there has to be a way around this
dilemma.

So, it was with great delight I read a recent study done by Google, that
has uncovered some fascinating insights into how information flows
around their organisation. Google has been able to correlate information
flow amongst their employees with a whole variety of factors; a person's
department, their membership on email lists, projects they had worked
on, friends, where they went to college, etc., etc. ...

What they have discovered is that by far the most significant influence
on who knows what is their physical location at work. Their study has
found that social and professional proximity matters very little,
whereas people who sit near each other in the office tend to know the
same things.

Over the years, I have seen a number of situations in which my client,
apparently restricted by organisation charts and structures, has simply
decided to sit people together who ought to collaborate, without
changing any reporting relationships. Particularly when there is a
customer service dimension to the work, the natural outcome of such a
relocation is that everyone settles into a pattern of sharing that has a
significantly positive effect on the work.

The study findings were rather surprising to me in today's world of
multiple virtual connections. And yet one conclusion is rather
depressing–if you really want to influence a person's behaviour, must
you live in their world? So, what can we do in our dispersed
organisations? Are we doomed? How are organisations that you know well
overcoming the problems of distance in getting their messages out there?

Quoted from Tom Peters

Innovation + design

The Center for Creative Leadership recently released the findings of
their study of senior executives' opinions of the future trends they face. It is no
surprise that the increasing complexity of their challenges was
forefront on the executives' minds. As authors Corey Criswell and André
Martin noted in the introduction to the report, "Senior executives face
increasingly complex challenges that involve organizational changes,
market dynamics and talent shortages. One popular response to increasing
complexity is to lean on innovation. Our respondents believe that aiming
for innovation through overt processes (systems and structures) and
talent development is paramount to creating a culture that is agile
enough to address complex challenges."

I certainly hear the cry for innovation often in my client work. Simple
logic would argue that creation of an innovative culture cannot occur
without first innovating current business practices. All too often the
stories I hear of innovation revolve around the lone wolf who somehow
beat the existing system. Innovation will not be widespread until the
systems, practices, policies, and procedures are changed so that
innovation becomes the path of least resistance. It may even be
counterproductive to preach innovation and fire up the troops if they
run smack into barriers that discourage it. Cynicism often occurs,
followed by disengagement of talent when they wonder why they should
bother.

In our model for analyzing and creating solutions we recognize this
architecture as being a key component of successful change. If
innovation is the goal, perhaps the focus shouldn't be restricted to
encouraging the players. Instead we should look seriously at the playing
field. Some examples I am seeing include rigid organization structures,
project teams being populated by those who are available rather than
those who are necessary, resource allocation that doesn't value
investment in innovation, and metrics that reward traditional practices
over innovative approaches. There are, of course, many forces affecting
innovation or the lack of it. But examining current architecture seems
to me to be a good place to start.

What are you seeing? Examples? Challenges? Emotional outbursts?

Quoted from Tom Peters Blog

Tribe Management

Brand management is so 1999.

Brand management was top down, internally focused, political and money
based. It involved an MBA managing the brand, the ads, the shelf space,
etc. The MBA argued with product development and manufacturing to get
decent stuff, and with the CFO to get more cash to spend on ads.

Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world.

It starts with permission, the understanding that the real asset most
organizations can build isn't an amorphous brand but is in fact the
privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to
people who want to get them.

It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to
connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to
build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because
it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a
story to tell and something to talk about.

And of course, since this is so important, product development and
manufacturing and the CFO /work/ for the tribal manager. Everything the
organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe.

Instead of looking for customers for your products, you seek out
products (and services) for the tribe. Jerry Garcia understood this. Do you?

Who does this work for? Try record companies and bloggers, real estate
agents and recruiters, book publishers and insurance companies. It works
for Andrew Weil and for Rickie Lee Jones and for Rupert at the WSJ...
But it also works for a small web development firm or a venture capitalist.

People form tribes with or without us. The challenge is to work for the
tribe and make it something even better.

Quoted from Seth Godin
<Tags> Seth Godin, connect, tribe, challenge

<http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Ef/typepad/sethsmainblog?a=FJGelQD>

Workaholic

A workaholic lives on fear. It's fear that drives him to show up all the
time. The best defense, apparently, is a good attendance record.

A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of
worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and
curiosity, not fear.

The passionate worker doesn't show up because she's afraid of getting in
trouble, she shows up because it's a hobby that pays. The passionate
worker is busy blogging on vacation... because posting that thought and
seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on
the beach for another hour. The passionate worker tweaks a site design
after dinner because, hey, it's a lot more fun than watching TV.

It was hard to imagine someone being passionate about mining coal or
scrubbing dishes. But the new face of work, at least for some people,
opens up the possibility that work is the thing (much of the time) that
you'd most like to do. Designing jobs like that is obviously smart.
Finding one is brilliant.

By Set Godin

<Tags> workaholics, Seth Godin, passion, curiosity, fun, fear, drive

Vestiges

Unless you just started, your organization is different than it used to
be. It has evolved.

The marketing you do, the decisions you make, the hurdles you have to go
through probably have vestiges of the old model. Sometimes, like the
little feet on the back of a whale, it's easy to ignore the vestiges.
Other times, it's entirely possibly that they prevent you from achieving
your goals.

Example: years ago, Prodigy, the original big online service, reflected
its origins from Sears, CBS and IBM when they unveiled chat and
discussion boards. Every single message posted was read by a censor
before it went online. At one point, they had literally hundreds of full
time editors sitting in an office tower outside of NY, painstakingly
reading every single post.

Example: the production values of an HD TV show are lost in the YouTube
environment, yet plenty of studios and advertisers are having trouble
giving up the staffing and hierarchy that served them so well in the
other medium. So the vestiges remain, slowing down the entire process
(and making it a lot more expensive.) 25 people to film a three minute
clip is just silly, but it makes sense if you look back at how they got
there.

Example: local banks with limited hours were the norm just a few years
ago. The move to online hasn't changed the way they all see the world...
it's a skeleton staff at night, because that's the way it always was.

If you're working hard to work around a vestige, maybe it makes sense to
work just as hard to get rid of it all together.

By Seth Godin

<Tags> : Seth Godin, vestiges, origin, optimization

The problem with perfect

When was the last time you excitedly told someone about FedEx?

They're perfect. The only time we notice them is when they screw up.

And that fancy restaurant with the four star reviews? They've got the
fine linen and the coordinated presentation of dishes... it costs
hundreds of dollars to eat there, but it's okay, because they're perfect.

Which is a problem, because dinner consists of not much except noticing
how imperfect they are. The second course came five minutes later than
it should of (ten, even!). The salad was really good, but not as perfect
as it was last time. And the valet parking... you had to wait in the
cold for at least ninety seconds before your car came. What a let down.

A let down?

The place is a gift, a positive bit of karma in a world filled with
compromise. And all you can do is notice that it's not perfect.

As the quality of things go up, and competition increases, it's so easy
to sell people on perfect. But perfect rarely leads to great word of
mouth, merely because expectations are so hard to meet.

I think it's more helpful to focus on texture, on interpersonal
interaction, on /interesting. /Interesting is attainable, and
interesting is remarkable. Interesting is fresh every day and
interesting leads to word of mouth.

I think our FedEx delivery person is interesting. I like her. I talk to
her. And yes, it changes my decision about who to ship with. I also
think that Spicy Mina is an interesting restaurant. So far from perfect,
it's ridiculous. But I talk about it.

By Seth Godin

<Tags> perfect, Seth Godin, fed ex, complain, promise, interesting

Indonesian traditional medicine

Dramatically re-orient healthcare from after-the-fact "fixes" to before-the-fact attention to prevention-Wellness.
(And "kindly suggest" that the "acute-care industry" give some passing thought to Quality.)

Tom Peters

Tags:Indonesian traditional medicine, jamu,tom peters

Freedom to create and serve

Effective enterprise always, but today (the creative age) more than ever, is a product of maximizing human freedom to create and serve.

Organizations exist to serve. Period.

Leaders exist to serve. Period.

Respond to customers' desires with products and services and experiences (think Cirque du Soleil) that are "gaspworthy," and a lot of
"other issues" will mostly take care of themselves.

-Tom Peters-

Tags:Tom Peters, Service,

The essence of business

"To me business isn't about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It's about being true to yourself,


your ideas

and

focusing on the essentials."

—Richard Branson

Greatness

"Groups become great only when everyone in them, leaders and members alike, is free to do his or her absolute best."

"The best thing a leader can do for a Great Group is allow its members to discover their own greatness."

-Organizing Genius-
Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biederman

Problems : Deal with it.. or, run!

There are three ways to deal with a problem, I think.

* Lean into it.
* Lean away from it.
* Run away.

You lean /into/ a problem, especially a long-term or difficult one, by
sitting with it, reveling in it, embracing it and breathing it in. The
problem becomes part of you, at least until you solve it. You try one
approach and then another, and when nothing works, you stick with it and
work around it as you build your organization and your life.

Some people choose to lean /away/ from the problems that nag them at
home or at work. They avoid them, minimize them or criticize the cause.
Put as little into it as possible and maybe it will go away.

And sometimes, a problem is so nasty or overwhelming that you just run away.

I'm a big fan of the first approach. And sometimes, quitting isn't such
a bad idea. The second approach, alas, is the one that many of us end up
with by default, and the one that's least likely to pay off.

If that helps with this year's resolutions, it was worth thinking about...

Seth Godin

Stasis vs. Dynamism

Do we crave predictability, or relish surprise? These two poles, stasis and dynamism, increasingly define our political, intellectual, and cultural landscape."
—Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies

"Wealth in this new regime flows directly from innovation, not optimization. That is, wealth is not gained by perfecting the known, but by imperfectly seizing the unknown."
—Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy," Wired, September 1997

"The secret of fast progress is inefficiency, fast and furious and numerous failures."
—Kevin Kelly

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