I write and talk a lot about what happens when you choose to change your MAP through awareness and the resulting boos to your energy and creativity.
What I can’t remember sharing with you is a critical ingredient in the change sauce that I call the Philosophy of ER.
I consciously developed it formally and have shared it for decades to offset all the talk about failure when people are working to change.
First, you have to understand that I don’t believe in failure; I don’t think that someone has truly failed unless they’re dead. As long as they’re breathing, the worst bums …read more

I read a fascinating article today about Americans, their stuff and their penchant for storing it instead of getting rid of it.
“The US has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space. (The Self Storage Association notes that, with more than seven square feet for every man, woman and child, it’s now “physically possible that every American could stand — all at the same time — under the total canopy of self-storage roofing. …one out of every 10 households in the country rents a unit…”
According to Derek Naylor, president of the consultant group Storage Marketing Solutions, “Human laziness has always been …read more

Yesterday I described how managers can use ALUC (Ask / Listen / Use / Credit) to engage their teams, whether or not the approach is supported by the overall company culture.
But think how much better it would be to have ALUC embedded in your culture as a part of its infrastructure.
ALUC isn’t something that can be mandated, even by the CEO.
All the proclamations, recommendations and demands aren’t going to force managers to do it if they don’t see the value or their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) isn’t synergistic with ALUC.
What you can do is instill its value in those managers …read more

Money makes the world go round. It’s one of the main causes of divorce and, right now especially, is on everyone’s mind.
I tend to agree with George Bernard Shaw that “Lack of money is the root of all evil.” That or an insatiable desire for more and more of it.
Way back in 1877, Russell H. Conwell said, “Money is power, & you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it.” The problem these days is that people substitute ‘all out’ for ‘reasonably’.
I don’t know who said the following or if they are just folk wisdom, but they certainly are accurate.
“All …read more

Innovation is crucial to success, especially in today’s economy, and diversity is crucial to innovation.
But diversity refers to much more than race, creed, or gender.
Juicing creativity and innovation requires a strong diversity of both thought and skills within your organization—homogenizing your workforce dilutes the juice.
Thought Diversity
True mental diversity is about MAP and mental function, not just a race and gender. I’ve known managers whose organizations were mini-UNs with equal numbers of males and females, but they might as well have been cloned from the boss, their thinking was so identical.
There are three main ways to homogenize thought

Hire all the same …read more

Remember employee commitment? Buy-in? Ownership?
These days it’s called ‘engagement’ and smart managers are looking for ways to increase it. They want to incorporate practices and attitudes in their group’s MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) that will improve productivity and increase engagement.
Two such items are

basic business knowledge and
a large dose of pragmatism.

Business 101
Naiveté regarding business frequently leads to non-reality based ideas and attitudes. If people have a fuzzy or rose-colored view of what has to happen for the company to be successful, there’s no way they can contribute effectively.
Worse, this lack of …read more

I never really paid attention to leadership as an industry until I took over Leadership Turn a couple of years ago. But now I realize that it’s as pronounced and cyclical as the fashion industry.
Jim Stroup at Managing Leadership describes it well.
“Initially the gurus told us that leadership was a superlative individual characteristic reserved to the elite, then a democratically distributed attribute accessible by all… first to vision, then decisiveness, then courage, then team-building skills, then forcefulness, then empathy. It’s about looking inward to one’s core self. No, it’s about communication and connecting with others.”
The list of leadership fashions is …read more

To get the most out of this post you need to read the prelude to it. It starts with Becky Robinson’s birthday musings that formed the basis of my post Monday and the comments that led to today’s topic. (Please read them if you haven’t already.)
We hear all the time about ‘living up to our potential’.
I know that every time I didn’t do what someone thought I should, I heard about my potential. It became the club-of-choice used by teachers and family to push me, but I don’t take well to being pushed and my reaction was to dig in …read more

Last week’s discussion about the difference between busy and productive featured a comment from Jim Gordon. In a follow-up comment he expanded how he deals with this problem when teammates complain, whether by word or look, that he’s goofing off because he isn’t ‘busy’.
“One strategy I used in my groups was to map out every single task we were doing, have the team agree that it is a fair and balanced, distributed workload, and completed the tasks on my terms. By doing this, I was able to finish everything quickly. In fact, on multiple occasions I gave myself MORE work …read more

What do you think about when you take stock of your life? What do you strive for? What makes you feel successful?
Before I go into this there is a caveat I want to make very clear.
What I’m about to write is NOT a judgment call—having been brought up in a judgmental family I don’t judge. Sure, I have opinions, we all do, but I don’t judge. The most I can say is “X isn’t right for me, but Y is.”
I might recommend Y; I might even argue passionately regarding the merits of Y, but in the end it’s your decision …read more