Who Feels Successful?

A person once asked me what it feels like to be successful.

I didn't know how to respond because I don't regard myself as a success. A scrambler, yes. A striver, certainly. A success? I'm not so sure about that.

The more I learn about various subjects, the more I'm humbled by the vast amount of material I haven't even studied, much less mastered. Others may see what has been done while I see all that remains undone.

There is another aspect to this feeling: the sense that to declare oneself a success is a bit smug. Smugness can be the prelude to decline. Many a dunce is a self-proclaimed genius.

This doesn't mean that the achievement of various goals cannot be appreciated. That is not only wise but necessary if the demoralization of the treadmill is to be squelched. Watching the clouds, having a good cup of coffee, and quietly reviewing how something was achieved can be as good as it gets.

There is another crucial point and I draw it from the Army's three elements of leadership:

Be - Know - Do.

Too often, society defines success in the realm of "Do" instead of "Be." In assessing our own progress, we need to avoid that trap and recognize that making progress both in Being and Doing is important. Our internal advances may well outweigh any external ones.

There is much wisdom in the old line that "He who conquers himself is greater than he who takes a city."

No Other Explanation?

"They have it in for me. There's no other explanation."

That's correct. That's the only possible reason unless:

• They have other priorities;



• They have to shift resources elsewhere;



• You failed to make your case;



• They didn't trust you;
  


• They have a different grasp of the situation;



• The timing isn't right;



• They see a major downside;



• They want to address it later;



• They want more time to think it over;



• They see a crisis on the horizon;



• They like parts of it but not all of it;



• They want to explore other options;



• They want to see what you will do after the proposal is rejected;



• They believe they'll get more out of a different approach;



• They believe your proposal is a quagmire;



• This is new territory for them and their fears have not been put to rest;



• This is familiar territory and they see problems you don't;



• They like your proposal but know their boss won't approve; or



• You've asked them to take too much on faith.

Quote of the Day

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is insincerity.

- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Feeling While Reading Shelby Foote's "The Civil War"

This guy is really good.

[Update: An interview with the author.]

Miscellaneous and Fast

Not bad: An interesting list of commencement speakers at law school graduations.


Eileen P. Gunn talks with Marshall Goldsmith and John Eldred on the power of schmoozing.

I like Toby Getsch's note to the person(s) who broke into his truck on Tuesday.

They didn't mention flames: What the color of your car may say about you.


An understated and powerful film: The trailer for Claude Lanzmann's masterpiece, Shoah.

Best biz books? A distinguished panel gives their choices of the best business books and some of the choices aren't even business books. [Good for them!]

The Word Unspoken

Consider the times when you should have said something. Some examples:

• When a colleague was the target of unfair attacks;


• After a sarcastic remark was made at a staff meeting;


• When you began to notice that a team member was being ostracized;


• When you didn't really understand the assignment;


• When you first sensed that a project was about to unravel; and


• Right after you said yes when you wanted to say no.

When a Film Spreads Happiness

Eurociao has the trailer for Amelie and he is correct: watching the film or listening to the soundtrack will cheer you up. A clever and sweet movie.

Bellow's Insight

Fear was a New Yorker’s constant companion in the 1970s and ’80s. We lived behind doors with triple locks, some like engines of medieval ironmongery. We barred our ground-floor and fire-escape windows with steel grates that made us feel imprisoned. I was thankful for mine, though, when a hatchet turned up on my fire escape, origin unknown. Nearing our building entrances, we held our keys at the ready and looked over our shoulders, as police and street-smart lore advised; our hearts pounded as we tried to shove the heavy doors open and slam them shut before some mugger could push in behind us, standard mugging procedure. Only once was I too slow and lost my money. A neighbor, who worked at a midtown bank, lost his life.


Read the rest of Myron Magnet's reflections on Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet.

Not Getting Vista

Business Week reports on companies that are bypassing Vista and waiting for Windows 7.

Vista taxes all but the most modern PCs with hefty processing and memory requirements. Many of GM's PCs can't even run the system. "By the time we'd replace them, Windows 7 might be ready anyway," Killeen says. Then there are compatibility problems with all the software that needs to run on Windows. GM's software vendors still haven't ensured all their programs will run on Vista trouble-free. So the company is sticking with Windows XP for now. Killeen figures GM could install Windows 7 in three or four years.

Quote of the Day

People say I don't take criticism very well, but I say what the hell do they know?

- Groucho Marx

Culture Break: "To This Day"

Commentary magazine has performed a literary service by publishing the first seven chapters of S.Y. Agnon's novel To This Day. The entire novel will be published for the first time in English later this month by Toby Press.

Consider the first paragraph:

During the Great War, I lived in the west of Berlin, in a room with a balcony in a small boarding house on Fasanenstrasse. The room was small, too, as was the balcony, but for someone like me whose needs were few it was a place to live. Not once during my stay there did I speak to the landlady or the other boarders. Every morning a chambermaid brought me a cup of coffee and two or three slices of bread, and once a week she brought the bill, which grew larger as the slices of bread grew smaller and the coffee lost its taste. I left the rent on the tray with a tip for her. She knew I didn’t like small talk and came and went without a word. Once, however, she forgot herself and stayed to chat a bit about the boarding house. Its landlady, Frau Trotzmüller, was a widow whose husband had been killed in a duel, leaving her with three daughters and a son, her youngest child, who had disappeared at the front. No one knew if he had been killed or taken prisoner. Despite all the family’s efforts to trace him, nothing was known of his fate. Multitudes of soldiers were dead, captured, or missing in action; who could locate a single mother’s son, a speck of dust swept away by the winds of war? Frau Trotzmüller and her daughters didn’t impose their grief on their boarders, and their boarders didn’t inquire about young Trotzmüller. Everyone had his own troubles; no one had time for anyone else’s. It was only because I was a poor sleeper that I heard the grieving mother sobbing for her son at night.

The One Line

Boiling down your reasons for a particular action to one sentence may sound simplistic but it is a very helpful exercise.


Doing so forces you to distinguish between the essential and the marginal. It also causes you to select the point of greatest priority among the essentials. Without such self-constraints, you can easily pour in so many points that your perspective becomes obscure.

As you know, major corporations condense their products to one word. [Disneyland sells Fun. Southwest Airlines sells Freedom. Revlon sells Hope.] Compared to the one word approach, crafting one line is easy.


One clear line makes it easier to communicate your key point to others. The single point presents a much smaller target to potential critics than a multitude of reasons.


Why should you be promoted? Have your supporting analysis but give the reason in one line.


Why should a disciplinary action be taken? Tie together the evidence with one connecting line.


Why should you buy a particular car? Once again, one line.


It's no guarantee that your decision is best but it can help you along the way.

Wiki Planning

The federal government has launched several wikis, which permit staffers to post information and expand on it until a consensus is reached. Intellipedia lets 37,000 officials at the CIA, FBI, NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies share information and even rate one another for accuracy in password-protected wikis, some "top secret." Users are told, "We want your knowledge, not your agency seal"; indeed, the wiki format may be the best last hope for connecting the dots of intelligence across 16 different agencies. Diplopedia lets State Department staff share information. It's closed to the public, rated "sensitive but unclassified." In the virtual world Second Life, where personal avatars can communicate with one another, the State Department now has an embassy.


Read the rest of The Wall Street Journal article here on the use of wikis in government.

Quote of the Day

Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity.

- Lao-Tzu

Eco Bikes

Check out this gallery of eco-friendly motorcycles.

Uses hydrogen and emits water vapor?

You know you want one...especially when you check out their mileage.

Prices and the World Middle Class

Moises Naim, the editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine, has written a short and thought-provoking article, "Can the World Afford a Middle Class?" An excerpt:

These protesters are the most vociferous manifestations of a global trend: We are all paying more for bread, milk, and chocolate, to name just a few items. The new consumers of the emerging global middle class are driving up food prices everywhere. The food-price index compiled by The Economist since 1845 is now at an all-time high; it increased 30 percent in 2007 alone. Milk prices were up more than 29 percent last year, while wheat and soybeans increased by almost 80 and 90 percent, respectively. Many other grains, like rice and maize, reached record highs. Prices are soaring not because there is less food (in 2007, the world produced more grains than ever before), but because some grains are now being used as fuel and because more people can afford to eat more. The average consumption of meat in China, for example, has more than doubled since the mid-1980s.

Seven Tips for a College Commencement Speaker

1. Don't try to be hip. You may have graduated a mere three years ago but to most of the students, you are no longer one of them.


2. Unless you are a professional comedian, don't tell a lot of jokes.


3. Keep it short. Your audience is already eyeing the exits.


4. Keep it nonpolitical. This should be an occasion for unity, not cheap political shots at any party or politician.


5. Try to say one thing that might be of practical use to the graduates 20 years from now.


6. Let your unspoken message be your example. Scrap any tasteless, cruel or ignorant remarks.
7. Translate all foreign phrases and keep jargon to a minimum.

Quote of the Day

Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.


- Alan Bennett

Get Your Red Dress!

Michael at 2Blowhards brings us "Shotgun" by Jr. Walker and the All Stars as well as a whole lot more.

Good stuff.

Growing People

Jim Stroup at Managing Leadership, a must read blog, looks at why managers should be "master gardeners."



Jim's point is right on target. One of the most successful executives I've known developed a reputation for grooming future department heads. By doing so, he influenced his entire industry because many of his employees went on to direct similar operations with other organizations. The ones who stayed with him were also extraordinarily good.

What Will Matter

Michael Josephson, the ethicist who founded the Josephson Institute of Ethics , has prepared a short video on What Will Matter.

The Filters

Two key questions in any workplace: How much do you report up the ladder? How much do you report down?

Both are determined by the anticipated reaction and by confidentiality obligations. Requirements to protect the well-being of various stakeholders also play a role.

The argument for honesty, which in some cases is indeed brutal, is that it is preferable to the hiding and cover-ups that occur in its absence. On the other hand, there are times when we'd prefer not to know certain items because the level of our response might not be entirely in our hands and a more intense cure might be worse than the disease. That filtering, however, usually applies to upward communication.

When it comes to downward communication, the bias should favor disclosure. Organizations that paternalistically withhold information from employees on the basis that they wouldn't understand or not be able to handle it are unlikely to be trusted. In most instances, people would rather hear the truth than be coddled.

That said, there are times when matters are simply so sensitive that confidentiality is crucial both in the immediate case and to facilitate the reporting and resolution of future ones.

In short, general "We always disclose or never disclose" rules are not appropriate. The decision to filter often requires a case-by-case determination. That is both a strength and an area of vulnerability. It may be sound decision-making but it also provides a great rationalization for inappropriate filtering when what should be an exception becomes the rule.

Quote of the Day

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.



- Oscar Wilde

Toyota's Magic

Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains. And so it rejects the idea that innovation is the province of an elect few; instead, it’s taken to be an everyday task for which everyone is responsible. According to Matthew E. May, the author of a book about the company called “The Elegant Solution,” Toyota implements a million new ideas a year, and most of them come from ordinary workers. (Japanese companies get a hundred times as many suggestions from their workers as U.S. companies do.) Most of these ideas are small—making parts on a shelf easier to reach, say—and not all of them work. But cumulatively, every day, Toyota knows a little more, and does things a little better, than it did the day before.


Read the rest of James Surowiecki on Toyota's approach.

Dear Disgruntled Employee

I've just started submitting what will be a post a week with the On Careers: Outside Voices section of U.S. News & World Report.

Here's a link to my first post on dealing with a silent resignation.

Eccentric Bosses and Colleagues

Get together with old acquaintances from a job and sooner or later the conversation will turn to eccentric colleagues or bosses. Some spark pleasant memories while others induce cringing but all are memorable. My own have included:

• A supervisor who used to hide from his employees. Weeks passed and few people reported having seen him. It was discovered that he'd created an office in another building and was working there. Management soon decided that he could locate his office even further away.



• A chief of staff who routinely declared that he was a "people person." If you worked with him long enough you realized he was a carnivorous people person.



• A department head who kept a huge jar of Rolaids on his desk. Over the months you could watch as it slowly diminished and then he'd fill it again.



• A director who was so full of ideas that he could reach brainlock trying to express them. Highly creative, he irritated a top executive and was soon exiled.



• A department head whose work, although meticulously and fully researched, was usually completed too late to have any relevance whatsoever.



• A profane and wild-looking executive who was used as a clean-up artist. Very capable but he had a short shelf-life in his assignments but a little dose of him went a long way.



• An oily, competent and thoroughly untrustworthy operator. Uriah Heep in a good suit. He went far. One of his secrets was revealed when people from outside the organization would gush about how they wished they could work with him because he is such a great guy.



• A thoroughly decent and competent executive. He also went far. His reputation was built on ethics and reliability.



• A manager who never discriminated because he treated everyone like dirt. One day, however, after a blunt conversation urging him to change his ways, he made a complete turnaround and became a human being.



• The professional who made a practice of praising people to the skies one month and then damning them to hell the next.



• The executive who always read her mail while staff reported to her.



• The executive who kept nothing personal, such as photos or awards, in his office and whose reason for doing so was he wanted to be able to walk away from the job at any time.

Quote of the Day

The enemy of life...is indifference.



- Elie Wiesel

City on Steroids

For a hint of what's going on in China, check out this video on a 12 million person city that is getting larger.

Much larger.

"Go Out and Make a Bunch of Money!"

Well, here you are at your college graduation. And I know what you're thinking: "Gimme the sheepskin and get me outta here!" But not so fast. First you have to listen to a commencement speech. Don't moan. I'm not going to "pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next."

I'm a member of the 1960s generation. We didn't have any wisdom.We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything -- which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

The rest of P.J. O'Rourke's commencement address is here.

[HT: Andrew Sullivan ]

Films for Training

Here's the assignment. You are going to teach classes on some leadership/management-related subjects.

You are not permitted to have a textbook, but are required to discuss one - and only one - film (fiction, not documentary) with the students in order to illustrate key aspects of each subject.

Which films would you choose?

Leadership

Sales

Ethics

Management

Motivation

Team Building



[My choices: Leadership: Northwest Passage; Sales: Local Hero; Ethics: Groundhog Day; Management: Topsy-Turvy; Motivation: Chariots of Fire; Team Building: Master and Commander.]

People with Big Ideas

People weren’t finding dinosaur bones, and they assumed that it was because they were rare. But—and almost everything that Myhrvold has been up to during the past half decade follows from this fact—it was our fault. We didn’t look hard enough.

Myhrvold gave the skeleton to the Smithsonian. It’s called the N. rex. “Our expeditions have found more T. rex than anyone else in the world,” Myhrvold said. “From 1909 to 1999, the world found eighteen T. rex specimens. From 1999 until now, we’ve found nine more.” Myhrvold has the kind of laugh that scatters pigeons. “We have dominant T. rex market share.”

Read the rest of Malcolm Gladwell on people with big ideas .

Quote of the Day

Experience is the child of Thought, and Thought is the child of Action. We cannot learn men from books.



- Benjamin Disraeli