This brilliant chart shows why European monetary union is likely to fail. The countries involved have less in common than, well, virtually any other entity.
Courtesy of Business Insider
Bertrand Russell’s 10 commandment for Teachers Nicely spikey and iconoclastic and potentially very unsafe. The opposite of how many teachers behave. Is orthodoxy learned or culturally imbibed?
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4.When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6.Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
With thanks to brainpickings.org
With the amount of information available today means people need to apply filters and gateways otherwise they quickly become overwhelmed by it all. This is where the role of the curator becomes interesting. Below is a thought-provoking films from some web curators
We have just read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. As we read it on Kindle (sorry Steve), so we thought we would ‘review’ it by listing the most popular highlights from the book as judged by all Kindle readers as at today’s date. We think it gives a good flavour of the man and the book, and also something about the people who’ve read it as well.
Highlighted by 755 Kindle users
He emphasized that you should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”
Highlighted by 585 Kindle users
“People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”
Highlighted by 653 Kindle users
Atop the brochure McKenna put a maxim, often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that would become the defining precept of Jobs’s design philosophy: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Highlighted by 238 Kindle users
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.”
Highlighted by 427 Kindle users
“Picasso had a saying—‘good artists copy, great artists steal’—and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Highlighted by 444 Kindle users
In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.
Highlighted by 607 Kindle users
“The journey is the reward.” The Mac team, he liked to emphasize, was a special corps with an exalted mission. Someday they would all look back on their journey together and, forgetting or laughing off the painful moments, would regard it as a magical high point in their lives. At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.”
Highlighted by 17 Kindle users
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
Highlighted by 585 Kindle users
We thought we would add our favourite quote from the book as well, talking about his co-founder (who he treated very badly on several occasions) Steve Wozniak and working with the best people.
For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn’t get along, they’d hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn’t like working with C players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that’s what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, even if they’re going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn’t nearly as good as he was, but that’s what I aspired to do.
Both these tools can be a very useful way of helping people to give of their best, but like any technique it is important firstly to get the definitions clear. Coaching and mentoring are not interchangeable terms.
Why are they different?
Coaching is not the same as mentoring. Mentoring is concerned with the development of the whole person driven by the person’s own work/life goals. It is usually unstructured and informal. Coaching is much more about achieving specific objectives in a particular way. Coaching is also more formal and more structured, usually around a coaching process or methodology.
Effective Coaching
- Both are volunteers
- The coach has some form of expertise to impart. That expertise might be related to a competence the coachee requires in their role or the expertise might be about helping the coachee to give their best.
- Expertise coaching is usually active/directive, centred on the coach having a view of what best practice looks like in a particular area and through a performance feedback loop gives the coachee ideas for improvement.
- The coach establishes a current state awareness and a desired state outcome objective and then works with the coachee on closing the gap
- Passive/reflective coaching is something else. This kind of coaching is more about the coach asking such questions as ‘how did you feel about that?’ and ‘how could you improve that?’ This style is more an interactive process of self-discovery on the part of the coachee. Here the coach is using the skills of facilitator and explorer to help the coachee reach new levels of effectiveness.
- The two strands are not mutually exclusive but the objectives should be made clear before beginning around what kind of coaching is being requested/offered.
- Effective coaching is non-hierarchical and between equals. One is simply helping the other. Peer to peer coaching is the ultimate expression of this.
Effective Mentoring
- Both are volunteers.
- The Mentor has no executive, or direct-line reporting responsibility for the mentee. Sometimes they don’t even work in the same organisation.
- Both are getting ego satisfaction from the relationship. The mentor gets the satisfaction of watching somebody grow who values his or her insights. The mentee, a feeling of being valued and gaining regular ‘air-time’ with somebody who they respect and admire.
- The intensity of the relationship is matched. It is taking up actual and mental time in proportions both people are comfortable with. This can flex, as the mentee’s needs change. Sometimes, several meetings quickly in a very challenging period, then none for three months.
- There is no dependency. Neither party needs the relationship to continue, both are happy for it to continue but it could stop tomorrow. It can be very destructive where the mentor needs the relationship for status reasons, or the mentee needs it as an emotional crutch. There might be occasions where the mentee needs a ‘shoulder to cry on’ but that is event, rather than relationship driven.
- The mentee is not a protégé. It is not a teacher pupil relationship, nor does the mentee (necessarily) have the patronage of the mentor. An effective mentor gives wise counsel, and the mentee can talk about what they need to talk about, where they can test arguments and have tough questions asked of them.
- The mentor should not be mentoring two people at the same time from the same team.
- Discretion and confidentiality are paramount. Also, rules of engagement. Who knows about the relationship, some are public knowledge some not, as long as both are happy, it doesn’t matter which.
- The obligation for continuing or stopping is two-sided. The mentor feels they have value to add, the mentee is getting something from the relationship. Either side can end it without justification.
- If the mentoring practice is to become widespread, rather than extraordinary, the culture of the organisation needs to be a supporting one, as it does with coaching.
- Mentoring processes are about guidance and support.
Sometimes the line between Mentoring and Passive/reflective coaching can cross over.
If you’d like to talk about coaching or mentoring give us a call on +44 (0) 1789 734300
Why Do Many Organisations Fail To Create The Right Conditions For Honest, Open Conversations?
How do you effectively engage with someone who isn’t doing what they should be doing? This seemingly innocuous issue creates serious problems for some organisations. There is a whole industry, almost sub-culture offering answers. The training solution, entitled handling difficult/challenging/courageous conversations flavoured to taste with NLP. Or the coaching solution around becoming more assertive and the book category which contains 100s of suggestions from pure snake oil, through to just more fishy varieties.
Whilst it’s obvious that some people find giving difficult feedback easier than others, we have found a much more interesting and productive starting point than the individual. Organisational culture is the biggest enabler or inhibitor of candid conversations. We are doing a lot of work in this area at the moment and have captured some of our conclusions in a summary below.
Firstly, two stereotypical definitions to help frame the issue, both amalgams of several, real organisations.
The Struggling Organisation
The rhetoric of giving and receiving feedback has little to do with reality. People are very territorial, often with over emphasis on hierarchy/position. It’s important in this environment to know ones place. Often the formal process of feedback is well established through appraisals and performance reviews, but these can be very stylised and ritualistic with little resulting motivational or development value for either the organisation or the individual. The idea of challenging someone either openly or from a different function is very alien, being charged with a lot of emotional baggage. Beneath this surface of ‘getting on’ is a lot a frustration and disagreement. This occasionally boils over into an overly personalised argument that requires a lot of smoothing back down of ruffled feathers.
People develop many different accommodation and coping strategies for this way of (not) interacting, and for new hires it takes a lot of working out. Meetings are a whole case study in themselves, often too many of them for fear of upsetting people, too large, for the same reason, and too discursive – ditto. Minutes for the record are taken and are often mediated through the chair before (delayed) circulation. But culling numbers or attendees or having more discipline around them is just too politically complex to pull off so things carry on, often with off-line, bi-lateral ‘meetings’ taking place where the real decisions are made. Which create reinforcing circle of frustrate with the official meetings process.
The Thriving Organisation
Here the focus is on openness and respect for peoples’ opinion regardless of seniority. There is likely to be a greater sense of purpose around what the organisation is trying to achieve (above the business plan, number delivery level), which gives people a greater commitment and ownership towards the organisational issues being discussed. There is real domain respect, which means the scaffolding around functional hierarchy is not as required. Who owns the issue, and what their agenda is with it is not material. What people are more exercised about is how to solve the problem, or effectively take the opportunity. There is more visible leadership from the senior team, they are in the business cheer-leading the goals, acting as custodians of the vision and values and generally being supportive role-models. There is less middle management. The more mangers there are the more decision-making is slowed down. There are big spans of control with decision rights widely delegated. Power doesn’t come from the size of your team(s) but from the connectedness of your network and the quality of your ideas. This confers influence. Meetings tend to be short and frequent, sometimes daily. Actions not minutes are taken, and are distributed in real-time.
In this environment feedback is constant and on the fly. When someone knows you respect what they are trying to do, and that is mutual, and you both share the vision and goals for what the organisation is trying to create, why wouldn’t you comment that idea x is not up to their usual standard? And why wouldn’t they respond constructively wanting to hear your thoughts around how their idea could be improved.
This isn’t controversial, or provocative, this is how any high-functioning group entity operates. Yet for too many organisations creating a dynamic discourse around strategy, operational delivery, or cross-functional process development (to name just three current organisational log-jams) is just too difficult.
Where to start in becoming a thriving organisation?
- Develop a purpose for the organisation, one that people can rally around and feel ownership of.
- Create a high-functioning top team, one that has genuine responsibilities beyond its functional vertical ones.
- Focus on behaviour as much as performance, create a behavioural framework.
- Demonstrate and ask for more leadership, and a less policing style of management – from all levels.
- Have a transparent and understood consequences policy. Encourage differentiated outcomes. Reward what’s special, value what’s expected, ignore what’s average and punish what’s unacceptable.
- Recognise people as much for whom they are as for what they do.
- Give informal feedback constantly.
- Identify and celebrate best practice wherever you find it.
All these things are achievable and with the right management support potentially transformational in a relatively short space of time. In the thriving organisation giving and receiving feedback just happens.
We’d love to talk to you about the ideas in this article. Please get in touch through the blog or call – use on the number at the top of the page.
We work with a wide range of organisations, sometimes in the same week, from large global corporations, spread around the world, to small family businesses with people working in the same room. It is fascinating what each wants to learn from the other. It seems that size really does matter – there are pros and cons, of course, that are a function of size – and a lot of that also has to do with mindset.
Small Business Mindset:
High levels of ownership and commitment; largely motivated by freedom and the agility to respond to customers’ needs and market trends (without all the red-tape messing up the decision-making process). These entrepreneurs are often innovative and web-savvy but use a spread sheet to do their accounts, go to bed late, don’t have a pension and don’t like the government (according to research by Smarta)
Large Corporate Mindset:
Low levels of ownership are balanced by high levels of ‘brand’ identification (they’re volunteers after all) who believe the ‘whole’ is greater than the sum of its ‘parts’. These organisations often have well-established benefits; processes and procedures that have been tried and tested – and consequently lead to entrenched attitudes that can be very resistant to change, with an unhealthy component of ‘jobs-worths’ where conformance can breed complacency.
What about those in the middle? The SME Mindset:
More often than not, Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (50-250 people) tend to fall between two stools ending up with the failings of both the micro/sole-traders and the large corporates. They have a core of die-hards who have endured thick and thin – surrounded by a mixture of mercenaries who are in it for themselves. They have some formalised processes (usually created to protect themselves rather than improve performance) which are seldom revised or updated and which become a drag on the business. They attempt to emulate corporate ways of working by structuring their operations into ‘functions’ only to create ‘divisions’ that lead to silo-thinking.
In our experience of working with diverse organisations, irrespective of size, they fall foul of the issues above not out of some perverse self-destructive urge – but rather through simple lack of awareness. It is not until these problems start to impact on the performance of a business that people begin to pay attention – by which time it becomes a bigger issue to resolve. As businesses become more established, whether through growth or as a function of surviving over time, they need to be consciously aware of the mindset attributes that will best serve their future ambitions. This means actively building a Purpose Framework of Vision, Values and Goals around those very qualities that are important to the business and ensuring they don’t get swamped in the short-term re-activism of day-to-day survival. If you recognise any of these issues in your organisation and want to discuss them further give us a call on +44 (0) 1789 734300
A delightful short film about a boy with a clear vision, an engineering mind and a huge sense of the possible.
If you don’t at first succeed – do these three things (before trying again)
Change A Controllable Variable. The reason for failure might be because of;
- a lack of effort
- the wrong approach
- a poor idea to start with
Look at these three variables and methodically audit your failure against each of them. Don’t make a category mistake. If the idea was poor no amount of extra effort will compensate. If the process (the approach) was wrong a good idea can be ruined. This root cause analysis can be more complex to unravel when it’s a combination of more than one variable. The key here is to be objective, be as clear-eyed as possible, ignore the amount of your sunk cost investment in the project (both time and money), focus on making the next attempt better.
Understand & Alter The Context. These are semi controllable variables, things you can influence but not control. If your idea involves getting people to respond (potential customers) then you need look at the controllable variables in context. Getting a customer to pay more for your idea than similar ones on the market is not going to happen unless the context can be altered. Your product going viral and gaining brand cachet for instance.
Don’t Fight The Science. These are the immutable facts that are beyond yours or anybody else’s control. People won’t pay to toboggan down your hill if it’s not steep enough to be exciting.
If you evaluate your ideas against these criteria you can save yourself a lot of time and expense. Better still try to do as much iteration as possible in your head and on paper/computer before committing development money.
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