Was thinking this weekend about people who seem to have the need to combine brutality with their honesty.   My observation is that far too many people seem to use honesty as a deliverly mechanism for their brutality.  The phrase, “I was just being honest.”  is no excuse and a poor cloak  for viciousness, envy or malice in any form.  Our “words reveal us”.

Richard Needham said it this way, “The person who is brutally honest enjoys the brutality quite as much as the honesty. Possibly more”.

In Jim Collins book, “Good to Great” , he identified that one key characteristic of organizations that made the leap to greatness was their ability to “Confront the brutality honest facts, without leaving people feeling attacked or brutalized.”  This takes a measure of skill, maturity, and wisdom that I have yet to witness in a person who commonly uses the phrase, “I was just being honest” .

That our world needs more honesty and more honest men and women than ever before is an undeniable truth.  But equally true is the fact that our world needs less brutality of both the physical and verbal variety.

Honesty can guide us, inspire us and protect us… we must never demean or undermine it an attempt to put someone in their place, get even, or in any way to dress someone down. 

If honesty is to remain the best policy, then brutality cannot be a companion policy.

Kirk Out - Honestly

Internet was down all morning… at first I was like “Bummer, now I can’t do these things.”  Then I changed my mind-sight and took another view.  Other possibilities soon opened up…including the training of a new office assistant.   As I mentioned on twitter earlier today… productivity has gone down a  bit, but creativity and fun have gone way up! Finding balance is always a challenge, but it is the challenges that help us to grow. 

Wayne Dyer said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

 So to be better, we must first see better. 

BE BETTER - SEE BETTER - Insight Changes Eyesight… which is one of the main missions of the “T4D -Thought 4 the Day“.  So I invite you… heck, I challenge you to change the way you see your challenges and see what it changes.

 Have a most exciting and insightful weekend.

Kirk Out

Cleaning out my inbox was only part of the needed spring/summer cleaning I have been needing to get done.  “Lean is just one letter short of clean.”I needed to “get lean” in other others of my life as well….namely the home office.  The other is my home office which often seems to serve as bit of  a pit stop where I come to change the oil and the tires before I race out to complete more laps. 

The problem is the old tires and oil cans and client notes seem to have stacked up pretty high in here. Along with some letters from the IRS, a jury summons, and some unopened birthday cards?!  (Not really on the birthday cards - I always check them for cash).

So I had to retain the skills of an expert… a master at organizational de-cluttering. On Monday I sought and received your help and advice with e-mails…and yesterday I asked for help from my wife Rebecca to de-clutter and re-organize my office. (Something she has been asking to do for nearly a year now.) 

 One of her core philosophies is - a clutter free home /office is the treasured companion of a clutter free mind.  Where I gather and easily attach sentiment to things… Rebecca chucks or throws things away her greatest sentiment is attached to the principle of simplicity.  She says, “If you are unlikely to ever read it, use it, or even look at in the future…it’s just stuff and it’s just clutter or soon will be.”  She’s right, and we all know the old saying “You can’t take it with you when you go.”  But if you don’t have a Rebecca in your life, you may end up moving it around a lot with you before you go.

Still in the sorting, chucking, and simplifying of my office… a couple treasures have been found and key learning’s remembered.

• 1) We must learn to “abandon ourselves to the strengths of others. Trust in them the things we know are not core to ourselves. This principle is at the core or books such as “Good to Great”, “Now Discover Your Strengths”, Max Depree’s “Leadership is an Art” and many others.

• 2) We must have the courage to ask for the help we need. Vulnerability based trust building. “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni - and”The Aladdin Factor”.

• 3) Be open to the possibilities of each moment… in the doing of hard and unpleasant things are moments that can teach us much if we can keep ourselves in a place of learning. My kids too often follow a pattern familiar to my own childhood….and as they sulk through the doing of their chores they miss a great deal of the satisfaction that comes from ” a job well done.” There are almost always great discoveries awaiting most often behind the final push and second effort. Examples here abound… Michael Phelps, Christopher Columbus, Roger Bannister…etc etc.

The treasure of today was this slip of paper found by my lovely, loyal, and pretty dang cute office cleanser Rebecca.  It was a note had written sometime last year(I think) while at a Hotel in Park City, Utah.  It read…

“If you want to retain the loyalty of those that are present, then always be loyal to those that are absent.” ~ Don Spradling -(my old special forces commander said that)

 So as you learn to be lean, you can also learn to be loyal.  Soon you may even come to learn the value of being loyal to principles lean. 

Kirk Out

Just this morning my wife Rebecca was talking to a group of teens and, quoting her Uncle Martz, counseled the teens saying…  “Seek to become not to acquire.”

Six words that say and suggest so much.  They are a really great complement to Rebecca’s philosophy of seeking to be a “Human Becoming” vs. “Human Being”.  More about this can be found my kids “Human Becomings” blog. http://humanbecomings.wordpress.com/2009/05/09/a-human-becoming-2/

These six words have meaning in the corporate context … some seek to acquire power, position and influence …. others realize those outcomes as a natural consequence of their personal development and becoming.

In our seeking to become rather than to acquire… I feel a need to state the obvious… When we speak of becoming, it is always in the context of “becoming better” otherwise the spoofy picture of evolution above loses it’s spoofyness and can become a personal reality not just a political one.

While others go through the day… let us choose wisely to grow through the day.

Kirk Out

PS thank you for all of the wonderful advice on E-mail management.  Most of it posted for everyone to access at .. http://kirkweisler.com/t4d/2009/08/25/ive-fallen-and-i-cant-get-up/#comments

The phrase “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” is an old one and it’s a bit how I feel today…and yesterday.

I’ve fallen “BEHIND” on my e-mails and I can’t “CATCH” up.  In the book “The 4 Hour Work Week”, author Tim Ferriss talks about spending 1 hour a week on his e-mail.. Thanks Tim for your inspiring example and message and for helping me to feel totally out of control. 

It’s so easy to get caught up in the thick of thin things.  Not that all e-mails are thin things… but obviously some are more important that others. 

I don’t know how you are you doing with your e-mail….but I need to do better.  This week I am working on my inbox…. It’s like cleaning out the garage.  So much clutter with occasion discoveries of lost treasures. 

What I really need this week is a new strategy for my whole approach.

Advice and well wishing is welcome…

I know this is not a pithy or motivation post today…but for any of those who may struggle with the same issue… it can sometimes be comforting to know you are not alone.

SO .. Let’s GET UP together and help others GET UP as we do.

Kirk out

Harvard and Stanford Universities have reported that 85%  the reason a person gets a job and gets ahead in that job  is due to attitude; and only 15% is because of technical  or specific skills.

Interesting, isn’t it? You spent how much money on your  education?  And you spent how much money on building your  positive attitude?

Ouch. That hurts.

Now here’s an interesting thought. With the “right” attitude, you can and will develop the necessary skills.

So where’s your emphasis? Skill building? Attitude  building? Unfortunately, “Neither” is the real answer for  many people.

Perhaps if more people knew how simple it is to develop  and maintain a positive attitude they would invest more  time doing so. So here we  go. Five steps to staying  positive in a negative world:

1.  Understand that failure is an event, it is not a  person. Yesterday ended last night; today is a brand new  day, and it’s yours. You were born to win, but to be a  winner you must plan to win,  prepare to win, and then you  can expect to win.

2.  Become a lifetime student. Learn just one new word every day and in five years you will be able to talk with just  about anybody about anything. When your vocabulary improves,  your I.Q. goes up 100% of the time, according to Georgetown  Medical School.

3.  Read something informational or inspirational every day.  Reading for 20 minutes at just 240 words per minute will  enable you to read 20 200-page books each year. That’s 18  more than the average person reads! What an enormous  competitive advantage . . . if you’ll just read for 20  minutes a day.

4.  Enroll in Automobile University. The University of  Southern California reveals that you can acquire the equivalent of two years of a college education in three  years just by listening to motivational and educational  cassettes on the way to your job and again on the way  home. What could be easier?

5.  Start the day and end the day with positive input into your mind. Inspirational messages cause the brain to  flood with dopamine and norepinephrine, the energizing  neurotransmitters; with endorphins, the endurance  neurotransmitters; and with serotonin, the feel-good-about-  yourself neurotransmitter. Begin and end the day by reading or doing something positive!

Remember: Success is a process, not an event.   Invest the time in your attitude and it will pay off in your skills as well as your career.

So a few hundred dollars worth of self improvement tapes may be more valuable than my college degree and the loans I’m paying back?!  : )  

Keep yourself Growing….

Kirk Out

“Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it.   The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.”  — Earl Nightingale

Some Friday fun…shared with us by T4d reader - Shawn Eliot

Night Watchman

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert. Congress thought someone may steal from it at night; so they  created  a night watchman, GS-4 position, and hired a person for the job.

 Then Congress said, “How does the watchman do his job without instruction?”  So they created a planning division and hired two (2) people, one person to write the instructions (GS-12) and one person, a Management Analyst, to do  time studies (GS-11).

Then Congress said, “How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?” So they created a quality control (QC) division and hired two (2) people, one (GS-9) to do the studies and one (GS-11) to write the  reports.

Then Congress said, “How are these people going to get paid?” So they created a payroll division with a time keeper (GS-9) and a payroll officer (GS-11), and hired two (2) people for clerks (GS-7).

Then Congress said, “Who will be accountable for all of these people?”  So they created an administrative division and hired three (3) people: an Administrative Officer (GS-14), Assistant Administrative Officer  (GS-13), and a Legal Secretary (GS-9). Then, one year later, Congress reviewed the GAO report of the  operation of the desert scrap yard and said, “We have had this command in operation for one year and we are $18,000 over budget. We must cut back overall costs!”

So they eliminated the night watchman.   (Is this the truth or what?)

Today I finish up working with WeStar Power on their annual safety conference which they themed, “Super Heroes For Safety”.  On the banner they made for this event I became Iron Man (yeah right).  The message to them was about how all of us can be Heroes for safety by courageously making and taking a stand for safety.     

That led me to this “Thought 4 the Day” on Heroes, which was shared wtih me by Korbie Tomlinson, originally posted in 2003 . 

Heroes are important and necessary symbols of our hopes and dreams. But they aren’t Gods. They’re flesh and blood like the rest of us.!

But when the test comes, heroes react in extraordinary ways. Rising above the ordinary, surpassing what would be expected, theynever fail to inspire us to dream bigger, reach higher, and endure longer.

“My mom and dad were heroes to me. Mom stresses the importance of treating all people equally. She taught me the importance of equal rights, and she blasted the hypocrisy of not accepting people because of the color of their skin. Mom backed up her words with actions. Putting our heart and soul into something is a commitment we make ourselves. It is our responsibility to do the best we can with what we have. -Roger Staubach (former Dallas Cowboys quarterback, pro football hall of fame)

Have a Hero, be a HERO

Kirk Out

  

“It is not enough merely to read books about leadership or to proclaim that we are students of leadership. Nor is it enough to fill our bookshelves with the writings of Maxwell, Collins, Buckinham, and videos of Fish, Cheese and how to make Steam.  True Leadership is not a spectator sport. We cannot expect to experience the resulting joy and growth of real leadership while we standing inactive on the sidelines any more than we can experience the benefits of health by sitting on a sofa watching sporting events on television and giving advice to the athletes.” Leadership is best defined as an action verb.  

Leaders learn yes, but they don’t learn in the library as much as they do in a laboratory.  Laboratories by design encourage and even require risk, experimentation, trial and error.  Results are measured, feedback is weighed and considered… adjustments are made and the experiment is repeated. In the laboratory of leadership the experimenting, or practicing and playing with the principles of leadership dramatically accelerates the leaders learning.  It both refines his character and deepens his convictions.  And perhaps most importantly, at the same time it helps the leader to identify and strengthen his or her natural talents and strengths. 

Life is a laboratory… experiment with it, gain experience from it, accelerate your growth and your ability to contribute in that unique way that only you can.

Kirk Out

Most of the ladies and gentlemen who mourn the passing of the nation’s leaders wouldn’t know a leader if they saw one. If they had the bad luck to come across a leader, they would find out that he might demand something from them, and this impertinence would put an abrupt and indignant end to their wish for his return.   ~ Lewis H. Lapham

Isn’t that the truth… I love that quote.  Leaders - real leaders -ask change of us, ask growth of us, ask us to be or do more than we currently are being and doing.  Far too many who clamor for leadership really only want someone fix and change others - while leaving them alone.  After all, they reason ,they aren’t the problem. 

If someone actually had the audacity to suggest they needed to do something, change something, or work to increase their competence and results …they would sadly attack that person’s competence. 

It’s so good - let’s read it again!  Most of the ladies and gentlemen who mourn the passing of the nation’s leaders wouldn’t know a leader if they saw one. If they had the bad luck to come across a leader, they would find out that he might demand something from them, and this impertinence would put an abrupt and indignant end to their wish for his return.   ~ Lewis H. Lapham

I don’t just want to be a good leader… I want to know them when I see them.  And I don’t just want to see them, but to seek them….because it may only be possible for me to reach my full potential with the rare gift of their candid feedback, encouragement and insight.   I need great leaders asking me to hard things so I can do the hard thing of becoming of a greater leader. 

Kirk Out