The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention.  – Duguet

Stop intending and start doing

Kirk

   “Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself. You may be surprised at how easily this happens. Your doubts are not as powerful as your desires, unless you make them so.”  Marcia Wieder 

In a recent bit of dialogue I heard this counsel being given to anyone who in admidst the sometimes overwhelming adveristies of life were losing hope, losing perspective and even beginning to doubt their faith.  The counsel was simple.. “doubt your doubts, not your beliefs”.

  Will adversity come?  I certainly hope so…it’s what pushes us to find our solutions, our resolve, even our purpose.  It refines us and our response to it defines us.  Adversity offers us many pathways.   Some lead towards bitterness some towards betterness.  The path to betterness is much easier to travel without the weight of doubts in our backpacks.

Will any single adversity last forever or do you in?  “I doubt it” 

Kirk out

“Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.” ~  Mother Theresa

THANK YOU - Thank You - thank you - you

Kirk out

   I read this fantastic piece in Fast Company…which I have included below as well as a link to the online article itself…it’s about making meetings more meaningful…. I really enjoyed it.  And if you think your meetings could be more meaningful, then you might gain an insight or two yourself from it and avoid the “Death By Meeting” and move towards meetings that matter and more meaningful.  http://www.fastcompany.com/online/23/begeman.html

And if your meetings already rock and leave you feeling refueld, refocused and recommitted then skip the article enjoy the following quote by Agatha Christie and enjoy your day, your week and your life…because after all…it’s a grand thing just to be alive.

“I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” - Agatha Christie

You Have to Start Meeting Like This!
We work — therefore we meet. But why do so few of our meetings meet our expectations? Michael Begeman may be the world’s foremost expert on the business world’s most universal ritual. Here’s his short course on running meetings that will work for you.

From: Issue 23 | April 1999 | Page 204 By: Gina Imperato Illustrations by: Greg Clarke
Michael Begeman is a leading authority on one of the business world’s most universal rituals: the meeting. An anthropologist and computer scientist by training, he serves as manager of the 3M Meeting Network, a loose-knit collection of meeting experts that’s been assembled by 3M, the innovation-obsessed manufacturing giant headquartered in Minneapolis.

But Begeman, 41, is much more than a meeting planner and facilitator. He spent four years as a member of the technical staff at Intel. He spent six years as a research manager at MCC, a high-tech research consortium based in Austin, Texas. He has run his own consulting firm. In short, he knows as much about how business works as he does about how meetings work.

So what’s the most effective meeting that Begeman has seen lately? He says that it didn’t take place in a high-rise office building or at a cutting-edge chip factory. In fact, it took place in a tepee — in a scene from Dances with Wolves (1990), the Oscar-winning film featuring Kevin Costner. The scene takes place after a group of Native Americans discover Costner not far from their camp. Between 20 and 30 members of the tribe gather around for a meeting. There’s one big question on their agenda: What should they do with this mysterious white man — kill him to send a message to others who might follow, or leave him alone to signal their willingness to reason with such newcomers?

What follows, claims Begeman, is a clinic in good meeting behavior. “People actually listen to one another,” he marvels. “There are some genuine disagreements, but everyone recognizes merit in everyone else’s position and tries to incorporate it into his thinking. The chief spends most of his time listening. When the time comes to make a decision, he says something like ‘It’s hard to know what to do. We should talk about this some more. That’s all I have to say.’ And the meeting ends! He is honest enough to admit that he’s not ready to make a decision.”

How does Begeman compare that powwow with what takes place inside most conference rooms today? “Do you want to know the truth?” he asks. “Here’s my mental image of what happens at most business meetings: You could take the people out and replace them with radios blaring at each other, and you would not have changed very much. That’s what most meetings are like. People wait for the person who’s speaking to take a breath, so they can jump into the empty space and talk. The quality of communication in most meetings is roughly comparable to the quality of the arguments that you used to have with your 10-year-old brother.”

Begeman’s mission is to change all that. The monthly email newsletter published by the 3M Meeting Network goes out to thousands of subscribers. The group’s Web site offers a collection of useful tools and techniques, of valuable hardware and software. “There is a ’science’ of meetings that’s available to people now,” he says. “We have the knowledge we need to make meetings better. But most people haven’t learned it or don’t bother to use it. And then they wonder why their meetings just stumble along.”

In an interview with Fast Company, Begeman offers a short course on how to make your meetings work.

Meetings Are Work — And Great Meetings Take Lots of Work
Great meetings don’t just happen — they’re designed. Producing a great meeting is a lot like producing a great product. You don’t just build it. You think about it, plan it, and design it: What people and processes do you need to make it successful? But first you have to create agreement among people that meetings are work — they are not an empty ritual to be suffered through before getting “back to the office.” Meetings are events in which real work takes place.

That’s a big mind flip. All primates — monkeys, apes, humans — are social creatures. When you’re out in the wild, studying nonhuman primates, one of the things you appreciate is just how social they are. They hang out together, they play together, they groom each other. You very rarely see solitary behavior. But if you walk into a typical company, what you see are rows and rows of cubicles. We’ve taken these wonderfully social creatures — human primates — and we’ve isolated them. And then we’ve asked them to be productive in that environment.

Now, as more and more of what people do takes place in teams, meetings become the setting in which most of the really important work gets done. I see this everyday in my own work and life. I do almost all of my work with a team of people — some from inside 3M, some from outside the company. If I spend most of the day sitting in my office, instead of interacting with people, a warning bell goes off in my head: I’m not getting my job done.

So many people complain to me, “I wish I didn’t spend so much time in meetings.” To which I say, “Resistance is futile!” The simple fact is, some of our peak experiences as people take place in work groups. Most people have attended at least a few meetings in which there’s been a real breakthrough: People are facing a problem, banging heads, not making very much headway — and then a kind of magic overtakes them. A wind comes along, it blows away the clouds, and you can just feel the energy in the room. It’s possible to have more experiences like that — if you design your meetings with the same care that you use to design your products.

Different Meetings Need Different Conversations
One of my main roles is to create useful linguistic distinctions for people. Organizations call meetings for lots of different reasons. And it turns out that different kinds of meetings require different kinds of conversations. If you’re not clear about the kind of conversation that you should be having, then your meeting probably won’t achieve a clear outcome.

For example, some meetings are built around a “conversation for possibility.” The group acknowledges that it has come together to generate ideas, not to make decisions. The goal is to maximize creativity. Other meetings are built around a “conversation for opportunity.” The goal is not to reach a final decision but to narrow down a field of ideas or options. You gather lots of information; you do some analysis; people take positions. Finally, there are meetings that are built around a “conversation for action.” The goal is to decide, to commit: “We want to leave this room with our three investment priorities for 2000.”

Unless everyone understands these distinctions, you run into certain familiar problems. You convene a brainstorming session (a “conversation for possibility”), and people are afraid to speak up because someone might shoot down their idea — or worse, someone might say, “Let’s do it.” Or you convene a budgeting session (a “conversation for action”), and someone loops back to an idea that was rejected earlier — which drives everyone else crazy. If you call a meeting, make it clear to people what kind of conversation they’re going to have, and then impose a certain amount of discipline on them. Remember: Meetings don’t go off topic. People do.

Always Play by the Rules (of Engagement)
Most participants come to a meeting with clear expectations about how other people should act. And if the meeting lives up to such expectations, the participants will feel like they’ve had a really good experience. If the meeting violates those expectations, then people will become upset or withdrawn. So the key is to translate implicit expectations into explicit agreements — into what I call “rules of engagement.” Do people feel strongly about starting and ending on time? Then make an explicit commitment to doing that. Are people concerned that a meeting doesn’t have a clear enough objective? Then make an explicit promise: “If we can’t agree on a clear objective within the first 10 minutes, then the meeting is over. We’ll schedule another meeting when the objective becomes clear.”

You can even create rules of engagement about individual behavior. For example: Before anyone makes a point, that person has to find merit in the point made by the previous speaker. Or, the senior people in the meeting can speak only after the junior people have had a chance to express themselves.

It’s a pretty simple idea, really. All you are trying to do is to make the invisible visible, to make the automatic deliberate. These rules of engagement take the bad behaviors that groups stumble into, shine a light on those behaviors, and then address basic questions: How can we change all of this? How do we want to act? Such rules of engagement give people a chance to design how they treat one another in meetings.

One last point about rules of engagement: You should be clear that not all successful meetings end with a decision — which goes back to why I love that scene in Dances with Wolves. Decisions are the Valium of meetings. They offer relief from the tension of what lies ahead, from the uncertainty of the world. They tend to create an illusion of progress: “We’ve finally made a decision. Now we don’t have to worry about that issue anymore.” Often it takes courage for a group to end a meeting without making a decision.

Small Talk is a Big Deal
There is a legitimate social component to meetings. Sure, we’d all rather be efficient than sloppy in our work. Sure, we’d all rather spend our time on “real work” than on “idle chitchat.” But you should never overlook the social side of work rituals — even in meetings that are “all business.” In many of the meetings that I run — especially in meetings that take place early in the day — I schedule 5 or 10 minutes of open time, just to encourage people to relate to one another. If you plan for such time, if you put it on your agenda, then you won’t feel as if you’re not doing what you ought to be doing. Instead, you can enjoy going around the room and asking people what they did last night, or over the weekend.

For some meetings, I book a certain amount of time at the beginning to ask, “Is there anything that people need to say in order to be ‘present’ at this meeting?” Remember, just because people walk into a conference room doesn’t mean that their mind is on your meeting. They may be thinking about an argument that they just had with a colleague, or about a computer glitch that they’ve been struggling with all day. If you let people express their frustrations before you get down to business, you allow them to clear their mind and to focus on your meeting.

Want Serious Meetings? Hand Out Toys!
There is much more to people — even serious businesspeople — than what’s above the neck. We are not just intellects that come together to interact with other intellects. The more you involve the whole person in your meetings, the more people will learn, and the more of that learning they will retain. If you want people to work together effectively, let them play together.

That’s why I think there is so much value in having kinetic stuff in meeting rooms: squeeze balls, Slinkies, little gizmos that you turn over and play with. Every so often, just go into a toy store, blow $20 on junk, and put all of it in your conference room. Toys are a great stress reliever — and a great creativity enhancer. I’ve found that when people have something to play with, when they can get more of their body involved in what they’re doing, they become more creative.

I’m famous around here for my bag of meeting toys. It comes in handy. Last summer, for example, I was working with a group of senior executives. The first thing I did when I started off the meeting was to give everybody two toys: a Meeting Network mouse pad and a Meeting Network squeeze ball. The executives played with this stuff throughout the meeting. It was great: One person would say something that another person didn’t like, and the second person would throw a ball across the table. Everyone at the meeting had lots of fun.

And these were senior executives, by the way — people who are not given to playing at work. A week later, I was in the same room, sitting in as an observer for someone who was presenting to the same group. The executives came in and sat around their table, and as the meeting was about to start, one guy said, “Wait a minute. We can’t start yet.” Then he ran out — and came back a few minutes later with his squeeze ball!

Even Good Meetings Can Get Better
If you’re serious about improving the quality of your meetings, then you should borrow an idea from the quality people: continuous improvement. Set aside five minutes at the end of every meeting you hold — make it a discipline for your team or your company — and ask some simple questions: What did we do in this meeting that really worked well? What happened that we never want to repeat? Are there bad habits that we seem to keep falling into?

Write down people’s answers, keep a running record of their comments, and then see how well the entire group improves over time. A written record can also be a great source of ideas for future rules of engagement. It can tell you not just how to behave, but why people believe it’s important to behave that way.

But don’t overdo this. The best medicine in the world can make you sick if you take too much of it. If you become too intent on improving meetings, you’re likely to become the most dreaded person in your department: “Oh no, Joe’s in this meeting. What’s he gonna come up with this time?” So, please, use these ideas and practices, but use them wisely.

Meeting Minutes
One classic meeting dilemma is deciding how much to record. Michael Begeman’s proposal: Don’t worry too much about taking detailed minutes — that is, exhaustive notes about who said what. Focus instead on three categories of information: decisions reached, action items that people need to follow up on, and open issues. “The record of all this becomes input for future meetings,” says Begeman. “Plus, encouraging people to use these categories will sharpen the quality of their participation.”
Actions speak louder than rules. Leaders send nonverbal as well as verbal messages. So it’s quite possible, says Michael Begeman, for your words to abide by the “rules of engagement” for a meeting, while your informal actions don’t. If you’re leading a meeting and people expect you to move the group toward a decision, then act accordingly. Sit at the head of the table to signal, “I’m in charge.” Stand while others are sitting to signal, “I have the floor.” If participants expect a collaborative meeting, ask one of your team members to run the meeting — to signal, “I want to share leadership.” Or to signal, “I’m with you,” sit on one side of the table. All of this may sound obvious, but it’s amazing how small, nonverbal behaviors can undermine — or promote — what you are trying to accomplish.
The best book I have ever come across on the subject is this one…

Make it a great day, it’s your choice!

Kirk Out

In my travel bag I carry several books whose titles never change.  I love these books and like to share with leaders how they can use these books as tools in their culture shifting efforts.  One of my favorites is by John Miller titled “QBQ“  The Question behind the Question.  The following is one of my favorite stories from the book. 

It is also one of the best stories I’ve ever read about exceeding a customer’s expectations. May I encourage you to read it and then think of ways you may exceed a customer’s expectations where you work today! –

It was a beautiful day in downtown Minneapolis when I stopped into a restaurant for a quick lunch. The place was jammed. I didn’t have much time, so I was happy to grab the one stool they had available at the bar.

A few minutes after I sat down, a young man carrying a tray full of dirty dishes hurried past on his way to the kitchen, but noticing me out of the corner of his eye, stopped, came back and said, “Sir, have you been helped?” “No, I haven’t,” I said, “but all I really want is a salad and a couple of rolls.” “I can get you that, Sir.’ What would you like to drink?” “I’ll have a Diet Coke, please.” “Oh, I’m sorry, Sir, we sell Pepsi. Would that be all right?” “Ah, no thanks,” I said with a smile, “I’ll just have water with lemon, please.” “Great, I’ll be back.” He disappeared.

Moments later he came back with the salad, the rolls and the water. I thanked him, and he was quickly gone again, leaving me to enjoy my meal, a satisfied customer. Suddenly, there was a blur of activity off to my left, the “wind of enthusiasm” stirred behind me and then, over my right shoulder stretched the “long arm of service,” delivering a 20-ounce bottle, frosty on the outside, cold on the inside, of - you guessed - Diet Coke! “Wow!” I said. “Thank you!” “You’re welcome,” he said with a smile, and hurried off again.

My first thought was, “Hire this man!” Talk about going the extra mile! He was clearly not your average employee. But the more I thought about the extraordinary thing he’d just done, the more I wanted to talk to him. So as soon as I could get his attention, I waved him over. “Excuse me, I though you didn’t sell Coke?” I asked. “That’s right, Sir, we don’t.”

“Well, where did this come from?” “The grocery store around the corner, Sir.” I was taken aback. “Who paid for it?” I asked. “I did, Sir; just a dollar.”

By then I was thinking profound and professional thoughts like, “Cool!” But what I said was, “Come on, you’ve been awfully busy. How did you have time to go get it?” Smiling and seemingly growing taller before my eyes, he said, “I didn’t, Sir. I sent my manager!” I couldn’t believe it. Was that empowerment or what? But beyond that, his actions paint a marvelous picture of personal accountability. Let’s take a look at my server’s thinking and the choices he made.

It was the lunch rush. He was already busy with plenty to do. But he noticed a customer who, though not in his section, looked as though he needed some attention, so he decided to do what he could to help. I don’t know what was in his mind at that moment, of course, but faced with a similar situation, many people would have had thoughts like these:

“Why do I have to do everything around here?” “Who’s supposed to be covering this area, anyway?” “When is management going to provide us with more products?” “Why are we always so short-staffed?” “When are the customers going to learn to read the menu?”

It’s understandable that someone would feel and think that way, especially when frustrated, but the truth is that these are lousy questions. They’re negative and they don’t solve any problems. Making better choices in the moment by asking better questions. That’s exactly what my service did. In the moment - he disciplined his thoughts, made better choices and asked better questions. His choices made the difference. Whether he used the words or not, his actions clearly indicated accountable thinking such as, “What can I do to help out?” and “How can I provide value to you?”

As I left that day, I gave him a good tip, as anyone would have. And when I returned a couple of months later and asked for “my favorite server, Jacob Miller” the hostess said, “I’m sorry, Sir, Jacob is no longer…” My thoughts flew fast, “NO, You lost my own personal server? You lost a guy who looked at me and thought, ‘What can I do right now to serve you!?’” I just couldn’t believe they had let him get away. But I didn’t say any of that to her. I simply interrupted with, “Oh no, you lost him?” to which she brightly responded, “Oh, no Sir, we didn’t lose him, he was promoted to management.” My first thought was “Management, what a waste.” The truth is, I wasn’t at all surprised that Jacob, with the way he thought, would be to quickly on his way toward his chosen goals. That’s the difference personal accountability can make. Everyone wins: customers, co-workers, the organization, everyone. And for Jacob, beyond the tips and the promotion, I can’t help but think the greatest win of all is the way he must feel about himself at the end of a day of making better choices, asking better questions and practicing personal accountability.

GET QBQ… read it, love it, live it!

Kirk

Working on a presentation on how great leaders use Questions as a tool to inspire higher levels of creativity, productivity and organizational change.  I’m liking the title, The Question-Able keynote.  Also found a couple fun quotes on coincidence…and by coincidence I had one too. (A coincidence that is)

 ”Sometimes questions are more important than answers.” ~Nancy Willard

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”~- Albert Einstein

“Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys.”~ Emma Bull Quotes

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” ~- Albert Einstein 

Friend and T4D subscriber Martin Silk from Australia sent this along today as he remembered me blogging(and whining) about a rental car experience in a previous T4D.  By chance Martin sent this on almost the very day I wrote about this in July of 2009!

  To read about the “Hertzful” expereince click here. http://kirkweisler.com/t4d/2009/07/24/ow-that-hertz/

Here’s wishing you a day filled with thoughtful questions, wonderful coincidence, and positive customer experiences.

Kirk Out

“We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.” Jim Rohn

From which pain do you suffer? 

Today…more discipline …less regret!  Let’s Grow for it!

Kirk

 

A positive attitude will not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.–Herm Albright

This next piece is something I kept from an e-zine all the way back in 2000 and talks about how life can sometimes be or seem to be “unfair”.  My experience tells me that we all have someone in our life who could personally benefit from reading it…maybe even ourselves.  The author, Patrick Combs, does a great job reminding us to stop comparing ourselves to others…and that we all must find and struggle up our own path at our own pace towards our own goals.   Enjoy!! ~ Kirk

Stay Centered by Patrick Combs

David Letterman worked for a good twelve to thirteen years in television before getting his own NBC Late Night show.  Conan O’Brian, on the other hand, got his own Late Night show on his first audition. At times, life can look very unbalanced.

Miami Dolphin’s quarterback, Dan Marino, owns more NFL records than any other player who’s played the game, but after 13 years in the NFL he’s never been on a team good enough to win the Super Bowl. On the other hand, countless NFL rookies, with far less talent, have been Superbowl
Champions in their first year.

“Unfairness” doesn’t just happen to others. We experience it, too. How come you seem to have to walk up a hundred flights of stairs in order to get to the top, while the person next to you seems to get to take the elevator? Who knows, really? Who cares, for that matter?

What matters is how you react to the seeming unfairness of life. Some people cry and complain. Some people give up and throw in the towel. And some people work hard to imitate “the lucky ones.” But none of these reactions make you feel better (and quite frankly, it’s my experience that none of
these help you succeed, either).

The only helpful reaction to the reality that life often feels unfair is a return to your center. Your center is the part of you that KNOWS your life is meant to unfold distinctly differently than anyone else’s. At the center of your being, you know that you are you - and no one else.

At your center you know that even though you’re aiming for similar goals as the next person, you both will get there by very different paths. You know that what works for them will not necessarily work for you. And vice versa, what works for you will not necessarily work for them.

Personally speaking, I get kind of nauseous when I peek in on “the other guy” and see success coming much more easily to him or her. I start thinking crazy thoughts like, “Maybe this endeavor isn’t meant to be for me. Maybe it’s not written in the stars.” And, “Maybe I’m not good enough and
that’s why things don’t happen easily for me.” These thoughts panic me - knock me off balance.

I begin fragmenting into a thousand insecure pieces. Not a good feeling. (In these humiliating moments, the words of the Albert Brook’s character in the movie Broadcast News often cross my mind, “Wouldn’t this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive?”)
But then I remember where I’ve been; the great experiences MY path has offered me, exclusively. And, I remember the good things that have happened in my life, that didn’t happen for the other person. Suddenly, I am faced with the question, “Would you really trade your path in life for his
or hers?”

Your path in life only looks unfair when something triggers you to forget all the great things that have happened to you so far. So the next time something triggers you to think that someone else’s path looks better than yours, remember:

* The good things that have happened exclusively to you

* The invaluable strength of character you’ve acquired from having had to “take the stairs”

* The unknown future benefits that your path has in store for you

* The hardships your path has spared you, but given to others

* Not all you wish would happen for you, would turn out to be good for you

A little quiet and reflective introspection, and you’ll see a path you wouldn’t trade for the world - a path all your own. A path that takes good care of your essential needs.

Patrick Combs is the author of Major in Success: Make College Easier, Beat The System & Get A Very Cool Job

“It is important to acknowledge a mistake instantly, correct it, and learn from it. That literally turns a failure into a success. Success is on the far side of failure.”  ~ T.J. Watson - 1874-1956, Founder if IBM

 

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. ~ — Helen Keller (1880-1968) American Writer