Friday, February 26, 2010

i-TFTD #256: On Trusting Ourselves

i-TFTD #256: On Trusting Ourselves

#256-1. I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.
-Mother Teresa

#256-
2. Trust yourself. you know more than you think you do.
-Anon

#256-
3. The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me.
-Mahatma Gandhi

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It is useful to believe that nothing we encounter is beyond the scope of our reasonable effort to respond. I relate to the idea of trusting our instinct and judgement, and of periodically listening to that small voice inside. These do not apply to those who do not have the humility or self-doubt to listen to anyone.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

i-TFTD #255: Revenge of the Right Brain

i-TFTD #255: Revenge of the Right Brain

This article by Dan Pink was a preview excerpt from his bestseller book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age! . I recommend this book to every parent interested in helping their child figure out where the world is going and in supporting them be successful and happy in it. It is a pleasurable read with its humor and deep insights based on cutting edge research, along with specific resources to explore each of the themes he covers in the book.

An important point to note while reading this is that this is not the old left brain vs right brain simplistic view but Dan Pink is using the hemispheric division of the brain as a metaphor.

(Thanks to Satyen Zaveri for sharing this.)

Revenge of the Right Brain
Logical and precise, left-brain thinking gave us the Information Age. Now comes the Conceptual Age - ruled by artistry, empathy, and emotion.
By Daniel H. Pink
February 2005

From http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/brain.html

When I was a kid - growing up in a middle-class family, in the middle of America, in the middle of the 1970s - parents dished out a familiar plate of advice to their children: Get good grades, go to college, and pursue a profession that offers a decent standard of living and perhaps a dollop of prestige. If you were good at math and science, become a doctor. If you were better at English and history, become a lawyer. If blood grossed you out and your verbal skills needed work, become an accountant. Later, as computers appeared on desktops and CEOs on magazine covers, the youngsters who were really good at math and science chose high tech, while others flocked to business school, thinking that success was spelled MBA.

Tax attorneys. Radiologists. Financial analysts. Software engineers. Management guru Peter Drucker gave this cadre of professionals an enduring, if somewhat wonky, name: knowledge workers. These are, he wrote, "people who get paid for putting to work what one learns in school rather than for their physical strength or manual skill." What distinguished members of this group and enabled them to reap society's greatest rewards, was their "ability to acquire and to apply theoretical and analytic knowledge." And any of us could join their ranks. All we had to do was study hard and play by the rules of the meritocratic regime. That was the path to professional success and personal fulfillment.

But a funny thing happened while we were pressing our noses to the grindstone: The world changed. The future no longer belongs to people who can reason with computer-like logic, speed, and precision. It belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind. Today - amid the uncertainties of an economy that has gone from boom to bust to blah - there's a metaphor that explains what's going on. And it's right inside our heads.

Scientists have long known that a neurological Mason-Dixon line cleaves our brains into two regions - the left and right hemispheres. But in the last 10 years, thanks in part to advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have begun to identify more precisely how the two sides divide responsibilities. The left hemisphere handles sequence, literalness, and analysis. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis. Of course, the human brain, with its 100 billion cells forging 1 quadrillion connections, is breathtakingly complex. The two hemispheres work in concert, and we enlist both sides for nearly everything we do. But the structure of our brains can help explain the contours of our times.

Until recently, the abilities that led to success in school, work, and business were characteristic of the left hemisphere. They were the sorts of linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs. Today, those capabilities are still necessary. But they're no longer sufficient. In a world upended by outsourcing, deluged with data, and choked with choices, the abilities that matter most are now closer in spirit to the specialties of the right hemisphere - artistry, empathy, seeing the big picture, and pursuing the transcendent.

Beneath the nervous clatter of our half-completed decade stirs a slow but seismic shift. The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we've often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.

To some of you, this shift - from an economy built on the logical, sequential abilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathic abilities of the Conceptual Age - sounds delightful. "You had me at hello!" I can hear the painters and nurses exulting. But to others, this sounds like a crock. "Prove it!" I hear the programmers and lawyers demanding.

OK. To convince you, I'll explain the reasons for this shift, using the mechanistic language of cause and effect.

The effect: the scales tilting in favor of right brain-style thinking. The causes: Asia, automation, and abundance.

Asia

Few issues today spark more controversy than outsourcing. Those squadrons of white-collar workers in India, the Philippines, and China are scaring the bejesus out of software jockeys across North America and Europe. According to Forrester Research, 1 in 9 jobs in the US information technology industry will move overseas by 2010. And it's not just tech work. Visit India's office parks and you'll see chartered accountants preparing American tax returns, lawyers researching American lawsuits, and radiologists reading CAT scans for US hospitals.

The reality behind the alarm is this: Outsourcing to Asia is overhyped in the short term, but underhyped in the long term. We're not all going to lose our jobs tomorrow. (The total number of jobs lost to offshoring so far represents less than 1 percent of the US labor force.) But as the cost of communicating with the other side of the globe falls essentially to zero, as India becomes (by 2010) the country with the most English speakers in the world, and as developing nations continue to mint millions of extremely capable knowledge workers, the professional lives of people in the West will change dramatically. If number crunching, chart reading, and code writing can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber-optic cable, that's where the work will go.

But these gusts of comparative advantage are blowing away only certain kinds of white-collar jobs - those that can be reduced to a set of rules, routines, and instructions. That's why narrow left-brain work such as basic computer coding, accounting, legal research, and financial analysis is migrating across the oceans. But that's also why plenty of opportunities remain for people and companies doing less routine work - programmers who can design entire systems, accountants who serve as life planners, and bankers expert less in the intricacies of Excel than in the art of the deal. Now that foreigners can do left-brain work cheaper, we in the US must do right-brain work better.

Automation

Last century, machines proved they could replace human muscle. This century, technologies are proving they can outperform human left brains - they can execute sequential, reductive, computational work better, faster, and more accurately than even those with the highest IQs. (Just ask chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.)

Consider jobs in financial services. Stockbrokers who merely execute transactions are history. Online trading services and market makers do such work far more efficiently. The brokers who survived have morphed from routine order-takers to less easily replicated advisers, who can understand a client's broader financial objectives and even the client's emotions and dreams.

Or take lawyers. Dozens of inexpensive information and advice services are reshaping law practice. At CompleteCase.com, you can get an uncontested divorce for $249, less than a 10th of the cost of a divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, the Web is cracking the information monopoly that has long been the source of many lawyers' high incomes and professional mystique. Go to USlegalforms.com and you can download - for the price of two movie tickets - fill-in-the-blank wills, contracts, and articles of incorporation that used to reside exclusively on lawyers' hard drives. Instead of hiring a lawyer for 10 hours to craft a contract, consumers can fill out the form themselves and hire a lawyer for one hour to look it over. Consequently, legal abilities that can't be digitized - convincing a jury or understanding the subtleties of a negotiation - become more valuable.

Even computer programmers may feel the pinch. "In the old days," legendary computer scientist Vernor Vinge has said, "anybody with even routine skills could get a job as a programmer. That isn't true anymore. The routine functions are increasingly being turned over to machines." The result: As the scut work gets offloaded, engineers will have to master different aptitudes, relying more on creativity than competence.

Any job that can be reduced to a set of rules is at risk. If a $500-a-month accountant in India doesn't swipe your accounting job, TurboTax will. Now that computers can emulate left-hemisphere skills, we'll have to rely ever more on our right hemispheres.

Abundance

Our left brains have made us rich. Powered by armies of Drucker's knowledge workers, the information economy has produced a standard of living that would have been unfathomable in our grandparents' youth. Their lives were defined by scarcity. Ours are shaped by abundance. Want evidence? Spend five minutes at Best Buy. Or look in your garage. Owning a car used to be a grand American aspiration. Today, there are more automobiles in the US than there are licensed drivers - which means that, on average, everybody who can drive has a car of their own. And if your garage is also piled with excess consumer goods, you're not alone. Self-storage - a business devoted to housing our extra crap - is now a $17 billion annual industry in the US, nearly double Hollywood's yearly box office take.

But abundance has produced an ironic result. The Information Age has unleashed a prosperity that in turn places a premium on less rational sensibilities - beauty, spirituality, emotion. For companies and entrepreneurs, it's no longer enough to create a product, a service, or an experience that's reasonably priced and adequately functional. In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more. Check out your bathroom. If you're like a few million Americans, you've got a Michael Graves toilet brush or a Karim Rashid trash can that you bought at Target. Try explaining a designer garbage pail to the left side of your brain! Or consider illumination. Electric lighting was rare a century ago, but now it's commonplace. Yet in the US, candles are a $2 billion a year business - for reasons that stretch beyond the logical need for luminosity to a prosperous country's more ! inchoate desire for pleasure and transcendence.

Liberated by this prosperity but not fulfilled by it, more people are searching for meaning. From the mainstream embrace of such once-exotic practices as yoga and meditation to the rise of spirituality in the workplace to the influence of evangelism in pop culture and politics, the quest for meaning and purpose has become an integral part of everyday life. And that will only intensify as the first children of abundance, the baby boomers, realize that they have more of their lives behind them than ahead. In both business and personal life, now that our left-brain needs have largely been sated, our right-brain yearnings will demand to be fed.

As the forces of Asia, automation, and abundance strengthen and accelerate, the curtain is rising on a new era, the Conceptual Age. If the Industrial Age was built on people's backs, and the Information Age on people's left hemispheres, the Conceptual Age is being built on people's right hemispheres. We've progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we're progressing yet again - to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.

But let me be clear: The future is not some Manichaean landscape in which individuals are either left-brained and extinct or right-brained and ecstatic - a land in which millionaire yoga instructors drive BMWs and programmers scrub counters at Chick-fil-A. Logical, linear, analytic thinking remains indispensable. But it's no longer enough.

To flourish in this age, we'll need to supplement our well-developed high tech abilities with aptitudes that are "high concept" and "high touch." High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to come up with inventions the world didn't know it was missing. High touch involves the capacity to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

Developing these high concept, high touch abilities won't be easy for everyone. For some, the prospect seems unattainable. Fear not (or at least fear less). The sorts of abilities that now matter most are fundamentally human attributes. After all, back on the savannah, our caveperson ancestors weren't plugging numbers into spreadsheets or debugging code. But they were telling stories, demonstrating empathy, and designing innovations. These abilities have always been part of what it means to be human. It's just that after a few generations in the Information Age, many of our high concept, high touch muscles have atrophied. The challenge is to work them back into shape.

Want to get ahead today? Forget what your parents told you. Instead, do something foreigners can't do cheaper. Something computers can't do faster. And something that fills one of the nonmaterial, transcendent desires of an abundant age. In other words, go right, young man and woman, go right.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

i-TFTD #254: For Busy-ness Patients

i-TFTD #254: For Busy-ness Patients

#254-1. Most people are so busy knocking themselves out trying to do everything they think they should do, they never get around to what they want to do.
-Anon

#254-2. It is easier to lead men to combat, stirring up their passion, than to restrain them and direct them toward the patient labors of peace.
-Andre Gide

#254-3. How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?
-Paul Sweeney

_____
Patience and priorities… A lot of people have commented on how the Internet age has led to an expectation of "instant gratification" in every sphere of life. Attention spans are decreasing, short-term thinking determines plans and road rage is rampant even in the developing world. In the business world people are questioning the obsession with quarterly results and CEOs who are one-year-wonders with a hefty severance package. A popular mail forward talks about a "slowdown culture" inspired by the Swedish.

On the other hand, this is not applicable to everyone. Instant cameras are great, frozen dinners are fantastic for some.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

i-TFTD #253: The Time is Now

i-TFTD #253: The Time is Now

Leading Ideas: Be Happy Now
by Doug Sundheim at Fastcompany.com (highlights mine)

7 Sep 2006

We are [repeatedly] sucked away into the future... incapable of actually living one minute of life.
-Thich Nhat Hanh, in The Miracle of Mindfulness

For so many of us, the life we want is just barely out of reach. We can see it. It's just a couple "if only's" away. We tell ourselves, "If only _____, then I'd be happy. I could relax." And so we pursue what we feel is missingconfident in ! the knowledge that while we're not happy right now, we will be soon. But then we achieve what we're after and yet something still feels missing. New "if only's" pop up to replace the old ones. We're caught in a race with a moving finish line. Contentment is more elusive than we had originally thought. Eventually, if we want to be happy, we must come to grips with an important fact. That we've been fooling ourselves. Contentment, it turns out, is not a destination. Rather, it's a manner of traveling. And if we can't feel ! it today, we won't find it tomorrow.

Consider This:
One of the most common questions I hear is, "How do I maintain a strong desire to progress/grow/achieve while also being happy where I am? They seem mutually exclusive." I point out that while this seems true on the surface, it's actually an illusion. What most people fail to realize is that if their happiness is dependent upon achieving something, when they achieve it they still won't be happy because they'll be consumed with trying to hold on to it. It comes down to! the difference between commitment and attachment. If we're committed to a goal, our happiness is independent from its fulfillment. If we're attached to a goal, our happiness is dependent on its fulfillment. And we unwittingly end up a slave to the very thing we think will free us.

Try This:
1. Take 10 minutes to jot down as many of your "if only's" you can think of. Finish the sentence, "If only _____, then I'd be happy."
2. Consider how you've made your happiness dependent upon the items on the list.
3. Don't judge yourself or the list. Realize that these are deeply embedded patterns that are not likely to go away quickly (the purpose of the exercise is merely to let you know what dealing with).
4. Let the list work on you over time.
5. Recognize when one of your "if only's" is robbing you of the present moment and bring yourself back to enjoying your immediate experience.
6. Repeat daily.

____
In addition to the dimension of happiness by focusing on the moment, the above is also applicable to continued effectiveness in general. This phenomenon of postponing the start of something to a more suitable time in the future is so common, isnt it? When this project pressure subsides, we can look at process improvement.
I shall organize my shelves as soon as my vacation begins. Let us solve the problems on hand, we will educate people on avoiding mistakes later. Sounds familiar? It is the same pattern, I believe, that underlies mail folders containing tons of unread newsletters and articles that we hope to get to, one day. Highly effective people strike a judicious balance between short-term and long-term issues, they weave changes and small pleasures within the daily grind of urgent tasks.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

i-TFTD #252: On the Why and How of Change

i-TFTD #252: On the Why and How of Change

#252-1. Either you're an agent of change, or you're destined to become a victim of change. You simply can't survive over the long term if you insist on standing still.
-Norm Brodsky, entrepreneur and author

#
252-2. If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
-Irwin Corey, comedian

#
252-3. The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything...or nothing.
–Lady Nancy Astor

____
Change is inevitable and can be deadly or full of wonderful opportunities, depending on how we look at it. Leaders cannot afford to be ignorant about the necessity of tackling this mindset issue up frontfirst in themselves and then in their teams. Taking an all or nothing stand is not wise.

Friday, February 5, 2010

i-TFTD #251: On Leadership and Power

i-TFTD #251: On Leadership and Power

#251-1. Leadership is not a formal authority one exercises over others. It is about developing moral authority within oneself.
-Stephen Covey, quoted in Business Standard India, Jan 2009

#251-2. To use power wisely is the final test of leadership. Thus, the first rule in the game of power (or life) and, in fact, the only hard and fast rule in the entire game is: Power must be the servant; it must not be the master!
-Thomas D. Willhite

#251-3. We in the West are just beginning to understand what globalization really means. The old lament, "When I was young, things were tougher," is, in my opinion, no longer accurate. I say: "When I was young, things were easier!"
-Marshall Goldsmith in his AskTheCoach column on Harvard Business School site, Dec 2008

____
Power is misunderstood and misused. Then it becomes an intoxicant. It provides a heady feeling for a short while with dangerous consequences later. When one wields it as one holds a new hammer—with respect for its efficacy and as a tool to achieve an intended effect—it is a great aid.

Change feels complex and difficult to those who resist it. Adaptable people perceive new opportunities and enjoy the process of figuring them out. Scaling up and maturing into a higher leadership role can also be seen as a change process.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

i-TFTD #250: Advice for Rebels

i-TFTD #250: Advice for Rebels

#250-1. A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.
-H. H. Munro

#250-
2. Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.
-Christopher Morley

#250-
3. Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
-Mark Twain

_____
In the first quote I believe the keyword is "sometimes", inaccuracy out of sloppiness or ignorance or fear of having to explain is not advised.

The second is about means and ends, putting up with a harmless cause and accomplishing a higher goal. Aimed at those who have the courage to rebel.

The third reminds us not to join and continue with the parade out of comfort and fear to rebel.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

i-TFTD #249: Amazing Duck Rescue Story

i-TFTD #249: Amazing Duck Rescue Story

On Tuesday, May 20, a Spokane man who works downtown as a loan officer at a local bank, became a hero in the eyes of his sister and many of his co-workers. What follows is his story, as told by his sister, Candace Mumm.

Something really amazing happened in Downtown Spokane this week and I had to share the story with you. Some of you may know that my brother, Joel Armstrong, is a loan officer at Sterling Bank. He works downtown in a second story office building, overlooking busy Riverside Avenue. Several weeks ago he watched a mother duck choose the cement awning outside his window as the uncanny place to build a nest above the sidewalk. The mallard laid ten eggs in a nest in the corner of the planter that is perched over 15 feet in the air. She dutifully kept the eggs warm for weeks, and Monday afternoon all ten of her ducklings hatched.

Joel worried all night how the momma duck was going to get those babies safely off their perch in a busy, downtown, urban environment to take to water, which typically happens in the first 48 hours of a duck hatching.

Tuesday morning, Joel came to work and watched the mother duck encourage her babies to the edge of the perch with the intent to show them how to jump off! The mother flew down below and started quacking to her babies above. In his disbelief Joel watched as the first fuzzy newborn toddled to the edge and astonishingly leapt into thin air, crashing onto the cement below. My brother couldn't watch how this might play out. He dashed out of his office and ran down the stairs to the sidewalk where the first obedient duckling was stuporing near its mother from the near fatal fall. Joel looked up. The second duckling was getting ready to jump! He quickly dodged out of the duckling's sight under the awning while the mother duck quacked at him and the babies above. As the second one took the plunge, Joel jumped forward and caught it with his bare hands before it hit the cemen! t. Safe and sound, he set it by the momma and the other stunned sibling, still recovering from its painful leap.

One by one the babies continued to jump to join their anxious family below. Each time Joel hid under the awning, just to reach out in the nick of time as the duckling made its freefall. The downtown sidewalk came to a standstill. Time after time, Joel was able to catch the remaining eight and set them by their approving mother. At this point Joel realized the duck family had only made part of its dangerous journey. They had at least two full blocks to walk across traffic, crosswalks, curbs, and pedestrians to get to the closest open water, the Spokane River.

The onlooking office co-workers then joined in and hurriedly brought an empty copy paper box to collect the babies. They carefully corralled them, with the mother's approval, and loaded them up into the white cardboard container. Joel held the box low enough for the mom to see her brood. He then slowly navigated through the downtown streets toward the Spokane River, as the mother waddled behind and kept her babies in sight. They walked block by block to the water’s edge. As they reached the river, the Sterling Bank office staff then tipped the box and encouraged the younglings, quite nervous from their adventurous ride, to walk toward the water and their mother. She approached her brood and marched them to the brink, ushering them with a splash into their new watery home.

All ten darling ducklings safely made the plunge and paddled up snugly to momma duck. Joel said the mom swam in circles, looking back toward the beaming bank workers, proudly quacking as if to say, "See, we did it! Thanks for all the help!"

Photos at http://www.spokane.net/stay_connected/HotTopics_DuckHero.aspx


____
The hero’s genuine caring and willingness to act is obviously inspiring. Interesting to note how the mother duck and his co-workers responded immediately to his authentic leadership in the situation.

Other points to ponder:
-the mother duck’s determined decision making in the face of obvious risks to her children
-the trust of the newborn ducks in the mother
-which of the following would make any difference to Joel’s sense of satisfaction:
    o if he received no public recognition of his kind act
    o if his co-workers did not join hands