i-TFTD #174

#174-1. If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.

-Julia Sorel

#174-2. I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation.

-Mike Todd

#174-3. It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'

-Sam Levenson

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Learning anything requires taking chances. Children do that a lot and learn rapidly: to walk, talk and everything else.

Being rich is not necessarily about the amount of money. Ask anybody you think is rich—their definition of a rich person would be someone else.

At least one pair of hands—ours—should be working on our cause! Sometimes that is not the case because we are busy wringing them in frustration at not receiving support from others, or using them to point fingers. Recall if there have been situations in your life when someone did not act in the way you expected them to, and you figured out a solution yourself and eventually felt satisfied about your achievement. Maybe the person provided the best possible help by not “helping”.

i-TFTD #173: The Biggest Mind-Flip in Business Today

by William C. Taylor (highlights mine)

William C. Taylor is the co-founder of Fast Company and the author of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win, with Polly LaBarre.

October 05, 2006

There is nothing more powerful in business than a truly original idea -- a distinctive point of view that redefines an industry, a breakthrough design that transforms a product category. In an era of hyper-competition and non-stop innovation, the one sustainable form of market leadership is thought leadership -- generating better ideas and making smarter adjustments than the competition.

So where do great ideas come from? The traditional answer is the stuff of entrepreneurial folklore, the creation myth of the creative process. Big ideas come from big thinkers: the eccentric genius, the inspired founder, the visionary CEO. Business history is filled with tales of breakthroughs fueled by unique imagination and individual determination. In this old model of innovation, the leader did the thinking, rank-and-file employees did the executing. If you were in charge, you were the "smartest person in the room."

But what happens when rivals become so numerous, when markets become so unpredictable, when technologies move so quickly, that no individual leader, no matter how inspired, can possibly think of everything? Then it becomes necessary to invent a new model of innovation. Today, one of the defining responsibilities of leadership is to attract the best ideas from the most people—to master a world in which "nobody is as smart as everybody."

This is, I believe, the most important leadership mind-flip in business today. According to Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, the computer-book publisher, and an evangelist for open-source innovation, creativity is no longer about which companies have the most visionary executives, but who has the most compelling "architecture of participation." That is, which companies make it easy, interesting and rewarding for a wide range of contributors to offer ideas, solve problems and improve products? Ultimately, he argues, the companies that are most likely to dominate their business are the ones most adept at harnessing the collective intelligence of everyone with whom they do business.

Leaders who embrace this new mindset ask different questions of themselves than other leaders. Questions such as: Can I exude personal strength, even charisma, along with intellectual humility? Am I the kind of person with whom other smart people want to work and contribute ideas? Can I conduct myself as openly and transparently as the participants in my project?

Find the right answers to those questions, and you’re likely find yourself at the center of exciting innovations -- many of them from contributors whom you’ve never met.

_____

The crazy, creative person stereotype is being replaced by the incremental innovation by many good thinking people. The fact that small, continuous improvements outweigh occasional, big-bang breakthroughs was strikingly demonstrated by Japanese manufacturing companies. The innovation process requires different kinds of contributors for success: questioners, dreamers, modifiers, adapters, practical converters, action-oriented implementers, business-oriented managers...

i-TFTD #172

#172-1. I love men who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection.

-Thomas Paine

#172-2. The man who has gotten everything he wants is all in favor of peace and order.

-Jawaharlal Nehru

#172-3. If you do not have peace in your life, you, like many others, have probably not fully understood its message.  You receive exactly what you put out, or, "As you sow, so shall you reap."

-Thomas D. Willhite, Living Synergistically

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Smiling and feeling positive when things are going well is easy. More admirable is to be able to do that when things aren't.

Lack of peace or order could be an indication of intolerable imbalances. It is the duty of leadership to probe that and address the root cause.

The simple but profound law of cause and effect operates at multiple levels. We know it but try to forget or ignore it. The heart-rending situation in the Mumbai terror attack of November 2008 makes many wonder, "Why? How to prevent such random killing of innocents?" While the authorities analyze and execute a logical course of action, I am struck by the statements of a spiritual guru (my paraphrasing): Nothing much has fundamentally changed in the forces driving the human mind. Unless we collectively do something about the violence inside each of our minds, disastrous actions by humans are likely to recur in different forms.

i-TFTD #171

#171-1. Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.

-Sam Ewig

#171-2. A lot of our 'busy-ness' is a way for us to avoid thinking about what is most important.

-Kristen Lippincott

#171-3. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

-Hugh Macleod

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The first one means, in order to build our character, we should gravitate towards situations requiring a struggle. I have many times experienced a discovery of my own strengths after facing a difficult period. Sometimes previously unknown weaknesses also become evident. Both are useful.

The second one resonates with me. We all practice degrees of mental laziness. One might avoid dwelling on aspects of health or family, instead plunging into work. When facing a setback I might concentrate on detailed criticism of others rather than asking what I could do better.

It is said that talent alone is not sufficient, but that is the subject of other i-TFTDs. One can use the third to assess one's progress. How often do I feel the need for extraneous support for my success, how many times do I rely on prayer (by itself, not necessarily a bad thing), how much do I attribute events to luck?

i-TFTD #170: Children's Day Special

November 14, the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, is celebrated as Children’s Day. Here's a special bonus edition of i-TFTD:

#170-1. If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.

-Abigail Van Buren

#170-2. You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

-Franklin P. Jones

#170-3. Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.

-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

#170-4. First you have to teach a child to talk, then you have to teach it to be quiet.

-Prochnow

#170-5. Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?

-Jane Nelson

#170-6. Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.

-Michael Levine

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Substitute children in the above with subordinates and parent with leader, to get useful insights on career development, leadership qualities and giving feedback. The last one is a killer: merely having people report into you does not make you a leader.

i-TFTD #169

#169-1. Careers, like rockets, don't always take off on schedule. The key is to keep working the engines.

-Gary Sinise

#169-2. Learn to pause... or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you.

-Doug King

#169-3. The best careers advice to give to the young is, 'Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it'.

-Katherine Whitehorn

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The first sounds simple but it is worth remembering that "working the engines" does not include blaming, moaning and whining (doing this regularly would make us what some trainers catchily call the BMW personality).

An occasional thoughtful pause is more productive than the continuous running around that gives the comfortable feeling of action. It even applies to thinking itself. When absorbing new information or ideas, intelligent people are especially prone to quick judgement and conclusions. A pause often uncovers additional nuances.

If you do not consider yourself as part of the young category, learn to like aspects of what you get paid for, learn to increase  the proportion of time every week that you spend on activities you really enjoy. These often provide clues to your innate talents and strengths.

i-TFTD #168

#168-1. If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will.

-Abraham Lincoln

#168-2. Wisdom doesn't automatically come with old age. Nothing does - except wrinkles. It's true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place.

-Anon

#168-3. Don't watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.

-Sam Levenson

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The converse of the first quote is also true. If we look for the good in people, we will surely find something.

The second might sound negative but one positive way to look at it is, wisdom is not correlated with age so a young person might also come out with a wise suggestion.