A colleague of mine said this the other day (in the context of some technical issue he was dealing with) and I thought it good advice for other areas of life as well. Sometimes you have to pick your battles and some are just not worth fighting. Other ones, are worth overcoming the impossible for.

I find the leadership is really about storytelling. First, having the skills to survey the landscape, recognize the patterns, and choose an appropriate path and second, and perhaps even more important, the ability to paint that picture for those that you may lead. To make them see themselves as part of the story. To paint a picture for others to see begins with framing a scene and then showing it.

There is a spectrum of emotion that is said to rule the stock market that runs from fear to greed. With the recent events in the financial markets making headlines, I have been thinking about the factors of fear and greed and how they affect our individual or organizational risk tolerance. If you have assets and resources adequate but not extraneous, the fear of loss may keep you in conservative investments. If you have an excess of resources or are investing with money you are prepared to lose, you can be driven by greed.

In other contexts, I prefer to draw the risk tolerance curve below.

When you are contemplating a decision, do you have more to lose or more to gain? This, more than any other thing, will determine your boldness, your willingness to accept risk, and the lengths to which you will go to preserve the status quo.

I used to work in an intrapreneurial group at a huge, multinational corporation. Although by the corporate standards it was a "start-up," I recognized immediately the difference between this group and the actual start-ups I had worked with. This was no scrappy start-up. As a case in point, we had a full-time attorney, PR professional and agency, and trained marketers making sure we used the brand appropriately. The company knew that at even the most aggressive projections, the revenue and margin that would be brought by this new business was less than the value of its brand in the marketplace. Thus, there was more to lose than gain. Which is one of the reasons why, in my opinion, these initiatives were not successful under that corporate umbrella? Start-ups work when there is more to gain than lose.

I see this curve playing out in the discussions about the use of "social media" in corporate contexts. Some companies large and small are jumping in and now have Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and active outreach by more than one "department" of the company. Other consumer brands are reluctant to jump in and lose control over the message, the brand, or the customer experience (all things that might be a false sense of control anyway). Tara Hunt's new book The Whuffie Factor outlines this well. When I met her last week at WebVisions, she said several times that her next book will be about the cultural change that is required to "do" social media and create social capital in the marketplace. I think she'll find that companies must create environments where they have more to gain than lose by their efforts to see the change take hold.

In fact, this even applies to personal motivation factors and change management. In Alan Webber's Rules of Thumb book, he says that there is a formula for predicting change: "Change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change." Said another way, change can happen when the risk of gain is more than the risk of loss.

I first heard this quote from a minister at a Portland-area church event and thought it was fantastic. It applies in so many situations and is such a good reminder about human nature.

If you want to use the cartoon for non-commercial purposes, make sure to give me the props and linked back to http://jenniferbdavis.blogspot.com.

If you were to make a list of the most and least effective meetings that you have, what would your list look like. Here is my first draft.


I have written before about meeting effectiveness and I am interested in your thoughts about how to make this staple of the corporate life more effective (or how to effectively end of life the practice all together).

Related to my earlier post about there not being a shortage of ideas, there is a natural selection process for ideas. In most organization, especially lean start-ups, only a handful of ideas get any resources, so they have to be good ones. That is a good tension to have. I have been told before that when money or resources exceeds ideas, then companies are in big trouble. I haven't ever experienced that situation and hope I never do!

The kids were playing in the yard today and I was enjoying hearing them decide what characters they were going to be. It made me think that at some point we stop deciding what characters we are, but that doesn't keep us from being characters in terms of having a defined dress code, language, location, strengths, weaknesses, and purpose for being. We are all characters, but we don't put much thought into the choices we have about all of these things.

So, if we were to imagine something different for ourselves (personally, professionally, in our work, in our play), what would it look like? I can't help but believe that daring to imagine would in itself open doors.

You are free to use the doodle above for any non-commercial purpose as long as you give me credit and link back to http://jenniferbdavis.blogspot.com.

I have been reading Alan Webber's new book, Rules of Thumb. In it, he offers and describes 52 different rules of business that he has learned over the years.

The concept in the cartoon above is a saying that I think I started repeating since my very first week on my very first job out of college. There was never a shortage of ideas. Things that could be done. Places to go. People to see. Products to build. Features to add. Only a shortage of everything else to make ideas reality: time, money, expertise, capacity, etc.

To me this is not only a inescapable truth, but it is also a blessing. Not all ideas are good ones. Without constraint the best ideas wouldn't win and we'd waste a lot of time. The corollary to this (and perhaps a future cartoon) would be "May the Best Ideas Win."

As always, feel free to use the cartoon for any non-commercial purpose, as long as you give me credit and link back to http://jenniferbdavis.blogspot.com. Thanks!

My friend and coach, Julie Naster, posted a great article about the danger of getting facts and interpretation mixed. Things she calls "assertions" are statements of fact, like the weather is 45 degrees. "Assessments" are the judgements we apply to those, for instance "it is cold and dreary" or "it is crisp and refreshing."

If we collapse the two or confuse them, we are ruled by our unguarded thoughts instead of having mastery over them. This is the little collapse that can lead to an avalanche in our mood or perspective, trapping us below it.

When you catch yourself making a judgement statement today see if it is fact and if there are alternative explanations that might be more useful to you?

Photo by Nebulous1 on flickr.

We've all been in bad meetings. Heck, we have lead them ourselves.

We've also been in great ones where people left with the tools and answers they needed. Where team members are aligned, where tough issues are tackled, and teamwork is demonstrated. These happen periodically so, the myth of the productive meeting persists.

At Intel they give classes on "Effective Meetings" (assuming that isn't an oxymoron) hoping to increase the hit rate of great meetings.

Seth Godin had a recent post about how to "solve your meeting problems." It included some provocative ideas like setting the default meeting length to 5 minutes (instead of one hour), removing chairs from conference rooms, or even creating a public voting system where people rate meetings according to usefulness.

Some companies have banned meetings all together. No meetings - only conversations and decisions. Is it just symantecs or is there something fundamentally different about a company without meetings? How else does the corporate culture, physical office layout, and work itself have to chance to adapt to an environment without meetings?

What has worked for you?

Meetings may be an unavoidable part of our professional lives, but how can they be more productive? It is a better presentation. More preparation. The "pre-meeting" (heaven help us). Is it an egg timer or the insistance on agendas? Or, is it as artist Craig Damrauer suggests above...all about the snacks?

Last night, a speaker confronted us with the importance of truth telling and its relationship to trust building. I was reminded that it takes courage and a genuine interest in others to tell them the truth, especially if that truth isn't what they want to hear.

You can tell someone that they have a peppercorn between their front teeth, but do you have the courage to tell them how they could be more effective at work?

I have been truly blessed by colleagues that have challenged me, when when the message they had to deliver was a tough one. They made me think. Really, think. And for that I am thankful.

You have to really care about the person to risk the relationship to tell them the truth and to make them think. As the quote below illustrates, they might hate you in the end.

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you: But if you
really make them think; they'll hate you." - Don Marquis

But without truth telling, there isn't much ofa relationship anyway.

I read Seth Godin's new book Tribes. In it, he makes some very provocative points about the fallacy of quality.

"Quality is not only not necessary, for amny items it's undesirable. If we
define quality as regularly meeting the measured specifications for an item,
then quality matters a lot for something like a pacemaker. It doesn't
matter at all for a $3,000 haute couture dress.

More fashion = less need for quality."

I found this statement very interesting. If something is more fashionable, it doesn't have to be "six sigma." More art. Less science.

I wonder if there isn't a graph that would show that people's expectation of quality rises as commoditization takes over a product. It becomes less unique. Less differentiated. And as a result, the marketplace raises the standards of "sameness." Predictability is favored over excellence. The restaurant franchise wins out over the brilliant chef. The factory pumping out millions of widgets wins out over the inventor.

Seth's point, and one that he doesn't advocate alone, is that quality is something the "factories" used to value, but that in many ways we have evolved beyond it. With the use of technology. With a growing discontent for sameness. We are demanding leadership and sometimes (or ALL the time) leadership is messy.

Makes me wonder how much we as leaders of companies, organizations, families, and product lines should emphasize quality, in its traditional definition. Maybe more effort needs to be put into true differentiation and a value that extends beyond predictable mediocrity.

As if the crushing financial burden of Sarbanes-Oxley is not enough, now it is pretty clear to me that Generation Y employees won't probably work at public companies. The controls, approval levels, and other things that are nearly required to maintain good SEC status, smiling auditors, and shareholders (who might be assumed to be more worried about the companies in which they invest stealing from them, than they are those companies being successful in their markets), all lead to a corporate culture that is too old-school for this new batch of employees. No wonder this generation is highly entrepreneurial.

See repost of a portion of a blog post from the good folks at 37Signals and tell me whether or not the public corporate entity has a chance...

The traditional workplace is broken
(Show original item)

In the article entitled, "Want to attract and retain Gen Y? Better rethink everything", The Arizona Republic explains how employers can attract younger workers and talked about 37Signals.

President Jason Fried says today’s employers present the biggest roadblock. “Simply put, employees are treated like children. They are not allowed to think for themselves, and there are too many layers of approval, just too much insulation that prevents anyone from doing anything. The traditional workplace is broken, and until someone realizes that, there’s always going to be conflict.”

This suffocation by protocol is dead on and will never allow an employee to “go beyond” or achieve something extra for the company. This is a critical link that most organizations continually fail to acknowledge. They are too focused on ensuring employees do no wrong that they actually prevent them from achieving anything beyond status quo."

As the economy tightens around us, I think we all feel a little poorer than we did even a few months ago. I read a few things in the past week that I have been thinking about.

1. Save Pennies, Spend Dollars
When times are tight (or perceived to be tight), it is still important to do the important things. Spending your child to private school or investing in a new business are those types of important things. To spend dollars on those things, you may have to scrimp on the things that don't matter as much. Save pennies elsewhere to make bold, purposeful investments where you need to. So, if celebrating a milestone birthday with a loved one is one of those important things, celebrate big (and bike to work the rest of the month)!

2. All Economics is Micro-Economics
I know the academics would disagree, but for most of us the only economics that matters is that which is very personal to us, close in physical proximity or time. Of course, the world economy is intertwined, but most of don't need millions of jobs, we only need one. We don't need a large bank, we just need someone to give us a return on the use of our money (which could be a micro-loan we make). The economy in our local community and the tax-base of public services we use is more important to us than the larger trends of housing starts across the country. Even our own retirement portfolio is only super critical if we are actively spending it (close proximity in the dimension of time).

3. Wealth is a Feeling, not a Bank Balance
I remember hearing a joke: "I have all the money I will ever need," the comic said. "As long as I don't spend another dime." How true. A feeling of wealth is still comes down to spending less than we earn, individually. Mr. Macawber, from Dickens' fame, wrote pointly about this type of micro-economics when he said that "to have an income of twenty pounds per annum, and spend twenty pounds and sixpence, is to be the most miserable of men; whereas, to have an income of only twenty pounds, and spend but nineteen pounds and sixpence is to be the happiest of mortals." Apparently, wealth is an emotion, like contentment or anxiety, that can be managed by perception and by personal action.

So, although we need to be concerned about the economy, about the bank bail-outs, the political races, and other things that good citizens need to stay up with, remember that the micro-economics matter the most. I wish you all wealth, in the truest emotional sense of the word.