Last year, Tania and I and our friends Chad and Adele spent the day walking the beach in Malibu. At the end of a beautiful day of sun, surf and conversation with great friends, we started rooting around for a place to eat. We went to a wine store first to stock up on spirits (spiritual growth is very important to me) and I found a vintage bottle of Krug Grand Cru. This champagne is very expensive and is almost impossible to find in Canada, so it's a great treat on a special occasion. Due to the US recession it was on sale for 50% off. A no-brainer. We asked the vendor to recommend a restaurant and he told us to try "Nobu" across the street, but warned us that it can take two weeks to get a reservation. We troddled off across the street, Krug in-hand to negotiate a reservation. Perhaps it was the fact we are Canadian, or it was the champagne we asked them to chill for us, or it was Chad's Black Amex. I don't know. But they let us in for an hour later. (I think it was the Canadian Factor.)
We asked the waiter to simply "bring us your best best stuff". I like going to a restaurant this way. The staff bring their signature items and we never know what's coming. We ate wave after wave of the most interesting sushi creations, drinking the bottle which the wine vendor said would be a "spiritual experience" (it was), watching celebrities eat all around us, and then finished with a chocolate spring roll. We all agreed it was a top five restaurant experience. For me it was the top one. Hands down.
My favourite concert was watching the Barenaked Ladies do an a cappella version of their most complex song "one week". My favourite musical moment was having the Canadian Tenors sing happy birthday to me (surreal but nice.)
My favourite sports moment was when Canada won the hockey gold medal in this recent olympics.
My favourite relationship moment was the first six hours of my romance with Tania and more specifically the first time I looked her in the eye.
My favourite business moment was finding out a client had rescued his marriage from the brink of a nasty divorce.
Children being born. Travel. Professional achievements. These are the highlights of our lives, what makes life worth living and what the stretching and striving is all about. The list is a dynamic thing and cultivating the presence of mind to actively seek out these experiences is the logic behind a bucket list.
It's possible to have a top five list that changes every day, if not every week, month or year.
For help with your bucket list go to http://www.stepup.net/
Friday, July 23, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
ghosts in the machine
Yvon Chouinard–the founder of Patagonia and the very successful environmental designer, climber, fly fisherman and outdoor clothing entrepreneur–earned his MBA early in his business career. "MBA", in his case, stands for "management by absence". YC spends much of his time surfing, fishing, travelling and supporting environmental causes while a competent team takes care of business while he is away.
While he may not be physically present all that much, people ask themselves frequently: "what would YC do?" His spirit is very much present, and still felt, almost like a ghost. This will likely be true, perhaps literally so, long after his death.
Ghosts are everywhere and are sometimes a help and sometimes a hinderance.
Today I just played my worst round of golf in some time, taking no less than 17 penalty strokes, mostly for lost balls. I played a course I've played often but inconsistently and wildly. I have bad memories of most of the holes there–times I'd hook the ball into the water or slice it into the trees–and I repeated most of those errors today. The same was also true of a few holes I've always played well on; I played well on those today as well.
Bad memories of past failures often lead to anxiety and fear which undermines the confidence we need to perform any skill well, just as good memories support our rise in confidence. Breaking the pattern of "residual misery", by even accidentally reversing the usual action and result, gives us a chance to overwrite previous actions and results and start new patterns.
For help with shifting out of bad patterns into new good patterns go to http://www.stepup.net/.
While he may not be physically present all that much, people ask themselves frequently: "what would YC do?" His spirit is very much present, and still felt, almost like a ghost. This will likely be true, perhaps literally so, long after his death.
Ghosts are everywhere and are sometimes a help and sometimes a hinderance.
Today I just played my worst round of golf in some time, taking no less than 17 penalty strokes, mostly for lost balls. I played a course I've played often but inconsistently and wildly. I have bad memories of most of the holes there–times I'd hook the ball into the water or slice it into the trees–and I repeated most of those errors today. The same was also true of a few holes I've always played well on; I played well on those today as well.
Bad memories of past failures often lead to anxiety and fear which undermines the confidence we need to perform any skill well, just as good memories support our rise in confidence. Breaking the pattern of "residual misery", by even accidentally reversing the usual action and result, gives us a chance to overwrite previous actions and results and start new patterns.
For help with shifting out of bad patterns into new good patterns go to http://www.stepup.net/.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
the yin and yang of selling
The Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner stated that the most creative boys are sensitive (empathetic) and the most creative girls are aggressive (ambitious). What he was saying is that for a boy to reach his full potential he would need to integrate his feminine qualities and a girl would need to integrate her masculine. The path to fulfillment lies in the integrity of the male (yang) and female (yin) energies we all possess.
The problem with this of course is the resistance men have to their feminine side and women to their masculine. There are many severe social judgements that come from being either a sensitive man or an aggressive female.
In business, I see this challenge showing up mostly in the selling process.
The words "selling" and "sales" and "salesmen" conjure up all sorts of negative images and connotations for people who operate professional service practices.
Obviously there is no business without a "sale", because without a "sale" there is no "customer" with a "need" that I can "service" in exchange for a "check".
One of the biggest barriers to a successful business is the resistance of service provider has to being a sales person, operating a sales process and making sales.
Most of the resistance comes from the first generation of professional sales. This was a very masculine era, when salemen had a tendency to push products on prospects using whatever manipulations, "buyer psychology" and trickery they could muster. As generation one selling matured, the profession and discipline of sales emerged. This included sophisticated needs analysis, presentation skills, objection handling and closing. The good thing about first generation selling was that the salespeople were ambitious. The negative was that they were overly aggressive in their willingness to do anything to get the sale.
As the saying goes, people love to buy but hate to be sold.The second generation of selling grew up as a direct reaction to the overly aggressive and manipulative darkside of the first generation. This also marked the entrance of women into the sales force en masse. The concept of "relationship selling" emerged to reflect the introduction of empathetic skills into the process: asking questions, listening, paraphrasing, support. The idea was to build a relationship with a prospect first and the commerce would then flow naturally out of the rapport and trust and goodwill residing in the relationship. The professional sales person would "draw the prospect out" and the prospect would come to the conclusion to purchase all on their own, without any prodding or solicitation on the part of the sales person. During this phase, sales people created clever and often useless and meaningless euphemisms for "sales person", such as "client relationship manager" or "director of business development", as if prospective buyers would not see through the ruse. As the pendulum swung, relationship selling added some much needed sensitivity and compassion, but became overly passive as it left prospects to figure things out on their own, without the direct intervention of the sales person. Prospects don't always know what they need and they are not always the ones with the sophisticated knowledge about what their options are. Relationship builders saw ambition as inappropriate and morally bad and thus would not engage, even if it would have been really helpful.
Third generation selling integrates the best of the female and male approaches to selling. It is both empathetic and ambitious as it aligns the values and needs of both the seller and the buyer into a workable professional relationship. It unites good open-ended questions with technical needs analysis, listening and presenting, objection handling and gentle support in moving forward. A third generation sales person is a coach who helps a prospect come to understand what they need and want, see what's in the way and then develop the mindsets and mechanisms to overcome the obstacles. Third generation selling is a professional intervention in the life of another person. It's neither passive nor aggressive, but assertive and ethical. The professional sales coach has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the customer but is not afraid to take the lead in the relationship.
For more on the possibilities of integrating a coaching mindset and methodology into your sales process go to http://stepup.net/.
The problem with this of course is the resistance men have to their feminine side and women to their masculine. There are many severe social judgements that come from being either a sensitive man or an aggressive female.
In business, I see this challenge showing up mostly in the selling process.
The words "selling" and "sales" and "salesmen" conjure up all sorts of negative images and connotations for people who operate professional service practices.
Obviously there is no business without a "sale", because without a "sale" there is no "customer" with a "need" that I can "service" in exchange for a "check".
One of the biggest barriers to a successful business is the resistance of service provider has to being a sales person, operating a sales process and making sales.
Most of the resistance comes from the first generation of professional sales. This was a very masculine era, when salemen had a tendency to push products on prospects using whatever manipulations, "buyer psychology" and trickery they could muster. As generation one selling matured, the profession and discipline of sales emerged. This included sophisticated needs analysis, presentation skills, objection handling and closing. The good thing about first generation selling was that the salespeople were ambitious. The negative was that they were overly aggressive in their willingness to do anything to get the sale.
As the saying goes, people love to buy but hate to be sold.The second generation of selling grew up as a direct reaction to the overly aggressive and manipulative darkside of the first generation. This also marked the entrance of women into the sales force en masse. The concept of "relationship selling" emerged to reflect the introduction of empathetic skills into the process: asking questions, listening, paraphrasing, support. The idea was to build a relationship with a prospect first and the commerce would then flow naturally out of the rapport and trust and goodwill residing in the relationship. The professional sales person would "draw the prospect out" and the prospect would come to the conclusion to purchase all on their own, without any prodding or solicitation on the part of the sales person. During this phase, sales people created clever and often useless and meaningless euphemisms for "sales person", such as "client relationship manager" or "director of business development", as if prospective buyers would not see through the ruse. As the pendulum swung, relationship selling added some much needed sensitivity and compassion, but became overly passive as it left prospects to figure things out on their own, without the direct intervention of the sales person. Prospects don't always know what they need and they are not always the ones with the sophisticated knowledge about what their options are. Relationship builders saw ambition as inappropriate and morally bad and thus would not engage, even if it would have been really helpful.
Third generation selling integrates the best of the female and male approaches to selling. It is both empathetic and ambitious as it aligns the values and needs of both the seller and the buyer into a workable professional relationship. It unites good open-ended questions with technical needs analysis, listening and presenting, objection handling and gentle support in moving forward. A third generation sales person is a coach who helps a prospect come to understand what they need and want, see what's in the way and then develop the mindsets and mechanisms to overcome the obstacles. Third generation selling is a professional intervention in the life of another person. It's neither passive nor aggressive, but assertive and ethical. The professional sales coach has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of the customer but is not afraid to take the lead in the relationship.
For more on the possibilities of integrating a coaching mindset and methodology into your sales process go to http://stepup.net/.
perfect enough
Stephen Covey was the first author I know to make the distinction between doing work which is urgent rather than doing work which is important.
The idea here is that many of us get caught up fighting short term fires, oiling the squeaky wheel or handling "apparent" emergencies at the expense of working on the activities that add real long-term value. Much of what appears in front of me as urgent "must-do-right-now-or-the-wheels-fall-off-the-wagon", proves out in the longer term not to have mattered at all, or at least to have mattered very little. Meanwhile, what truly matters, what is whispering rather than screaming for my attention, gets bumped to the back burner of low priority items.
Many really successful people discover this the painful way as they achieve material success at the expense of marriages, relationships with children, health and free time to spend on interesting hobbies and other intellectual pursuits outside of business–all the stuff that proves out to be the important stuff, but did not appear to be so at the time.
Dimension one then is a focus on the important rather than the merely urgent.
Another pursuit that is equally troubling is perfectionism. The drive towards perfection is a really the perversion of the drive towards excellence. Perfectionism is a very destructive force that operates under the mindset that "nothing is ever good enough" (or the more personal "I'm not good enough.") The mindset under the drive towards excellence is the idea that "things can always be made better". This mindset opens up possibilities of creativity and innovation without activating the law of diminishing returns brought on by perfectionism.
At some point in the process of improving something, we attain a place where it is good enough and sufficient to satisfy the requirements and expectations of our customers or other patrons. All the work we do past the point of sufficiency adds genuine value–it does make the thing better–but in a way that does not really matter as much to the people we serve. This is the point of diminishing returns when we would be better served investing all that energy, attention, creativity and other resources on improving other things that are not yet at that point of sufficiency.
Dimension two then is a focus on the sufficient rather than the perfect.
If we created a two by two matrix out of these two dimensions, I'd say that many of us are wasting our energy on trying to do urgent but unimportant tasks perfectly.
It seems to me that a better way to invest myself is working on important things to the point where they are sufficient to satisfy the requirements: to work on the things that really matter until they are "perfect enough".
For support on changing your mindset, go to http://stepup.net/.
The idea here is that many of us get caught up fighting short term fires, oiling the squeaky wheel or handling "apparent" emergencies at the expense of working on the activities that add real long-term value. Much of what appears in front of me as urgent "must-do-right-now-or-the-wheels-fall-off-the-wagon", proves out in the longer term not to have mattered at all, or at least to have mattered very little. Meanwhile, what truly matters, what is whispering rather than screaming for my attention, gets bumped to the back burner of low priority items.
Many really successful people discover this the painful way as they achieve material success at the expense of marriages, relationships with children, health and free time to spend on interesting hobbies and other intellectual pursuits outside of business–all the stuff that proves out to be the important stuff, but did not appear to be so at the time.
Dimension one then is a focus on the important rather than the merely urgent.
Another pursuit that is equally troubling is perfectionism. The drive towards perfection is a really the perversion of the drive towards excellence. Perfectionism is a very destructive force that operates under the mindset that "nothing is ever good enough" (or the more personal "I'm not good enough.") The mindset under the drive towards excellence is the idea that "things can always be made better". This mindset opens up possibilities of creativity and innovation without activating the law of diminishing returns brought on by perfectionism.
At some point in the process of improving something, we attain a place where it is good enough and sufficient to satisfy the requirements and expectations of our customers or other patrons. All the work we do past the point of sufficiency adds genuine value–it does make the thing better–but in a way that does not really matter as much to the people we serve. This is the point of diminishing returns when we would be better served investing all that energy, attention, creativity and other resources on improving other things that are not yet at that point of sufficiency.
Dimension two then is a focus on the sufficient rather than the perfect.
If we created a two by two matrix out of these two dimensions, I'd say that many of us are wasting our energy on trying to do urgent but unimportant tasks perfectly.
It seems to me that a better way to invest myself is working on important things to the point where they are sufficient to satisfy the requirements: to work on the things that really matter until they are "perfect enough".
For support on changing your mindset, go to http://stepup.net/.
what would steve do?
Many Christian people have key chains or pendants with the letters "WWJD" on them. This stands for "what would Jesus do?".
The essential choice any of us have in each moment is: "what decision creates the most value?". WWJD is one a way that Christians tap into that value question, by invoking the presence of greatness in the process of making decisions and determining direction, particularly in times of moral quandary or ambiguity or uncertainty. The question seems to tap into a very complex value structure in a very simple way.
There is a secular version of the question that is very useful. For the past few months I've been designing a coaching app that will see it's way onto my iPad and iPhone. I have a tendency to make things overly complicated and I really admire Apple for its approach to everything. When Apple first introduced laptops they created a blockbuster product. Then came the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad–all blockbusters. When Apple opened its retails stores they eventually became the most successful retail operation on the basis of dollars per square foot. It's rare for a company to have even one blockbuster. I admire how Apple approaches innovation and I admire the leadership of Steve Jobs, as they both seek the ultimate simplicity of form and function.
The question "what would Apple do?" captures a complex Gestalt of philosophies, mindsets, processes and methodologies in a simple way that provides immense guidance in times of moral quandary or ambiguity or uncertainty.
It's possible to design that question using the inspiration of any great person.
One of our clients is rebuilding his business and for direction he is looking at three people he greatly admires: Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet and Clint Eastwood. He his imagining what a business would be like if those three men went into partnership.
Next time I'm stuck, all I have to do is think about someone I greatly admire and ask what they would do in the same situation. The person could be someone I know or don't know, someone famous or not famous, someone real or fictional (from literature or film.) What follows is an inspiration to guide me to the next level.
For assistance when you are stuck, go to http://www.stepup.net/ for guidance.
The essential choice any of us have in each moment is: "what decision creates the most value?". WWJD is one a way that Christians tap into that value question, by invoking the presence of greatness in the process of making decisions and determining direction, particularly in times of moral quandary or ambiguity or uncertainty. The question seems to tap into a very complex value structure in a very simple way.
There is a secular version of the question that is very useful. For the past few months I've been designing a coaching app that will see it's way onto my iPad and iPhone. I have a tendency to make things overly complicated and I really admire Apple for its approach to everything. When Apple first introduced laptops they created a blockbuster product. Then came the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad–all blockbusters. When Apple opened its retails stores they eventually became the most successful retail operation on the basis of dollars per square foot. It's rare for a company to have even one blockbuster. I admire how Apple approaches innovation and I admire the leadership of Steve Jobs, as they both seek the ultimate simplicity of form and function.
The question "what would Apple do?" captures a complex Gestalt of philosophies, mindsets, processes and methodologies in a simple way that provides immense guidance in times of moral quandary or ambiguity or uncertainty.
It's possible to design that question using the inspiration of any great person.
One of our clients is rebuilding his business and for direction he is looking at three people he greatly admires: Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet and Clint Eastwood. He his imagining what a business would be like if those three men went into partnership.
Next time I'm stuck, all I have to do is think about someone I greatly admire and ask what they would do in the same situation. The person could be someone I know or don't know, someone famous or not famous, someone real or fictional (from literature or film.) What follows is an inspiration to guide me to the next level.
For assistance when you are stuck, go to http://www.stepup.net/ for guidance.
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