It’s your Kuleana to pay attention! My ROA coach is none other than Katie Couric.

I could not have planned this better if I tried.

Yesterday I posted here at MWAC about the responsibility that managers have for leadership, and translating that can-be-intimidating-but-doesn't-have-to-be phrase into making things clear.

Well, sometimes making things clear is as easy as having a well-timed discussion that we in Hawai‘i call “Let’s Talk Story.”

Here's what happened. Read it at Talking Story and then come back here. I just parked a trackback link there to make it easy for you to return.

Back?

The moral of the story is this: As a manager you don't have to think of everything, create everything, and reinvent everything by yourself. You just have to seize Kuleana, your personal responsibility, for paying attention to what is going on around you, and then step back to ask yourself, “Is this something I can use? How shall I use it?” Then you try whatever you come up with — with your business partners (and we know who I mean, right? Every employee a Business Partner? Yep.)

When you grab it, Kuleana opportunity helps you get ROA

What's ROA? Return on your Attention.

If I had to single out the one business “discipline” I’ve scrambled to learn more about in recent years, it would be marketing — and I still study it, and play with it daily. What I’ve learned about marketing can be reduced to this: Attention is an extremely valuable and very scarce commodity. When someone gives it to you, you better be able to deliver and make it worth their while, so that they in turn will want to make their own Investments and Relationships work with you.
—From the Talking Story archives: The 3 R’s in Business: ROI, ROR, and ROA.

What I'm talking about here is just slightly different from the excerpt above. You give yourself return on your attention too.

You know who helps me practice optimizing my attention? Katie Couric (did you know she is a video blogger?) When I can catch it, I make a point of watching the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric because she does such a terrific job as both anchor and their managing editor (...and I have a crush on Steve Hartman because of the exceptional job he does with Assignment America.) I don't watch much TV, but I do think that CBS does an exceptional job with their news coverage and their story creation (in my humble opinion also proving why TV is here to stay no matter how media-smart we get on the internet.) Katie was the one who mentioned the Forever Stamp the other night, and got me thinking about it,

...which led to me writing this post: Is Forever a good business strategy?

...and then this one because of the talk story that happened: “Just what could you pull off in 90 days?”

...and then this one that you are now reading: It’s your Kuleana to pay attention! My ROA coach is none other than Katie Couric.

All because of the Kuleana opportunity
I feel I need to optimize,
because I am aware that
managers have given me their precious, valuable attention
hoping for ideas they can use right away in their workplaces.

Great ROA for me this week! For as I started with above, I could not have planned this better if I tried.

What are you paying to attention right now, and how are you connecting it to your Kuleana?

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Ho‘ohana with us!
~ Rosa Say
More about me here.