Talking Story with Say Leadership Coaching

Color Outside Your Lines

2009 is teaching us to be brave. We are finding we need to reinvent, and break out of any little boxes we may have put ourselves in.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I stretch and pull at my own business models (I have three of them going right now), and I realized something: For me to reinvent my models, I probably have to start with reinventing me first.

But do I have to reinvent, or do I just have to open up, and let some parts of me come out and play more than they have before? Isn’t that what Palena ‘ole teaches us? Palena ‘ole is one of the 9 key concepts of Managing with Aloha: It is the abundance mentality of unlimited capacity. As we learn Palena ‘ole practices, we learn to dabble in each of our four-fold capacities; physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.

As I’ve thought about this over the last few months, I’ve decided that one way I would love to ‘dabble’ and to see me change (yep, me) is within Le‘ale‘a, the spirit of playfulness. For most of my life I’ve been so darned serious. Playful businesses can be successful just as much as serious ones can, right? The prospect seems much more joyful to me.

You’ve been here as I’ve explored some of these thoughts. Remember A Whole New Mind? And Dwayne’s birthday... remember the image I had there?

Well, this past weekend I decided that I am going to learn something that is way outside the box for me. I am going to literally color outside the lines I’ve closed myself in, and learn watercolor painting. Found the perfect book to help me with my first playful swipes at this: Watercolor for the Artistically Undiscovered, one of those crafty books in the Klutz Press series. I love the approach by authors Thacher Hurd and John Cassidy:

“Why You Can’t Not Paint”

Relax for a moment while we probe into your mind and read your innermost thoughts. You’re looking at this book and reading these words because deep inside you, some little part of you would like to learn to paint or draw. But, at the same time, you’re confused, frustrated. Why? Because your artistic talent is in remission. It was last seen in a fingerpainted flower your mother stuck to the refrigerator. Since then, your genius has been in a deep sleep, perhaps even in a coma, buried somewhere inside you. You haven’t heard from it in years.

Allow us to make an obvious point.

Art is Personal Expression. You have YOUR talent. Nobody else has anything like it. They can’t. It’s biologically impossible. DaVinci splattered paint his way; you splatter paint your way… In this book, the only mistake you can make is to criticize yourself, get in your own way —or to start straining and stop having fun. Your talent is for being you and for expressing all that wonderful you-ness; you’re the world’s absolute undisputed champion at it.”

So far I’m only on splats, smudges, wiggles and twirls. Haven’t even got to any color mixing yet. The authors call it “no-thinking brush play.” Right up my alley. “Quick, no thinking strokes = clear colors. Too careful, slow strokes = muddy colors.”

And I’m having a ball.

  

I’ll be doing this again next weekend. Might not even wait that long!

What does this have to do with my business reinventions? Maybe nothing. Most probably everything.

What will you be doing in your Palena ‘ole exploration?

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You are Your Habits, so Make ‘em Good!

~ Originally published on Say “Alaka‘i” April 2009 ~
You are Your Habits, so Make ‘em Good!

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Cryptic Graffiti by Rosa Say

We last spoke about when training sessions work and when they don’t. I ended “When Made to Stick Will” with three questions you could talk story about, either here with me and the rest of the Say “Alaka‘i” community, or in your own workplace. Two of those questions had the word ‘habit’ in them:

• What simple practices can help you make something stick in your habit-building?
• If your manager offered to give you some help in grooming a new habit within your organizational culture, would you know what to ask for?

I have attended dozens of workshops over the years, and when I narrow down their take-aways to those impact-full bits which have truly stayed with me, a now-yellowed handout is the first thing which pops into very clear focus in my mind’s eye. Yes, even more than all the handouts I give people for Managing with Aloha.

I make sure this lesson is a part of every single class I do which specifically targets improving workplace productivity. If the lesson resonates with my students —and it always does— and if they choose to proactively believe in its magic, they will make it work in their favor. Everything else we set our sights on achieving will become so much easier.

It’s a riddle I received when getting my certification as a 7 Habits trainer with the Stephen R. Covey Leadership Center back in 1995:

Who do you suppose this is?

“I am your constant companion.
I will push you forward to success or I will drag you down to failure.
I am completely at your command.
80% of what you do, you might as well hand over to me and I will do it promptly and I will do it correctly.
I am easily managed; you must merely be firm with me.
Show me what you’d like to have done, and after a couple of lessons, I will do it automatically.
I am the servant of all great people.

Alas, I am the servant of all failures as well.
All who are great, I have made great.
All who are failures, I have made failures.
I am not a machine; but I do work with the precision of a machine and the intellect of a human.

Take me, train me, be firm with me, and I’ll lay the world at your feet.
Be easy with me, and I will destroy you!”

“Who am I?”

Postscript: I would love to give credit where credit is due for this, but it was on a plain white sheet of paper to keep us guessing until the great reveal of the answer. I am not sure if it came from Covey (not then Franklin-Covey), The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, where I was employed at the time, or Julie, the very smart Covey coach who gave it to me.

The answer, as you can more easily guess from the framing of my posting today, is “I am your habits.”

Habits are powerful magic. Problem is that we tend to mostly think about bad ones – like smoking, and biting our fingernails, or twirling our hair – and not about the fact that there are exceptionally good ones too. Some are simple, but they make a profound difference in our lives, like biting your lip each time you are tempted to blurt out a negative statement, so you can catch yourself and say something more encouraging or nothing at all.

The best productivity tip I can give you, is to proactively create good habits that put you on automatic pilot in a good way, in an advantageous way. For instance…

• Take just two full minutes to stand at the side of your bed and stretch every morning before you head off toward the bathroom to brush your teeth – do it consciously for the next two weeks, and you will find you do it from now on. Stretching your muscles to wake up every limb in your body and gain more energy for the day will become the automatic pilot of how you wake up. You will be more alert.

• Simply put your blackberry or iPhone down on a surface in front of you every time someone speaks to you (your pocket or on your lap works too), and you will focus on them, listen better, and never be thought of as a rude crackberry addict again. More on this one here: Send that Blackberry to Solitary Confinement.

• Choose a morning or afternoon where a Weekly Review is done with your calendar as sacred, non-negotiable planning time, and you will never miss an important appointment or trace date again. You will begin to make time for all those nagging projects that never get scheduled, and you’ll begin to say “no” to the clutter and procrastination which has now become so visible week after week.

As we wind up this ‘taxing’ week of April, I encourage you to read over this Habit Riddle one more time. Take inventory of your habits, and choose to create some good ones which can replace the not-so-good ones.

Better yet, enroll someone else in your goals and ask them to coach you. Scroll back up to those two questions at the top and get a good friend or team member to partner up with you in answering them; you may find that you both want to work on the same thing.

Then, let’s talk story! Let me know how it goes, will you?

• Which of your own personal habits are the ones which ‘push you forward to success’ and which ones ‘drag you down to failure’?
• Which of your own personal habits are you ‘firm’ with, and which do you ‘go easy on’?

Any thoughts to share? Comment here, or via the tweet-conversation we have on Twitter @sayalakai.

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From the Talking Story Archives: We recently talked about another habit here, one connected to reading and learning which is sequential and consequential... remember?

• Has ALAWB09 got you into the RTTS Habit yet?

For more articles similar to this one, subscribe to Talking Story, and join the discussions held by the Ho‘ohana Community of the Managing with Aloha ‘Ohana in Business.

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Welcome to a Brexy Presidency

Brex was the name we in the Ho‘ohana Community had given to the learning initiative we embraced during all of 2008: Braver Experiments [with] Digital Learning. This was how I had introduced it about a year ago; much of this is different now, which is good ~ we did learn!

I've just joined a new social network on Ning in the past week. Have been on LinkedIn for a while now, have a Tumblr lifestream, but I'm not a Twitterer and have said no to Facebook on purpose (Yeah, you can say no. What's hard is to stop second-guessing yourself about it.) Have discovered some contextual and social construct strengths I never realized I had, but am lost within learning how to actually apply them now.

I am feeling like I am really getting behind. I'm not being facetious: Read between the lines for what I still don't do, or think about what your kids already do. Think how much longer it takes you to learn the same things... One thing the Ho‘ohana Community has taught me through all this, is not to go it alone in my learning now.

See Postscript 2 at the end of this article for more on how we Brexed it last year.

Therefore, one of the things I have been most tickled about in these historic months leading us to our Barack Obama presidency, is how they have furnished us with such a precedent-setting living laboratory for our digital learning. We have taken global surveys and hummed along to YouTube parodies, we have tweeted and flickred, and we have ourselves learned to become citizen publishers.

I was able to spend a fair amount of time online during Inauguration Day, and the geek in me thrilled to the links shared, and the immediacy of them. Here are some you might enjoy too:

• Transcript of President Obama's Inaugural Address, shared by KGMB9.com at 7:35am HT
  "Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met."
• Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov, at The White House Blog - first post at 12:01pm ET, a clear "we are ready" signal about the smoothness of this transition, and a message about the work which had already been steadily done to prepare.
  "Our initial new media efforts will center around three priorities: Communication... Transparency... Participation... "
• We watched, on the Flickr blog. This one was such fun: We all saw many of the same media clips on television, but the Flickr community brought us into living rooms all across the globe. In particular, I loved seeing children watching; I imagined their parents teaching, and taking up their first line of responsibility in doing their part.
  "Many of us stopped what we were doing this morning to watch history being made. Here are a selection of photographs from our Inauguration 2009 group pool."
• Starbucks Pledge5, created by Starbucks Coffee
  "Join the call for national service: What if you gave 5 hours to help your community?"
  The cynical may say this one is just a clever marketing campaign to get us in their coffeeshops, however were you this clever and timely in your business? When the email first hit my inbox, there were already over 80,000 hours pledged ~ that would be 16,000 customers listening...

Those are a mere sampling, for there were dozens to choose from! If you caught a favorite online yesterday, let us know in the comments, would you?

I am eager to see what will come next: Eager to share in imaginations far bigger than mine, but overjoyed with this new ease within which I can share in them, and continue to learn.

If the history-making aspect of this first digitally staged and commanded campaign and presidency intrigues you too, here are a few more links you might enjoy, most written immediately after his election victory:

1. Nov.04th: Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency at the Wired Blog Network
2. Nov.10th: Barack Obama’s Ultimate Guide to Marketing: How he Used Internet and Social Media to Become President-Elect at DWSmg.com
3. Nov.22nd: How Will Obama Now Use the Internet Army He Built? at Newsweek Enterprise - Technology

Postscript: I will be posting soon on the learning initiative that I have chosen for our Ho‘ohana Community in 2009. My thoughts have bounced back and forth between two different possibilities, and I have been allowing both to sit with me since the New Year, trusting that the most pressing of the two will begin to speak the loudest until I have no choice but to listen, and sure enough, it did.

Postscript 2: We kicked off Brex in February of 2008 with a series of 4 articles on Managing with Aloha Coaching. Here are the links:

• Part 1: Who is the Digital Learning Coach in your company?
• Part 2: What is Required of ME as a Digital Learner in 2008?
• Part 3: What are the changes Digital Learning requires of your organizational culture? 
• Part 4: Ready to create your Digital Learning List, tribe style?

Job-hunting? Don’t apply and fill, create and pitch

Today I am reprinting Sunday’s Say “Alaka‘i” blog post in total here, for some variation of this conversation is coming up quite a bit currently. While it is directed toward job-hunting for managers who now find themselves out of work, it may apply most of all to those who still have their jobs, but are feeling nervous, seeing “the writing on the wall” and wondering when your number may be up too.

This economic recession we are in, sends out this message: No job is safe. To keep it, you have to deliver just one kind of result, and that’s financing your own paycheck with profits. At the very least, every manager should be educating themselves thoroughly about the state of their company’s financial health: Are they on as solid a footing as you think they are? Many companies are surprising us right now.

Here is a snippet of another article at The Honolulu Advertiser today: 2008 saw end to many big brands:

NEW YORK — Shoppers won't be picking up ornate lamps from the Bombay Co. in the coming year. Or investing with Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. No flying to Hawai'i on Aloha Airlines or buying ultra-cheap tickets on Skybus, either.

All those names vanished in the past year, victims of the economy, the financial meltdown or other factors. Experts say 2009 could mark the end of even more well-known brands as the now yearlong recession puts more struggling companies on life support.

"I think 2009 is going to be a bloodbath," said Scott Testa, a marketing professor at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia. "I think it's going to be very, very ugly."

Here’s today’s Say “Alaka‘i” article: Job-hunting? Don’t apply and fill, create and pitch. My intention is NOT to bring you down this morning, but to help you see what you CAN do, and should be.
~ Rosa

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Preface: Welcome to Sunday Koa Kākou. Sunday is the day I answer questions you send to me. If you have a question connected to management and leadership, leave a comment here, or email me. 

From the Say “Alaka‘i” mailbox:

I was laid off recently, and while it was upsetting, I can’t say I was surprised, for it was obvious that the company couldn’t afford to keep me and the others who were let go (all of us managers). I’ve been looking for another job for about three months now and it’s been tough: I’ve just found an hourly position that will help me get most of my bills paid, but I want to get back into management and I’m going to keep looking. Any advice? The rejection has been grueling.

That sage advice of fulfill the biggest need is still the best advice I can give you.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone with the ability to hire you and keep paying you: What are they looking for, and why should they hire you, unless they are sure you’ll deliver what they need?

Fulfill the Biggest Need

There are two things business owners are focused on right now, and they go together:

a) Boosting cash flow quickly
b) Making customers deliriously happy

Said another way, cash is King and a paying customer’s loyalty is Queen.

To be blunt, these two things were not the priority for most managers before our current economic recession. Most managers were focused on making everyone else happy (employees, peers, the boss, vendors, suppliers and other partnerships). They were preoccupied with organizational systems and processes, most of which need to be reinvented right now, not maintained. Why should any business owner maintain something that isn’t working?

Business is, and has always been, about money and about the value add for a customer that results in market share (i.e. brand penetration). Those are not bad things, however this recession has made that truism blatantly real and completely unavoidable for every single person in a company – you can’t departmentalize them anymore as the responsibility of the sales and marketing people, or those in customer service who “directly touch the customer.”

Job-hunting is a waste of your time and your brainpower

If a management or leadership role is what you are looking for, there really is no such thing as ‘job hunting’ now... it’s like trying to go fishing in a desert. If you want someone to hire you, (or recast or promote you) when almost no one is hiring, you have to be a) more creative and b) much more proactive. You cannot apply for, and realistically hope to fill jobs that are old news and simply not there: You have to be the one who creates a new role, a highly necessary and desirable one, and then pitches it to the employer in the best position to hire you, and give you the opportunity to test your creation and earn your keep.

Go back and read that last sentence again: You have to author a job description for yourself. It must be one that showcases your best talents with cash generation and customer satisfaction in a company. You must propose it to a prospective employer BEFORE they hire you and pay you a dime. It’s the new resume you take to an interview.

And keep this in mind: They probably aren’t even scheduling any interviews. You have to call for an appointment when you’ve scoped out and chosen the company you want to work for, by saying something like this,

“I have a proposal I’d like to discuss with you. My proposal has two deliverables: Increased cash flow, and happy customers. I am a big fan of your product and services, and I have been one of your customers: I’m very interested in helping you succeed. Do you have some time this week to meet with me?”

The only one actually ‘interviewing’ is you

What I am suggesting you do takes work on your part, but it is creative work that will burst open far better possibilities for you. So make the entire process worth your time and effort. Do your homework on a company's values, mission and vision. Interview the company which deserves to hear your proposal. Think of them as your best-case scenario buyer of your idea, and a purchaser of you as a package deal of ready-to-hit-the-ground-running talent, skills, and knowledge.

Every savvy business owner knows that there is one thing better than buying a patent: Hiring the inventor.

Good luck to you! Pull this off, and you’ll discover there’s another huge bonus: From here on in, you’ll be working on management the way it should be done in the first place.

A bit of related reading: If you missed it, I wrote about the best role for managers in another Sunday Koa Kākou response just two weeks ago: Staying Positive in a Negative Workplace.

Go to the sub-heading within that article titled “How will you know if your managers are up to the challenge?”

Keep in mind that this describes the role someone with a calling for management eventually wants to be filling, however in today’s recession, you must work on the ‘King and Queen’ we talked about above first.

Talking Story: Changes versus Constants

Tuesday Coaching is up on MWAC today, and we're looking at both change and our constants using this Nānā i ke kumu framework:

Let’s look at “both source and capacity to learn” in another way, as constants (source) and as change (capacity to learn). At any given time, and with any given effort, we are working on one or the other: Either we are

• Working to maintain our healthy constants, or

• Working to effect a change we desire.

Further, it is in effecting a desired change that we experience our most elevated experiences with learning.

People will write me after they have read my book, and ask for exercises for the small business or for the single team in a larger organization, saying, "We don't have access to the resources the big guys have." You don't need them! This is precisely the reason I blog here in the first place, to offer you possibilities for discussions ("talk stories" as I call them) that can turn into exercises and mini-studies you can personally apply to your own situation and within your own context.

Changes versus Constants is a beauty.

As I have written at MWAC (and again above) we are working on maintaining a constant or effecting a change within every effort we make - sometimes we work on both simultaneously.

To transfer this lesson plan to your team, just set up a flipchart or whiteboard with two columns:

1. Write "our Constants" atop one, and "Desired Change" atop the other and get a brainstorm and discussion going.
2. End it with a specific action plan for one of the efforts you talk about.
3. End the talking about it (say mahalo!) and get out and do it!
4. When your team has finished tackling it, bring the flipchart out again in another huddle and just ask everyone: "Do we have anything current to add to this, or shall we just move forward with picking our next issue from this list as it stands?"
5. Repeat the process.

You can use the full coaching on MWAC to help you as the facilitator (by "full" I just mean today's Tuesday Essay -- don't get overwhelmed!) or you can print it out and distribute it to your whole team -- read it together, then start with number 1 above.

Here is a snippet of the Change section on MWAC today:

Are you okay with Change? Are there certain proverbs or quotes which became aha! moments for you when you first heard them? This was one of mine: “People do not resist change; people resist being changed.” —organizational change pioneer Richard Beckhard That made so much sense to me! It made sense both in my own experience with when I vigorously resisted change and when I embraced it. It made total sense when I thought about those successes and failures I’ve had in trying to champion changes that others resisted accepting no matter how good I thought the change sounded, for aha! it just didn’t sound that great to them. Said simpler, it wasn’t their idea, and they thought it was a lousy idea.

These are the sub-headings of the MWAC Essay today, How Nānā i ke kumu Helps You Embrace Change and Growth:

• Are you okay with Change?
• The worst possible Change? To your Constants.
• Choosing Embraceable Change.
• You Choose, or I’ll Choose!
• Choose to Learn.

If you turn any of them into a Talk Story within your workplace, come back and share your experience with us!

Shedding the Blinders of Age and Wisdom

… and finding my-worth marketing gurus.

I eased into the weekend with some online reading with a definite intention: I wanted to get to know a few people better who I’d impulsively (or you could say instinctively) had begun to follow on Twitter. I even said so on Friday with as much intention as I could tweet in those 140 characters:

Aloha Pō‘alima: Aloha Friday Twitter plan ~ Click on your links, read some good stuff, comment in those places, cut back my own noise here.

My instincts were pretty good; I got reacquainted with a few people, and was somewhat startled by how much they had accomplished or changed since I last visited their web pages, for new looks have popped up everywhere, and initiative is flourishing. As just one example, I love what Mark Goren is now doing with his Planting Seeds. (I wrote about Mark 15 months ago on Joyful Jubilant Learning and will need to update my links there!)

In several instances, I was very startled (though I am not sure why I should have been surprised at all) by the bravado and almost-audacity of youth.

Wisdom unfolds before my eyes in a remarkable way on Twitter. First there is this spark of brilliance. Then another tweet reveals that it wasn’t just a spark; there is a warm ember glowing there. The tweets someone shares get hotter and hotter, and as they do, I suspect I need to know this person better, and as I did over the past two days, I begin to explore and probe, from Twitter bio link to blog, to About Page, to a Hire Me statement of some kind, until I find their intentions —and more often than not, their Storefront.

What has been startling me is how young so many of my Twitter Sages are revealed to me as. Not in their content, just in their pictures. Twenty-somethings. Thirty-somethings.

What is so delightfully refreshing is that these “brash youngsters” are not allowing their age to hold them back. They know what they already have to offer the world, and so they are. Not only that: They are capitalizing on their in-born talents magnificently.

Within my own not-so-random sampling, there is not a single “internet marketer” in the bunch. If you have that statement in your bio I’m sorry, but it really rubs me the wrong way; in my consciousness, “internet marketers” have become the sharky car salesmen of the online world (with apologies to ethical car salesmen and women everywhere).

Those who have impressed me over the past two days of my focused web-reading, are all what I’d call ‘my-worth marketers’.

They know their Ho‘ohana, or at the very least they are dabbling in experimenting their way toward revealing it, and now they are busy at this new expression of the business of life. They are busy within their very intentional work, and they are contributing to our world as they do so.

Their About Pages and their Hire Me pages may be somewhat shallow in testimony to what they have already done, but my goodness they are goldmines in what they confidently offer about what they now DO. Age is irrelevant, but wisdom is highly relevant, and it is present.

My generation (and yes, I wish I didn’t have to write it that way, but it’s an accuracy, a point of reference) was way too hung up on paying our dues and logging our past experiences, when in fact, past experience is no guaranteed predicator of what will happen in the future. We lost so much valuable time, and we took too many hits to our self-esteem.

In comparison, I am really loving what I am seeing emerge right now. I am enjoying learning from the wise young.

Thank goodness our kids are not following our example.

Some kind of squash I think…
I love the way that vegetable vines like this grow with such eager exhuberance. They reach out, latch on to something, with no hesitation, no doubt that they belong wherever they end up.

Postscript:
Karen Wallace has stimulated a thoughtful discussion at Joyful Jubilant Learning this morning with a posting called Expecting Perfection. Another way of saying this might be that I don’t expect perfection from others, not at all. I do expect initiative, and I do expect people to manifest the strengths they have to offer, and that’s what I’m cheered by this morning, that the generation of my son (21) and my daughter (24) is delivering those things already.

More on Digital Learning, Organizational Culture, and Obsolete Skills in that Culture

More on Digital Learning:

My 3rd article is up today on the MWAC Brex feature: [Brave Experiments [with] Digital Learning]. Part 3 is called What are the changes Digital Learning requires of your organizational culture?

And just for fun, there is a screenshot there of the Digital Learners who were online to check it out :)

Part of my article talks about the digital skill sets we may be expected to bring with us in today's workplace, and about other expectations in the organizational culture - your workplace may be defining you (and limiting your capacity) more than you realize.

Organizational Culture:

After posting my essay last night, I continued my reading of Rayona Sharpnack's book Trade-Up!: 5 Steps for Redesigning Your Leadership and Life from the Inside Out and this is what she says about organizational culture: As a quick lead-in, her book is about how our lives are shaped by our context, and as she uses the word thus;

“…context is the often unexamined mind-set or frame of reference we operate from that informs our behavior and evokes behavior from others. In other words, context is the belief system you carry inside. It's your frame of reference, your paradigm, your view of reality or life from which your actions and behaviors spring.”

“Groups, organizations, and societies have contexts, too - the culture or set of norms and beliefs that provide the boundaries of acceptable behavior and predictable outcomes. Now, that may sound strange because organizations don't actually think, but organizations do have atmospheres, environments, or cultures that enlarge or suppress what people are allowed to think, say, and do, whether they recognize it or not.”

So I offer you some of that ‘recognition’ over at MWAC in regard to digital learning :)

and Obsolete Skills in that Culture:

Then this morning I'm scrolling through my feed reader, and see this at Web Worker Daily, by Mike Gunderloy:

Obsolete Skills for Web Workers
Blogger-about-town Robert Scoble recently kicked off an online discussion (and now a wiki) about obsolete skills: “things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us.” Scoble’s list covers a variety of things overtaken by technology: dialing a rotary phone, changing tracks on an eight-track tape, using a slide rule, adjusting a carburetor, and so on.

This got me to thinking: what are the equivalent obsolete skills for web workers? Of course detractors of telecommuting will be quick to put “maintaining personal hygiene” and “changing out of pajamas” on the list, but on a more serious note, here are a few of the skills from earlier jobs that I haven’t needed since becoming a full-time web worker:

• Punching a timeclock (though I still track my own time)
• Transferring phone calls by punching buttons on the phone
• Wearing a tie every day
• Arguing about where to eat lunch
• Using a ten-key calculator
• Drinking from a water cooler
• Fighting for parking space every day

How about you? Has web work made any of your hard-earned skills completely obsolete?

Readers have added:

• the art of filling out holiday forms
• arguing with the IT people about why I want to use a Mac for my work :-)
• cubicle culture
• traffic jams in rush hour
• office politics
• having to report to a boss…
• going through the chain of command for raise
• going through “procedures” if your paycheck was short for the month
• having your creativity cut off by upper management because they didn’t want to get involved in another long-term project before retirement
• being “green” (from a corporate mindset).

Fascinating to me how people define skill and will argue the point of their obsolescence (read the comments there).

Could I bring the question back to our MWAC subject, Talking Story readers?

What are the digital skills you would define as the new basics in most organizational cultures?

Photo credit: Little Professor Hand-held Calculator on Flickr by draggin.

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First time here or catching up, and thinking you missed something?

I first mentioned the MWAC 4-part series here on Talking Story in this posting:

How good (and gracious) a Receiver are you?

Reinventions at Work and in Business: a Ho‘ohana Community Forum

Are you ready to get inspired by a brand new world of work?

Are you up for the challenge of shaking business people out of their comfort zones in the status quo?

Are you one to be involved, engaged, and part of the action?

Well, you’ve arrived at precisely the right place! Welcome to Reinventions at Work and in Business: our Ho‘ohana Community Forum for May, 2006

We have more than doubled last year’s reinvention forum: In what follows, 14 authors from our Ho‘ohana Community share (19...oops) 20 of their ideas with you in the hope you will be energized, enthusiastic and eager to help us reinvent the workplace for the better.

Work can rock the world and make our hearts sing; it can be the stuff we feel our legacies are made of, and it can make a significant difference for our families and in our communities.

As I put this together, I looked back to when we did this for the first time 14 months ago; our objectives have not changed, and we share the same mission of proactively chosen change initiated by a community which is Lōkahi: unified and in harmony. If anything our commitment to each other and to our vision has gotten stronger, and the ranks of our community leadership continually grows larger. Today I bring you the same message I printed here over a year ago:

I encourage you to lead as these business leaders have done. Make the decision to be a catalyst today: don’t leave it for “the other guy” —Reinvention is something you can make happen. Get inspired. Be proactive and be optimistic. We are.

You will find links to articles which tackle robotic customer service, compensation structures, job descriptions and conventional roles, traditional corporate departments, organizational charts, the way we use brainstorming, Stephen Covey's Circle of Influence, and even the Marine Corps! There is one which urges us to reinvent our attitude about the sharing of knowledge, another which cheers on customer evangelists, and one which challenges the limits of our imagination. We are invited to shatter resistance and reinvent ourselves even when it seems impossible.

Let’s begin.  Near the beginning of our list, please welcome the two newest contributors to our HC Forums, Karen Wallace of The Clearing Space, and Greg Balanko-Dickson of Business Performance Coaching. However Top Billing today goes to someone celebrating his birthday...

The Reinvention of Human Resources

If you check the ‘brochureware’ on my SLC website, you will see there is just one speaking topic listed for me with the word ‘Reinvention’ in it.

As much as we in business love to self-analyze and theorize, there is quite a bit we do right thanks to the very nature of free enterprise. We are subject to the market’s responsiveness to our business efforts where ultimately, the almighty customer rules.

However, while there is a wealth of intelligence, logic, and good intention in the operational processes we already claim to use, actual practice lags behind; we continually write about the flaws because we aren’t that great at doing our right things continually and consistently. We talk about them and document them rhetorically in mission statements, but those seemingly visionary documents are rendered meaningless when we fail to execute.

Reinvention comes into play when the reasons we don’t execute well reveal root causes riddled with red flags: Ignoring our sacred cows may actually be wise. Yet if there’s a good reason we don’t do something, we shouldn’t stop at just ignoring it. Instead, let’s pay attention, dig deep, and get real about turning old thinking upside down and looking for a far better way. Let’s reinvent.

My current favorite for reinvention? Human Resources, and I couldn’t let our Ho‘ohana Community May Reinvention Forum skip by me this year without bringing my speaking topic here to Talking Story too.

First, I must say I always find that those who work in HR are good people who had initially entered Human Resources as their field of choice with a sincere desire to be the employee’s advocate, no matter what that position that person may hold —including managers. Therefore, I never wish to vilify them, just challenge them to the greatness they had once aspired to.  In their fervent wishes to be a service department they’ve unfortunately become doormats, far too complacent about asserting their ideas and assuming their responsibility for leadership.

Doormats. Think that’s harsh? Well, let’s take a look at a few of the reasons why I feel that HR is so ripe for reinvention.

Reinvented Work: So many possibilities.

A few blocks from the White House, Chris Bailey and I sat at a Caribou Coffee for three hours this past Monday afternoon talking about soulful, joyful work.

At one point, Chris whips a book out of his backpack to show me, called Joy at Work, A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job by Dennis W. Bakke, formerly the CEO of The AES Corporation (Applied Energy Services). Chris was sure I’d love reading it, saying that Bakke and I seemed to be very much in sync in the way we looked at how work, and our workplaces, can be reinvented into much more joyful and purposeful places.

Much later that evening, finding I had some extra time on my hands, I took a walk to a Borders bookstore we’d walked by earlier, and bought a copy of the book for myself, figuring it was a good way to commemorate my time in Washington DC with Chris. In the morning I had a 12-hour travel schedule looming large, and I also knew the book would help the long plane ride pass more quickly.

Well, it was a terrific recommendation Chris, for I absolutely devoured the book, finishing its final pages mere minutes before landing. The woman sitting next to me turned out to be a retired grade school teacher, and she kept watching me, smiling, as I flagged and annotated the book the way I normally do when I have something I am not just reading, but studying intently.

She said, “You really should scan that book and send a few shots to the author, for what you’ve just done amazes me. I bet he’d think it a terrific compliment. I wish my students had loved reading their books that much.”

A book review will follow in greater detail, and Chris has one posted on his Bailey WorkPlay already if you’re anxious. For now, with possible job reinventions so much on the brain, I have to share one passage in particular with you. I could barely sit still in my seat when I first read it.