Cost of Comparisons!

It seems I’m forever comparing things. I walk down the street and see a car I like and then hear the inner voice telling me why it’s better than the car next to it. I then see someone who is heavy and that same little voice says, “Hey look, they’re bigger than you, you’re not doing so bad!”. When I listen to talk radio there seems to be a never ending stream of conversation about why the caller has the right perspective and people who don’t agree with him are idiots.This process goes on and on.

What is it that has me need to be better than those around me? This form of judgment has at its root, my concern that I’m not enough. The best way to overcome this nagging concern is to continuously compare things in my world so that I receive  constant reinforcement that I’m smarter, better looking, more successful and, in general, more impressive than others.

“We all do this, so what’s the big deal?” , chimes in the inner voice. The big deal is that all this comparison hides things. In the case of the car I liked, I could overlook some important flaw because I’m committed to this car being the best. In business, we often think of others who offer services or products like ours as competitors. We then favorably compare ourselves to them. Unfortunately, this bias may blind me from seeing why they are well-regarded by their customers. I remember reading a news report when the iPad was first introduced, where Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft, called the product a fad, that would soon pass. This type of blindness is in us all.

What can I do? I can stop comparing things. I’m not suggesting that I look at the world without discrimination. Discrimination allows me to pragmatically see things as they are, not as I want them to be. This unbiased perspective brings clarity to my choices, and radically reduces my surprises. Seems like a good payoff.

Are you Awake?

Some years ago, I was a student of Richard Strozzi Heckler. Richard is extraordinary. He is a 6^th degree Aikido black belt, has a PhD in clinical psychology and is one of the founding spirits of modern Somatics. I was in his dojo one summer afternoon with 30 fellow students. Lunch was delicious, and many of us ate more than necessary. Most of the class was in a dozing kind of mood.

Richard entered the dojo, and we assembled around him in a circle. He immediately sensed our inattention. Richard suggested we consider we were sitting on a very narrow precipice. Below us was a long drop. Our sitting perch was only as big as our bottoms. If we teetered in any direction, we were certain to fall to our death.

Immediately the class’ attention went to full alert. In the 15 years since that summer afternoon, I bring that experience back when I feel I’m drifting. Richard’s point that day was that every moment calls us to full alert. When we drift because our body is out of harmony or our thoughts are about something other than the present moment or our actions aren’t deliberate, we are missing the aliveness that is always present.

As a leader, in whatever way you choose, remember you are always called to be alert, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Warning Bells

This morning I was reading more about the big losses at JPMorgan Chase. By most accounts, warning bells had been going off about the danger the bank was facing with its trading activities in London. Executives were tranquilized by their optimism. This type of emotional illusion is often present at the downfall of leaders.

This myopia, however, isn’t the exclusive purview of organizational leaders. We all get caught up in it from time to time. There was a groundswell of optimism in the U.S. about the continuous rise of housing prices. While there were some on the edges, who warned of the fallacy of this belief, many bet their 401k accounts or acquired greater debt than was prudent under the spell of this infectious optimism.

Warming bells go off and we don’t heed them. We believe they are not meant for us. Our intuition is often screaming “NO” and we override the warning with tranquilizing stories that are logical. It is the flaw of logical thinking that blinds us. There is no logic that can understand the complexity of the world. We can’t yet explain how a plant knows to grow roots and leaves and flowers. How then can we logically explain an economic system that is as much hidden as it is visible?

If we reorient our guidance system and allow intuition to be the centerpiece, we will rarely experience surprises. I’m not advocating ignoring the logical mind. I suggest we use it in a different way. Instead of having it be the captain of our boat, give it a new job. This job is to gather information that helps us better understand what our intuition is showing us. This broadened understanding helps us act with greater confidence and feel more peaceful.

I’m trusting intuition more and more. I see life-long patterns that orient me to not trust it. Every time I have ignored intuition lately, I look back and realize it showed me the truth of a situation and my mind’s confidence was not well placed. The journey continues.

What is Enough Accountability?

Yesterday, I wrote on the the question, “What is Enough?” As I was walking with my wife among the wild peppermint and bee balm hearing our bees industriously gathering pollen around us, I realized there are many other viewpoints from which to consider this question.

As I sat back at my desk to write, I remembered a conversation I had with someone who works with leaders of large corporations. I said, “I believe it’s vital to strive to absolute accountability within businesses.” He pushed back saying, “That is too much. People will become disillusioned if you set the standard too high. We should be satisfied with improvement over the current state.”

What is enough accountability? Over the past few days, I have read comments from Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, about the $2B trading loss they incurred. Today several people who were directly responsible for the loss resigned. This is a typical outcome when something big goes wrong. A few people get the ax and the beat goes on.

What about the people who are accountable for the business culture that fostered this situation? What about the board of directors, who have oversight accountability? They all seem to be saying, “OK, we made errors, let’s learn from them and move on.” I’m not certain that real learning is possible unless everyone who is accountable has a consequence. I’m not suggesting that a bunch of people be fired. What I’m saying is that there should be a consequence that is public and clear.

I know when my young boys act in a way that is inconsistent with our agreements, they experience a consequence. They might lose access to television or treats for a period of time. I know if I don’t apply a consequence immediately and uniformly, they don’t learn.

Accountability is absolute. We are either accountable for what happens, or we are not. I know if someone is being accountable if there is a consequence for their accountability. This isn’t a matter of blame. It’s simply an outcome that is directly connected to accountability.

My accountability to you as readers is to write what I feel is true and do it when I promise. If I don’t do that, I’m not going to be punished. There is a consequence. It’s lowered trust, which may mean you tune out. On the other hand, if I do what I promise, trust increases and the number of readers grows. It’s really simple.

Introspection and Leadership

In·tro·spec·tion – the act of looking within oneself. When I talk with leaders, they all agree they should take more time for introspection. When I ask them, “How would you do that?” They generally don’t have a clue.

Introspection needs a “pump primer”. I don’t simply sit in a chair and say to myself, “Well, what do I see?” Introspection is catalyzed by fully participating in activities that take me out of traditional conversations and into ones that touch my spirit. Some people read. Joseph Badaracco, a professor at the Harvard Business School, talks about the power of reading fiction for introspection in his book, Questions of Character: Illuminating the Heart of Leadership through Literature.

For others, it might be painting or horseback riding or carpentry. It’s about throwing oneself completely into this activity so that all the threads to the operational world are quieted and the act of introspection arises. Great leaders know the importance of this practice and they value it as much as a meeting with their most important constituents.

My personal practice for introspection is reading and writing poetry. When I lose myself into the feeling that comes from being with a poem, a mirror arises and I see myself in ways that were not possible before. A recent poem that touched my soul follows this post.

I encourage you to find your place to lose yourself. While I talk about leaders in this blog, I really mean you, for each of us is a leader in some way.

Until later,

Thomas

What Can I Say

What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.

Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Motherhood and What Really Matters in Business

Money and the Meaning of Life is the title of a book Jacob Needleman published in 1994. Needleman’s premise is that our obsession with money and materialism has eroded our aliveness, robbed us of our authenticity, and left us spiritually impoverished. I read this book many years ago, and was reminded of its lessons as I have reflected upon my conversations with women business owners over the past few weeks.

I had been preparing for our Business Matters program on women entrepreneurs . For some time, I have had the sense that there was much to learn from women in business that could change for the better the role that business plays in our world. What I found crystallized my intuition and sparked a passion to learn all I can and tell their stories to both men and women.

One of the most poignant lessons came from understanding the purpose these women had for starting their businesses. In no case did they tell me that they started the business so that they could make a lot of money. Their reasons varied a bit; however, in essence, they are the same. They started the business because they thought they could do something that was valuable. They started the business because they wanted to no longer participate in a system that was focused on money first and people second. They started the business so they could channel their passions into something they loved doing.

There is a sense that with this focus these women-owned businesses would not be successful. If success is only measured in terms of maximizing profits, perhaps that is true. Maximizing profits is a code word for making as much money as possible. These women did derive profits from their businesses. That is vital in a world where we are not self-sufficient and use money to secure the resources we need for a healthy life.

For them, though, success was measured in a broader context. Success came from how well they took care of their customers. Success, for them, is measured in how they felt about themselves at the end of the day. Success, for them, comes from knowing they are doing the right thing for their communities.

These qualities are amplified by one thing many of these women share – they are mothers. As a mother, they took care of a sick child through the night while everyone else slept. As a mother, they juggled the needs of all the members of the family. As a mother, they made things happen no matter what resources they had.
All of these qualities and more are what we say we want in those who lead and work in organizations, yet we don’t place a high value on what women, particularly mothers, bring. These qualities of care, determination and imagination are discounted when a woman applies for a bank loan to start her business. They are told their work experience as a “stay at home” mom isn’t relevant. I have to tell you after talking with these women entrepreneurs that that’s just plain wrong. There is no better experience than for leading a business than mom as ‘CEO’ of the family.

What I found in women led businesses can be a roadmap for how we can move from the devastating impact of consumption at all costs. The women I spoke with show us how collaborative work environments produce better long term results for everyone. It’s time for us men to go back to the drawing board with our beliefs about what business is about and take the lessons these women are clearly showing us.

Let me know your thoughts.

Thomas

Our beliefs define what’s possible!

As I was reflecting on the quote of Anaïs Nin, in which he says,” We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,” I was thinking about the current state of the economy. It seems that there are so many signs that the system within which we have worked for many decades is failing.

Every day there is news of layoffs or bankruptcies or another government bailout program. What’s interesting is that all of these steps are implemented from a belief that what we have been doing works if only we can temporarily bolster it.

What if that belief is invalid? What if we need to change the basic structure of how our economic system works? In times of great crisis, it is those who propose solutions that remake the landscape who often provide the most effective way out of the crisis.

In this time, we all need to assess our core beliefs about our individual economic situations. It is in these beliefs that we will find both our blindness and our strengths. To help you understand what I mean, I will use myself as an example.

I have a belief that “hard work” is the only way to financial success. This belief comes from a long history in my family that the men who worked hard were considered “good” men. So what is the problem with this belief? For one thing, it comes from an hourly wage labor perspective. The more I work, the more I get paid. Overtime (working harder) is a favorable consequence for hard work!?!

Now this belief may have worked well if I was a contract laborer when manufacturing was booming. What this belief does is not have me understand the value that I provide. This type of belief likens people to machines and the consequence of that is felt in every aspect of our lives.

When I think of the current economic situation, there is one belief that I find indicative of the challenges we face for change. This belief is that a corporation should live forever. When you think about it, corporations are formed for a specific purpose. This purpose was framed in the world that the corporation was serving. The world changes. A fundamental question that would be useful to ask is “Does it make sense for this corporation to continue?”

What happens more often than not is that the leaders of the corporation work diligently to find a way to shift the company. Maybe it’s new markets or a new technology approach, or whatever. This is fraught with challenges. For starters, the belief system that the corporation was founded upon is still in place. Simply making some changes in product lines or customer bases doesn’t change those now obsolete beliefs. So then, the company is struggling to succeed in its “new world” while unknowingly holding on to all the baggage of its past.

There are many other analogies I can draw. The point is, to borrow a quote from Albert Einstein, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” So why do we try? Probably, because it seems like the only thing to do. And yet it will fail.

What to do? Stop for a moment and let the true nature of life reveal itself. This can be done by quieting my emotions and ‘logical’ intellect. The key to this “essential looking” is to look with my intuition. For my intuition doesn’t have an agenda to further, or a point of view to support. It only feels what’s so.

When you feel you have the real truth of a situation, see if it “rings” in you. If it does, then you are on the right track. If it doesn’t, then stop and keep looking for the essence until you feel that ring of knowing.

Let me know your feelings about this.

Until later,

Thomas

What is the role of a leader?

As i was preparing for next week’s broadcast of our radio program, Business Matters, I was talking with Peter Block. Peter is someone who I have admired for many years. His early book “Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self Interest” was an early writing that brought to my attention that the role of the leader was not to direct people but to support them in their ability to contribute.

Peter and I were talking about the leadership characteristics that are most important in a new President. Peter remarked that the notion of leadership was a problem. He feels that we still have a collective belief that leadership is something separate from ourselves. We project the responsibility for how things work out for us in many, if not all, aspects of our lives onto someone else. We often do this to someone who we believe is in power – often people with political or financial position. Peter contends that they only true role of a leader during this time is to facilitate.

We talked about what this would look like. Peter said that the useful leader would be part of a community, whatever its configuration (family, town, business, school,,,) and use their skills and gifts to help the community find its purpose and supporting its members in feeling accountable for the community living in that purpose.

As I see the disarray and distress in most organizations, what Peter said had a ring of truth for me. For too long, I and others have been advocating a leader as someone that was a role that determined who we are and what we do. This approach distances the community members from both accepting accountability for the community and for themselves. Through this acceptance of my own responsibility for everything, I reinvent my world.

Peter gave a simple example of a group he is working with. A local school district asked for his help. As he was talking with parents, he realized that they had completely delegated the accountability for the education of their children to the school district. He said to the parents and school district leadership, “This is too important a role to be delegated to anyone else. The parents must bear the primary responsibility for their children’s education.”

There are many examples where we have released our accountability to someone else. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to reclaim our role as creators or our world?

Until later,

Thomas

Technorati Tags: Accountability, children, culture, Purpose, simplicity, Trust, Wisdom

What are you afraid of?

The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself – Franklin D. Roosevelt

There is so much news that is, well, frightening. It seems like every day there is more “bad” news and the reaction to this news as reported by the media is a response of contraction or panic. This stampede of fear is not something new in either our history or the history of the world. Often choices are made in times of such gloom that are later seen as misguided and seldom change the circumstances we are most afraid of.

As I was watching this happen, I began to wonder what I do when I am afraid. Fear is an interesting phenomena. Sometimes I am aware that I am afraid and sometimes I am not. Either way, I often act in a similar manner. I have two general responses to being afraid. The first is to strike out at whatever or whoever is closet to me when the fear reaction is engaged. This might be yelling at someone or at least showing them a high level of annoyance. Now my reaction doesn’t have anything to do with the person that I direct my response to. It is really my own need to push my fear out of my body and onto someone else.

The other response I have is to feeling afraid is to fudge the truth (sometimes called lying). This response often happens when I don’t immediately know that I am afraid. I fudge the truth to try to gives others a confidence that everything will be OK. I do this to bolster my own confidence without any real notion of whether what I am saying is really true or not. For example, I can say that I am confident that a certain client contract will close, when I don’t have any real evidence that supports this position I say this to tranquilize myself and others so that I don’t have to engage the panic that I am feeling inside.

I have been working through these reactions to fear for some time. I find that when I can say, “I am afraid”, I diffuse the need for either of the two reactions I mentioned above. What often happens next is that I am no longer feel controlled by the fear. It’s not that I don’t have some residual physical feelings that the fear invoked, but I can begin to consider what actions to take from a peaceful perspective and once I am clear on a course of action, I get busy.

My little microcosm isn’t much different than what I see happening in our financial markets and political system. There are many good reasons to be concerned with the situation we are facing not just economically but with the resources we need to sustain our quality of life. These circumstances didn’t just arise in the past few months. They have been around for some time. Our business leaders and politicians have been trying to keep us all a bit pacified so that we won’t change our economic behaviors.

We are now at a moment when the hiding the facts from us won’t work anymore. We are letting our business and political leaders know that we expect them to act differently. So I invite you to join me in not reacting in fear when you hear the news. If you feel fear, that’s OK. Just don’t let it be the prevailing mood when you decide what is the best response by both you and our leaders. Once you get clear outside the clutches of fear, then do like it do – get busy.

Until later,

Thomas.

Technorati Tags: Accountability, authenticity, change management, courage, dotherightthing, integrity, leadership, Peacefulness, Purpose, success, Trust, Truth, Wisdom

Parenting and Leadership

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. – John Quincy Adams

I teach about leadership in my day job. It can be a very rewarding experience. I think that sometimes we think of leadership in too narrow a framework. It is what those in power or authority do. Yet, real leadership, the type that inspires, can be practiced by anyone.

As if to make this point, my wife, Sherry, showed our children the courage and commitment of leadership. The story begins with Sherry and four children driving on one of the state highways in our area. The speed limit on that stretch of road is 50MPH. In her rear view mirror, my wife watched as a car approached her minivan at high speed. The driver seemed to be in a great hurry. So much so that she was driving very close to the rear bumper of my Sherry’s minivan.

Sherry became concerned over the safety of the situation so she increased her speed to 60 mph. The person following increased her speed as well so that her car was again extremely close to the rear bumper of my wife’s car. Sherry became anxious for the safety of not only herself and the kids but the driver of the other car.

After a few more tense moments, my wife decided to slow down. At least if the other car was going slower, she thought, the potential for an accident would be less. Not long after Sherry slowed down, the driver of the car behind her passed and went on her way.

My wife was troubled by this situation. As she considered what to do, she had the premonition on where the driver of this car was. She felt she could find her at a near by Wendy’s (how she is able to have hightened intuition will be a topic of future Blog). So she decided to drive to Wendy’s and see if the driver was there. Sure enough as she pulled into the Wendy’s parking lot, the car that had created such potential havoc was parked there. My wife parked her minivan and told the kids she was going to talk to this driver.

Now she didn’t take this lightly. Her insides were rumbling and her legs were shaking. As she was preparing to leave the car, the older boys (10 and 13) were curious about what she would do. In fact, the older one wanted to follow her into Wendy’s to see what would happen. Sherry didn’t think this was such a good idea.

So in she went. There was the driver of the tail gating car filling a container of catsup after receiving her order. Sherry walked over to this young woman and asked her is she realized the danger she had created with her reckless driving. She emphasized that the car she so closely tail gated was filled with four children and that her behavior was simply unacceptable.

I believe this young woman probably was in shock at being so clearly called to accountability for her actions. She had no response to my wife’s entreaty.

How many times are each of us faced with situations where we know we are called to do something courageous to bring attention to something that just isn’t right. Perhaps we are afraid of what the other person will think of us. Perhaps we are afraid of some sort of attack. Whatever our reason, we let the situation slide and never know if someone else may be at the effect of the same situation we experienced.

This simple and courageous act had an impact on the children. They could witness fist hand someone they respect “doing the right thing.”

What about you. Do you have an instance like Sherry’s you would like to share? Do you feel that as a parent you are a leader? Do you act when you know you should?

Until later,

Thomas

Technorati Tags: authenticity, children, courage, dotherightthing, inspiration, integrity, Knowing, leadership, Trust, Truth, Wisdom