Courage of Conviction

When you look at most successful businesses and organizations, a key characteristic is that the leaders of these organizations know how the organization or business is doing at any given time. They know because they measure, not just results, but more importantly activity and key indicators. I wrote a short article about this idea. Here’s a couple of the paragraphs:

One of the most important parts of any strategic plan is the implementation of that plan. Without implementing what you’ve laid out, all you’ve really done is a nice exercise in philosophy.

A key to implementation is measuring results. A common question I hear is “but what do I measure?”

The big question of course comes down to what to measure. Each business and organization is different. When in doubt, measure something, anything - you’ll learn over the course of a short time span if what you are measuring is what you need to measure - is it a key indicator for how well your business is doing or is what you are measuring a lagging measurement that tells you something after the fact. If what you are measuring is not assisting you to make future adjustments, then change what you are measuring. Just like most things in life - the hardest part is getting started.

I wrote a post about being flexible.  Being flexible is so very important to so many parts of life - not just business.  Being stiff, or rigid, is the equivalent to death.  Dead things have no flexibility - they snap.  Things that are full of life bend - the palm tree is a great example.  Here’s some more questions from the posting:

What do you do with this extra time that you now have?  Do you travel back to the office?  Do you pull out a laptop and answer some e-mails?  Do you pull out a book to do some reading?  Do you networking with someone nearby?  Do you work on something you have been procrastinating?

All of these are great options.  However, unless you plan ahead of time, you’ll never know what the best use of that extra time will be.  Yes, that’s right, I’m talking about planning what to do with extra time ahead of time.

I wrote a post on the subject of freedom vs. security. This subject goes way beyond politics. Every day we make decisions that are towards freedom or security, or atleast what we think is security.

Here’s a different way of thinking about freedom and security:

It’s easy to choose security - it’s familiar, it’s stable, and it’s predictable - i.e. we gain a sense of control.

The choice of freedom on the other hand is unpredictable. It may come out as assisting an employee towards their dream job or career - knowing full well that you’ll “lose” a great employee if you do that. But imagine how happy that employee will be for the duration they remain under your employ. What’s the ripple effect of that on your customers?

I wrote a post on managing conflict.  When it comes down to it, regardless of the obstacle, what matters is how we look at the situation.  Do we respond with an emotional reaction, or do we see the experience as a learning opportunity?

This past week, I was presented with a conflict.  My initial reaction was one of anger - a very normal response.  I was not happy about the situation.  I wanted to publicly confront an individual about a situation.

Then I decided that being angry wasn’t going to solve anything (and would probably make the situation worse), so I decided I would determine what I could learn from the situation.

What I learned first was a reminder that I cannot control other people - either in what they do or how they think.

Read the rest here.

Today, I posted an article about thinking on my EADD blog.  Here’s a quote from the article:

A Stanford Institute study showed that 79% of people do not think.  When I first heard that, it shocked me.  But upon further thought, that pretty much fits into the 80/20 rule.

Enjoy the full article.