Friday, September 24, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
LittleThingsMatter: Quiet Time is Critical for Decision Making | Todd Smith - So true!
In to today’s fast paced electronic world, the need for quiet time has never been more crucial. The number of interruptions and resulting stress coming from texts, calls, emails, and social sites has increased. And, of course, as if we don’t all have enough already going on, we have an endless supply of addictive options at our fingertip to fill our heads with chatter.
If you want to advance your life forward, it’s absolutely critical that you block out time when you turn off the noise so you can think and process information in silence.
The Value of Quiet Time
You’ve heard it before, but it’s a quote worth memorizing. Jim Rohn said, “Success comes from a series of good decisions made over time while failure comes from a series of poor decisions made over time.” After more than 15 years of thinking about this statement and watching it play out in the lives of people I know, I am convinced that our lives are a mirror image of our decisions.
If you want to make sensible life-planning decisions, the kind of decisions that allow you to move ahead in life, you need quiet time to think and process the things going on in your life.
I assume that you want to build a stronger relationship with your spouse or significant other, that you want to be an understanding parent, that you want to enjoy a successful career, and that you want to make enough money to stay out of debt and enjoy the good things life has to offer. Am I right?
If these things really are important, then ask yourself: How much time have I spent in the last month quietly thinking about these issues?
- How can I manage my money more efficiently
- How can I increase my market value
- What would I like to accomplish over the next year
- How can I fulfill the needs and desires of my spouse or significant other
- How can I improve the connection with my children or friends
Was the time you spent thinking about each of these congruent with their level of importance in your life? Yes or No? If your answer is no, then think about how much time you have spent in the last month with each of these activities:
- Listening to music or the radio
- Watching TV
- Checking out the social sites
- Reading books unrelated to your goals
- Surfing the Web
How can you say something is important, but yet not allocate time to think about it and make thoughtful decisions as to how you can improve that area of your life?
If achieving your goals is really important, then you must make it a priority to block out time to sit in silence and process what’s going on in your life and make good course-correcting decisions.
Let me offer you a few suggestions:
1. Start your mornings by sitting in silence. Rather than watching the news, reading the morning paper, or opening your computer, find a quiet place to just sit and think.
2. While driving alone turn off the music and talk shows. Turn your car into a think tank where you process life and make good decisions.
3. Go for a daily walk and leave the music at home. Pick a topic to concentrate on. Almost all of my major decisions are made on my walks. Here are my three favorite questions I ask myself when choosing to think about a specific subject:
- What’s going on? Think about the subject you have selected.
- What are my options? Consider all available options.
- What’s my plan? Make a decision on what you will do.
4. If you have a major decision to make, block out a day, get out of your home, and go somewhere where you can think in peace and quiet. As you do, consider all aspects of yourdecisions: options, pros, cons, risks, rewards, and possible outcomes.
When you make it a priority to block out time in your busy schedule to just sit in silence and think about your life and where you are going, you will immediately begin to see the benefits of quiet time.
Will you agree to test this lesson by finding 15 minutes TODAY to sit in silence and think about an important decision you need to make?
If you agree with the importance of taking quiet time, please share what you do during your quiet time and how it helps you make better decisions?
If you want to make life-guiding decisions that will help you achieve the things that are truly important to you, you must turn off the noise, surround yourself with silence, and think.
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About the Author: Todd Smith is a successful entrepreneur of 29 years and founder of Little Things Matter. To receive Todd’s lessons, subscribe here. All Todd’s lessons are also available on iTunes asdownloadable podcasts. (Todd’s podcasts are listed #35 in America’s top 100 podcasts.)
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Harvard Business Review: Big Hairy Goals Can Get Hairy | Robert I. Sutton
Hey Boss — Enough with the Big, Hairy Goals
Managers often think their job is to inspire their people with "stretch goals" — clear objectives that will be hard to meet, but that would have a dramatic impact on the organization's success. That this kind of ambitious goal-setting is a hallmark of effective leaders, and of high-performance organizations, is an old theme in behavioral science. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham in particular have produced a brilliant and compelling stream of research over the past 35 years demonstrating that difficult, specific goals lead to better task performance. In a more popular mode, Jim Collins has convinced thousands of managers of the value of "BHAG's" — big, hairy, audacious goals.
There's no denying that ambitious goals are essential to motivation. But my view is that the best bosses don't spend much time thinking or talking about them. There are a few reasons for this:- They are strategically obvious. What if I asked you to guess at the stretch goals of various teams, ranging from the grizzled sailors on the Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch, to the U.S. Soccer team now competing for the World Cup in South Africa, to a giant retailer like Target Stores? You wouldn't know the exact numbers to name, but you'd know the nature of their goals: the captains are trying to catch x tons of crab, the soccer team is trying to win ynumber of games (culminating with the championship), and Target is trying for a z percent gain in market share, or profit margin, or stock price. Even if a goal is a more noble, relating to employee retention, for example, or carbon footprint reduction, it will not be surprising. For most organizations in most industries, success is measured on well known and accepted yardsticks. Sure, there are differences and they do matter, but ambitious goals rarely send people in directions they didn't realize they needed to go.
- They're too blunt to provide daily guidance — or satisfaction. Tell a division that it needs to double its revenues in the next five years and people will not likely see what they should individually do differently to achieve that. A good boss lays out the path to a big goal, and works with people to break it down into objectives that more clearly imply the necessary actions. Focusing attention on the little steps not only clarifies what people need to accomplish on a daily basis, it also allows people to enjoy Small Wins, as Karl Weick called them in his wonderful 1984 article in The American Psychologist. (Here is the pdf.)
- They're too daunting. Weick also points out that organizations tend to be stymied by big goals that have not been broken into bite-size pieces. Faced with seemingly huge and overwhelmingly difficult challenges, people freeze up or even freak out. So the best bosses not only outline the steps, they talk and act like each is not overly difficult — which quells people's fears and enhances their confidence that, if they just keep moving, everything will turn out fine.
In Good Boss, Bad Boss, I share a story from a CEO I know who set a monumental revenue target for his organization. The number he named was so high that it would take the most successful sales campaign the company had ever run to make it. Adding to the pressure, the business was on the ropes. It had lost some key accounts, and nothing less than the revenues he targeted could save it from large-scale layoffs.
Few on his team were inspired by the audacity of the goal. Immediately fears were expressed that it could never be realized given the severe time pressure, limited resources on hand, and tough market conditions. But rather than simply repeat the do-or-die imperative, the CEO led a discussion of what it would realistically take to make the campaign a big success. Before long, the list of "to do's" had stretched to over 100 tasks, causing even more doubts to be vocalized. The turning point came when the CEO asked the group to sort that list into "hard" and "easy" tasks. When a task was declared easy, he asked who could do it and by what date. Within 15 minutes, the group realized that they could accomplish over half the tasks in just a few days. The anxiety level dropped, and stage was set for a succession of small wins.
How did it all turn out? The company did run the most successful sales campaign of its history. This was in 2009. Better yet, the power of the CEO's approach carried over to the next year. The senior team (with much less guidance from him this time) used a similar small-wins strategy for a 2010 campaign that generated even more business than 2009's — thanks in part to their higher confidence level and in part to the skills they'd gained at breaking down tasks. They knew how to get the myriad easy ones out of the way so they could focus on the harder (but still manageable) ones.
I'm eager to hear if all this is consistent with your own experience. For the moment, here's my conclusion: great bosses do set very challenging goals and communicate them to their followers. But you're a bad boss if, once those goals are known and accepted, you keep mindlessly invoking them. Rather than continually drawing people's attention to that distant horizon, help them see what they can and must accomplish right now. Let them proceed calmly, with confidence, and with the motivation that comes from taking clear little steps — and they may just accomplish those big hairy goals.
Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life. His new book is Good Boss, Bad Boss, forthcoming from Business Plus.
