Everyday Excellence

Bryant August 27th, 2008

If you think about some of the most successful business leaders who would you name?

If you’re a technology guy like me you might say Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. If you’re in the entertainment industry, you might mention Walt Disney. In my own life, I’d put the founder of the consulting firm I used to work for as a great business leader.

There is one key personality trait that is common to all of the leaders listed above….They are all screamers! And by “screamer” I mean that they manage by biting the head off of employees who are not performing at the level that the leader believes they should.

These leaders don’t quietly say that it would be best if the employee improved their performance. No, they scream that the person is a “Fucking Idiot!!!” for doing it the way they did it. And they better work the weekend to make it better or they’re fired!!!

Think I’m making this stuff up? Let’s run through some examples:

• Gates: Whenever a project was not going well at Microsoft, Gates would storm over and scream. “I’ve never met a stupider, more inept group in my fucking life!”, “How fucking hard can it be?”. When asked about Gates people often say things like “There were times he’d yell uncontrollably at me, spit between his teeth, just like my little boy.”  These kind of quotes are repeated over and over in most any biography about Gates.
• Jobs: Jobs is known to fire people in a tantrum or scold them profusely if they disagree with him. During a meeting, one of the great Pixar founders dared to write on Jobs whiteboard and Jobs threw such a fit that the man left the company.  According to biographer Deutschman. “No one greets him or says hi to him. Low ranking employees are afraid of him. I remember him walking around the campus one time and groups of people in his way would just split and let him walk through.”
• Disney: Disney’s animators were similarly terrified of him. He would prowl the halls at night and review their drawings. In the morning he would rip them a new one in front of their peers if he did not like the direction something was heading. Most animators would try to avoid him.

As horrible as these people sound, somehow they pushed their people and their companies to achieve greatness. In fact, all of their companies dramatically declined after they left. Disney Entertainment didn’t really recover until about 30 years after their founder’s death when they got another set of screamers (Eisner and Katzenberg). Apple progressively declined after Steve Jobs was let go and was finally rescued when Jobs returned. Microsoft has been on a steady decline since Gates began to focus on other ventures and then finally retire. And my old consulting company has lost its luster without its screaming founder.

So what makes screamers so great? In a nutshell, they will accept nothing but the best and they are passionate about their product.  That in itself is a recipe for great leadership even if it comes in a loud screaming package…

It’s painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world [...] My job has sometimes exactly been that — to get rid of some people who didn’t measure up.

Steve Jobs

Tags: Managment, Screamers

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Bryant August 11th, 2008

People often wonder what the point of blogging is. Especially when starting out, it can be a lot like yelling in a noisy train station. There are lots of others bloggers out there (roughly 70 million at last count), and what you’re talking about may seem to go unnoticed by the world at large.

For most bloggers, their revenue from the activity barely covers their hosting costs. Except for some superstars, blogging is largely still unpaid. So given that I preach that time is your most important asset, you are probably wondering why I think blogging is a productive use of that time?

Even though it most likely will not make you rich, blogging has some key benefits that I believe make it worth the cost for me:

• Improving Communication Skills: The mere act of writing an idea down helps you to remember it and think it through more deeply. The best way to become a better writer is to write more. Becoming a better writer helps you become a better communicator, and the best communicators have the greatest success in life whether in business, relationships or politics.
• Spreading Ideas: Great ideas are spread through the written word. Back in the day, if you wanted to spread a great idea you had to do it through the book. Now, blogging provides a simple way to send your idea germ into the world. After you are long gone, your great ideas will still be floating around the internet and cached in search engines.
• Connecting with Others: By reading someone’s ideas you really get to know them. I feel truly connected to some of my favorite authors and bloggers. So I see blogging as a way for people to get to know me and understand what I think is important.

I’ll let you decide whether blogging is worth it for you, but I’ve made my decision.

“How can I know what I think until I read what I write?”

-James Reston

Tags: Blogging

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Bryant July 27th, 2008

A young comedian once asked Jerry Seinfeld to share his secret to being so successful. Seinfeld explained that a comedian is successful because he has funny jokes, and the key to having funny jokes is to work on them as much as possible.

To enforce this habit, Seinfeld set up a big calendar on the wall in his house. Each day that he wrote or worked on jokes, he would mark a big X. Any day that he did not would remain blank. So, when he was regularly writing jokes it would form a chain of X’s across the days. The trick, he explained to the young comedian, was “Don’t Break the Chain!!!!”

After hearing about “Don’t Break the Chain”, I wrote in my journal something like “try to run, write, read or code every day”. Because those are things I enjoy and want to improve on. It’s been a really effective technique and it’s one of the reasons I’ve been blogging so much (which may be good or bad depending on your perspective ).

I didn’t know that the productivity gurus had picked up on this idea and given it a cool name until I was recently reading A Year of Change by Peter Clemens and he mentioned the “Every Day Mindset”:

What is this mindset? Put simply, it is a mindset that remembers that this day you are currently living will only ever happen once, and it therefore encourages you to make the most of it.

He expanded on Seinfeld’s basic calendar with X’s and outlined it this way:

• Enjoy Each Day: Don’t get so obsessed with time management or end goals that you don’t make sure and enjoy each day.
• Take Small Steps: Try to improve by 1% each day.
• Make Your Habits Daily: If you only do something 3 or 4 times a week, it’s easy to skip it, but daily habits (like brushing teeth) stay with you.

I agree with the majority of his points, and the fact that time is our most limited resource — I don’t want to waste a single day.

Sunday, July 27th 2008 will never happen again. Make sure you don’t break the chain!!!

If I miss one day of practice, I notice it. If I miss two days, the critics notice it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.

-Ignacy (Jan) Paderewski, Polish Pianist & Composer

Tags: Every Day Mentality, Productivity, Seinfeld, Success

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Bryant July 15th, 2008

I’ve often struggled with perfectionism. In fact, I never used to blog because I was always trying to write the “perfect” blog on the “perfect” topic so at the end of the day I wouldn’t publish anything.

Perfectionism can be useful to help ensure quality, but at some point you start to face diminishing returns. At some point, you are starting to waste time tweaking the minute details. And you just have to say that a project is good enough and call it finished.

Without that ability, projects don’t get done or even worse they don’t get started. Timeboxing is one of the most powerful techniques for fighting perfectionism.

Basically you give yourself a specific slice of time to complete an activity. For example, take thirty minutes to clean the kitchen and you will stop at the end. Maybe you will come back to it later, but at least you will have moved the ball forward today.

The key is that nothing is this world is ever perfect, so we should strive for excellence everyday (hmm…sounds like a good blog title) rather than perfection!

The perfect is the enemy of the good.
-Voltaire

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Bryant July 14th, 2008

I learned a valuable and painful lesson during the 2006 Chicago Half Marathon about the importance of training.

In preparation for that half marathon, I followed a standard running plan. I did all the necessary runs in the beginning. Then about a month before the race, my work schedule got extremely busy and I no longer had time for my long runs. I thought I could just wing it at the half marathon because I did most of the runs. In fact, I had even run nine miles during one of my long runs (which seemed like a lot at the time)!

When race day came, I felt great for the first nine miles. But when I hit mile ten, and for the remaining three miles, my legs were in extreme pain and I was really dragging. My body was just not properly prepared for the entire race because I skimped on the training. Luckily, Molly pulled me through by telling me how close we were to the end.

When I finished, I was so miserable that I told myself I’d ran as far as I ever wanted to and I was done running. In fact, I didn’t run again for an entire year. It was a painful lesson to learn, but a valuable one.

Now that I’m preparing for the Disney Marathon in Jan 09, my head is focused on training hard and not skimping. I can’t say that it won’t be painful, but I will be as prepared as possible to enjoy the experience.

You have to forget your last marathon before you try another. Your mind can’t know what’s coming.
- Frank Shorter

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