Courage — to serve?

Ever reach out to connect or collaborate with someone, thinking it was all about a “project” to find yourself trying to comprehend the quality of the person you were reaching out to; how separate from convention, how extra-ordinary they truly were? I did, and I am still processing it.

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As many of you will know, I have recently completed the draft writing of a new book: Resilience; How culture enabled the rebirth of Ford Motor Company (iBooks). Writing a book is the easy part, I hear, and promoting it is where the real work begins. So I have committed to engaging the process, so as to be true to the message. I thought it would be helpful to get an endorsement from Ford, and so I set out to see if this was possible. In the end, I did get the endorsement, but the experience of encountering Alan Mulally (President and CEO of Ford Motor Company) in the process of achieving it, was a greater gift; far more moving than  Please Continue Reading …

Assumptions

If you are old like me…you ight remember a baseball coach lecturing his team at the start of the movie “The Bad News Bears” (not the remake)…wherein he wrote the word “ASSUME” on the board…exhorting his team to never assume…for if they did, they would make “an ASS out of U and ME”.

Since that time, I have heard many people use a similar philosophy…referring to how dangerous assumptions can be. No doubt, there are instances where caution is wise…but not in every instance. Let me suggest that, in the context of team and partnership, it may be more beneficial to assume. To assume Please Continue Reading …

Culture: an elite athlete perspective

I received permission to share an email (below) that one of my clients circulated among the staff of his organization…the day after an intensive culture workshop I facilitated. So often it seems that leaders are looking for a light switch process to “turn on” culture improvement…rather than go through the process. However, it is the process that works the depth of true transformation…painful though it may be.

At the start of a person’s journey from inactivity to elite athlete they have to expend high levels of their energy to do relatively little because they are not in very good shape. At the same time, they make big improvements in their fitness and ability to achieve in their sport.

As they get more fit, that same level of energy expenditure does quite a lot more and they improve noticeably. It’s a nice linear progression and as long as you only want to be good at the sport you can work reasonably hard and be in quite good shape.

However, if the goal is to be an elite athlete then moving from the 90th percentile to the 92nd percentile doesn’t take just 2% more energy, it takes almost as much energy as was expended to get from 0 – 90%. Getting a tiny bit better takes high levels of intense energy and focus. The work to go from 10th best in the world to on the podium is massive.

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Sustainable High Performance & Assumptions

Values are the foundation of culture. A healthy culture has healthy values…but furthermore is one wherein the behaviors, articulated statements – and assumptions – are in alignment.

Assumptions are the subconscious motives for the way we act. We can hold a value for something (example innovation), but our assumptions will lead us in differing directions on the same value.

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