The Company Culture Challenge

    

Issue No. 229 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Sept. 2, 2011) highlights a hot-off-the-ePress Kindle book on company culture. Heed this warning, “Low turnover can be an indication of a poor company culture just as high employee turnover indicates employees are not fully engaged.” And this reminder: check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.

It’s the Culture, Stupid!

Do you feel like Sisyphus, the mythical character, pushing your boulder-of-an-organization (or department) up a hill, knowing no matter how hard you work, it will eventually all just come crashing back down again? Then this is the book for you—but the solution may surprise you.

It’s the culture, stupid!

Authors David Russell and Robert Betzel begin their book by describing a modern day Sisyphus. They dive into the dismal corporate culture wasteland—expose the skinny relic that it is in most organizations—and then deliver a very, very practical step-by-step process for fixing it.  In their view, a company culture must mean something—and it can be measured in sales, growth, engagement, healthy relationships and much more. 

News Flash! You must get this book! It’s already on my Top-10 List for 2011—and I still have about 15 books to read before New Year’s Eve—but I’m that confident you’ll find huge value in The Company Culture Challenge. (Note: You can download it now on Kindle and other apps. The hardback is coming in October.)

Example: when is the last time a business book (or high-priced consultant) added the word “accountability” after mission, vision and values?  Russell and Betzel do—and their action steps to build accountability into your culture’s DNA are worth the price of a hundred Kindles.

The book refuses to waste your time with hypothetical, theoretical mumbo jumbo filler. Instead, the authors deliver real people in real organizations who demonstrate what a healthy and thriving culture looks like. Example: Jim Cabela, founder of the $2.6 billion outdoor retailing company Cabela’s, “works until noon daily personally addressing new complaints received the day before from customers.”  Ya think that might inspire the troops?

How’s this? To take the company culture temperature at other organizations, they suggest you give your team members $50 to $100 each to purchase something at another company—and then report back to the group on their experience. (Allow your people to keep what they buy.)

Always and Never.  Do you articulate your values using “Always” and “Never” standards? Russell includes his Top-10 “Always Standards” in the book. Example: “Always observe the client’s surroundings like Sherlock Holmes.”

Another good one: As you create the perfect customer (or donor, or volunteer or client) experience, what are your “Experience Bookends?” How do you start and how do you end every customer experience? Have you created an intentional culture? See—this stuff is very, very practical.

Gut check time! “Do you know that statistics prove it costs an average of one year’s compensation to replace an employee?” Stuck with team members who “were great actors during interviews, but poor performers on the job?”  The recruiting standards chapter is brilliant.

Low turnover? “If you are experiencing high employee turnover then you are either not hiring people who fit well in your company culture or your leadership skills/systems need work. If you are experiencing low employee turnover, then it may be too easy to work at your company.” So they suggest specific ways to improve your hiring process.

Goal alignment is a big deal in their step-by-step process. They quote Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “…81 percent of employees do not have clear, measurable goals.”  Yikes! They add, “If you are not working on your culture, then your company culture is working against you.”

What’s the problem? “They have leadership tendencies, but no leadership skills because they have not been trained, coached and mentored how to lead people systematically, even though they follow proven processes for accounting, operations, marketing, sales and technology.”

What’s the solution? Scrap the “Idea-of-the-Week Club” and, instead, use this book to begin building company culture systems, step-by-step. 

I need to sign off…and I’ve just scratched the surface of my Kindle notes and highlights—dozens of them—but they’re now digitized on my personal Amazon Kindle webpage for future reference.  I’m starting to like this thin little machine! (Didn’t think I would.)

To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for The Company Culture Challenge, by Robert Betzel and David Russell.

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
........................................................................
1) The authors are (ahem) in your face a bit, like this note: “Those of you who do not know your Average Client Lifetime Value, and think this is a stupid waste of time, need to make a choice: (1) calculate the value; or (2) stop reading this book because you have not experienced enough pain yet to convince you to change your company culture.” So…do we know our Average Client (or Volunteer or Donor) Lifetime Value here?

2) The authors write, “How can we expect our people to deliver a perfect client experience if we have never defined what it is? This is the primary purpose of this stage: To work through a process to define from your client's perspective what a perfect experience is when they interact with your company.” So…what’s our next step?
........................................................................

Kindle the Hoopla!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit

One of the big ideas in the Hoopla! Bucket, Chapter 10, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to recognize your team’s contributions with spontaneous hoopla! So here’s a way to coach your team on company culture, with a little bit of hoopla! added in.

Purchase a Kindle from Amazon for your next staff meeting. Give Hank a week on the Kindle and tell him he can download a book of his choice (like this issue’s book)—and ask for his book review at your next staff meeting. Then ask Hank to hand it off to another team member for the same drill the following week.  At the end of each quarter, present a new Kindle to the best book reviewer. Maybe offer an iPad to the best reviewer of the year for the one book that has had the greatest impact on your organization.

For book recommendations on hoopla!, such as The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their Employees, Retain Talent, and Drive Performance, visit the Hoopla! Bucket webpage.

MORE RESOURCES:

• BLOG: Pails in Comparison
• SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews
• JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon 
• WEBSITE: Management Buckets
• BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations
• PODCASTS: John Pearson's Buckets Podcasts 

NOTICE! Issues No. 1 to 657 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (2006 to 2025), previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to this blogsite you are on now (John Pearson's Buckets Blog).

Tribes - We Need You to Lead Us

    

Issue No. 127 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Feb. 16, 2009) is all about tribes, Seth Godin’s latest book on leading a movement. By the way, Peggy Noonan commented in her Feb. 7, 2009, Wall Street Journal column, “Every new president starts out fresh, in part because he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Ignorance keeps you perky.” That’s the big challenge as you lead your team: helping them move from “I don’t know what I don’t know,” to “I know what I don’t know.” And this reminder: check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.

Sell One!

One word, one paragraph, not even one page can adequately describe Seth Godin’s latest epistle on leadership—because it’s more about marketing. No, it’s about tribes (I’ll explain). No it’s about the Internet and factories. No, it’s about how leaders build communities (tribes, again) and focus on true fans versus thousands.

Well, actually it’s about heretics, nonprofits, faith, religion, Steve Jobs, unicorns and the Customer Bucket and the Printing Bucket (aka Communications Bucket)—and how movements are looking for leaders—and how you can lead your tribe (I think).  Aw…forget it. I can’t really explain this book, but I’m going to read it at least twice. You should too.

Guarantee. Read all 147 pages (it’s short and small) and you’ll have dozens of conversation-droppers to impress and amaze your colleagues. You’ll also change your thinking on stuff. I counted 127 short stories/principles—each with a gotta-read-this headline. There are no chapters—just quick-reading, page-turning marketing/leadership insights:

   • Leadership Discomfort: “Leadership is scarce because few people are willing to go through the discomfort required to lead … When you identify the discomfort, you’ve found the place where a leader is needed.”

   • Twitter and Trust and Tribes and True Fans: “The essential lesson is that every day it gets easier to tighten relationships you have with the people who choose to follow you.”

   • Leading from the Bottom (with a Newsletter): “Twice a week, the newsletter went out. Twice a week, I talked about our quest. Twice a week, I chronicled the amazing work of our tiny tribe. The newsletter connected the tribe members. It turned a disparate group of career engineers into a working community.”

Godin, bestselling author of Poke the Box and This Is Marketing, says there are three steps in tribe work: motivating, connecting and leveraging. His real-life examples get your adrenalin going. His pithy bursts of wisdom are memorable. “My friend Fred has a new book coming out and he was trolling around for marketing ideas. I think he’d be surprised at this one: Sell one.”

To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, by Seth Godin.

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
........................................................................
1) Seth Godin writes, “The first thing a leader can focus on is the act of tightening the tribe.” He says it’s tempting to make the tribe bigger versus more connected. What are we doing here to “tighten the tribe?”

2) He adds, “Friending 10 or 20 or a thousand on Facebook might be good for your ego but it has zero to do with any useful measure of success.” What would be a useful measure of success on Facebook [or Instagram or X]?

........................................................................

Giftedness vs. Slots
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit

One of the big ideas in the Volunteer Bucket, Chapter 12, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to leverage the spiritual giftedness of your volunteers. Rather than filling volunteer slots, take time to discover the spiritual gifts of your volunteers—and place them in roles where their giftedness shines. (Now there’s a concept!)

Paul reminds us in Ephesians 4:11-13 (The Message), “He handed out gifts above and below, filled heaven with his gifts, filled earth with his gifts. He handed out gifts of apostle, prophet, evangelist, and pastor-teacher to train Christ’s followers in skilled servant work, working within Christ’s body, the church, until we’re all moving rhythmically and easily with each other, efficient and graceful in response to God’s Son, fully mature adults, fully developed within and without, fully alive like Christ.”

For more volunteer resources and ideas, visit the Volunteer Bucket page of my website.

MORE RESOURCES:

• BLOG: Pails in Comparison
• SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews
• JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon 
• WEBSITE: Management Buckets
• BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations
• PODCASTS: John Pearson's Buckets Podcasts 

NOTICE! Issues No. 1 to 657 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (2006 to 2025), previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to this blogsite you are on now (John Pearson's Buckets Blog).

Hemingway Didn’t Say That

 

Issue No. 389 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (July 29, 2018) warns—those famous quotations from Mark Twain, Yogi Berra, and Ernest Hemingway? Probably fake news. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies).   Pop Quiz on Popular Quotes Fake news. Fake stats. Fake quotes. Who ya gonna call? Call Garson O'Toole. He’s got some chops, at least for branding—he labels himself “the internet’s foremost quote investigator.” We haven’t talked about the Printing Bucket for a while (aka the Communications Bucket)—so during these lazy days of summer, here’s a fun reference book by O’Toole that will position you as the premier quotemeister at staff meetings. Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations, by Garson O’Toole, describes (to accurately quote the book’s dust jacket): “How one man corrected hundreds of modern misquotations infecting the internet, our books, and our minds.” POP QUIZ!  Did the following people originate these quotations? (True, False, or Recycled? Answers below.) 1) Andy Warhol: “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” 2) Woody Allen: “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” 3) Pablo Picasso: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” 4) Edmund Burke:  “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” 5) Thomas Edison: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” 6) Bill Gates: “640K [of computer memory] ought to be enough for anyone.” 7) Chief Seattle: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” 8) Dorothy Parker: “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” 9) Mother Teresa: “’Do good anyway’ and the Paradoxical Commandments.” 10) U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes on the invention of the telephone: “Great invention, but who would ever want to use one?” 11) Benjamin Disraeli: “Half of the town councilors are not fools.” 12) David Foster Wallace: “You’ll worry less about what people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” 13) John Wooden: “Sports do not build character. They reveal it.” 14) Albert Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted.” 15) John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, and Woodrow Wilson: “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” 16) Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Easy reading is hard writing.” 17) Yogi Berra: “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” 18) Mark Twain: “If your own tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.” 19) Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Proverbs 17:28: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” 20) Mark Twain: “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” You’ll enjoy this book! Garson O’Toole (click here for his Quote Investigator website) segments his known quotation falsehoods into four categories: Group Error, Reader Error, Author Error, and Finders Keepers. Example:  In researching the quotation attributed to Benjamin Disraeli: “Half of the town councilors are not fools,” O’Toole devotes six pages (including notes) and concludes that the earliest reference was in 1927 in Sweden, and not from London and Prime Minister Disraeli. The 1927 quotation: “A government official reportedly lost his temper and rebuked his fellows. A municipal councilor . . . remarked that certainly half of his colleagues were fools. An apology was demanded. He promised to make reparation and caused bills with the following correction to be posted on boardings in the town: ‘I said that half of the town councilors are fools. I now declare that half of the town councilors are not fools.’” According to O’Toole, “Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, Dorothy Parker, and Yogi Berra are quotation superstars. Personas of this type are so vibrant and attractive that they become hosts for quotations they never uttered.” So…what’s your favorite quotation—and have you verified its accuracy? As Abraham Lincoln noted, “Not everything you read on the internet is true.” POP QUIZ ANSWERS: Quotations 1 and 2 are true. All others are false, except O’Toole says 12 and 15 are “recycled.” And here’s an interesting note (at least to me): Quotation 12 notes that Ethel Barrett should also get some credit for this recycled quotation. It appeared in her 1968 book, Don’t Look Now, but Your Personality Is Showing (5th printing), published by G/L Regal Books—also the publisher of my book, Mastering the Management Buckets (now distributed by Baker Books). To order from Amazon, click on the title for Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations, by Garson O'Toole. Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:  1) “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life” is frequently attributed to Confucius. Not so, says O’Toole. But…whoever said it, do you agree with it? Why? 2) “Proofreading occurs best after publication” is one of my favorite quotations, but I don’t know who first shared that wisdom. Discuss: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how committed are we to zero typos and accurate attribution?” (Visit the Printing Bucket.)       Typos Matter! Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook (2nd Edition with 17% Fewer Typos!) The Printing Bucket chapter in Mastering the Management Buckets will remind you that if the written emergency instructions on a Boeing 747 are laced with typographical errors, it may cause passengers to wonder, “If the proofreading is shoddy—what about the safety precautions?” Check out the six strategic “balls” in either the book or the hot-off-the-press second edition workbook, Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates and Tips From John Pearson. Order here on Amazon. #1. LEVERAGE your communication tools to keep programs and projects aligned with your BHAG and strategies. #2. APPOINT and empower a printing coordinator. #3. CREATE a failsafe proofreading system. #4. POST your printing deadline calendar by the coffee. #5. SELECT a style and take off! #6. MAXIMIZE new technologies and innovations. The workbook (232 pages) includes worksheets for staff meetings on all 20 buckets/core competencies, including the Results Bucket, the Customer Bucket, the Team Bucket, the Delegation Bucket, the Printing Bucket and much more.   NOTICE! Issues No. 1 to 657 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (2006 to 2025), previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to this blogsite you are on now (John Pearson's Buckets Blog).               Printing Bucket Resources  JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Looking for new ways to communicate your mission—with messages that won’t be lost in the sea of kitten videos and fake news? Check out the innovative work from Pearpod. MORE RESOURCES: • BLOG: Pails in Comparison • SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews • JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon • WEBSITE: Management Buckets • BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations • PODCASTS: John Pearson's Buckets Podcasts   LESSONS FROM THE NONPROFIT BOARDROOM Dan Busby and John Pearson are authors of the new book, Lessons From the Nonprofit Boardroom. Order from Amazon and follow the "40 Blogs. 40 Wednesdays."  guest bloggers each week here. What are your favorite books on board governance?  Check out this new series from John Pearson, on the ECFA Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations blog. Read it here.

Smart Moves for People in Charge - 130 Checklists

   

Issue No. 227 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Aug. 20, 2011) highlights a book of 130 checklists, including 14 ways to facilitate a meeting—and how to infuse them with energy and substance. You’ll also note a way to leverage this book’s wisdom once a week for over two years. And this reminder: check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.

130 Checklists!

Rats! I wish I had written this week’s book!  It’s very, very good and will probably make my Top-10 list for 2011. It’s got checklists and I’m big on checklists.  (FYI: one of my Top-10 books from last year, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, was just ranked No. 7 on this month’s New York Times’ paperback business bestseller list.)

So when Jim Canning recommended Smart Moves for People in Charge: 130 Checklists to Help You Be a Better Leader, I was immediately hooked—even before the book arrived.  It exceeded my expectations by about 129!

The “checklists” run about three pages each, but each item on the checklist has been expertly honed down to just the big idea, with three to five lines of color commentary. That’s it—the big idea, an insight—and you’re in and out.  Examples:

Checklist No. 48: Nine Guidelines to Make Praise Motivating
   #1. Overcome your reasons for not praising enough (there are three).
   #9. Initiate a team-of-the-month program. “Your company will be one of the very few that elevates work teams in this way.”

Checklist No. 50: Seventeen Inexpensive Ways to Reward Employees
   #12. Taking a member of the support staff on a sales call. “People in support roles may spend their entire careers without meeting those people who ultimately pay their salaries—customers. What this trip will cost is puny compared to the motivation it will purchase.”

Checklist No. 56: Thirteen Tactics for Increasing Teamwork
   #1. Create a teamwork culture. “Rename staff meetings ‘team meetings.’”

Checklist No. 61: Eighteen Tips for Conducting a Selection Interview
   #7. Stay away from hypothetical questions. “Whenever you ask, ‘What would you do if…’ you encourage the candidate to guess at what answer you’re looking for rather than tell the truth.  These are hypothetical questions calling for hypothetical responses. Since you’re not hiring a hypothetical candidate, it’s best to avoid them. Instead ask, ‘When was the last time you encountered…? How did you handle it?’”

Each of the 130 checklists has an average of 10 to 20 big ideas—with easily 1,200 ideas in this 296-page goldmine. The first of nine sections, for example, “Build Your Executive Power,” has more than 150 ideas, plus the short color commentaries and some memorable call-outs. You’re probably familiar with half of the ideas (but maybe not practicing all of them)—but likely 20 percent of the ideas are new gems for you, or certainly many of your team members, including those you’re mentoring.

Each of the nine sections, like Spread the Word, Lead Your Team, Build Your Team, Stay Close to the Customer, and Find Your Balance, conclude with a dozen or more pithy quotations. Example: under “Twelve Quotes Worth Quoting About Teamwork,” the authors include this from former Boston Celtics NBA Coach Red Auerbach, “They said you have to use your five best players, but I found you win with the five that fit together best.”

The call-outs scream-out to be shared immediately! For example:

“A consultant advised one manager to initiate a gripe session with several dissatisfied employees. The manager responded, ‘Are you crazy? All they’ll do is complain!’ To which the consultant retorted, ‘I hope so—that’s just what a gripe session is for.’”

Speaking of consultants, there’s a checklist titled, “Ten Tips for Hiring a Consultant.” The call-out is brilliant! “If you can’t fully identify the problem in advance, consider using one consultant to identify the problem and another to help you solve it. Here’s one reason why. Let’s say you know you’ve got serious morale problems but haven’t figured out why. If you hire a human relations consultant both to pinpoint the cause and to recommend solutions, you’re tempting that consultant to find the problems he knows how to solve.”

Or, as Abraham Maslow said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail.”

How can you not buy this book when the checklists are so tempting?
   --13 Ways to Get Employees to Keep You Informed
   --  6 Red Flags of Burnout
   --13 Steps to Delegate Effectively
   --17 Ways to See Your Business Through Your Customers’ Eyes
   --10 Steps to Resolve Customer Complaints
   --  9 Tips for Creating a Succession Plan

   --  8 Ways to Get Great Value From Mentoring
   --  9 Methods to Handle an Insubordinate Manager
   --13 Ways to Make Sure Your Incentives “Incent”
   --18 Management Classics You Should Read
   --15 People to Listen To
   --64 Business Terms to Have on the Tip of Your Tongue
   --  7 Tips for Giving Off-the-Cuff Speeches

[x] Check! Like I said…this is a goldmine!

To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Smart Moves for People in Charge: 130 Checklists to Help You Be a Better Leader, by Sam Deep and Lyle Sussman.

YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
........................................................................
1) Gutsy idea: “From this book’s table of contents, select the 25 leadership behaviors you believe are most essential to your success (e.g. ‘Managing your time effectively’). Give the list to your employees and ask that they identify the three behaviors that you display most consistently and the three you display least consistently. Tabulate the results. Ask humbly for explanations and perhaps examples of feedback you don’t understand. (For even greater impact, ask employees to choose the 25 leadership behaviors they’ll evaluate in you.)”

2) OK…who wants to borrow this book for a week? Your assignment: report back at our next team meeting on just one checklist—and what you learned.  Then inspire another member to do the same for next week. (Note: with 130 checklists, you can keep your team meetings energized for over two years with just one book!)

........................................................................

Hire Healthy People!
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit

One of the big ideas in the Culture Bucket, Chapter 8, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to hire for attitude, not aptitude. Other thoughts on culture and core values:

Max DePree: “The corporation can never be something we are not.”

Miles McPherson: "One way to get a healthy culture is to hire healthy people."

For five book recommendations on culture and core values, plus other resources, visit the Culture Bucket webpage.

MORE RESOURCES:

• BLOG: Pails in Comparison
• SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews
• JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon 
• WEBSITE: Management Buckets
• BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations
• PODCASTS: John Pearson's Buckets Podcasts 

NOTICE! Issues No. 1 to 657 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (2006 to 2025), previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to this blogsite you are on now (John Pearson's Buckets Blog).

Little Bets

   

Issue No. 217 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (May 15, 2011) highlights a page-turner book on innovation and experimentation with dozens of “I didn’t know that” examples from Pixar, Frank Gehry, early-era HP, and many others. I read it on my new Amazon Kindle, but I think I prefer books you can touch, feel and loan out. And this reminder: check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.

Fail Quickly to Learn Fast

“The writers for the humor publication, the Onion, known for its hilarious headlines, propose roughly six hundred possibilities for eighteen headlines each week,” reports Peter Sims in his fascinating book, Little Bets. That’s just a three percent success rate for headline writers. Yikes. Or maybe not yikes.

Subtitled, “How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries,” we quickly learn—through dozens of mini-case studies—that innovation comes through hard work, experimentation, and bosses who are cheerleaders for failure. (And I would also guess innovation happens with a healthy dose of weekly staff encouragement, motivation and hoopla-type fun.  I mean, what if your best headline ideas were ranked 19th each week?)

Example: Comedian Chris Rock tests, tests and re-tests every joke—and every word—for up to six months (or even a year) at his local comedy club before he takes his hour-long act on the road or on national television.

Example: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has built an “experimental discovery mentality” so that “whether or not employees are doing so is a part of their performance reviews.” (Read more about Amazon.)

The author adds, “Like Chris Rock, Bezos has accepted uncertainty; he knows that he cannot reliably predict which ideas for new markets will work and which won’t. He’s got to experiment. One such example is a feature the company launched that would compare a customer’s entire purchase history with its millions of other customers in order to find the one person with the closest matching history. In one click, Amazon would show you what items that customer purchased.

“‘No one used it,’ Bezos has said. ‘Our history is full of things like that, where we came up with an innovation that we thought was really cool, and the customers didn’t care.’”

It’s all about making a series of little bets—not one humongous bet—just little ones with the hope that just a couple will pay big dividends. “Experimental innovators like Rock, Brin and Page, Bezos, and Beethoven don’t analyze new ideas too much too soon, try to hit narrow targets on unknown horizons, or put their hopes into one big bet. Instead of trying to develop elaborate plans to predict the success of their endeavors, they do things to discover what they should do. They have all attained extraordinary success by making a series of little bets.”

The book surprised me.  I expected cute little success stories like, “Well…I just flipped the spaghetti onto the wall—and it stuck!” Instead, the innovators of little experiments were actually productive creative teams of “rigorous, highly analytical, strategic and pragmatic” people. There are no step-by-step formulas. 

Instead, there is a focus on five fundamentals: 1) Experiment (fail quickly to learn fast); 2) Play (a fun environment never snuffs out or prematurely judges the ideas—the case study on Pixar is amazing); 3) Immerse (get out with customers and learn from the ground up); 4) Reorient (make small wins and necessary pivots); and 5) Iterate (repeat, refine and test frequently).

Caution though: this approach is a 180-plunge from what the profs taught us. He quotes Sir Ken Robinson, “We are educating people out of their creativity.” Plus, most management approaches are all about reducing errors and risk—not giving license to having a good whack at a half-baked idea. Goodness, this is God’s money we’re wasting!

So…is this just one more niche business book—a good read, a few memorable stories—and then back to real-life-in-the-trenches? Hopefully, no.  Leverage the insights of Little Bets in your planning process—with one mega-caveat. “The fact is that much of what we would like to be able to predict is unpredictable.

"Global market movements, political and cultural complexities, and demographic shifts constantly reshape the ground beneath us. This certainty of uncertainty is becoming ever more evident with the accelerating pace of technological change. The Internet has reduced communications barriers and allows new players from different corners of the world to rapidly emerge and compete globally. Thus a key flaw with the top-down, central planning approach is how limited it is in allowing us to be limber and able to discover new ways of doing things.”

Yikes…I’ve exceeded my prudent word limit—but I have another 100 paragraphs or whole pages of Little Bets highlighted you’ll have to discover for yourself. BTW, I read this on my new Amazon Kindle—and love the highlighting and note-making options. Perfect for airplanes; but not as easy to pass around the room during my workshops and board consultations! I’m still undecided about it.

To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries, by Peter Sims.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions: 
........................................................................
1) Sims quotes from the book, The Fog of War, saying former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (under Kennedy and Johnson) fell prey to the “illusion of rationality.” He says “it happens when ideas or assumptions seem logical in a plan, spreadsheet model, PowerPoint, or memo, yet they haven’t been validated on the ground or in the real world.” Do we have any recent examples of this in our shop?

2) How effective are we at “failing quickly” to learn fast?

........................................................................

Singing From the Same Songsheet
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit

One of the big ideas in the Printing (Communications) Bucket, Chapter 19, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to choose a stylebook and stick with it.

I use the Associated Press Stylebook as my bible for abbreviations, capitalizations, style, dates (is it December 10 or Dec. 10?), etc. For example, the AP Stylebook says San Clemente, California (in a sentence) should be abbreviated as “San Clemente, Calif.” not “San Clemente, CA.”  Every stylebook is different, but you must pick one.  In your newsletters, websites and press releases, you’re striving for consistency—so every team member is singing from the same songsheet.  

For more help visit the Printing Bucket webpage.

MORE RESOURCES:

• BLOG: Pails in Comparison
• SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews
• JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon 
• WEBSITE: Management Buckets
• BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations
• PODCASTS: John Pearson's Buckets Podcasts 

NOTICE! Issues No. 1 to 657 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (2006 to 2025), previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to this blogsite you are on now (John Pearson's Buckets Blog).

Being Generous

  

Issue No. 166 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (Dec. 4, 2009) highlights a remarkable hot-off-the-press new book to spark generosity in your own life. It’s also the perfect Christmas gift for donors and colleagues. And this reminder: check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.

Bon Appetit!

The author of Being Generous shares a transparent axiom at the beginning of his 139-page panoramic and profound sweep of global generosity. He confesses, “I had to practice religious disciplines in order to become more generous. This is something I still must work at constantly, for ultimately the business of giving is unfinished business.”

The good news: this is a no-brainer gift book for every person who wants to be a God-honoring and generous giver.  The bad news: just when you thought you understood generosity and believed yet-one-more-book is certainly not needed on the subject, Theodore Roosevelt Malloch serves up a sumptuous feast.  In 139 pages, no less!

You may be tempted to sample the dessert first: 27 one-page profiles of generous givers from the Pew Family to the Maclellan Family.  From George Cadbury to William Wilberforce. From Bach and Mendelssohn to J.C. Penney, John Walton and Eli Lilly.  Then there’s Joan Kroc, Mother Teresa, Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett and C.S. Lewis.  The profiles will enlighten and, often, surprise you. 

Malloch writes, “The story is told that when a friend heard that Lewis had given money to a beggar in Oxford, the friend remarked that he shouldn’t have done so because the beggar would only spend the money on alcoholic drink. Lewis replied, ‘If I kept the money, I would only have spent it on drink!’”

But the profiles are just the dessert.  The meat and potatoes (10 short chapters) offer remarkable and synergistic insights.  Malloch delivers a smorgasbord of generosity research and commentary: historical, political (why socialism inhibits generosity), religious (all the major religions promote generosity), theological, physiological (our brains are hardwired to give), societal, scientific and cultural.  You’re quickly convinced. You must embrace generosity as a virtue—and help others to do the same.

Being Generous is profound—yet very, very readable. It’s not yesterday’s leftovers—it’s new thinking pulled from the widest array of knowledge—served up with inspiring side dishes that motivate and are generously seasoned with wisdom.

Malloch suggests we give greater priority to a balanced diet of time, talent and treasure (not just treasure) when practicing the virtue of generosity.  He proposes a “Generosity Index” that would chart two items along an axis:
   • How you use your time (your date book)
   • How you use your money (your check book)

“By calculating these two points along a graph,” he adds, “you could see where you are in terms of generosity. You could tell if you are living a generous life and if any axis is falling short. You could compare yourself with others and against yourself over time, year-to-year, decade-to-decade.”  He’s on to something.

If you’re a pastor, or a CEO or development officer of a nonprofit, this is a no-brainer Christmas gift for yourself and for your Top-100 donors. If you’re just hungry to be a more generous person, bon appetit! 

To order this book from Amazon, click on the title for Being Generous, by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch.

Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions: 
........................................................................
1) How much should we keep for ourselves—and how much should we give?  C.S. Lewis said, “I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.” Do you agree?

2) The author describes an entrepreneur who started his company one year and then a company foundation by the second year. He said, “I believe you start giving when you have nothing. Then, when you become successful, it’s a habit from the heart.” What giving habits have you formed in your own life and in the lives of the children in your circle of influence?

........................................................................

Extravagance & Exuberance
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit

One of the big ideas in the Donor Bucket, Chapter 11, in Mastering the Management Buckets is is that generosity should be marked by extravagance and exuberance.

In 1 Chronicles 29 (The Message), King David addressed the nation and announced he was giving his personal fortune of gold and silver for the temple project. He challenged the people: “And now, how about you? Who among you is ready and willing to join in the giving?” (v. 7).

The leaders and the people then gave extravagantly! According to verses 6 through 8, the fundraising campaign contributions totaled 188 tons of gold, 377 tons of silver, 679 tons of bronze and 3,775 tons of iron, plus precious jewels! (Note for the file: God is not short of money.) The Scriptures record the people’s response in verse 9: “And the people were full of a sense of celebration—all that giving! And all given willingly, freely! King David was exuberant.”

For more books, insights and resources, visit the Donor Bucket webpage at the Management Buckets website.

MORE RESOURCES:

• BLOG: Pails in Comparison
• SUBSCRIBE: Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews
• JOHN'S BOOK REVIEWS: on Amazon 
• WEBSITE: Management Buckets
• BLOG: Governance of Christ-Centered Organizations
• PODCASTS: John Pearson's Buckets Podcasts 

NOTICE! Issues No. 1 to 657 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting (2006 to 2025), previously archived on Typepad.com are slowly (!) being moved to this blogsite you are on now (John Pearson's Buckets Blog).