I know
You have too
What I have
May be
You value
Different things
I have mine you have
Your ways to live
I have got nothing
to give© Ratish
Random life experiences that touch me enough to acknowledge through writing or images
November 27, 2016
October 23, 2016
Execution The Discipline of getting things done - Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan
Strategies most often fail because they aren't executed well.
The leaders who executes assembles an architecture of execution. He puts in place a culture and processes for executing, promoting people who get things done more quickly and giving them greater rewards. His personal involvement in that architecture is to assign the tasks and them follow up. This means making sure that people understand the priorities. which are based on his comprehensive understanding of the business, and asking incisive questions. The leader who executes often dos not even have to tell people what to do; she asks questions so they can figure out what they need to do. In this way she coaches them. passing on her experience as a leader and educating them to think in ways they never thought before. Far from stifling peoplel this kind of leadership helps them expand their own capabilites for leading.
The walking around is useful and important but only if the leader doing the walking knows hwat to say and what to listen for.
Organisations do not execute unless the right people, individually and collectively, foucs on the right details at the right time.
BUILDING BLOCK 1
The Leader's Seven Essential Behaviors
The leaders who executes assembles an architecture of execution. He puts in place a culture and processes for executing, promoting people who get things done more quickly and giving them greater rewards. His personal involvement in that architecture is to assign the tasks and them follow up. This means making sure that people understand the priorities. which are based on his comprehensive understanding of the business, and asking incisive questions. The leader who executes often dos not even have to tell people what to do; she asks questions so they can figure out what they need to do. In this way she coaches them. passing on her experience as a leader and educating them to think in ways they never thought before. Far from stifling peoplel this kind of leadership helps them expand their own capabilites for leading.
The walking around is useful and important but only if the leader doing the walking knows hwat to say and what to listen for.
Organisations do not execute unless the right people, individually and collectively, foucs on the right details at the right time.
BUILDING BLOCK 1
The Leader's Seven Essential Behaviors
- Know your people and your business
- Insist on realism
- Set clear goals and priorities
- Follow through
- Reward the doers
- Expand people's capabilities
- Know yourself
BUILDING BLOCK 2
Creating the framework of cultural change
Your aim is to ask questions that bring out the realities and give people the help they need to correct problems.
We don't think ourselves into a new way of acting. we act ourselves into a new way of thinking.
An organisations culture is the sum of its shared values, beliefs and norms of behaviors. Values may need to be reinforced, they rarely need changing.
The beliefs that influence specific behaviors are more likely to need changing. The beliefs are conditioned by training, experience, what people hear inside or outside about the company's prospects, and perceptions about what leaders are doing and saying. People change them only when new evidence new evidence shows them persuasively that they;re false.
Linking rewards to performance.
The foundation of changing behavior is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent. A business's culture defines what gets appreciated and respected and ultimately rewarded. If a company rewards and promotes people for execution, its culture will change.
The importanc eof robust dialogue
You cannot have an execution culture without dialogue - one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality. Robust dialogue makes an organisation effective in gathering information, understanding information and reshaping it to produce decision.
When people speak candidly, they express their real opinions not those that will please the power players or maintain harmony. Indeed, harmony - sought by many leaders who wish to offend no one - can be the enemy of truth.
Leaders get behavior they exhibit and tolerate
The culture of company is behavior of its leaders. Leaders get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate. You change the culture of a company by changing the behavior of its leaders. You measure the change in the culture by measuring the change in the personal behavior of its leaders and the performance of the business.
BUILDING BLOCK THREE:
The job no leader should delegatge - having the right peopole in the right place.
Follwing through ensures that people are doing the things they committed to do, according to the agreed timetable.
THE THREE CORE PROCESSES OF EXECUTION
People process: Making the link with strategy and operations
A robust peoples process does three things.
- It evaluates individuals accurately and in depth.
- It provides a framework for identifying and developing the leadership talent - at all levels and of all kinds - the organisation will need to execute its strategies down the road and
- it fills the leadership pipeline that's the basis of a strong succession plan.
One of the biggest shortcomings of the traditional people process is that it'sbackward looking. focused on evaluation the jobs people are doing today. Far more important is whether the individuals can handle the jobs of tomorrow.
The basic goal of any strategy is simple enough: to win the customer's preference and create a sustainable competitive advantage. while leaving sufficient money on the table for the shareholders. It defines a business's direct an positions it to move in that direction
If a strategy does not address the hows. it is candidate for failure.
A strong strategic plan must address the following questions:
- What is the assessment of the external environment?
- How well do you understand the existing customers and markets?
- What is the best way to grow the business profitably and what are the obstacle to growth?
- Who is the competition ?
- Can the business excute the strategy?
- Are the short term and long term balanced?
- What are the important milestones for executing the plan?
- What are the critical issues facing the business?
- How will the business make money on sustainable basis?
What Got You Here Won't Get You There - Marshall Goldsmith
The Success Delusion, or Why we Resist Change
We
We
- Overestimate our contribution to a project
- Take credit, partial or complete, for successes that truly belong to others
- Have an elevated opinion of our professional skills and our standing among our peers
- Conveniently ignore the costly failures and time consuming dead ends we have created
- Exaggerate our project's impact on net profits because we discount the real and hidden costs built into them
But our delusions become a serious liability when we need to change
Four key beliefs help us become successful. Each can make it tough for us to change. And that's the paradox of success: The beliefs that carried us here may be holding us back in our quest to go there.
Belief : I have succeeded
Successful people believe in their skills and talent.
Belief 2: I Can Succeed
I am confident that I can succeed. Successful people believe that they have the capability within themselves to make desirable things happen.
The challenge is to make them see that sometimes they are successful in spite of their behaviour.
Belief 3: I Will Succeed
I have the motivation to succeed.
Over commitment can be as serious an obstacle to change as believing that you don't need fixing or that your flaws are part of the reason your're successful.
Belief 4: I Choose to Succeed
When we do what we choose to do, we are committed. When we do what we have to do, we are compliant.
The more we believe that our behavior is a result of our own choices and commitments, the less likely we are to want to change our behaviour.
Cognitive dissonance - It refers to the disconnect between what we believe in our minds and what we experience or see in reality. The underling theory is simple. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.
Almost every one I meet is successful because of doing a lot of things right, and almost every one I meet is successful in spite fo some behavior that defies common sense.
Their success has showered them with positive reinforcement. so they feel it's smart to continue doing what they've always done.
If there's any art to what I do maybe it happens at the decisive moment when I discover someone's hot bottom.
The Twenty Habits that hold you back from the top
The higher up you go in the organisation, the more you need to make other people winners and not make it about winning yourself.
Trouble is candor can easily become a weapon. People permit themselves to issue destructive comments under the excuses that they are true. The question is not "Is it true?" but rather "Is it worth it?"
The interesting thing about not listening is that for the most part it's a silent invisible activity. People rarely notice you ding it.
When you find yourself mentally oor literally drumming your fingers while someone else is talking. stop the drumming. Stop demonstrating impatience when listening to someone.
When somebody makes a suggestion or gives you ideas. your're either going to learn more or learn nothing. So thank them for trying to help.
Gratitude is a skill that we can never display too often. Gratitude is not a limited resource nor is it costly.
The first is assessing the situation, the second is isolating the problem, the third is formulating 4 woo up to get your superiors to approve 5 you woo laterally to get your peers to agree 6 you woo down to get your direct reports to accept 7 implement
Listening
Is it worth it? engages you in thinnking beyon the discussion to consider
a. how the oher person regards you
b. what that person will do afteerwords
c how that person will behave the next time you talk.
Belief 2: I Can Succeed
I am confident that I can succeed. Successful people believe that they have the capability within themselves to make desirable things happen.
The challenge is to make them see that sometimes they are successful in spite of their behaviour.
Belief 3: I Will Succeed
I have the motivation to succeed.
Over commitment can be as serious an obstacle to change as believing that you don't need fixing or that your flaws are part of the reason your're successful.
Belief 4: I Choose to Succeed
When we do what we choose to do, we are committed. When we do what we have to do, we are compliant.
The more we believe that our behavior is a result of our own choices and commitments, the less likely we are to want to change our behaviour.
Cognitive dissonance - It refers to the disconnect between what we believe in our minds and what we experience or see in reality. The underling theory is simple. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong.
Almost every one I meet is successful because of doing a lot of things right, and almost every one I meet is successful in spite fo some behavior that defies common sense.
Their success has showered them with positive reinforcement. so they feel it's smart to continue doing what they've always done.
If there's any art to what I do maybe it happens at the decisive moment when I discover someone's hot bottom.
The Twenty Habits that hold you back from the top
- Winning too much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations – when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point.
- Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion.
- Passing judgement: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them.
- Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasms and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty.
- Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these negative qualifiers which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.”
- Telling the world how smart we are: The need to show people we’re smarter than we think we are.
- Speaking when angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool.
- Negativity, or “Let me explain why they won’t work”: The need to share our negative thoughts even when we weren’t asked.
- Withholding information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
- Failure to give proper recognition: The inability to praise and reward.
- Claiming credit that we don’t deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
- Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it.
- Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else.
- Playing favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
- Refusing to express regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
- Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
- Failing to express gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners.
- Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent who are usually only trying to help us.
- Passing the buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
- An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are.
The higher up you go in the organisation, the more you need to make other people winners and not make it about winning yourself.
Trouble is candor can easily become a weapon. People permit themselves to issue destructive comments under the excuses that they are true. The question is not "Is it true?" but rather "Is it worth it?"
The interesting thing about not listening is that for the most part it's a silent invisible activity. People rarely notice you ding it.
When you find yourself mentally oor literally drumming your fingers while someone else is talking. stop the drumming. Stop demonstrating impatience when listening to someone.
When somebody makes a suggestion or gives you ideas. your're either going to learn more or learn nothing. So thank them for trying to help.
Gratitude is a skill that we can never display too often. Gratitude is not a limited resource nor is it costly.
The first is assessing the situation, the second is isolating the problem, the third is formulating 4 woo up to get your superiors to approve 5 you woo laterally to get your peers to agree 6 you woo down to get your direct reports to accept 7 implement
Listening
Is it worth it? engages you in thinnking beyon the discussion to consider
a. how the oher person regards you
b. what that person will do afteerwords
c how that person will behave the next time you talk.
July 10, 2016
Focus - The hidden driver of excellence - Daniel Goleman
1. The subtle faculty
While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.
Attention works much like a muscle - use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows.
Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions, Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the lager world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.
Attention connects us with the world, shaping and defining our experience.
Attention provides a mechanism that underlie our awareness of the world and the voluntary regulation of our thoughts and feelings
Your focus determines your reality
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
PART I THE ANATOMY OF ATTENTION
2 Basics
The focus in the midst of a din indicates selective attention, the neural capacity to beam in on just one target while ignoring a staggering sea of incoming stimuli, each one a potential focus in itself.
There are two main varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional.
The more our focus gets distracted, the worse we do.
The ability to stay steady on one target and ignore everything else operates in the brain's prefrontal regions. Specialised circuitry in this area boosts the strength of incoming signals we want to concentrate on and dampens down those we choose to ignore.
Since focus demands we tune out our emotional distractions, our neural wiring for selective attention includes that for inhibiting emotion. That means those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence, more able to stay unflappable in a crisis and to keep on an even keel despite life's emotional wave.
The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.
The stronger our selective attention, the more powerfully we can stay absorbed in what we've chosen to do.
We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we are learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know, making new neural connections.
Lacking focus, we store no crisp memory of what we're learning.
Deep thinking demands sustaining a focused mind. The more distracted we are, the more shallow our reflections.
One key to more flow in life comes when we align what we do with what we enjoy.
3. Attention top and bottom
Our brain has two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems.
Bottom-up brain is
The bottom up system multitasks, scanning a profusion of inputs in parallel, including features of our surroundings that have not yet come into full focus; it analyses what's in our perceptual field before letting us know what it selects as relevant for us. Our top down mind takes more time to deliberate on what it gets presented with, taking things one at a time and applying more thoughtful analysis.
If we have mastered the requisite skills to a level that meets the demand, they will take no extra cognitive effort.
At topmost levels the more you you can relax and trust in bottom-up moves, the more you free your mind to be nimble.
Brain studies find that having a champion athlete start pondering techinque during a performance offers a sure recipe for a screwup.
The bottom-up circuitry learns voraciously - and quietly taking in lessons continually as we go through the day. Such implicit learning need never enter our awareness, though it acts as a rudder in life nonetheless, for better or for worse.
Bottom-up awareness makes us suckers for subconscious primes.
We're most prone to emotions driving focus as automatic involuntary choice when - our minds are wandering, when we are distracted or when we're overwhelmed by information - or all three.
We fixate on what's so disturbing and forget the rest. The stronger the emotion, the greater our fixation. Hijacks are superglue of attention.
Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets.
The downside of a life lived bottom-up on automatic: we miss the moment as it actually comes to us, reacting instead to a fixed template of assumptions about what's going on.
4. The value of a mind adrift
Wandering mind may also be considered as not wandering away from from what counts but wandering towards something of value
While mind wandering may hurt our immediate focus on some task at hand, some portion of the time it operates in the service of solving problems that matter for our livers.
Open awareness creates a mental platform for creative breakthroughs and unexpected insights.
A classic model of the stages of creativity roughly translates to the three modes of focus: orienting, where we search out and immerse ourselves in all kinds of inputs; selective attention on the specific creative challenge; and open awareness, where we associate freely to let the solution emerge - then home in on the solution.
Our mind holds endless ideas. memories. and potential associations waiting to be made. But the likelihood of the right idea connecting withe right memory within the right context - and all that coming into the spotlight of attention - diminishes drastically when we are either hyperfocused or too gripped by an overload of distractions to notice the insight.
Creative insights flowed best when people had clear goals but also freedon in how they reached them. And, most crucial, they had protected time - enough to really think freely. A creative cocoon.
5 Finding balance
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the root of judgement, character, and will. - William James
Mind wandering itself seemed to be a cause of unhappiness some or much of the time.
Creative associations aside, mind wandering tends to centre on our self and our preoccupations. While the mind sometimes wanders to pleasant thoughts or fantasy, it more often seems to gravitate to rumination and worry.
You can't ruminate about yourself while you[re absorbed in a challenging task.
The more our mind wanders, the less we can register what's going on right now, right here.
Whenever you notice your mind wandering bring your mind back to its point of focus.
Catching a wandering mind in the act is elusive; more often than not when we are lost in thought we fail to realise that our mind has wandered in the first place. Noticing that our mind has wandered marks a shift in brain activity; the greater this meta-awareness, the weaker the mind wandering becomes.
An even keel in attention reflects a mental mode where we simply notice what ever comes in to awareness without getting caught up or swept away by any particular thing. Everything flows through.
People who are able to rest their attention in this open mode notice more about their surroundings.
Tightly focused attention gets fatigued when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion.
The antidote to attention fatigue is the same as for the physical kind: take a rest.
Atten restoration occurs when we switch from effortful attention, where the mind needs to suppress distractions, to letting go and allowing our attention to be captured by whatever presents itself. But only certain kinds of bottom-up focus act to restore energy for focused attention.
We do well to unplug regularly; quiet time restores our focus and composure.
Total positive absorption shuts off the inner voice, that running dialogue with ourselves that goes on even during our quiet moments.
PART II SELF AWARENESS
6. The inner rudder
Our subtle physiological reactions reflect the sum total of our experience relevant to the decision at hand.
The decision rules derived from our life experiences reside in sub cortical neural network that gather, store, and apply algorithms form every event in our lives - creating our inner rudder.
The brain harbours our deepest sense of purpose and meaning in these sub-cortical regions - areas connected poorly to the verbal areas of the neocortex, but richly to the gut. We know our values by first getting a visceral sense of what feels right and what does not , then articulate those feelings for ourselves.
How well people can sense their heartbeat, in fact, has become a standard way to measure their self-awareness.
Our "gut feelings" are messages from the insula and other bottom-up circuits that simplify life decisions for us by guiding our attention toward smarter options. The better we are at reading these messages, the better our intuition.
Somatic marker - the sensations in our body that tell us when a choice feels wrong or right. This bottom up circuitry telegraphs its conclusions through our gut feelings often before the top-down circuits come to more reasoned conclusion.
7. Seeing ourselves as other sees us
There is intriguing relationship between self-awareness and power: There are relatively few gaps between one's own and others' ratings among lower-level employees. But higher someone's position in an organisation, the bigger the gap. Self awareness seems to diminish with promotions up the organisation's ladder.
The acoustics of our skull case render our voice as it sounds to us very different from what others hear. But our tone of voice matters immensely to the impact of what we say.
Group think begins with the unstated assumption We know everything we need to.
Clarity begins with realising what we do not notice - and don't notice that we don't notice.
Candid feedback from those you trust and respect creates a source of self awareness, one that can help guard against skewed information input or questionable assumptions. Another antidote to groupthink: expand your circle of connection beyond your comfort zone and inoculate against in-group isolation by building an ample circle of no BS confidants who keep you hones.
8. A recipe for self control
Attention regulates emotion.
Willpower emerged as a completely independent force in life success - in fact, for financial success, self-control in childhood proved a stronger predictor than either IQ or social class of the family of origin.
The ability to notice that we are getting anxious and to take steps to renew our focus rests on self-awareness. Whatever our best talents may be, self-awareness will help us display them at their peak.
In the mind's arena, willpower represents a wrestling match between top and bottom systems. Willpower keeps us focused on our goals despite the tug of our impulses, passions, habits, and cravings. This cognitive control represents a "cool" mental system that makes an effort to pursue our goals in the face of our "hot" emotional reactions - quick, impulsive, and automatic.
PART III READING OTHERS
9. The woman who know too much
Gestures always occur just before the most emphasised part of what you're saying.
The timing of the gesture interprets its meaning. If your timing is off, a positive statement can have negative impact.
Such readings of meta-message in nonverbal channels occur to us instantly, unconsciously, and automatically. Everything we attend to in another person generates meaning at an unconscious level, and our bottom-up circuitry constantly reads it.
10. The empathy triad
Super-sensitive reading of emotional signals represents a zenith of cognitive empathy, one of three main varieties of the ability to focus on what other people experience.
In contrast, with emotional empathy we join the other person in feeling along with him or her; our bodies resonate in whatever key of joy or sorrow that person may be going through.
The third variety, empathetic concern, goes further: leading us to care about them mobilising us to help if need be.
An inquisitive nature, which predisposes us to learn from every body, feeds our cognitive empathy, amplifyiing our understanding of other people's worlds.
You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of others.
Empathy entails an act of self-awareness: we read other people by tuning in to ourselves.
Compassion builds on empathy, which in turn requires a focus on others. If self-absorbed, we simply do not notice other people.
By being more self-aware you can see what's being projected on to you, and what you're projecting on to others.
The more you can pick up the subtle cues of emotion the more emphatic understanding you are able to have.
11 Social sensitivity
Social intuition tells us how accurate we are at decoding the stream of nonverbal messages people constantly send, silent modifiers of what they are saying.
Ground rules for what's appropriate can create invisible barriers when people from different cultures work together.
Attention to context lets us pick up subtle social cues that can guide how we behave.
The more you care about someone, the more attention you pay - and the more attention you pay, the more you care.
PART IV THE BIGGER CONTEXT
12. Patterns, Systems, And Messes
Systems are virtually invisible to the naked eye, but their working can be rendered visible by gathering data from enough points that the outlines of their dynamics come into focus. The more data, the clearer the map becomes.
13. System Blindness
Systems are, at first glance, invisible to our brain - we have no direct perception of any of the multitude of systems that dictate the realities of our lives. We understand them indirectly, through mental models and take actions based on those models. The more grounded iin data those models are, the more effective our interventions.
Native lore has been a crutial part of our social evolution, the way cultures pass down their wisdom through time.
In a system there are no side effects - just effects, anticipated or not. What we see as "side effect" simply reflect our flawed understanding of the system. In a complex system cause and effect may be more distant in time and space than we realise.
It's easier to override an automatic, bottom-up response with top-down reasoning than it is to deal with the complete absence of a signal.
14. Distant Threats
You can plan for a hundred years, but you don't know what will happen the next moment. - Neem Karoli baba
We've reached the pivot where more data leads to poor choices.
Better: Zero in on a manageable number of meaningful patterns within a data torrent and ignore the rest.
PART V SMART PRACTICE
15. The Myth of 10,000 hours
You don't get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal - Andres Ericsson
You have to tweak the system by pushing allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits.
Ericsson argues that the secret of winning is "deliberate practice," where an expert coach takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration.
Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practising makes a crucial difference.
Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognise errors and correct them. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye - and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don't get to the top ranks.
The feedback matters and the concentration does, too - not just the hours.
After about fifty hours of training people get to that "good-enough" performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they've learned. No matter how much more they practice in this bottom-up mode, their improvement will be negligible.
The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain's urge to automatise routines. They concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what's not working in their game, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game, of focusing on the particulars of feedback from a seasoned coach. Those at the top never stop learning: if at any point they start coasting and stop such smart practice, too much of their game becomes bottom-up and their skills plateau.
The expert performer actively counteracts such tendencies toward automaticity by deliberately constructing and seeking out training in which the set goal exceeds their current of performance. The more time expert performers are able to invest in deliberate practice with full concentration, the further developed and refined their performance.
Focused attention, like a strained muscle, gets fatigued. World-class competitors tend to limit arduous practice to about four hours a day. Rest and restoring physical and mental energy get built into their training regimen. They seek to push themselves and their bodies to the max, but not so much that their focus gets diminished in the practice session.
Memory is like an index; expert have approximately 50,000 chunks of familiar units of information they recognise.
Negativity focuses us on a narrow range - what's upsetting us. A rule of thumb in cognitive therapy holds that focusing on the negatives in experience offers a recipe for depression.
Positive emotions widen our span of attention; we're free to take it all in.
16 Brain on Games
A lot of tedh is oriented towards distracting. But with calming tech, we're asking how can bring more balance to the world.
17. Breathing buddies
Stopping on cue is the holy grail of cognitive control.
Deliberate, top-down attention holds a key to self-management.
Mindfulness boosts the classic attention network in the rain's fronto-parietal system that works together to allocate attention. These circuits are fundamental in the basic movement of attention: disengaging your focus from one thing, moving it to another, and staying with that new object of attention.
Another key improvement is in selective attention, inhibiting the pull of distractions. This lets us focus on what's important rather than be distracted by what's going on around us.
The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correction your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.
Mindfulness develops our capacity to observe our moment-to-moment experience in an impartial, nonreactive manner.
PART VI THE WELL-FOCUSED LEADER
18 How leaders direct attention
Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.
Stories do more than grab our attention: they keep it.
Attention tends to focus on what has meaning - what matters. The story a leader tells can imbue a particular focus with such resonance, and so implies a choice for the others on where to put their attention and energy.
First the people running the old system don't notice the change. Whey they do, they assume it's minor. Then it's a niche, then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they've squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
Exploration means we disengage from a current focus to search for new possibilities, and allows flexibility, discovery and innovation. Exploitation takes sustained focus on what you;re already doing, so you can refine efficiencies and improve performance.
Those who exploit can find a safer path to profits, while those who explore can potentially find a far greater success in the next new thing - though the risks of failure are greater and the horizon for payback is further away.
19 The leader's triple focus
The sweet spot for smart decisions comes not just from being a domain expert but also from having high self-awareness. If you know yourself as well as your business then you can be shrewder in interpreting the facts.
Leaders who inspire can articulate shared values that resonate with and motivate the group. But to speak from the heart to the heart a leader must first know her values. That takes self awareness.
Inspiring leadership demands attuning both to an inner emotional reality and to that of those we seek to inspire.
The common cold of leadership is poor listening.
Every organisation needs people with a keen focus on goals that matter, the talent to continually learn how to do even better, and the ability to tune out distractions. Innovation, productivity and growth depend on such high performers.
Focus is not just selection the right thing but also saying no to the wrong ones. Single pointed fixation on a goal morphs into over-achievement when the category of "distractions" expands to include other people's concerns, their smart ideas and their crucial information. Not to mention their morale, loyalty and motivation.
Managing your impact on others - by skillful leveraging of their visibility and role to have a positive impact.
To anticipate how people will react you have to read people's reactions to you. That takes self awareness and empatahy in a self reinforcing cycle. You become more aware of how you're coming across to other people.
With high self awareness you can more readily develop good self management. If you manage yourself better you will influence better.
20 What makes a leader?
Emotional aperture the ability to percieve subtle cues in a group oerates a bit like a camera. We can zoom in to focus on one person's feelings or zoom out to take in the collective whether a classroom or a work group.
For leaders aperture ensures a more accurate reading for exaple support or antagonism for a proposal. Reading it well can mean the difference between a failed initiative and a helpful mid-course correction.
Two of the main mental ruts that threaten the ability to notice are unquestioned assumptions and overly relied on rules of thumb.
Top performing teams follow norms that enhance the collective self awareness such as by surfacing simmering disagreements and settling them before they boil over.
To harvest the collective wisdom of a group you need tow things: mindful presence and a sense of safety.
Play equals trust a space where people can take risks. Only by taking risks do we get to the most valuable new ideas.
PART VII THE BIG PICTURE
21 Leading for the long future
Decisions with the long horizon in mind raise questions like, How will what we do today matter in a century or in five hundred years?
We have strong cognitive biases towards our present needs and are weak thinkers about the long away future. Great leaders must have the essential long view that a systems understanding brings.
Great leaders do not settle for systems as they are but see what they could become and so work to transform them for the better to benefit the widest circle.
While the link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time, it ripples through almost everything we seek to accomplish.
Attention works much like a muscle - use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows.
Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions, Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the lager world. A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.
Attention connects us with the world, shaping and defining our experience.
Attention provides a mechanism that underlie our awareness of the world and the voluntary regulation of our thoughts and feelings
Your focus determines your reality
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
PART I THE ANATOMY OF ATTENTION
2 Basics
The focus in the midst of a din indicates selective attention, the neural capacity to beam in on just one target while ignoring a staggering sea of incoming stimuli, each one a potential focus in itself.
There are two main varieties of distractions: sensory and emotional.
The more our focus gets distracted, the worse we do.
The ability to stay steady on one target and ignore everything else operates in the brain's prefrontal regions. Specialised circuitry in this area boosts the strength of incoming signals we want to concentrate on and dampens down those we choose to ignore.
Since focus demands we tune out our emotional distractions, our neural wiring for selective attention includes that for inhibiting emotion. That means those who focus best are relatively immune to emotional turbulence, more able to stay unflappable in a crisis and to keep on an even keel despite life's emotional wave.
The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.
The stronger our selective attention, the more powerfully we can stay absorbed in what we've chosen to do.
We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we are learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know, making new neural connections.
Lacking focus, we store no crisp memory of what we're learning.
Deep thinking demands sustaining a focused mind. The more distracted we are, the more shallow our reflections.
One key to more flow in life comes when we align what we do with what we enjoy.
3. Attention top and bottom
Our brain has two semi-independent, largely separate mental systems.
Bottom-up brain is
- faster in brain time, which operats in milliseconds
- involuntary and automatic: always on
- intuitive, operating through networks of asssociation
- impulsive driven by emotions
- executor of our habitual routines and guide fro our actoins
- manager for our mental models of the world
By contrast top-down mind is:
- slower
- voluntary
- effortful
- the seat of self control, which can (sometimes) overpower automatic routines and nute emotionally driven impulses
- able to learn new models, make new plans, and take charge of our automatic repertoire - to an extent
Voluntary attention, willpower and intentional choice are top down; reflexive attention, impulse, and rote habit are bottom-up
The bottom up system multitasks, scanning a profusion of inputs in parallel, including features of our surroundings that have not yet come into full focus; it analyses what's in our perceptual field before letting us know what it selects as relevant for us. Our top down mind takes more time to deliberate on what it gets presented with, taking things one at a time and applying more thoughtful analysis.
If we have mastered the requisite skills to a level that meets the demand, they will take no extra cognitive effort.
At topmost levels the more you you can relax and trust in bottom-up moves, the more you free your mind to be nimble.
Brain studies find that having a champion athlete start pondering techinque during a performance offers a sure recipe for a screwup.
The bottom-up circuitry learns voraciously - and quietly taking in lessons continually as we go through the day. Such implicit learning need never enter our awareness, though it acts as a rudder in life nonetheless, for better or for worse.
Bottom-up awareness makes us suckers for subconscious primes.
We're most prone to emotions driving focus as automatic involuntary choice when - our minds are wandering, when we are distracted or when we're overwhelmed by information - or all three.
We fixate on what's so disturbing and forget the rest. The stronger the emotion, the greater our fixation. Hijacks are superglue of attention.
Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets.
The downside of a life lived bottom-up on automatic: we miss the moment as it actually comes to us, reacting instead to a fixed template of assumptions about what's going on.
4. The value of a mind adrift
Wandering mind may also be considered as not wandering away from from what counts but wandering towards something of value
While mind wandering may hurt our immediate focus on some task at hand, some portion of the time it operates in the service of solving problems that matter for our livers.
Open awareness creates a mental platform for creative breakthroughs and unexpected insights.
A classic model of the stages of creativity roughly translates to the three modes of focus: orienting, where we search out and immerse ourselves in all kinds of inputs; selective attention on the specific creative challenge; and open awareness, where we associate freely to let the solution emerge - then home in on the solution.
Our mind holds endless ideas. memories. and potential associations waiting to be made. But the likelihood of the right idea connecting withe right memory within the right context - and all that coming into the spotlight of attention - diminishes drastically when we are either hyperfocused or too gripped by an overload of distractions to notice the insight.
Creative insights flowed best when people had clear goals but also freedon in how they reached them. And, most crucial, they had protected time - enough to really think freely. A creative cocoon.
5 Finding balance
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the root of judgement, character, and will. - William James
Mind wandering itself seemed to be a cause of unhappiness some or much of the time.
Creative associations aside, mind wandering tends to centre on our self and our preoccupations. While the mind sometimes wanders to pleasant thoughts or fantasy, it more often seems to gravitate to rumination and worry.
You can't ruminate about yourself while you[re absorbed in a challenging task.
The more our mind wanders, the less we can register what's going on right now, right here.
Whenever you notice your mind wandering bring your mind back to its point of focus.
Catching a wandering mind in the act is elusive; more often than not when we are lost in thought we fail to realise that our mind has wandered in the first place. Noticing that our mind has wandered marks a shift in brain activity; the greater this meta-awareness, the weaker the mind wandering becomes.
An even keel in attention reflects a mental mode where we simply notice what ever comes in to awareness without getting caught up or swept away by any particular thing. Everything flows through.
People who are able to rest their attention in this open mode notice more about their surroundings.
Tightly focused attention gets fatigued when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion.
The antidote to attention fatigue is the same as for the physical kind: take a rest.
Atten restoration occurs when we switch from effortful attention, where the mind needs to suppress distractions, to letting go and allowing our attention to be captured by whatever presents itself. But only certain kinds of bottom-up focus act to restore energy for focused attention.
We do well to unplug regularly; quiet time restores our focus and composure.
Total positive absorption shuts off the inner voice, that running dialogue with ourselves that goes on even during our quiet moments.
PART II SELF AWARENESS
6. The inner rudder
Our subtle physiological reactions reflect the sum total of our experience relevant to the decision at hand.
The decision rules derived from our life experiences reside in sub cortical neural network that gather, store, and apply algorithms form every event in our lives - creating our inner rudder.
The brain harbours our deepest sense of purpose and meaning in these sub-cortical regions - areas connected poorly to the verbal areas of the neocortex, but richly to the gut. We know our values by first getting a visceral sense of what feels right and what does not , then articulate those feelings for ourselves.
How well people can sense their heartbeat, in fact, has become a standard way to measure their self-awareness.
Our "gut feelings" are messages from the insula and other bottom-up circuits that simplify life decisions for us by guiding our attention toward smarter options. The better we are at reading these messages, the better our intuition.
Somatic marker - the sensations in our body that tell us when a choice feels wrong or right. This bottom up circuitry telegraphs its conclusions through our gut feelings often before the top-down circuits come to more reasoned conclusion.
7. Seeing ourselves as other sees us
There is intriguing relationship between self-awareness and power: There are relatively few gaps between one's own and others' ratings among lower-level employees. But higher someone's position in an organisation, the bigger the gap. Self awareness seems to diminish with promotions up the organisation's ladder.
The acoustics of our skull case render our voice as it sounds to us very different from what others hear. But our tone of voice matters immensely to the impact of what we say.
Group think begins with the unstated assumption We know everything we need to.
Clarity begins with realising what we do not notice - and don't notice that we don't notice.
Candid feedback from those you trust and respect creates a source of self awareness, one that can help guard against skewed information input or questionable assumptions. Another antidote to groupthink: expand your circle of connection beyond your comfort zone and inoculate against in-group isolation by building an ample circle of no BS confidants who keep you hones.
8. A recipe for self control
Attention regulates emotion.
Willpower emerged as a completely independent force in life success - in fact, for financial success, self-control in childhood proved a stronger predictor than either IQ or social class of the family of origin.
The ability to notice that we are getting anxious and to take steps to renew our focus rests on self-awareness. Whatever our best talents may be, self-awareness will help us display them at their peak.
In the mind's arena, willpower represents a wrestling match between top and bottom systems. Willpower keeps us focused on our goals despite the tug of our impulses, passions, habits, and cravings. This cognitive control represents a "cool" mental system that makes an effort to pursue our goals in the face of our "hot" emotional reactions - quick, impulsive, and automatic.
PART III READING OTHERS
9. The woman who know too much
Gestures always occur just before the most emphasised part of what you're saying.
The timing of the gesture interprets its meaning. If your timing is off, a positive statement can have negative impact.
Such readings of meta-message in nonverbal channels occur to us instantly, unconsciously, and automatically. Everything we attend to in another person generates meaning at an unconscious level, and our bottom-up circuitry constantly reads it.
10. The empathy triad
Super-sensitive reading of emotional signals represents a zenith of cognitive empathy, one of three main varieties of the ability to focus on what other people experience.
In contrast, with emotional empathy we join the other person in feeling along with him or her; our bodies resonate in whatever key of joy or sorrow that person may be going through.
The third variety, empathetic concern, goes further: leading us to care about them mobilising us to help if need be.
An inquisitive nature, which predisposes us to learn from every body, feeds our cognitive empathy, amplifyiing our understanding of other people's worlds.
You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of others.
Empathy entails an act of self-awareness: we read other people by tuning in to ourselves.
Compassion builds on empathy, which in turn requires a focus on others. If self-absorbed, we simply do not notice other people.
By being more self-aware you can see what's being projected on to you, and what you're projecting on to others.
The more you can pick up the subtle cues of emotion the more emphatic understanding you are able to have.
11 Social sensitivity
Social intuition tells us how accurate we are at decoding the stream of nonverbal messages people constantly send, silent modifiers of what they are saying.
Ground rules for what's appropriate can create invisible barriers when people from different cultures work together.
Attention to context lets us pick up subtle social cues that can guide how we behave.
The more you care about someone, the more attention you pay - and the more attention you pay, the more you care.
PART IV THE BIGGER CONTEXT
12. Patterns, Systems, And Messes
Systems are virtually invisible to the naked eye, but their working can be rendered visible by gathering data from enough points that the outlines of their dynamics come into focus. The more data, the clearer the map becomes.
13. System Blindness
Systems are, at first glance, invisible to our brain - we have no direct perception of any of the multitude of systems that dictate the realities of our lives. We understand them indirectly, through mental models and take actions based on those models. The more grounded iin data those models are, the more effective our interventions.
Native lore has been a crutial part of our social evolution, the way cultures pass down their wisdom through time.
In a system there are no side effects - just effects, anticipated or not. What we see as "side effect" simply reflect our flawed understanding of the system. In a complex system cause and effect may be more distant in time and space than we realise.
It's easier to override an automatic, bottom-up response with top-down reasoning than it is to deal with the complete absence of a signal.
14. Distant Threats
You can plan for a hundred years, but you don't know what will happen the next moment. - Neem Karoli baba
We've reached the pivot where more data leads to poor choices.
Better: Zero in on a manageable number of meaningful patterns within a data torrent and ignore the rest.
PART V SMART PRACTICE
15. The Myth of 10,000 hours
You don't get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal - Andres Ericsson
You have to tweak the system by pushing allowing for more errors at first as you increase your limits.
Ericsson argues that the secret of winning is "deliberate practice," where an expert coach takes you through well-designed training over months or years, and you give it your full concentration.
Hours and hours of practice are necessary for great performance, but not sufficient. How experts in any domain pay attention while practising makes a crucial difference.
Smart practice always includes a feedback loop that lets you recognise errors and correct them. Ideally that feedback comes from someone with an expert eye - and so every world-class sports champion has a coach. If you practice without such feedback, you don't get to the top ranks.
The feedback matters and the concentration does, too - not just the hours.
After about fifty hours of training people get to that "good-enough" performance level, where they can go through the motions more or less effortlessly. They no longer feel the need for concentrated practice, but are content to coast on what they've learned. No matter how much more they practice in this bottom-up mode, their improvement will be negligible.
The experts, in contrast, keep paying attention top-down, intentionally counteracting the brain's urge to automatise routines. They concentrate actively on those moves they have yet to perfect, on correcting what's not working in their game, and on refining their mental models of how to play the game, of focusing on the particulars of feedback from a seasoned coach. Those at the top never stop learning: if at any point they start coasting and stop such smart practice, too much of their game becomes bottom-up and their skills plateau.
The expert performer actively counteracts such tendencies toward automaticity by deliberately constructing and seeking out training in which the set goal exceeds their current of performance. The more time expert performers are able to invest in deliberate practice with full concentration, the further developed and refined their performance.
Focused attention, like a strained muscle, gets fatigued. World-class competitors tend to limit arduous practice to about four hours a day. Rest and restoring physical and mental energy get built into their training regimen. They seek to push themselves and their bodies to the max, but not so much that their focus gets diminished in the practice session.
Memory is like an index; expert have approximately 50,000 chunks of familiar units of information they recognise.
Negativity focuses us on a narrow range - what's upsetting us. A rule of thumb in cognitive therapy holds that focusing on the negatives in experience offers a recipe for depression.
Positive emotions widen our span of attention; we're free to take it all in.
16 Brain on Games
A lot of tedh is oriented towards distracting. But with calming tech, we're asking how can bring more balance to the world.
17. Breathing buddies
Stopping on cue is the holy grail of cognitive control.
Deliberate, top-down attention holds a key to self-management.
Mindfulness boosts the classic attention network in the rain's fronto-parietal system that works together to allocate attention. These circuits are fundamental in the basic movement of attention: disengaging your focus from one thing, moving it to another, and staying with that new object of attention.
Another key improvement is in selective attention, inhibiting the pull of distractions. This lets us focus on what's important rather than be distracted by what's going on around us.
The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correction your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.
Mindfulness develops our capacity to observe our moment-to-moment experience in an impartial, nonreactive manner.
PART VI THE WELL-FOCUSED LEADER
18 How leaders direct attention
Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.
Stories do more than grab our attention: they keep it.
Attention tends to focus on what has meaning - what matters. The story a leader tells can imbue a particular focus with such resonance, and so implies a choice for the others on where to put their attention and energy.
First the people running the old system don't notice the change. Whey they do, they assume it's minor. Then it's a niche, then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they've squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
Exploration means we disengage from a current focus to search for new possibilities, and allows flexibility, discovery and innovation. Exploitation takes sustained focus on what you;re already doing, so you can refine efficiencies and improve performance.
Those who exploit can find a safer path to profits, while those who explore can potentially find a far greater success in the next new thing - though the risks of failure are greater and the horizon for payback is further away.
19 The leader's triple focus
The sweet spot for smart decisions comes not just from being a domain expert but also from having high self-awareness. If you know yourself as well as your business then you can be shrewder in interpreting the facts.
Leaders who inspire can articulate shared values that resonate with and motivate the group. But to speak from the heart to the heart a leader must first know her values. That takes self awareness.
Inspiring leadership demands attuning both to an inner emotional reality and to that of those we seek to inspire.
The common cold of leadership is poor listening.
Every organisation needs people with a keen focus on goals that matter, the talent to continually learn how to do even better, and the ability to tune out distractions. Innovation, productivity and growth depend on such high performers.
Focus is not just selection the right thing but also saying no to the wrong ones. Single pointed fixation on a goal morphs into over-achievement when the category of "distractions" expands to include other people's concerns, their smart ideas and their crucial information. Not to mention their morale, loyalty and motivation.
Managing your impact on others - by skillful leveraging of their visibility and role to have a positive impact.
To anticipate how people will react you have to read people's reactions to you. That takes self awareness and empatahy in a self reinforcing cycle. You become more aware of how you're coming across to other people.
With high self awareness you can more readily develop good self management. If you manage yourself better you will influence better.
20 What makes a leader?
Emotional aperture the ability to percieve subtle cues in a group oerates a bit like a camera. We can zoom in to focus on one person's feelings or zoom out to take in the collective whether a classroom or a work group.
For leaders aperture ensures a more accurate reading for exaple support or antagonism for a proposal. Reading it well can mean the difference between a failed initiative and a helpful mid-course correction.
Two of the main mental ruts that threaten the ability to notice are unquestioned assumptions and overly relied on rules of thumb.
Top performing teams follow norms that enhance the collective self awareness such as by surfacing simmering disagreements and settling them before they boil over.
To harvest the collective wisdom of a group you need tow things: mindful presence and a sense of safety.
Play equals trust a space where people can take risks. Only by taking risks do we get to the most valuable new ideas.
PART VII THE BIG PICTURE
21 Leading for the long future
Decisions with the long horizon in mind raise questions like, How will what we do today matter in a century or in five hundred years?
We have strong cognitive biases towards our present needs and are weak thinkers about the long away future. Great leaders must have the essential long view that a systems understanding brings.
Great leaders do not settle for systems as they are but see what they could become and so work to transform them for the better to benefit the widest circle.
July 03, 2016
Questions
Thoughts dictated on phone on Sunday walk.
What would you trade
to keep on putting food
on the plate?
Why don't we shed
the parts of us
that turned out bad?
Where do you stay
Every passing moment
night and day?
When will you stand
against the things that don't make
sense?
Which tunes to play on the little
instrument that you have?
How will you measure your worth
on the last day in this earth?
© RatishJune 05, 2016
Good Strategy Bad Strategy - Richard Rumelt
One of the challenges of being a leader is mastering this shift from having others define your goals to being the architect of the organisation's purposes and objectives.
To help clarify this distinction it is helpful to use the word "goal" to express overall values and desires and to use the word "objective" to denote specific operational targets.
Dog's Dinner Objectives
Good strategy words by focusing energy and resources on one, or very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favourable outcomes.
Blue-Sky Objectives
The objective good strategy sets should stand a good chance of being accomplished, given existing resources and competence.A blue-sky objective is usually a simple restatement of the desired state of affairs or of the challenge. It skips over the annoying fact that no one has a clue as to how to get there.
The purpose of good strategy is to offer a potentially achievable way of surmounting a key challenge.
Why so much bad strategy?
Bad strategy is active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy.
The unwillingness or inability to choose
Any coherent strategy pushes resources towards some ends and away from others.
Unless collective ruin is imminent, a change in strategy will make some people worse off. Hence, there will be powerful forces opposed to almost any change in strategy.
The Kernel of Good Strategy The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:
- A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspect of the situation as critical.
- A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.
- A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.
The Diagnosis
A great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what is goin on.
At a minimum, a diagnosis names or classifies the situation, linking facts into patters and suggesting that more attention be paid to some issues and less to others.
Diagnosisi is a judgment about meanings of a fact.
The guiding policy
They define a method of grappling with the situation and ruling out a vasat array of possible actions.
Good strategy is not just "what" you are trying to do. It is also "why" and "how" you are doing it.
A good guiding policy tackles the obstacles identified in the diagnosis by creating or drawing upon sources of advantage. Just as a lever uses mechanical advantage to multiply force, strategic advantage multiplies the effectiveness of resources and/or actions.
Coherent Actions
Strategy is about action, about doing something. The kernel of strategy must contain action.
Moving to Action
Without action, the world would still be an idea
Coherence
The coordination of action provides the most basic source of leverage or advantage available in strategy.
Strategic coordination, or coherence, is not ad hoc mutual adjustment. It is coherence imposed on a system by policy and design
USE LEVERAGE
In general, strategic leverage arises from a mixture of anticipation, insight into what is most pivotal or critical in a situation, and making a concentrated application of effort.
Anticipation
The strategist may have insight into predictable aspects of other's behaviour that can be turned to advantage.
In many circumstances, anticipation simply means considering the habits, preferences, and policies of others, as well as various inertias and constraints on change.
Pivot Points
It is a natural or created imbalance in a situation, a place where a relatively small adjustment can unleash much larger pent-up force.
In direct rivalry, the pivot point may be an imbalance between a rival's position or disposition of forces and their underlying capabilities, or between presentation and reality.
Concentration
A"threshold effect" exists when there is a critical level of effort necessary to affect the system. Levels of effort below this threshold have little payoff. When there is threshold effect, it is prudent to limit objectives to those that can be affected by the resources as the strategist's disposal.
PROXIMATE OBJECTIVES
One of leader's most powerful tools is the creation of a good proximate objective - one that is close enough at hand to be feasible.
Resolving Ambiguity
Every organisation faces a situation where the full complexity and ambiguity of the situation is daunting. An important duty of any leader is to absorb a large part of that complexity and ambiguity, passion on to the organisation a simpler problem - one that is solvable.
Taking A Strong Position and Creating Options
The more dynamic the situation, the poorer your foresight will be. Therefore, the more uncertain and dynamic the situation, the more proximate a strategic objective must be.
What one single feasible objective, when accomplished, would make the biggest difference?
You can't concentrate on the crisis if flying isn't automatic
To concentrate on an objective - to make it a priority - necessarily assumes that many other important things will be taken care of.
CHAIN-LINK SYSTEMS
If you have a special skill or insight at removing limiting factors, then you can be very successful.
Getting Struck
When each link is managed somewhat separately, the system can get struck in low efficiency state. The problem arise because of quality matching. There is no point in investing resources in making your link better if other link managers are not.
Getting Unstruck
Chain link systems can be changed and made excellent. It takes insight into the key bottlenecks. Plus, it takes leadership and the willingness to absorb short term losses in the quest of future gains.
Excellence
The excellence achieved by a well managed chain link system is difficult to replicate.
USING DESIGN
Purest and most essential form of strategy - Premeditation, the anticipation of other's behaviour and the purposeful design of coordinated actions
Anticipation
A fundamental ingredient in a strategy is a judgement or anticipation concerning the thoughts and/or behaviour of others.
The Trade off
A design type strategy is an adroit configuration of resources and actions that yields an advantage in a challenging situation.
If organisation has few resources, the challenge can be met only by clever, tight integration. ie. The grater the challenge, the grater the need for a good, coherent, design type strategy.
The Arc of Enterprise
Existing resources can be the lever for the creation of new resources, but they can also be an impediment to innovation.
A very powerful resource position produces profit without great effort, and it is human nature that the easy life breeds laxity.
USING ADVANTAGE
In real rivalry, there are an uncountable number of asymmetries. It is leader's job to identify which asymmetries are critical - which can be turned into important advantages.
You must press where you have advantages and side-step situations in which you do not. You must exploit your rival's weaknesses and avoid leading with your own.
A competitive advantage is interesting when one has insights into ways to increase its value.
Value Creating Changes
The wealth increases when competitive advantage increases or when the demand for the resources underlying it increases. In particular, increasing value requires a strategy for progress on at least on of four different front:
Improvements come form re-examining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives.
Broadening the Extent of Advantage
The idea that some corporate resources can be put to good use in other products or markets is possibly the most basic in corporate strategy.
Creating Higher Demand
A competitive advantage becomes more valuable when the number of buyers grows and/or when the quantity demanded by each buyer increases.
Strengthening Isolation Mechanism
An isolating mechanism inhibits competitors from duplicating your product or the resources underlying your competitive advantage.
The most obvious approach to strengthening isolating mechanisms is working on strongert patents, brand name protections, and copyrights.
USING DYNAMICS
Discerning the Fundamentals
As changes begin to occur, the air will be full of comments about what is happening, but you must be able to dig beneath that surface and discover the fundamental forces at work.
INERTIA AND ENTROPY
In business, inertia is an organisation's unwillingness or inability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Weakly managed organisations tend to become less organised and focused. Entropy makes it necessary for leaders to constantly work on maintaining an organisation's purpose, form and methods even if there are no changes in strategy or competition.
Inertia of Culture
A good product-market strategy is useless if improvement competencies, assumed present, are absent and their development is blocked by long-established culture.
We use the word "culture" to mark the elements of social behaviour and meaning that are stable and strongly resist change.
The first step in breaking organisational culture inertia is simplification. This helps to eliminate the complex routines, processes, and hidden bargains among units that mask waste and inefficiency.
Using Your Head
First, you must have a variety of tools for fighting your own myopic and for guiding your own attention. Second, you must develop the ability to question your own judgement. If you reasoning cannot withstand a vigorous attack, your strategy cannot be expected to stand in the face of real competition. Third, you must cultivate the habit of making and recording judgements so that you can improve.
© Ratish
USING ADVANTAGE
In real rivalry, there are an uncountable number of asymmetries. It is leader's job to identify which asymmetries are critical - which can be turned into important advantages.
You must press where you have advantages and side-step situations in which you do not. You must exploit your rival's weaknesses and avoid leading with your own.
A competitive advantage is interesting when one has insights into ways to increase its value.
Value Creating Changes
The wealth increases when competitive advantage increases or when the demand for the resources underlying it increases. In particular, increasing value requires a strategy for progress on at least on of four different front:
- deepening advantages
- broadening the extent of advantages
- creating higher demand for advantaged product or services or
- strengthening the isolating mechanisms that block easy replication and imitation by competitors
Deepening A|dvantage
Deepening an advantage means widening the gap (between buyer value and cost) by either increasing value to the buyers, reducing costs, or both.
Improvements come form re-examining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives.
Broadening the Extent of Advantage
The idea that some corporate resources can be put to good use in other products or markets is possibly the most basic in corporate strategy.
Creating Higher Demand
A competitive advantage becomes more valuable when the number of buyers grows and/or when the quantity demanded by each buyer increases.
Strengthening Isolation Mechanism
An isolating mechanism inhibits competitors from duplicating your product or the resources underlying your competitive advantage.
The most obvious approach to strengthening isolating mechanisms is working on strongert patents, brand name protections, and copyrights.
USING DYNAMICS
Discerning the Fundamentals
As changes begin to occur, the air will be full of comments about what is happening, but you must be able to dig beneath that surface and discover the fundamental forces at work.
INERTIA AND ENTROPY
In business, inertia is an organisation's unwillingness or inability to adapt to changing circumstances.
Weakly managed organisations tend to become less organised and focused. Entropy makes it necessary for leaders to constantly work on maintaining an organisation's purpose, form and methods even if there are no changes in strategy or competition.
Inertia of Culture
A good product-market strategy is useless if improvement competencies, assumed present, are absent and their development is blocked by long-established culture.
We use the word "culture" to mark the elements of social behaviour and meaning that are stable and strongly resist change.
The first step in breaking organisational culture inertia is simplification. This helps to eliminate the complex routines, processes, and hidden bargains among units that mask waste and inefficiency.
Using Your Head
First, you must have a variety of tools for fighting your own myopic and for guiding your own attention. Second, you must develop the ability to question your own judgement. If you reasoning cannot withstand a vigorous attack, your strategy cannot be expected to stand in the face of real competition. Third, you must cultivate the habit of making and recording judgements so that you can improve.
© Ratish
May 28, 2016
Nothing outlives
What you strive forAll of your life
Bread, mirth & wealth
At your grave
What you crave is
Companionship, peace & health
All you try to hold
Will perish
Life, memories & gold
Nothing outlives
But what you freely give
Fruits from trees of
Love, labour & learning
© Ratish
Blewbury
Chalk pit
27th May 2016
May 07, 2016
Play on
Shifting sand
On which you stand
Keep steady
Head, heart and hand
Endless maze
We spend our days
Whirring around
In slumber and daze
What you gain
From bloodstains
Left behind
In your gravy train
You are sold
Stories new and old
Most intriguing
Is the one you unfold
This moment
You are the game
rule and opponent
Play on as chosen
© Ratish
6 May 2016
Didcot
On which you stand
Keep steady
Head, heart and hand
Endless maze
We spend our days
Whirring around
In slumber and daze
What you gain
From bloodstains
Left behind
In your gravy train
You are sold
Stories new and old
Most intriguing
Is the one you unfold
This moment
You are the game
rule and opponent
Play on as chosen
© Ratish
6 May 2016
Didcot
March 27, 2016
Decisive
How to make better decisions
Decisive - Chip & Dan Heath
A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped - Daniel Kahneman
The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analysing it. - DK - Thinking, Fast and Slow
The Four Villains of Decision Making
Any time in life you're tempted to think,'Should I do this OR that?' instead, ask yourself, 'Is there a way I can do this AND that?'
Narrow framing - (unduly limiting the options we consider) the tendency to define our choice too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.
Confirmation bias - (seeking out information that bolsters our beliefs) Our normal habit in life is to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out information that bolsters our belief.
The tricky thing about the confirmation bias is that it can look very scientific. After all, we're collecting data.
And this is what's slightly terrifying about the confirmation bias: When we want something to be true, we will spotlight the things that support it, and then, when we draw conclusions from those spotlighted scenes, we'll congratulate ourselves on a reasoned decision.
Short term emotions - (being swayed by emotions that will fade) When we've got a difficult decision to make, our feelings churn. We replay the same argument in our head. We agonize about our circumstance. We have kicked up so much dust that we can't see the way forward. In those moments, what we need most is perspective.
Overconfidence - (having too much faith in our predictions) People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold. The future has an uncanny ability to surprise. We can't shine a spotlight on areas when we don't know they exist.
Vanishing Options Test: You can't choose any of the current options you're considering. What else could you do?
What if our least favourite option were actually the best one? What data might convince us of that?
Multitrack (Consider more than one option simultaneously)
Toggle between the prevention and promotion midnsets
Find someone who's solved your problem
When you need more options but feel stuck look for someone who's solved your problem
Look outside: completive analysis, benchmarking, best practices
Look inside: Find your bright spots'
Consider the opposite
To gather more trustworthy information, we can ask discomforting questions
Can we force ourselves to consider the opposite of our instincts?
Zoom in Zoom out
When we zoom out, we take the outside view, learning from the experiences of others who have made choices like the one we're facing. When we zoom in, we take a close-up of the situation, looking for "color" that could inform our decision.
Zooming out and zooming in gives us a more realistic perspective on our choices. We down play the overly optimistic picture we tend to paint inside our minds and instead redirect our attention to the outside world, , viewing it in wide-angle and then in close-up.
Often we trust "the averages" over our instincts but not as much as we should.
The inside view = our evaluation of our specific situation. The outside view = how generally things unfold in situation like ours. The outside view is more accurate, but most people gravitate towards the inside view.
If you can't find the "base rate" for your decision, ask an expert
Ooch
Ooching = running small experiments to test our theories. Rather than jumping in headfirst, we dip a toe in
Ooching is counter productive for situations that require commitment
Overcoming Short-Term Emotion
Fleeting emotions tempt us to make decisions that are bad in the long term
10/10/10 provides distance by forcing us to consider future emotions as mush as present ones.
Honour Your Core Priorities
Agonizing decisions are often are sign of a conflict among your core priorities.
Tripwire ensures that we are aware it's time to make a decision, that we don't miss our chance to choose we've been lulled into autopilot.
Tripwires encourage risk taking by letting us carve out a "safe space" for experimentation
Tripwires allow us the certainty of committing to a course of action, even a risky one, while minimizing the costs of overconfidence.
In life, we naturally slip into autopilot, leaving past decisions unquestioned. A tripwire can snap us awake and make us realize we have a choice. Tripwire can be especially useful when change is gradual.
Decisive - Chip & Dan Heath
A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped - Daniel Kahneman
The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analysing it. - DK - Thinking, Fast and Slow
The Four Villains of Decision Making
Any time in life you're tempted to think,'Should I do this OR that?' instead, ask yourself, 'Is there a way I can do this AND that?'
Narrow framing - (unduly limiting the options we consider) the tendency to define our choice too narrowly, to see them in binary terms.
Confirmation bias - (seeking out information that bolsters our beliefs) Our normal habit in life is to develop a quick belief about a situation and then seek out information that bolsters our belief.
The tricky thing about the confirmation bias is that it can look very scientific. After all, we're collecting data.
And this is what's slightly terrifying about the confirmation bias: When we want something to be true, we will spotlight the things that support it, and then, when we draw conclusions from those spotlighted scenes, we'll congratulate ourselves on a reasoned decision.
Short term emotions - (being swayed by emotions that will fade) When we've got a difficult decision to make, our feelings churn. We replay the same argument in our head. We agonize about our circumstance. We have kicked up so much dust that we can't see the way forward. In those moments, what we need most is perspective.
Overconfidence - (having too much faith in our predictions) People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold. The future has an uncanny ability to surprise. We can't shine a spotlight on areas when we don't know they exist.
Vanishing Options Test: You can't choose any of the current options you're considering. What else could you do?
What if our least favourite option were actually the best one? What data might convince us of that?
Multitrack (Consider more than one option simultaneously)
Toggle between the prevention and promotion midnsets
- Prevention focus = avoiding negative outcomes.
- Promotion focus = pursuing positive outcomes
Find someone who's solved your problem
When you need more options but feel stuck look for someone who's solved your problem
Look outside: completive analysis, benchmarking, best practices
Look inside: Find your bright spots'
Consider the opposite
To gather more trustworthy information, we can ask discomforting questions
Can we force ourselves to consider the opposite of our instincts?
Zoom in Zoom out
When we zoom out, we take the outside view, learning from the experiences of others who have made choices like the one we're facing. When we zoom in, we take a close-up of the situation, looking for "color" that could inform our decision.
Zooming out and zooming in gives us a more realistic perspective on our choices. We down play the overly optimistic picture we tend to paint inside our minds and instead redirect our attention to the outside world, , viewing it in wide-angle and then in close-up.
Often we trust "the averages" over our instincts but not as much as we should.
The inside view = our evaluation of our specific situation. The outside view = how generally things unfold in situation like ours. The outside view is more accurate, but most people gravitate towards the inside view.
If you can't find the "base rate" for your decision, ask an expert
Ooch
Ooching = running small experiments to test our theories. Rather than jumping in headfirst, we dip a toe in
Ooching is counter productive for situations that require commitment
Overcoming Short-Term Emotion
Fleeting emotions tempt us to make decisions that are bad in the long term
10/10/10 provides distance by forcing us to consider future emotions as mush as present ones.
- How will we feel about it 10 minutes from now?
- How about 10 months from now?
- How about 10 years from now?
Honour Your Core Priorities
Agonizing decisions are often are sign of a conflict among your core priorities.
Core priorities: long-term emonional values, goals, aspirations. What kind of person do you want to be?
By identifying and enshrining your core priorities, you make it easier to resolve present and future dilemmas
Bookend the Future
The future is not a "point" - a single scenario that we must predict. It is a range. We should bookend the future. considering a range of outcomes from very bad to very good.- Lower bookend - we need to premortem. It's a year from now. Our decision has failed utterly. Why?
- Upper bookend - we need to preparade. It's a year from now. We're heroes. Will we be ready for success?
To prepare for what can't be foreseen, we can use a "safety factor"
Set a tripwire
Tripwire ensures that we are aware it's time to make a decision, that we don't miss our chance to choose we've been lulled into autopilot.
Tripwires encourage risk taking by letting us carve out a "safe space" for experimentation
Tripwires allow us the certainty of committing to a course of action, even a risky one, while minimizing the costs of overconfidence.
In life, we naturally slip into autopilot, leaving past decisions unquestioned. A tripwire can snap us awake and make us realize we have a choice. Tripwire can be especially useful when change is gradual.
March 07, 2016
Social Media Activism, Shannon and the 4 Villains
Social media can be used to accumulate and amplify our beliefs and preferences. Our interests, associations and interactions in the virtual world can shapes our world view.
Some have appropriated this platform for activism - to present an argument, prove a point and further their cause. They carry their personal biases into the virtual world. Content (words,links, images, videos) that resonates with, strengthens and vindicate their viewpoint is widely circulated.Often they feed off people who hold similar views or defend against opponents of their cause.
We face a constant onslaught of misinformation promulgated by fixated individuals. We inadvertently add noise to the system acting on our natural impulses. There is a need to develop a method that will filter out these distortions.
Communications theory can be used as an approximate model to describe the issue .The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. The terms used in communication theory (noise, information, capacity, channel and bandwidth) can't be referred in exact context in social media parlance but it presents an interesting parallel.
Shannon [1] was concerned with transmitting messages through a channel even in the presence of noise.
- Noise and distortion may be differentiated on the basis that distortion is a fixed operation applied to the signal, while noise involves statistical and unpredictable perturbations
- Distortion can, in principle, be corrected by applying the inverse operation, while a perturbation due to noise cannot always be removed, since the signal does not always undergo the same change during transmission
- If the noise is increased over the value for which the system was designed, the frequency of errors increases very rapidly
- Narrow Framing - Narrow framing means that you are not considering all the alternatives available to you and defining your choices too narrowly.
- Does the argument or position covers a narrow cross-section or presents it in binary terms.
- Does it not even consider options that may be better?
- Is there a tendency to put a spotlight on specific aspect while neglecting positions that do not support the argument or are contrary?
- Action: Widen Your Opinions
- Confirmation bias - Confirmation bias means that when you want or believe an idea to be true, you pay more attention to the information that supports that belief. People naturally tend to select information that supports their pre-existing attitudes, beliefs and actions.
- Does the viewpoint feed to our confirmation bias?
- Action: Reality Test Your Assumptions
- Short term emotion - Short-term emotion clouds thinking. When you are emotional about a decision, you might replay arguments over and over until you can’t think straight, even though the facts have not changed.
- Does the argument only panders to your emotions or asks you to take immediate action on some issue without proper consideration
- Action: Attain Distance Before Deciding
- Overconfidence. Overconfidence is believing that we know what the future holds. Being overconfident leads to not considering alternatives or what might happen if your choice doesn't work out well.
- Are the views projecting any foregone conclusions for a future event?
- Action: Prepare to Be Wrong
I end by quoting Robertson Davies "Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don’t choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you."
January 03, 2016
6 tips to help you focus on your most important improvement area this year
My challenge is to achieve desired results by engaging in deliberated actions that lead to the intended results. Often times, we do not act in consistent manner with what we know is the right things to do. There is a disconnect in our intent and action. This is something I would like to focus for the year.
I have used tools (6 Successors To The Elevator Pitch) suggested by Daniel Pink in his book "To Sell Is Human" to position this as a self selling pitch. This concept can be used to reinforce your focus for the year as well.
Here are my practice pitches on intent vs action that I will use to keep the focus this year.
One word pitch:
Action
Question pitch:
Why are your excuses stronger than the intent?
Rhyming pitch:
Focused effort every waking hour
Makes dream real with its magical power.
Subject line pitch:
6 tips to help you focus on your most important improvement area this year (will try alteration)
Twitter Pitch: (will tweet)
Pixar Pitch
Once upon a time I had a good intention
Every day I wanted to act on it but got distracted with other things
One day I disregarded my excuses and took a small step
Because of that I was able to make small progress in desired direction
Because of that the feeling of making an impact got reinforced
Until finally my actions became stronger than my excuses.
© Ratish
I have used tools (6 Successors To The Elevator Pitch) suggested by Daniel Pink in his book "To Sell Is Human" to position this as a self selling pitch. This concept can be used to reinforce your focus for the year as well.
- One word pitch: |Push brevity to its breaking point. Reducing your point to single word demands discipline and forces clarity. Choose proper word and rest can fall in place.
- Question Pitch: When you are asked question you are compelled to respond.
- Rhyming Pitch: Rhymes boosts processing fluency. The ease with which our mind slice, dice and makes sense of stimuli
- Subject line (Email) Pitch: Utility,Curiosity, Specificity. Utility works better when lots of email- something to gain or loose. Curiosity in low demand -intrinsic motivation.
- Twitter Pitch
- Pixar Pitch
Once upon a time ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___
Here are my practice pitches on intent vs action that I will use to keep the focus this year.
One word pitch:
Action
Question pitch:
Why are your excuses stronger than the intent?
Rhyming pitch:
Focused effort every waking hour
Makes dream real with its magical power.
Subject line pitch:
6 tips to help you focus on your most important improvement area this year (will try alteration)
Twitter Pitch: (will tweet)
Pixar Pitch
Once upon a time I had a good intention
Every day I wanted to act on it but got distracted with other things
One day I disregarded my excuses and took a small step
Because of that I was able to make small progress in desired direction
Because of that the feeling of making an impact got reinforced
Until finally my actions became stronger than my excuses.
© Ratish
January 01, 2016
Rip it up - Richard Wiseman
You do not run from a bear because you are afraid of it, but rather become afraid of the bear because you run from it. - William James
If you want a quality, act as if you already have it. W.J.
Your behaviour does influence how you feel and so , as a result, it is possible to manufacture emotions at will.
He who sings frightens away his ills - Miguel de Cervantes
© Ratish
If you want a quality, act as if you already have it. W.J.
Your behaviour does influence how you feel and so , as a result, it is possible to manufacture emotions at will.
He who sings frightens away his ills - Miguel de Cervantes
© Ratish
Happy New Year!!
We have another chance
To go for one more dance
Don't try to flaunt the steps or spin
Just sway to the tune from within
May you forget trying
And learn to live
May you get back
More than you give
May you always be among family and friends
May you have fortitude on life's sharp bends
May you learn to conquer your doubts and fear
And go on spreading joy with each passing year
© Ratish
Didcot
1st Jan 2016
To go for one more dance
Don't try to flaunt the steps or spin
Just sway to the tune from within
May you forget trying
And learn to live
May you get back
More than you give
May you always be among family and friends
May you have fortitude on life's sharp bends
May you learn to conquer your doubts and fear
And go on spreading joy with each passing year
© Ratish
Didcot
1st Jan 2016
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