Leadership is all about focusing energy on achieving important goals.
In achieving focus, leadership is implicitly saying “no” to all the other less-important things that might be attempted at this time. In this sense, “saying no” to trivia and distractions is the essence of leadership. For instance, Steve Jobs.
A big part of Steve Jobs’ success has been to shed all the good ideas that don’t make the final cut. Carmine Gallo in an interesting article, “Steve Jobs: Get Rid Of the Crappy Stuff” writes: “Editing also leads to great product designs and effective communications. According to Steve Jobs, ‘People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.’”
Imagine how much better our lives would be if all firms “got rid of the crappy stuff”....
Continued at:
http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/2011/05/30/leadership-how-to-say-no-while-also-inspiring-people/
Monday, May 30, 2011
Four Hour Work Week: Reality Distortion Field
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/11/21/bill-clinton-reality-distortion-field/
How to Go From “Eye Shy” to “Eye Ballsy” In Three Easy Steps
STEP 1: Practice Brief Eye Contact With Strangers
While you walk down the sidewalk (during daylight hours!) look at the eyes of every person walking towards you long enough to see their eye color. Less than a second. Then look away. This is the best technique I know for building solid eye contact skills quickly. In my experience, if the eye contact is brief enough, no one minds at all, and you get tons of practice in.
You can also practice longer eye contact with waiters, salesclerks, cashiers, and other paid service staff, so long as you do it respectfully and in a friendly way.
In all cases, keep a neutral facial expression and soft gaze. You don’t want anyone to think you’re trying to stare them down, rob them, or get them into the sack. If you practice all this for a week or two as you go about your daily business, the quality of your eye contact will become better than most people’s, in a short amount of time.
STEP 2: Learn the Art of Personal Space
You’ve probably experienced bosses or strangers “get up in your face,” and it feels very unpleasant. Bill Clinton and others with RDFs are experts at getting close to you while making you feel totally safe and comfortable. This increases feelings of intimacy, trust, and affinity.
How do they do it? They have mastered the subtle art of personal space. First written about in-depth by anthropologist Edward Hall, our sense of “personal space” is the feeling we get of being “invaded” when someone steps too close.
Interestingly, our sense of personal space is not a pure function of physical proximity; many other psychological factors influence it. In general, your sense of physical proximity with someone increases when they are:
- Making direct eye contact with you
- Facing you directly (as opposed to standing side-by-side looking into the crowd)
- Touching you (i.e., rubbing elbows in a crowd, patting your back, touching your arm or shoulder)
- Raising their voice
- Talking about you (as opposed to a neutral subject)
If a stranger starts doing too many of these at once, your personal space begins to feel violated, and you start having that icky “eww get away from me!” feeling we’ve all experienced with unwelcome conversations at parties.
In contrast, if you learn to modulate these five different factors, and combine them in different ways, you can make your conversation partners feel safe and comfortable while at the same time feeling close and intimate with you.
When you increase eye contact, try leaning back or standing back a little to increase their comfort. When you are physically close because it’s a crowded room, try lowering your voice. When you pat someone on the back or touch their arm as you talk, try standing at an angle, not facing them directly.
By playing with these different factors, cranking some of the dials up as you turn others down, you can create the feeling of being incredibly close, without triggering the “Red Alert! Get Away!” response in your conversation partner. People with RDFs are masters of this skill. And it’s very seductive.
STEP 3: Practice Being Present
Have you ever felt someone was making eye contact with you, but wasn’t taking in a thing you were saying? My friend Marie Forleo has referred to this phenomenon as a “pretend gaze—their eyes are on yours, but their mind is on a Hawaiian beach.”
In our age of tweets and Facebook status updates and cellphone buzzes and new texts and IMs and VMs every few seconds, focusing your inner attention on the same person you’re talking with can be challenging, but its worth practicing the skill. (BTW, following Tim’s low-information diet helps with this.)
For one week, whenever you talk with someone, practice noticing whenever your mind drifting—to the laundry, your bills, you co-worker’s snide comment today, that hottie you just spotted at the party whom you want to meet. Then, when you notice this inevitable mental drifting, bring your attention back to whomever you’re talking with at the moment. They will truly appreciate it.
We are living in a world where no one, it seems, has attention for anyone or anything for more than a few moments. How rare it is when someone pays attention to us. Consider the wording of the phrase: pay attention. In industrialized nations, at least, attention is becoming almost as scarce a resource as money. Someone who “pays” it to you is giving you something of true value.
As Elizabethan poet and statesman Fulke Greville has written, “Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.”
Clinton pays out his focused attention generously, making us feel he’s truly interested in us and what we have to say. This is why people love talking with him face-to-face.
That feeling of “we were the only two people in the room,” which Clinton is so skillful in fostering, stems from his eye contact, from his careful use of personal space, and from his unshakeable attention once he’s talking with you.
Learn to combine these three factors together, and you’re on your way to a rock-star Reality Distortion Field. Just be careful about what you do with all the attention!
How to Go From “Eye Shy” to “Eye Ballsy” In Three Easy Steps
STEP 1: Practice Brief Eye Contact With Strangers
While you walk down the sidewalk (during daylight hours!) look at the eyes of every person walking towards you long enough to see their eye color. Less than a second. Then look away. This is the best technique I know for building solid eye contact skills quickly. In my experience, if the eye contact is brief enough, no one minds at all, and you get tons of practice in.
You can also practice longer eye contact with waiters, salesclerks, cashiers, and other paid service staff, so long as you do it respectfully and in a friendly way.
In all cases, keep a neutral facial expression and soft gaze. You don’t want anyone to think you’re trying to stare them down, rob them, or get them into the sack. If you practice all this for a week or two as you go about your daily business, the quality of your eye contact will become better than most people’s, in a short amount of time.
STEP 2: Learn the Art of Personal Space
You’ve probably experienced bosses or strangers “get up in your face,” and it feels very unpleasant. Bill Clinton and others with RDFs are experts at getting close to you while making you feel totally safe and comfortable. This increases feelings of intimacy, trust, and affinity.
How do they do it? They have mastered the subtle art of personal space. First written about in-depth by anthropologist Edward Hall, our sense of “personal space” is the feeling we get of being “invaded” when someone steps too close.
Interestingly, our sense of personal space is not a pure function of physical proximity; many other psychological factors influence it. In general, your sense of physical proximity with someone increases when they are:
- Making direct eye contact with you
- Facing you directly (as opposed to standing side-by-side looking into the crowd)
- Touching you (i.e., rubbing elbows in a crowd, patting your back, touching your arm or shoulder)
- Raising their voice
- Talking about you (as opposed to a neutral subject)
If a stranger starts doing too many of these at once, your personal space begins to feel violated, and you start having that icky “eww get away from me!” feeling we’ve all experienced with unwelcome conversations at parties.
In contrast, if you learn to modulate these five different factors, and combine them in different ways, you can make your conversation partners feel safe and comfortable while at the same time feeling close and intimate with you.
When you increase eye contact, try leaning back or standing back a little to increase their comfort. When you are physically close because it’s a crowded room, try lowering your voice. When you pat someone on the back or touch their arm as you talk, try standing at an angle, not facing them directly.
By playing with these different factors, cranking some of the dials up as you turn others down, you can create the feeling of being incredibly close, without triggering the “Red Alert! Get Away!” response in your conversation partner. People with RDFs are masters of this skill. And it’s very seductive.
STEP 3: Practice Being Present
Have you ever felt someone was making eye contact with you, but wasn’t taking in a thing you were saying? My friend Marie Forleo has referred to this phenomenon as a “pretend gaze—their eyes are on yours, but their mind is on a Hawaiian beach.”
In our age of tweets and Facebook status updates and cellphone buzzes and new texts and IMs and VMs every few seconds, focusing your inner attention on the same person you’re talking with can be challenging, but its worth practicing the skill. (BTW, following Tim’s low-information diet helps with this.)
For one week, whenever you talk with someone, practice noticing whenever your mind drifting—to the laundry, your bills, you co-worker’s snide comment today, that hottie you just spotted at the party whom you want to meet. Then, when you notice this inevitable mental drifting, bring your attention back to whomever you’re talking with at the moment. They will truly appreciate it.
We are living in a world where no one, it seems, has attention for anyone or anything for more than a few moments. How rare it is when someone pays attention to us. Consider the wording of the phrase: pay attention. In industrialized nations, at least, attention is becoming almost as scarce a resource as money. Someone who “pays” it to you is giving you something of true value.
As Elizabethan poet and statesman Fulke Greville has written, “Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.”
Clinton pays out his focused attention generously, making us feel he’s truly interested in us and what we have to say. This is why people love talking with him face-to-face.
That feeling of “we were the only two people in the room,” which Clinton is so skillful in fostering, stems from his eye contact, from his careful use of personal space, and from his unshakeable attention once he’s talking with you.
Learn to combine these three factors together, and you’re on your way to a rock-star Reality Distortion Field. Just be careful about what you do with all the attention!
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Why arguing leads us to better management decisions
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/business/27corner.html
NY Times article - The Corner Office: Richard D. Fain - Want Clarity: Learn to Play Devil's Advocate
"One of my mentors was Jay Pritzker [the Hyatt Hotels founder and a former director of Royal Caribbean Cruises]. Jay was an extraordinary man. In all the time I knew him, I don’t think he ever agreed with me on any subject, ever. When we would have an important decision at the board level, Jay would be my No. 1 antagonist, and he would argue vociferously against whatever I was proposing and question me in a highly skeptical tone. He was good at it, and he would ask the penetrating questions for exactly as long as it took for any other member of the board to agree with him. And the minute anybody else started to pick up the cudgel and continue along the same path that he had just been on, he would say, “You know, I think he’s crazy, but we’ve got to follow Richard on this.”
It was fascinating. He loved to play devil’s advocate. I love to play devil’s advocate, so we were on much the same wavelength. I always find that you learn more by arguing with someone than by just agreeing with them. And I also realized early on that having to explain something to someone is often the best way to make sure you understand it yourself.
And so part of my management style is to play devil’s advocate. There are people who think that I sometimes forget the second part of the term, but I do find that I learn by arguing with somebody. I learn more about whether somebody really believes their point of view and has thought it through, and it also helps me clarify in my own mind the direction I’m going."
NY Times article - The Corner Office: Richard D. Fain - Want Clarity: Learn to Play Devil's Advocate
"One of my mentors was Jay Pritzker [the Hyatt Hotels founder and a former director of Royal Caribbean Cruises]. Jay was an extraordinary man. In all the time I knew him, I don’t think he ever agreed with me on any subject, ever. When we would have an important decision at the board level, Jay would be my No. 1 antagonist, and he would argue vociferously against whatever I was proposing and question me in a highly skeptical tone. He was good at it, and he would ask the penetrating questions for exactly as long as it took for any other member of the board to agree with him. And the minute anybody else started to pick up the cudgel and continue along the same path that he had just been on, he would say, “You know, I think he’s crazy, but we’ve got to follow Richard on this.”
It was fascinating. He loved to play devil’s advocate. I love to play devil’s advocate, so we were on much the same wavelength. I always find that you learn more by arguing with someone than by just agreeing with them. And I also realized early on that having to explain something to someone is often the best way to make sure you understand it yourself.
And so part of my management style is to play devil’s advocate. There are people who think that I sometimes forget the second part of the term, but I do find that I learn by arguing with somebody. I learn more about whether somebody really believes their point of view and has thought it through, and it also helps me clarify in my own mind the direction I’m going."
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