Leadership

Derek Sivers on what’s your compass?

I just finished Derek Siver’s Domino Project book, Anything Your Want. In 77 short pages, Derek shares what he learned from starting, growing, and selling CD Baby.

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On page 2 he asks a question that frames the decisions he made as he grew CD Baby from an idea to a company that generated $40 million in revenues just 10 short years later.

What’s your compass?

Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own. They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won’t make them happy. Don’t be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because your pursued little distractions instead of big dreams. You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what’s worth doing.

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Posted on July 8, 2011 in Leadership, Vision

Do one thing to become more stress resistant

Stress is a part of lives, yet some of us seem to handle it better than others.

In a recent article in the New York Times, Gretchen Reynolds introduced me to a recent animal study from researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health. The study of mice give us some powerful insights into stress and how we can become stress resistant.

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For the experiment, researchers at the institute gathered two types of male mice. Some were strong and aggressive; the others were less so. The alpha mice got private cages. Male mice in the wild are territorial loners. So when then the punier mice were later slipped into the same cages as the aggressive rodents, separated only by a clear partition, the big mice acted like thugs. They employed every animal intimidation technique and, during daily, five-minute periods when the partition was removed, had to be restrained from harming the smaller mice, which, in the face of such treatment, became predictably twitchy and submissive.

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Posted on July 7, 2011 in Action, Leadership

Reactors at the helm of RIM?

“I have lost confidence” wrote an anonymous executive at Research In Motion, the maker of the Blackberry, last Thursday.

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In an open letter to the company’s co-CEOs and other senior managers, the executive lamented, “While I hide it at work, my passion has been sapped. I know I am not alone — the sentiment is widespread and it includes people within your own teams.”

RIM responded publicly saying it was aware of the issues, but in the process it defensively questioned why someone would write an open letter and then awkwardly highlighted its track record and future prospects. That sounds like the response of a reactor.

Here’s the reality. The percentage of phones sold by RIM in the US during the last three months dropped from 11% to 6% according to analysts with Nielsen, a near 50% decline. In addition, RIM has reportedly chopped its internal sales estimates for the Blackberry Playbook, its iPad-like tablet launched in April.

What is happening at RIM? Are there a couple of reactors at the helm? There are many possibilities, but a few stand out:

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Posted on July 1, 2011 in Leadership

When do you feel smart?

According to research done by Carol Dweck and others, the answer to the question–”When do you feel smart?”– can give us direct access to our mindset. I asked myself this question recently and my response tells me I have work to do.

© @boetter via Flickr

Ask yourself, “When do I feel smart?” and look at the table below and see which set of responses most closely match your own.
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Posted on June 30, 2011 in Beliefs, Leadership

The virtue of ‘I don’t know’

I just read Gregory Rodrigeuez’s insightful editorial in the LA Times entitled, “The virtue of ‘I don’t know’.”

We seem to be obsessed with opinions because we take them to be a marker of individual independence, distinctiveness and reasoned intelligence. Expressing opinions is how we also express our freedom of conscience and flex our political rights. But when we’re obliged to have an opinion on everything, all the time, our expressions of conscience are less about independent thinking than about making stuff up.

A 1981 study out of the University of Michigan found that roughly 30% of survey respondents were willing to offer an opinion on a highly obscure piece of legislation if a “no opinion” option wasn’t available. The researchers concluded that people “who really have no views on the issues under inquiry ” often “simply flip mental coins in order to satisfy the interviewer’s expectation.”

The authenticity of a meaningful “I don’t know” is powerful. Let’s stop flipping mental coins in order to satisfy each other’s expectations and use “I don’t know” whenever we don’t.

Posted on June 29, 2011 in Beliefs, Leadership, Vision

What is your leadership DNA?

I suspect that many of us never get a handle on our leadership DNA. Instead, we take our views, our tendencies, our work style for granted. Without the self-knowledge that comes from introspection, we give control of what may be our greatest influence to chance.

If you take time to understand your professional wiring, you can begin to understand how your mindset, experiences, and habits influence your work. You’ll begin to see what others see as you lead. You’ll begin to understand why you do the things you do well and why you do others poorly. You’ll begin to identify your weaknesses, which can help you avoid putting them to work. You’ll begin to see your worldview, mindset, assumptions, and beliefs and how they influence what you think, say, and do.

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Posted on June 27, 2011 in Leadership