It’s amazing to me that companies can survive in these types of conditions. When they do, it’s the innovative products and entrepreneurial ideas that got them to where they are. To move past the hero worshiping phase of a start up, companies need to focus on the first principles of facilitating learning. Like a child who is full of themselves without any experience, they need to experience being put in their place so they can open their minds to learning from others. Some never do and suffer dissolution, closure, and death. For those that can learn, the foundation of growth is a willingness to listen not to respond to issues and keep moving product but to understand why the many issues came to be and more importantly defining a future state to close the gap between where one is and where one wants to be.

Without understanding the gap between where we are and where we want to be, we are stuck repeating the same issues over and over and over again. Luck becomes the thing that keeps us progressing in lieu of an open mind and willingness to change. Luck runs out especially when we are not open to seeing the opportunities in front, around, and more importantly within us. Organizational and personal situational awareness is the first principle upon which all others reside. Know thy place not only in the world, but in relation between the current state and the future we want to create. Without this awareness we are simply flotsam on an ocean of yearly, monthly, daily, and moment by moment change. Floating here and there with the current, we lack direction and motive power to do anything. But there is hope.

All we need to do is to tune our brains to. be aware of what’s bobbing and floating around us. Watching the flotsam enables us to se what rubble can come together. Piece by rejected piece we can start brining things together and fashioning ourselves a life boat. Before long we can find use for various pieces of flotsam to begin guiding our raft. Some pieces will even enable us to provide motive power to our life boat. Continuing down this path, we may even come across other rafts and gang together and form alliances provided we maintain awareness of the issues and the gap between where we are and where we want to be. If we can only mind the gap, we can find more opportunity and utilize what we do have to make more out of ourselves. 

If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

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We are obligated to question what we do, how we do it, and, most importantly, why each step matters. The conscious questioning, professional debate, and thoughtful implementation will transport us to better and more efficient ways to meet our needs. Status quo thinking often leads to stagnation. We must learn from our failures, recognize the lessons, and, crucially, communicate all to our colleagues. Only then can we say we are truly preparing the next generation. And, we must not allow the scar tissue of past failures to hold us back from meeting the complex challenges of the future. We must test our ideas, not only talk about them. We must understand what is possible, along with limitations and constraints. Finally, we must work to critically evaluate and eliminate non-value-added activities that so frequently find their way into our processes.

Now think of this not in terms of the aerospace industry but in terms of our own lives.

To maintain relevance in our ever changing world, we are obligated to question what we do, how we do, and whether each step along our path matters. Conscious questioning and engaging with others about what we are passionate about enables thoughtful implementation and more efficient ways to meet our own expectations. Simply following what others do, the status quo, only alienates us from the rapid change going on all around us. We must learn from our failures, recognize how we can improve and share our intent with others during every interaction. Only then can we say we are truly preparing for our future and the future of the generations to follow. We must not allow our scar tissue of past failures to hold us back from the adaptation needed in the current situation or meet the challenges in our future. We must test our ideas, by dropping our pebble into our local meme pool and see what reflects back as relevant and of benefit not only to ourselves but other as well. We must understand what opportunities are available to us along with any constraints keeping us from capitalizing on them. Finally, we must think critically about what we do in terms of what is value or non-value-add for our particular way of pursuing happiness and freedom. 

Unlike Henry David Thoreau who went to the woods to live deliberately and suck out all the marrow of life, we have to enter the river of time, live deliberately within our changing world, and suck out all the marrow from the bones available to us in our stream of consciousness. In doing so, we can share the nutrients with those we interact with thereby enabling a better future for all of us all. Whether you are floating lazily or amidst rapids, the river of time is where life abounds. May we all enjoy our journey along the river.

If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

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The organization’s capacity to perform is constricted when information does not readily flow when needed. Sometimes this is due to an individual’s inflated ego and associated power mongering. Sometimes it’s due to personnel not knowing what information is important and what does not serve the larger system’s performance. Sometimes it has less to do with people than the systems that contain or surface the information. Business systems and more specifically the flow of information between business systems can have a profound positive or negative impact on organizational performance. To illustrate, imagine an organization having multiple divisions where one business location makes sub-assemblies integrated into a product integrated at another location. When an issue with one of those dub-assembly elements is discovered at the integrated product level, investigation ensues costing delivery schedule and money. Finding root cause reveals that the issue was discovered by the team that worked the element many months ago. Having an issue at the integrated level after it was identified by another team represents a failure of information flow. Knowing about the issue when it happened at the element level would likely have prevented the issue at the integrated level.

The same holds true for us personally. We are comprised of many elements integrated into what we think of as our self. Everyone has different levels of awareness of their constituent elements and how they may or may not affect our health, happiness, and life itself. The more we can learn about ourselves, how our bodies, minds, spirits and environment work together enables us to identify potential issues before they become problems. Of course, we often must have some level of experience with the issues before we can bring them into our awareness to pay attention to. However, we are often told by others what our issues are but refuse to ingest the information. To take advantage of what the universe is telling us requires asking how we may be wrong more than looking for ways confirming our unconscious biases. We must evaluate the information, source, and applicability to our situation. We must determine if the information from outside as well as within ourselves if fit for use. To put it in another way, is the quality (i.e. level of fitness for use) of the information we are consuming sufficient surviving, thriving, and improving or is it perpetuating our issues and hastening our end?

We become what we consume.

If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

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Family and teams are the next level up of system integration. Individuals come together to comprise small groups. While some members may not feel part of the family or team, it’s up to them to find where they do fit in with their intentions, purposes, quirks and weirdness. Small groups have a character and are the tertiary roots of culture experienced at higher levels of system integration. Small teams within an organization are part of a function within a business, a team of teams in larger organizations. Individual functions within a business are the secondary roots of culture bringing together the individuals and small teams performing that specific function. Individuals come together with shared purpose in support of the function necessarily exhibiting a particular character or culture of their own. Engineer teams have a culture different from finance and human resources personnel. Business systems and information technology functions typically integrate across functions and have a different mindset and culture within their teams. The tap root of a business are its functional leaders and more specifically how those leaders integrate with the business owners or board of directors depending on the type of business. This culture of the company is often what’s talked about in business jargon. During interviews culture is often discussed, but I wonder if we as individuals have the capacity to understand what’s truly going on with the entire company. We all get stuck in our thoughts and feelings about our stuff and how we integrate at our particular level in the business whether we be individual contributors, managers, directors, vice presidents, or the owners.

Simon Sinek, in his book Start With Why, talks about why people accomplish great things and how culture is fundamental to our survival whether we are aware of it or not. Becoming aware of culture is a key not only to success but also enabling ourselves to thrive within the particular environments we experience in our lives. Culture is a buzz word in leadership books and journals but it’s something extending millions of years into our past. 

We’ve succeeded as a species because our ability to form cultures. Cultures are groups of people who come together around a common set of values and believes. When we share values and beliefs with others, we form trust. Trust of others allows us to rely on others to help protect our children and ensure our personal survival.  The ability to leave the den to hunt or explore with confidence that the community will protect your family and your stuff until you return is one of the most important factors in the survival of an individual and the advancement of our species. -Simon Sinek

Trust between individuals, teams, functions, and leaders is the foundation of culture. When trust erodes at any level so does the culture, as I recently experienced in my loss of a two decade tenure at a company. Trust is born and managed with each and every one of our interactions. We enable trust when we approach each interaction with respect of the differences and similarities of those involved whether that be a one-to-one or one-within-many conversation. So, to get a sense of a culture of any level of system integration, it is necessary to observe the interactions of people, teams, functions and leaders. this isn’t really possible in a 60 minute interview. Thus it is necessary to talk with people in the company and trend across whatever interactions we can have prior to being hired from the first contact and any other interactions thereafter. When the interactions at different levels are consistently open and respectful the company has a strong unified culture. When interactions have different character at different levels observed, the company is not unified, likely fragmented, and trust is questionable. There are different values and beliefs and trust will be isolated within small groups. Depending on our personal character this could be a problem or not. Maybe we can help bring it together or perhaps we need to seek another company to integrate into.

Each of us have to manage our personal system to enable us to thrive within our environment. A key element of our thriving is understanding our character; what we do; how we do what we do; and most importantly why we do what we do. Starting with Why is foundational to living a successful life no matter how we define success for our system. This is true in our personal and work lives. There is no such thing as balancing work and life. There is only life and our integration into our environments of which work is a significant one.  What we do need to balance is how we invest our time, energy and attention within our various environments of which work is a large investment. As most people don’t like work, it can feel like just depletion of our valuable time and energy. Changing our attention on work from consumption into investment where utilizing our time, energy and attention to obtain long-term returns is managing ourselves as a business. Actively managing the business of you results in the dismembering of our worry about balancing life and work. Every interaction is a business transaction in this paradigm with the potential to obtain a return on our investment of our resources. Our energy follows our attention and time is consumed concordantly. This is the process based approach to thriving in our lives where our past selves created the input into the current situation with its associated environment. What we do in this interaction now is the input to our future selves. It’s our choice to make the best of each and every interaction. Similar to the rule of camping stating leave it cleaner than you found it, in our present interaction we can leave our future selves better off by ensuring we invest our attention and energy towards our purposes. Every interaction counts. 

If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

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This is true of any relationship including our bodies, minds, friends, lovers and yes even our work. I’ve been struggling with what and how to write about recent events at work. In the last few months, I lost a love of twenty years and am already entering into a new relationship (i.e. separated from work and found new employment). I’m unable to convey details due to the agreement (i.e. not fired or laid off and I didn’t quit). The details are unimportant. The fact is, I found myself amidst serious life change very quickly. So this post is about respecting the interplay of life and work. Note, I did not say work-life balance as that pop fad managerial term puts work first. 

The situation at work deteriorated for me a few months back. I found myself questioning the relationship I was in with work. The growth in the company was amazing yet I found myself unable to keep my career progressing. I asked why I worked there for twenty years. I asked why the teams I had been building were being reassigned. I meditated on what contribution I had been involved with beyond myself. My emotions were trying to do what they do in life trying to feel my way through the situation unfolding within the relationship. I found my value declining and purpose no longer connecting with the organization’s new culture. 

Stepping back and looking at my two decade tenure at a single organization helped gain purchase on my situation, thoughts, and feelings. What I found is that our work together as a team helped expand human knowledge. We’ve had our hands on hardware that smashed into comets, flown by Pluto, and discovered water on Mars to name a few. As a leader I worked with people to manage their lives while increasing or maintaining their long-term value at home and within the business. While my passion from the start was about the missions throughout our solar system, what really kept me forty percent of my life was helping people manage the biz of themselves which included what we did together in the aerospace business. We listened and learned from one another. We developed together as unique individuals while managing the daily, weekly, and recurring issues together. 

Using information from my leadership, I argued with myself that I could continue with those things while surviving another major change. As I felt and thought my way through my chaos, I found the company culture and recent changes did not match my fundamental expectations for team leadership. The relationship between the company and myself changed and quickly soured to the point of my feeling sick when facing certain situations at work. As a leader I disseminated my knowledge throughout my team so that if a bad day happened the organizational knowledge wasn’t lost albeit spread amongst many individuals. I think that’s what a good leader does. I knew the bad day of me not being at the company was coming rapidly and so I shared the organizational knowledge network I had established as best I could with my replacement. I also think a good leader supports their team so that if anyone of the team falls down, we help each other get back up. 

While my relationship of two decades didn’t pick me up, the people who I supported in leaving to find different cultures or perhaps pastures over the last few years did. Network contacts, Teammates, People, no the correct notion is: Friends came out of the wood work to offer assistance even if it just emotional. Numerous friends offered to be references within one company and I was able to move to the greener side of the fence as we say when talking about other companies. The thing is there’s weeds on both sides, but when we look from one side to the other, we see what we need to see. I suck at networking. I don’t manage my LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social networking accounts. Hell, people bitch at me for not responding quickly to email. What I proved is that the basis of networking is not some app on our phone but rather having relationships with people, not personal or professional, but continuously respectful interactions that become trusting relationships. When we are in this thing called life together, we find ways to help one another when we respect our differences as well as our commonalities. But when we get lost in the darkness of you vs me or us vs them, we wind up suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Helping each other and realizing there’s grass and weeds on both sides of the fence, the slings and arrows turn into a warm rain nourishing the flowers that come out of the weeds and up through the grass. 

And there it is, respecting and appreciating what we create together serves us better in the long run than putting products, processes, and people in their appropriate places. Furthermore, relationships and those that comprise them change in ways outside of our control. It’s up to us to manage our personal business with purpose and understanding why we do what we do in order to preserve ourselves (i.e. sanity, schwerpunkt, and happiness) through life’s changes. Every interaction counts.

If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

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I found myself deeply concerned when I was almost turned away from a surgery because of high blood pressure. For years, I assumed it was genetics. Having taken over cooking for the family, I changed our diet practically eliminating going out to eat. We bought a treadmill and began adding more exercise to our already over-constrained schedule. And, yet, there I was being counseled by the anesthesiologist as she brought my blood pressure into an acceptable range for my surgery. After which I began to search for information about what I could do about my predicament other than the standard medical advice of “diet and lifestyle.” What does that even mean!

I’m an avid reader and listener to podcasts. I happened across a reference to a Canadian doctor who was helping people reverse diabetes. I downloaded the audio book so I could listen on the way to work. What I learned from The Diabetes Code by Jason Fung fundamentally changed my life. Diabetes along with cardiovascular disease are associated with metabolic syndrome. Diabetes is characterized by too much or too little glucose in our bodies. I was on the typical path of more than half the people world wide. My doctors prescribed diabetes medications about ten years ago. My heart doctor prescribed blood pressure and cholesterol medications. At the beginning of this year, I was taking 6 different medications. I was a diligent patient and followed all the directions trusting the health industry had my best interests in mind. While the individual doctors want to help, the entire system has some issues we all know about. I don’t want to get into those. What I will share is how science and the pursuit of truth still exists. That’s where Jason’s book comes into play.

Dr. Jason Fung does an excellent job of building a solid argument with new data, meta-data analyses of long “understood” data, and scientific reasoning of how our thinking and societal habits around eating are not supportive of our basic metabolic needs. To feed a world of more than seven billion people, we had to transform agriculture in the last century. Business and more importantly our ego bound profit motive went for the ride and fundamentally changed our approach to eating that had been around for thousands of millennia. Before the 1940’s it was common to not have three meals a day. Going back into the 1800’s our eating could be once a day or every few days depending on our situation. Exploring the past further, it’s easy to see how our hunting and gathering ancestors may have gone for weeks without much to eat. We lived in a feast or famine type world for a very very long time. We fasted on a regular basis as we had to. Our biology adapted to these environmental constraints. When we don’t eat, our bodies switch from using available glucose to stored glucose. We go into a natural state of ketosis when the body burns stores of glucose.

Returning to the present day when we have gotten used to and even expect three square meals a day. What is a square meal anyway? Not eating is seen as negative. And thus The Toronto Metabolic Clinic dares to think again and achieves some seriously excellent results. While I have not attended the clinic, I did read a follow on book about fasting that Jason wrote with Jimmy Moore. In January of this year, I started my own intermittent fasting plan. Realizing I’d have to convince my doctors of my results, I started collecting data on myself including weight, glucose, ketones, blood pressure and other parameters. I also had my blood work up front to establish a baseline by which i could compare my monthly progress to. My wife joined me after a month or so and to make a long story short after 6 months my primary doctor agreed to see what happens after I went off all my medications. I’m still not taking medications and working my weight down to a level she and I agreed upon. My blood work has returned to the levels before I started my medications. My liver function has never been better. I effectively and practically have reversed diabetes lowered my blood pressure and cholesterol. I’m finding my own eating regimen that fits with my lifestyle. 

One of our greatest resources is information vetted by professionals and scientists who evaluate data from multiple perspectives. While our society is facing many issues arising from misinformation, there are still threads of truth and value amongst the information chaff. It is our responsibility to sift through information, evaluate its validity, and determine its value for our biz. Applying well vetted information to our lives has the potential to extend our lives. I know this as I’m demonstrating it by reducing the risks of mortality associated with diabetes, high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol levels. I’m back to normal which is a most wondrous thing. 

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If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

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A friend told me that he saw many interview for their jobs in bigger aerospace companies. Often these interrogation panels were often motivated by politics amongst the VIPs. So what would your reaction be. Perhaps you’re a twenty year old and would simply say, “Fuck this, I’ll just find a new job.” Maybe you’re a thirty year old and might say, “Fine, I need a change anyway.” Or, you’re a forty year old with a family and think, “Wow, how will this affect my family?” And, if you’re fifty, you might wonder, “How will this impact our retirement plans?”  Of course there are the slew of emotions that can arise based on the myriad fears and hopes we have. We may be angry, sad, confused, or disenchanted. We may even be happy. No matter what our reactions are the fact remains it is the organization that brought this to you.

There are political forces in every organization stemming from individual leaders focused on something other than the success of the business. Often politics arise from selfish pursuits even if it’s in the guise of “good for the company.” Leaders may be focused on getting more money, prestige, or fodder for their resume. They may be control freaks not able to let the organization evolve to meet the needs of their industry. They may be of the type to hold onto the past not accepting they sold the business they grew and developed. Or, they may not care for anyone other than themselves. When we as leaders put our selfish needs over the needs of the business, we become less effective. As leaders, our priority is to enable the teams we are responsible for and set the situations by which they may be successful. Success is nothing more than meeting a defined range of expectations. And thus, we as leaders set the expectations, provide resources, and planning to bring about the future state we intend to create. The success of a leader is measured by the performance of their team and how well it integrates with the larger team of the business, agency, or society at larger. 

Being asked to interviewed for your own job represents a gap between organizational leadership and our individual activities as a leader within the company. Certainly it may be driven from political intentions, but being interviewed is an opportunity to communicate directly with our interested parties. It’s also an opportunity to learn how we may need to manage the perception of our own leadership approach and team activities. And remember, interviews are bidirectional. This is an opportunity to clarify expectations of those involved in the interview. With clarity comes insight and insight is the progenitor of good decisions. Who knows what clarity will arise in our awareness as we are questioned and question in return.  We may find we don’t like where the organization is going. The organization may find it likes what we have been doing and just unaware of it.  A decision will be made no matter what happens. Our life will continue to unfold and our personal biz will prevail no matter what happens.

Herein lies a root of success in managing our personal biz. Our jobs will come and go. Even if we stay at a company for two decades, there will come a time we depart whether for retirement or for other reasons outside our control. Our biz is the value we bring to our life over the long term. No matter what may unfold in our lives and at work, our self worth is linked to our life in its entirety, not the short term events which are more often than not out of our control. So, if perchance you get asked to interview for your own job, embrace it as an opportunity to move on no matter if that movement is within the company or finding greener pastures to graze on. 

If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

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When interacting with our environments, we all go through what is called the OODA loop. We all make Observations, Orient to our situation, Decide, and Act accordingly. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we participate in this repeating decision loop every moment of our lives and every day our egos get depleted from all the decisions we make. Being conscious of this fact helps us to better manage our energy and connections within our interactions. Like surfers or skateboarders, we ride the wave of unfolding circumstances. We get knocked off our board when the wave gets ahead of us or something unanticipated occurs. We enable ourselves to stay on our boards longer as we accumulate life experiences. Another thing we can do is actively participate in the unfolding circumstances by consciously running ourselves through the OODA loop:

• Observe our environment and available facts without judgement
• Orient ourselves to what’s needed in the moment and the future state to create
• Decide explicitly taking into account the various probabilities affecting the outcomes
• Acting resolutely as if there were no other choice and observe the situation that unfolds (i.e. repeat).

With respect to leadership, the OODA loop may be used to drive more success than failures. To generate more success in whatever environment we may find ourselves in, we have to get inside the situation’s decision loop. As a director in an aerospace company, I find success by adjusting my decision loop to be within the decision loop of the organization. Like changing a frame rate, computational speed, or frequency of decisions, we have the ability to adjust our decision processing to be within that of our environment. This enables us to bridge between the decisions made by others and the data emerging from the changes they or the organization make. It enables us to link our bias for action with the changes in process. The leadership bridge as depicted below provides a mental model to help us keep our eyes open and our actions aligned with the organization, team, or family. Often our situations are not as clear as we’d like them to be. The fuzzy borders of the organizational OODA are an attempt to show that unknown element of our interactions. The general form of the model is similar to a Wheatstone bridge which allows for precise measurement of an unknown parameter. The intent of leadership is to make decisions in the midst of constraints, limited resources and unknown variables in such as way as to bring about a desired future state. And as John Boyd indicates in his published paper, Destruction and Creation, “To make these timely decisions implies that we must be able to form mental concepts of observed reality, as we perceive it, and be able to change these concepts as reality itself appears to change. The concepts can then be used as decision-models for improving our capacity for independent action.” This last idea is of utmost importance to be the best leaders we can be.

To survive our present day systems of business, family and social constructs we necessarily need to be independent. Without seeking independence, we become a cog in the machinery, stuck in our information or misinformation bubbles, and unable to lead. We toe the line. It is the easy path to mindlessly integrate into our particular team, group, faction, or herd. Being stuck within our particular corner of social media and nuanced understanding of the world greatly reduces the probability of us bridging our current situation with our desired future state. We have to lift our heads up and look away from the common to see the gaps between us and where we want to go. We have to keep our heads up as leaders so we can see the unfolding tapestry of reality of our business, family, or social environment. Consciously engaging in a decision process is one way to be a good leader. Continually seeking learning and independence is another more powerful organizing principle. It is by no means the only way. Just as leadership styles vary like individual character, there are myriad tools to help us achieve what we want out of life and our endeavors at work and home. As with anything, we have to decide what tools are appropriate for us and how we want to extract as much marrow from life as possible.

If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

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My friends and I had a great discussion about all sorts of topics. Throughout the luncheon, I was reminded of why I’ve stuck around for almost 20 years at the company I work for. I was reminded of the meaning I derive from my work not only from the product but from what I think of as my true success in my role as a leader. Specifically, helping others achieve what they want to achieve is what drives me to do what I do as a leader. Helping people transition to other phases of life whether that be retiring or moving on to a job they better connect with is what truly gives me purpose. Certainly, having helped create spacecraft that expand human knowledge by visiting other planets is meaningful but it is the connections with people I’ve made that creates a profound sense of accomplishment. Don’t get me wrong, I love telling others I have my name physically inscribed on a plaque on Mars and not just on a microchip with millions of others. However, it is the connections I’ve made and what I hope are positive influences on lives that provides a sense of accomplishment. 

After being reminded of who I am and the value I bring to others, I found myself later that day reviewing the contract I have with myself. I printed out the contract with my future self written 8 years ago and taped it to the inside of a cupboard I get into daily as I cook for the family. Reading through the contract and having been reminded of my value in the eyes of others I’ve helped allowed me to return to my center, my schwerpunkt if you will. All I can say is thank you to my past self for writing down what’s important to me in the form of a contract to review when needed. And, of course, I have the utmost gratitude for the friends who helped me recenter myself.

If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

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We may really dislike the person we are interacting with but may not have a choice especially at work. Our success, failure and everything in-between emerges from managing how we convey our information and share the energy beneath our thoughts. Our ideas may be spot on, true, and meet all requirements, but if we turn people away with our energy, it doesn’t matter if we were right. If people don’t listen to our principles and ideas to make a better future, company, or relationship, then it does not matter. The most likely result when we don’t connect with others in our communications is that we lose value not only in that person’s eyes but in all the people they interact with concerning our topic, interests, and character. All our energy and principles amount to nothing if we are on an island by ourselves. It is for this reason, we have to understand where we are coming from and think about how others may receive us as we move between interactions. Without connecting with those we interact with, there is no communication and likely just disagreement and certainly loss of personal value. Herein lies something all of us forget at times, the value of communication is in the connections we make. Without connecting to those we interact with, we are just songbirds chirping away in the background of life that moves on without us.

If you’d like to open a dialog on this or any topic on this blog, feel free to email jacob@bizofyou.com

I apologize for any typos, punctuation or grammar errors.
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