BusiZen Creative Business

Carpe Diem Power Pattern

2013-04-12T05:15:00.002-07:00

Carpe Diem Power Pattern

Thursday, April 11, 2013

8:04 AM

There is a season for everything and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season if indeed it can be called the same phenomenon at any other season .

There is a time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake to look for arrowheads to study the rocks and lichens a time to walk on sandy deserts and the observer of nature must improve these seasons as much as the farmer his. So boys fly kites and play ball or hawkie at particular times all over the State.

A wise man will know what game to play today and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules as by the almanac but let the season rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature's.

Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock Now or never.

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land there is no other life but this or the like of this.

From Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal "April 23, 1859 - Times and Seasons" Google eBook Page 159.

From Thoreau’s “launch yourself on every wave” – I am creating my Carpe Diem Power Pattern –

Carpe Diem Power Pattern:

Peace, fun, and ease today.

Peace:	I have things showing up to be done and I am doing them when they show up. I know to trust the one who guides me.
	Presence: Everything is now. I know there are things for future nows that I can schedule and I do so when they show up. Otherwise I am only doing things in the now.
Fun:	I am doing things I want to do without the constraints of "have to" or "should" - just because they show up and I want to do them. They are all forwarding my game (or perhaps not and I don't know it) and any otherwise, I would not do them
Ease:	There's the Human Game, and my Move Game. In both, I see that actions I take go with ease and if I can't shake dis-ease, I just be with it and let it take me where it will. I am present to things that work or don't work. I "enjoy" then discard the things that don't work and I "enjoy" the things that do work and discard them too. There's now!

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Coach Jim Muir’s No Goal Method for Business Planning

2013-02-19T06:35:00.000-08:00

Coach Jim Muir’s No Goal Method for Business Planning

Goals and objectives, business plans, and strategies are always the first recommendation of any business guru or experienced business management person. So why do these recommendations always fail? Dan Waldschmidt, Edgy Conversations says “When you don’t act with purpose you end up doing something stupid.” He believes the intention is missing. (http://www.businessinsider.com/why-your-business-plans-fail-2013-2)

And he’s not alone. I have been an entrepreneur and businessman. I have also worked in the nonprofit realm as an HR Manager for 17 years. I have seen every kind of plan from business plans to strategic plans with marketing plans, staffing plans, and intervention plans in-between. More often than not, I confess, the plans get scrapped as soon as they are produced (oh, the wasted time, you have no idea – or maybe you do know how much time is wasted on these “strategic plans”). Plans are like budgets: necessary fiction. Necessary only because they are often “required” by some entity that controls money or time. If however, you really have passion to do some thing – a business or a creation of your choice, skip the formal plans and play on the passion. You have to cycle through constantly. You must refresh your passion and rethink everything every day you work on it. Instead of budgeting, create a cash flow spreadsheet that contains real income and expenses, and track it. It’s better than any budget because it is “what is so”. Every day has next actions. Every day has imagination about what it’s like playing and winning the game. Every day is a review of your passion.

I know this all sounds counterintuitive. And I am not advocating any endeavor which ignores critical or key documentation or financial management. I am just advocating taking the drudgery of planning, strategic planning, and such nonsense out of the equation. If you have to put those elements in , figure out how to have that happen without you investing your passion time in it. Be a maverick; hire someone else to do the dreaded business plans. They are all phony creations anyway – but sometimes they are “necessary fiction” for banks and investment firms to approve loans and financing.

You, yourself? You are following your passion, doing what you want to do. And if you want to win the game, keep cycling on the road of passion for what you want to do. Get off the hamster wheel (budgets, plans, strategies that measure the past) and get on the cycle where the road goes to the uncertain future and enjoy the ride as an adventure. That way, playing the game (the journey) makes it worthwhile to keep cycling.

What I learned today - about Scores, Targets, Comparisons, Goals & Strategies doesn't hold water.

2013-02-04T12:30:00.003-08:00

Keeping score, in many cases, is a really bad idea – except when we are playing a game. It means giving up arbitrary targets too. Keeping score on relationships is toxic. Keeping score in business is ok as long as it is something you can actually count except if you are comparing.

Comparing ourselves to others – is always a bad idea. Comparison in general is best left to measuring objects and things not humans. Leave it to science and get out of the comparison business (unless you are working in science).

Zapping bad habits is easiest when we are mindfully engaged with our everyday things. The secret to willpower is physical exercise and what it does to the front part of the cerebral cortex when we regularly exercise.

Setting goals and objectives or setting resolutions or targets and tracking those is a waste of time, it disappoints, and it makes us liars and fools. Instead set a broad intention and let the rest be your actions toward the intention without all the busy work of trying to track and document the minutae. Be mindful instead and experience the journey with the intension firmly present. When you select your intention, be sure it is broad enough to encompass everything you seek. If you end up with more than one intention, perhaps step back and broaden the intension to swoop them up into a grand scheme so big it involves everything.

The whole idea of strategy in business is built around the false idea promoted by a Frenchman describing what Napolean was doing in battle. The false part of that is that Napoleon simply set out to win battles and when he saw the opportunity he organized himself around winning. He didn’t set the strategy first. Military science then picked up the false idea and the idea then became a predominant aspect in business in the 20^th century. Now whole businesses operate on building strategy first and then execution. They forget to look and see if the battle is winnable and they miss the whole point of strategy. No wonder so many goals and objectives get left in the archives unmet and so many people are unemployed.

Drink Lots of Fresh, Filtered Water.

Looking at the Future of Work – a great article from Hanneke C. Frese

2012-12-10T09:19:00.002-08:00

Reference Article: The Future of Work (in German)

Thanks for Google Translate, I was quickly able to look at Hanneke’s article on the Future of Work. I was interested because Hanneke is a global thinker, a self-realized professional in human resources, she has a great perspective (European and American) and she gets to what is important for the field.

The bottom line is Human Resources professionals need to own the risk and own the task of preparing the organization for the changes that are already in progress.

Demography:

Aging Society, 50 + Workers, declining birthrate, and an altered composition of the society

Migration of labor and workers:

Outsourcing of jobs (where knowledge, skills and the right cost structure exists), diversity in the workplace and in teams, collaboration of different nationalities

Education, Knowledge and Learning:

Enhance innovation through knowledge and creativity, employability through life-long learning skills necessary for future markets

Work Motivation:

Different motivations of different generations, site staff flexibility, flexible work schedules

Globalization:

Exploratory interconnectedness of the world, counter-trend, local culture, intercultural competence in management

Productivity in the knowledge society:

Free knowledge (open source), team learning and learning from other disciplines, always something new project teams (group dynamics), knowledge capital

Technology

Work in virtual teams, merging, Work and Life by constant accessibility, to make a difference, the new generation’s large experience with computer games, internet, mobile phones.

If Hanneke Frese is correct, and I think she is dead-on, Human Resources managers will have to become adaptive leaders in organizations and bring communication to the table with all the leaders in the organization. As she puts it: “Get fit on future trends” and lead the organization in communicating the trends across all areas. She also cautions that different trends affect different organizations differently. It’s the communications that reveal the opportunities and risks.

If you want HR to have a seat at the table, “get fit on future trends” and lead.

Want to See what a Management 2.0 Big Data Bonanza looks like?

2012-11-14T07:29:00.001-08:00

Management 2.0 Innovation philosophy of management that stresses worker autonomy and responsibility and blends the best effective systems to support the missions and visions of organizations and the self-managed people who make them up.
Big Data Big data usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly-used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target, as of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set. With this difficulty, a new platform of "big data" tools has arisen to handle sense-making over large quantities of data.”
Bonanza A source, usually sudden and unexpected, of luck or wealth. Or it could be winning a really big, important, critical election resoundingly without others predicting so.

This is not about politics. I read that in a blog article by Warren Bobrow where Warren begins in the same manner. There is a great lesson in this election. In fact it’s so huge I wish I were 20 again studying political science in college like I was doing 40 some years ago.

Now this might hurt (OUCH) if you are a fanatical Republican but I have to get it out: with all the talk about Mitt Romney being the management and businessman guru, Barack Obama may have outperformed the guru having selected the very best team to manage his election campaign and by applying Management 2.0 innovation and using some innovative community organizing techniques. (Remember 'Hannity's America' examined the job Barack Obama says qualifies him for the nation's highest office “only thing he’s ever done is community organizing”?) The campaign also demonstrated the real use of very Big Data, and of course, a realized and significant BONANZA that was the winning of reelection. The Obama election campaign in Ohio will likely be studied for decades or more that’s how good it was.

Both campaigns used BIG DOLLAR$ so consider that a “Citizen’s United” wash. In fact, in terms of investment, Obama got much more bang for the buck than the Romney campaign. Romney’s campaign was a more traditional political campaign and in Warren Bobrow’s blog article, there was an overabundance of “gut” calls and reliance on older polling techniques that turned out to be misleading. Take the Gallop Likely Voters Poll which was 7.2 % biased Republican and other polls which led the Romney Campaign Staff, the Republican Super PAC leaders like Karl Rove, Republican pundits and the Fox News organization itself down the slippery slope of wishful thinking instead of victory.

So what was did the Management 2.0 Big Data Bonanza look like?

Barack Obama had a top notch team of dedicated and innovative campaign staff. You don’t have that in an organization which traditionally relies on Management 1.0 command and control philosophy.
The idea of Big Data is still floating around the internet information markets for IT, business, education, government circles while the Obama Campaign got it and invested heavily in infrastructure and staff to manage big data and get powerful, reliable, consistent, repeatable results from actions taken using the big data. They really knew what was happening. No theory any more. For real.

Most people don’t know what Big Data is let alone use it to orchestrate things like “dinner with George Clooney” because it would appeal to a specific subset of age 40-49 female voters the Obama Campaign was targeting. Now you say, some pundit might have thought of that, and you would be right! And the Obama Campaign made sure every eligible voter who likes George Clooney saw the invitation to donate for a chance to have dinner with the President at George Clooney’s house. That is an example of an idea around fund raising for the campaign and the Obama Campaign also used big data for getting out the vote in states like Ohio. In fact, new voters from various ethnic groups probably made up the difference in the election and the Obama Campaign knew that, acted on it, and drove the results with real actions.

Like an example out of Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad Business Startup Course (Silicon Valley) where
“you get out of the building” and experiment with what works or not: this was reflected in Michael Scherer’s Time magazine article Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win:

“Early on, for example, the campaign discovered that people who had unsubscribed from the 2008 campaign e-mail lists were top targets, among the easiest to pull back into the fold with some personal attention. The strategists fashioned tests for specific demographic groups, trying out message scripts that they could then apply. They tested how much better a call from a local volunteer would do than a call from a volunteer from a non–swing state like California. As Messina had promised, assumptions were rarely left in place without numbers to back them up.“

This was pretty amazing overall and if you can get past the first OUCH in my second paragraph, you will be amazed too. I’m sure the academic professors who made up Obama’s volunteer dream team were proud and excited to see their work really significantly make a difference. Imagine if we used that model of big data to understand the effectiveness and manage our social service entitlements and government services? If Obama can do that for a campaign, he can do that for big government and trim the fat where the services are not needed, effective, or affordable and adjust tax rates and policies that provide the best solutions to our debt crises. I’m thinking he can do that. We shall see.

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

No goals, How's that work?

2012-11-06T05:59:00.000-08:00

What is the first thing you think when you hear about people living, loving, succeeding and doing all of that without goals? What? Yep, living, loving, succeeding and doing all of that without goals. You think some craziness is going on here. And you might be right. It's a form of enlightenment these people have. Let's call them Zen Types for lack of any other name that comes to my mind this moment. I am not referring to any religious notion.

Zen Types move forward in life with ease and generally do life without the filter of goals interfering with the experience. They "succeed" in many ways that we define success and yet seem to have no goal system in place. Let's peak at how it works.

Zen Types have a purpose in life. They have it. They aren't seeking it, they are living their purpose. You might argue this is, in essence, a goal, and you might be right. The point is They have it - a life purpose, however it was derived. In having the purpose as the living intention, there is no need to establish goals. There is just to live your purpose and let your greater self (perhaps the hand of God) guide you. Your choices become part of that mission.

Leo Babauta put it so great:

It’s all good. No matter what path you find, no matter where you end up, it’s beautiful. There is no bad path, no bad destination. It’s only different, and different is wonderful. Don’t judge, but experience.

Some of you may be familiar with Leo Babauta who did fantastic work with Zen ideas and has a great article titled The Best Goal is No Goal where he outlines the practice.

As I see it, I still manage my schedules with Outlook, get reminders of events, things I promised others and this too could be seen as "goals" in some way and for me, it is not. The reminders are part of my greater self guiding me on the path of my purpose like a good flashlight. It is the journey and not the end of game destination. No goals puts you in the present where the action really is and moves you out of the past and future.

I am really enjoying the ease around having things happen on my behalf (my purpose). My purpose is to have everyone experience greatness. I'm thinkin' Zen Type.

Quick Access to What Motivates Us (Daniel Pink)

2012-10-23T07:15:00.001-07:00

Daniel Pink has a few ideas from RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.

The video was embedded in an online article by Mike Saporito on August 20, 2011 titled Hello Map the article's author expands on a great definition of responsibility and how we might look at workers. He distinguishes two motivations that he says

If an individual is responsible for only “mechanical” work requiring little thought and creativity…rewards do work (i.e. – carrots and sticks; “if you do this, then you get that”). The higher the pay, the better the performance.

If an individual is responsible for work requiring even rudimentry cognitive skill…rewards do not work. (i.e. - ”If…then” rewards actually hurt performance.) When a task requires creative thinking, rewards hurt performance.

This is a very good Briefing on Management 2.0 thinking.

What I Learned Today: Monday, October 22, 2012

2012-10-22T15:51:00.002-07:00

Monday, October 22, 2012

What I learned Today!

Human Resources as a business entity has to step up in the new economy. Deliver: self-realized, committed, responsible, antonymous, team oriented, and trained in communication in the new economy.

Now to figure how I translate that into small business and non-profit reality.

HBR or Harvard Business Review has reinvented itself and is striving to be the cutting edge publication in management. I have been moved by the transformation.

Now to figure when I have time to read this stuff?

Entrepreneurship in the 21^st Century is Enterprise 2.0 ( maybe 3.0?). Business schools and their associated universities are moving fast to adopt new innovative views of organization and management. Leadership gets a makeover.

Unfortunately we have a lot of hungry people out there looking for access to entrepreneurship with misguided business plans.

How about a (Not) Ready, Set, Go power pattern?

2012-10-21T06:24:00.000-07:00

Power Patterns are created memes that "enable" us to overcome resistance. The (Not) Ready, Set, Go power pattern as applied to business, involves the idea of experimenting. Instead of getting stuck on "Getting Ready", we proceed to "SET" and "GO" in the real world with real ideas, actions, consequences. Following the power pattern we apply, you don’t know how it will go – you just go. In business, (Not) Ready, Set, Go shows up as skipping the focus groups (including the dumb political ones) and getting out of the building (as Steve Blank says is Lean Launchpad Startups) and experimenting with real customers.

As a power pattern, it reminds me of Marilyn Davidson’s “ready, fire, aim” power pattern. I got this idea from an ad for the Harvard Business Review blog. Unfortunately, I never could find an actual article that this might have been derived from. (HBR October 2012 Pg 10) That’s what makes it a gift!

(Not) Ready, Set, Go Power Pattern

A few weeks ago, I created a team of friends and family to help me getting the 15 years of family accumulation of "stuff" out of my house. I called it a House Clearing Pitch Party. When I looked back at the House clearing “pitch party” that was so successful in freeing me up, I remember there was my being “not ready” for what showed up. I was uncomfortable with the preparation I had made. I consciously declared accepting “not ready” as if it were OK, just allowing it to be. The day showed up and the result was a miracle. The place got cleared of loads of stuff. My personal energy that is restored from “managing” all that stuff is awesome. The universe is organizing me. I followed the pattern: I wasn’t ready, I set, I go. It went, and like I said, it was a miracle being paid in value to me many, many times over already. Like a spiritual awakening, all that energy and freedom.

Try it on next time you think you are sidelined by “not being ready enough”. Like this little article, I could keep tweaking it for a day, week, perhaps a month and never send it. Or I could just hit send.