Ho‘ohana Aloha

The Boy Who Played With Fusion | Popular Science

Sat, 26 May 2012 11:55:00 -1000

The Boy Who Played With Fusion | Popular Science:

I adore stories like this. They help you better understand your gifts as a remarkable human being.

Found via the DailyGood newsletter with this quote:

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.
- Pearl S. Buck -

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that the older of the Wilsons’ two sons would be a difficult child to keep on the ground… “Where does it come from?” Kenneth and his wife, Tiffany, have asked themselves many times. Kenneth is a Coca-Cola bottler, a skier, an ex-football player. Tiffany is a yoga instructor. “Neither of us knows a dang thing about science,” Kenneth says.

But they did know how to be extraordinary parents:

For his fifth birthday, [son Taylor] wanted a crane. But when his parents brought him to a toy store, the boy saw it as an act of provocation. “No,” he yelled, stomping his foot. “I want a real one.” This is about the time any other father might have put his own foot down. But Kenneth called a friend who owns a construction company, and on Taylor’s birthday a six-ton crane pulled up to the party. The kids sat on the operator’s lap and took turns at the controls, guiding the boom as it swung above the rooftops on Northern Hills Drive. To the assembled parents, dressed in hard hats, the Wilsons’ parenting style must have appeared curiously indulgent. In a few years, as Taylor began to get into some supremely dangerous stuff, it would seem perilously laissez-faire. But their approach to child rearing is, in fact, uncommonly intentional. “We want to help our children figure out who they are,” Kenneth says, “and then do everything we can to help them nurture that.”

People Who Do Good Work | Managing with Aloha

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:34:59 -1000

People Who Do Good Work | Managing with Aloha:

People will quickly point to all kinds of reasons for their dysfunctional workplace culture.

“Who has time for innovation when there’s so much other stuff to be done?”
“We work with equipment harking back to the time of the dinosaurs.”
“Nobody walks by this street corner anymore; our storefront is useless.”
“We can’t afford anything. When will this recession be over?”

And the biggie:
“Our boss is clueless and completely out of touch.”

There are exceptions to the rule, however.

Those exceptions are the people who do good work.

[ … read more … ]

Later is better...

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:20:56 -1000

Today is our 29th wedding anniversary, yet Ker and I had the same reaction to a picture in the paper of a high school graduate proposing to his girlfriend while still in cap and gown:

“What’s the rush? I hope she says no, even if she loves him and believes he’s the one.”

Please wait.

Neil Gaiman: Library opinion, made rebloggable...

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:18:00 -1000

Neil Gaiman: Library opinion, made rebloggable...:

neil-gaiman:

I’m a graduate student earning my master’s in library science, and everyone asks me, “Why are you doing that? Libraries are going extinct because of e-readers!” Obviously, I don’t agree, but I’m curious - what’s your opinion on libraries today and in the future, and do you own an e-reader?

I have a Kindle somewhere, but I have no idea where it is any more. On the other hand, I know where the Kindle apps are on my phone, tablet, iPad and Macbook Air, which makes knowing where the actual Kindle is irrelevant.

Let’s see… we’re entering an age of too much information, in which knowledge and information retrieval and navigation are going to be some of the most important skills anyone can possibly possess. You are being trained in library science, which is knowledge and information categorisation, management and retrieval. And someone wants to know if your job is going to be extinct because we may not have as many places with lots of paper books any longer?

I think libraries are more vital now than they have ever been. And whatever form books (and other information) take in the centuries and millennia to come, we will always need librarians.

A Sense of Place Delivers True Wealth | Managing with Aloha

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:10:00 -1000

A Sense of Place Delivers True Wealth | Managing with Aloha:

My Monday recharging on this glorious day in May:

When I meet Alaka‘i Managers (managers who are the Great Ones), and am able to visit their workplaces, I consistently see the Sense of Place commonality they share as culture-builders. I will feel it in my surroundings, for while sound and solidly built, their place pulses with its deeply veined character and vibrant energies.
Alaka‘i Managers know that this is what every single workplace represents: The wonderful opportunity to create a special place…

How to Build a Beautiful Company | Inc.com

Sat, 05 May 2012 12:52:01 -1000

How to Build a Beautiful Company | Inc.com:

What a great question to ask of your own values: How would I build a beautiful company?

Beauty isn’t just “a look” it’s the flavor of your human morality, ethics, and integrity.

Bill Witherspoon:

I am an optimist and an idealist. In shaping The Sky Factory, I started with the assumption that people are naturally curious and creative. I wanted to craft an environment in which they would act like entrepreneurs, not like robots. My first decision was to give people the opportunity to purchase discounted ownership, and 100 percent of employees have participated. The responsibility for revenue and profit belongs to everyone. From that foundation, I derived five principles… read more at Inc.

Recently for me, at TalkingStory.org: If you worked for me

Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed - Forbes

Sat, 05 May 2012 08:39:34 -1000

Intelligence Is Overrated: What You Really Need To Succeed - Forbes:

Keld Jensen, with info we can add to our learning within Palena ‘ole (Key Concept 9 in MWA):

Nobel Prize winning Israeli-American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, found that people would rather do business with a person they like and trust rather than someone they don’t, even if the likeable person is offering a lower quality product or service at a higher price.

No surprise there… so what to do?

With this in mind, instead of exclusively focusing on your conventional intelligence quotient, you should make an investment in strengthening your EQ (Emotional Intelligence), MQ (Moral Intelligence), and BQ (Body Intelligence). These concepts may be elusive and difficult to measure, but their significance is far greater than IQ.

MQ, or Moral Intelligence, strikes me as a good 2-word description of our values-based management at Managing with Aloha, for Jensen describes it as dealing with our integrity, responsibility, compassion, and forgiveness.

After reading this article, I enjoyed learning more about what author Keld Jensen does. He seems to have found a niche in negotiations, and his communications approach is rooted in some strong values: Can you pick them out?
[Related posting at Managing with Aloha: Values in the Drivers Seat]

Another from Keld Jensen for Forbes: Rebuilding Trust: It All Starts With You

…the single most powerful way to build trust is to show a willingness to trust others. This does not mean being naïve, weak, or overly susceptible to people driven by greed. It does mean being open to taking calculated risks with coworkers, employees, and in relationships that are in the earliest stages of development. The fact is, trust will always be based on a certain willingness to take risks—and you can’t win if you don’t play the game.

Banish your Possibility Robbers | Managing with Aloha

Fri, 04 May 2012 07:01:56 -1000

Banish your Possibility Robbers | Managing with Aloha:

Possibility Robbers don’t belong in your life. Get rid of them.

In the eyes of your Boss, or any coach or mentor who’s frustrated with you, Possibility Robbers are the villains who have robbed you of having a good attitude. They can muck up your other relationships too.

See them for who they are, so you can banish them once and for all, saying goodbye to them forevermore. Banish them, and your Language of We will blossom. You’ll be saying hello to much healthier work, and a much happier you. You’ll become magnetic: Others will be attracted to your positive energy like never before.

Let’s identify them, so we can truly see these Robbers for who they are, and what they are stealthily doing to you, until you have the foresight in stopping them.

There are 5 Possibility Robbers haunting our workplaces…

Schumpeter: Simplify and repeat | The Economist

Thu, 03 May 2012 06:41:00 -1000

Schumpeter: Simplify and repeat | The Economist:

Management gurus love to tell companies to reinvent themselves. The Bainies do something more interesting: they preach simplicity. They argue that most successful companies share three virtues. They have a highly distinctive core business. They make great efforts to keep their business model as simple as possible. And they apply it relentlessly to new opportunities.

Simplify and repeat.

The Bain authors argue that there are three ways to apply the repeatability model. Some companies, such as American Express, target ever more precise groups of customers. Some apply the model to new markets: Nike has brought its “swoosh” to one sport after another. Some apply the same management system to lots of different businesses: Danaher, an American holding company that specialises in manufacturing, has applied its “lean” management system, the Danaher Business System, to the 85 businesses it has bought over the past ten years.

The Victory of Continuous Celebration | Managing with Aloha

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:44:18 -1000

The Victory of Continuous Celebration | Managing with Aloha:

I’d like to tell you about one of my greatest victories, because I just celebrated it again and the goodness is so pervasive I must share it with you.

I celebrate it each time I do it, and it makes me think about what a ‘victory’ actually is — just how much accomplishment must be involved, so a person will feel victorious? How much quantity (or how little, in that vein where “Less is more” ) as compared to how much quality?

It’s a glorious feeling, being victorious and being able to celebrate it fully… [read more … includes a discussion of those brutal questions in Letting Go. Are you maintaining, or moving forward?]

14 Action Inducing Lessons from Benjamin Franklin - by Thea Easterby for Dumb Little Man

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:38:48 -1000

14 Action Inducing Lessons from Benjamin Franklin - by Thea Easterby for Dumb Little Man:

A good follow-up for our Managing with Aloha next-stepping and value-verbing discussions recently, for both practices are about higher energy action.

April Playlist: Managing with Aloha

Tue, 01 May 2012 11:02:39 -1000

We had a great 1st month back at www.ManagingWithAloha.com! These were the top 5 articles there, according to your visits and sharing of them with others —- mahalo!

You can scan all April article titles here (the Archive Page).

latimes: At home in a piece of history: Beth Howard stumbled...

Tue, 01 May 2012 07:26:00 -1000

latimes:

At home in a piece of history: Beth Howard stumbled onto the Iowa farmhouse depicted in Grant Wood’s 1930 painting “American Gothic” on a road trip after her husband died three years ago. She pays $250-a-month rent, and a clause in her lease requires her to be nice to the thousands of people a year who come to pose for photos in her front yard.

Photo credit: Alana Semuels / Los Angeles Times

Love that clause in her lease! Makes me think about Sense of Place (Key 8) and how we transfer it (or fail to)… think about all the “it used to be” stories you hear that make new splashes and start ripple effects just because people suddenly know.

Choose your next Project Kukupa‘u | Managing with Aloha

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:52:10 -1000

Choose your next Project Kukupa‘u | Managing with Aloha:

More value-verbing and MWA value-mapping for you: We’re moving on to piloting projects.

I’ve come to love April and May for these efforts; it seems like providence conspires with us so perfectly.

Management Secrets: Core Beliefs of Great Bosses | Inc.com

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:15:25 -1000

Management Secrets: Core Beliefs of Great Bosses | Inc.com:

A good list: The author uses it to illustrate the difference between an average boss and an extraordinary boss.

Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield
A company is a community, not a machine
Management is service, not control
My employees are my peers, not my children
Motivation comes from vision, not from fear
Change equals growth, not pain
Technology offers empowerment, not automation
Work should be fun, not mere toil

Very much in keeping with the core teaching in Managing with Aloha, that our beliefs lead to our values, which in turn, lead to our behaviors.

Said another way, you must believe it before you’ll value it enough to always do it.

"Good Management Is Like The Beatles": Steve Jobs On Technology, Hollywood And How Running A Company Is Like Running A Marathon | Fast Company

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 11:45:00 -1000

"Good Management Is Like The Beatles": Steve Jobs On Technology, Hollywood And How Running A Company Is Like Running A Marathon | Fast Company:

Sounds like Lōkahi to me:

GOOD MANAGEMENT IS LIKE THE BEATLES

from October 2004

“My model of management is the Beatles. The reason I say that is because each of the key people in the Beatles kept the others from going off in the directions of their bad tendencies.

“They sort of kept each other in check. And then when they split up, they never did anything as good. It was the chemistry of a small group of people, and that chemistry was greater than the sum of the parts. And so John kept Paul from being a teenybopper and Paul kept John from drifting out into the cosmos, and it was magic. And George, in the end, I think provided a tremendous amount of soul to the group. I don’t know what Ringo did.

“That’s the chemistry [at Pixar] between Ed [Catmull] and John [Lasseter] and myself. It’s worked pretty doggone well. We talk about things a lot, and sometimes one of us will want to do something that’s really stupid, or maybe not stupid but … oh, I don’t know … maybe not the wisest thing in the long run for the studio. And, you know, at least one of the other two will say, ‘Hey, you know, I think there’s a better way to do that.’ So we’ll all slow down and think it through, and we usually come up with a much better way.”

~ Steve Jobs via Fast Company

The Top of My Todo List | Paul Graham

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 10:32:57 -1000

The Top of My Todo List | Paul Graham:

One of his shorter essays, in part:

Don’t be a cog. The 5 regrets [of the dying] paint a portrait of post-industrial man, who shrinks himself into a shape that fits his circumstances, then turns dutifully till he stops.

The alarming thing is, the mistakes that produce these regrets are all errors of omission. You forget your dreams, ignore your family, suppress your feelings, neglect your friends, and forget to be happy. Errors of omission are a particularly dangerous type of mistake, because you make them by default.

I would like to avoid making these mistakes. But how do you avoid mistakes you make by default?

Teach the Books, Touch the Heart | An English Lit Teacher writes the NYTimes.com Opinion

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 10:07:00 -1000

Teach the Books, Touch the Heart | An English Lit Teacher writes the NYTimes.com Opinion:

I completely agree with Claire Needell Hollander here. I admit that I preferred essay tests throughout my school years because I was so much better at them, but I honestly never have understood why we use multiple choice testing at all. Where is the learning value in being a good guesser?

What really got to me in this article though, was her discussion of “cultural capital.”

I MAY not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students’ test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By “using data to inform instruction,” as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck’s novels of the opportunity to read them.

It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for “cultural neutrality.” This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level — not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous…

FRANZ KAFKA wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” I once shared this quotation with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation.

Well now, if English Language Arts exams are designed for “cultural neutrality” that probably leaves out Managing with Aloha! I wrote an emotional book, and I am proud that I did so.

She makes an awfully big assumption here about “more privileged peers” though: Most of the people “of privilege” I know haven’t read all the books on the reading list she mentions —- including me!

Along with “Of Mice and Men,” my groups read: “Sounder,” “The Red Pony,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Lord of the Flies,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “Macbeth.” The students didn’t always read from the expected perspective. Holden Caulfield was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage. About “The Red Pony,” one student said, “it’s about being a dude, it’s about dudeness.” I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies read as raps, but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went on to read “The Grapes of Wrath” and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical perspective was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year, ex-students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their freshman year as a result of the classes.

And yet I do not know how to measure those results.

This also recalled the Maria Popova interview I read earlier this week. When she said,

Because I didn’t grow up in the U.S. and only moved here for college, I’ve always felt like I have this vast literary debt.

—- Maria Popova in the How We Will Read series on Findings

I felt like I was physically shrinking an inch or two, knowing of the vast literary debt I can still pay as well, especially when so many of the classics are offered on Kindle now, and are absolutely free.

Next-stepping and other Verbs | Managing with Aloha

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 09:11:44 -1000

Next-stepping and other Verbs | Managing with Aloha:

I have been playing with this post all week long while it was still in drafts, and now that it’s published, I’ll be playing with its linky-ness all weekend long too.

Serious stuff in MWA’s Language of Intention and energy creation, but so, so good in the play factor with learning the 9 Key Concepts of our value-mapping.

The Secret to Creative Flow | The Art of Everyday Wonder

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:21:04 -1000

The Secret to Creative Flow | The Art of Everyday Wonder:

Beautifully written Aloha Spirit wisdom from Joanna Paterson.