Selecting the Right Apps

17. May 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: General Discussion, Success

We’re overloaded with apps.  There’s an app for any conceivable, or inconceivable situation, and more than likely your phone has them loaded.    Yet regardless how many apps you may have loaded on your phone, you likely only use a handful regularly enough to call them “a necessity”.  These are the apps that help get things done faster, more efficiently, and with less effort. These are the apps we leverage constantly to deliver our goods.  And when we don’t need one anymore we delete it.

Like with smart phones, it’s easy to be overloaded with the wide variety of apps available to us in the world.  These apps, life-apps, are the knowledge, skills, and beliefs that we’re exposed too and download as we move through life.  Unlike your smart phone, however, you can’t quickly download a life-app and you can’t easily erase it with the swipe of a finger.  You need a way to choose wisely what you download.

Picking the Right Apps for Life

If you need to download a new life-app to improve your professional or personal life it’s worth investing the time to make certain you pick the right one.  You might as well, since many of the apps we carry around were picked for us or we unconsciously downloaded moving through childhood, school and then our early professional lives.  Picking wisely now allows us to overwrite and methodically “erase” un-useful knowledge, outdated skills and old beliefs.

When evaluating a new life-app, you may want to run it past a few key questions like these:

Is the skill/knowledge needed for a long-term or short-term requirement?
What’s the cost:  time/money?
What’s the downside?  e.g. maintenance level, prejudices, health impacts, etc.
Can the knowledge be applied across multiple facets of my life?
Is it in line with my primary aim?
Am I picking it, or is someone picking it for me?  If the later, is that acceptable?

Despite the widely spouted view that we have ninety-percent of our minds available for knowledge, none of us have an infinite amount of storage space for an infinite number of life-apps.  Like any smart phone, there’s going to be a select few apps that we leverage repeatedly to deliver our highest level of performance.  That’s why it’s essential that downloading the right life-apps, then consistently applying them and developing them is so vitally important.

“The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.”  G.K. Chesteron

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Zoning and Self Development: What You Need to Know

14. May 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Professionalism · Tags: , ,

Communities use it.  Your favorite sports team uses it.  You may even use it when you’re on the elliptical machine every morning.  It’s applied as a means to give order to endeavors that can be chaotic.  Want to ensure that heavy industry doesn’t build in the center of town?  Zone it.  Want to overcome the opponent’s speed or size on the field?  Use zones.  Want to develop your aerobic capacity and basic endurance.  Then get in your zone.  Want to develop yourself?  You’re right…a zone is what you need.   The right growth zone.

The Zones

Noel Tichy, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and former director of General Electric’s infamous Crotonville Leadership Center, highlights that there are three zones that we might operate within.  Viewed as three concentric circles, the inner circle is the “comfort zone”, the middle is the “learning zone”, and the outer is the “panic zone”.  Which one you operate within will dictate whether you’re building your future, or hunkering-down.

Comfort Zone.   When you’re operating in the comfort zone, you’re the master.  You’ve figured-out how to attack the problems as tasks, because they’ve become routine.  What you once found difficult you now find easy.  Sounds good, however, this zone is one that leads to complacency and stagnation…two words that do not correspond with development.  If you chose to stay in this zone, you chose to not develop yourself.

Learning Zone.  This zone is the zone of progress.  When you’re operating in this zone, you’re working on projects and assignments that are just out of reach.  You understand enough to get started and that you lack skills or knowledge.  Then you go out and get the new skills or knowledge.  In this zone, you’re in control of yourself, operating on the edge and growing.

Panic Zone.   When you fall into the panic zone you’re dealing with issues that are so hard you don’t even know how to approach them.  The project or task you take on overwhelms you and instead of stretching your knowledge, crushes you.   Instead of growth you take a defensive position and hunker-down for the barrage.  Stress is not a zone you want to operate in and you fall quickly back to the comfort zone.  Complacency or stress?   That’s an easy decision.

What Zone Are You In?

If you’re interested in growing your knowledge or skills the obvious zone you need to build in is the “learning zone”.  This is a challenging endeavor and one that requires you to constantly be on point to ensure that you don’t slip back into blanket of complacency that the comfort zone offers.

“It takes as much stress to be a success as it does to be a failure.” Emilio James Trujillo

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Meeting Expectations

10. May 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Communications, Entrepreneur · Tags: , ,

In the architectural/engineering business, much focus goes towards the lag measures of time, scope and cost.  The rule of thumb being that delivering a project on time, to scope, and within budget meets the expectations of all stakeholders and results in a win all-around.  However, is this the case?  Have all expectations truly been met?  It’s easy to see if the expectations for time, scope and cost were met – you can easily quantify and measure these.  What’s not so easy, is determining if you’ve met the soft-expectations.  These are expectations that are virtually impossible to quantify such as trust, experience/wisdom, and character.  It is these soft-expectations that often times are more important than the hard-expectations of time, scope, and cost.

Soft Expectations

Hitting the target on the hard-expectations is something that a lot of firms can do and is absolutely vital if a company it desires to remain in business.  To be overly effective, and hence build repeat business and brand recognition, delivering on the soft expectations is what is crucial.  Since clients expect (demand?) that a firm will deliver on the hard expectations, the firm that can exceed expectations on the soft expectations will win every time.  Why?  Because hard expectations are quantifiable and can only be improved so much: you can only cut so much time in delivery before quality suffers; you can only avoid costs so much before your firm is working at  a loss; you can only exceed scope by providing a set amount of betterments before your firm is paying to do the work.

With soft expectations, sky’s the limit.  Soft expectations come from relationships and personal interaction throughout the life of a project and beyond.  They are based on feelings vice fact.  With facts, you can measure the results.  Not so with feelings.  You can’t measure someone’s feelings about trust, experience/wisdom, or empathy.  Therefore, your competitive advantage comes from maximizing stakeholder’s feelings about your firm’s trustworthiness, empathy, listening skills, and wisdom.

How To Get There?

Meeting a client’s soft expectations takes time, success on the hard expectations, and action.  There’s no better way to meet the soft expectations of anyone than to simply do your work and let the results speak for themselves.  You can’t develop measures for items such as “trust”, “empathy”, or “wisdom”.  Think about it…what would it look like?   “We increased our customers trust 25% over what we’d targeted and did it 2 weeks ahead of schedule.”  Not likely.  You meet the soft expectations through doing your work, paying attention to the needs of those you serve, and building relationships that transcend the project.  When you do that, you build a reputation worth gold…and repeat business.

“A clients needs and expectations are vastly different.”  Bruce Bennett

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Generate Change

07. May 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Leadership · Tags: , ,

Organizations and individuals go through a lot of trouble to limit change and churn for what is felt are good reasons.  The thinking goes that change and churn mean going from a position of knowledge and security to one of ignorance and danger.  For the most part it’s true.  There is always certain level of ignorance when going into new territory.  There’s learning to be had, people to meet, alliances to build.  And there’s danger as well.  Danger to biased ideas, ingrained complacency, and stasis.   If given the choice which do you chose?  If leadership and self development are what you desire, then the choice is clear….change and churn.

Change is all about going from Point A to Point B. It denotes action and forward momentum.  Looking to launch a new product line, initiate a new development, get a new job, or start a company?  Then change is what it’s all about and you need to grab on to it.  As the old maxim goes, “the only constant is change”.  If you’re a leader, then you’ll certainly experience it…and if you’re taking action, you’ll experience it a lot.  You can get in the right mindset to take change head-on and make it kowtow to your will by:

Embracing Churn.  The natural by-product of change is churn.  If you’re changing, plan on getting mixed feelings and indecision.  One moment you’re all-in, the next looking for a way out.  The same happens in individuals or organizations.  Churn is a natural by-product of change and a symptom to be acknowledged, but not feared.  Sure, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s what’s needed for growth.

Educating Yourself.  Change is fearful because it involves moving from a point of knowledge to one of ignorance.  The only way to move back to a point of knowledge is to make yourself smart.  Research, link-up with those that have gone before, and read.   With knowledge so readily available, there’s no excuse to be fearful of change because you don’t feel smart enough.  Make yourself smart.

Knowing Your Vision.  Change for the sake of change is worthless.  So is lurching from one fad to the next.  When this happens with either an individual or an organization, it’s because there’s a lack of vision.  A clear, concise vision is what exists at all times and transcends the theory of moment.

Being committed to change in your life doesn’t equate to leaps of faith.  Changing in order to bring aspects of your vision into your life is good and must be sought.  In fact, that’s the whole reason behind generating change.

“Change before you have to.”  Jack Welch

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