This is the Laser 7 Group, one of my Growth Cycle Groups that meet frequently. We had dinner in the remarkable Seven Restaurant and then met in my wonderful suite at The Ivy Hotel.
Clockwise from left: Scott Edinger, Urko Wood, John Martinka, Ann Latham, Alan Weiss, Lisa Nirell
Print This Post
June 17, 2013—Issue #195
This week’s focus point: Dropping weight enables us to rise, to run faster, to breathe easier. In our careers and lives those “weights” are often meetings, routines, habits, colleagues, tasks, and obligations. You can’t carry all your old baggage and weights, else you’re too overburdened to move–you’re pinned in place, like an insect in a museum. Marshall Goldsmith has written that “what got you here won’t get you there.” David Maister has written that “we know what to do, but still don’t do it.” I’ve written that “you must let go in order to reach out.” There are too many people who become better and better at less and less, corkscrewing themselves into the ground until they’re barely noticeable on the surface. Even some beliefs and values can become weights if they’re never examined and you never allow them to be challenged. I’m constantly surprised at how stupid I was two weeks ago.
Monday Morning Perspective: Sed quis Custodiet ipsos Custodes? (Who shall guard us from the guardians?) — Juvenal
My 52nd book–Alan Weiss on Consulting: “A guided journey with the rock star of consulting” Pre-publication discount: http://www.summitconsulting.com/store/AlanWeissOnConsulting.php
In the Buyer’s Office, Live: http://summitconsulting.com/seminars/InTheBuyersOffice.php A live-streaming event about converting conversation to cash
Alan’s Common Sense World View: Five-minute videos each week on geopolitics, energy, education, personal development http://www.summitconsulting.com/seminars/Alans-Common-Sense-World-View.php
You may subscribe and encourage others to subscribe by clicking HERE.
Privacy statement: Our subscriber lists are never rented, sold, or loaned to any other parties for any reason.
Contact information: info@summitconsulting.com
http://www.contrarianconsulting.com
ISSN 2151-0091
© Alan Weiss 2013. All rights reserved
Print This Post
At the start of every airline flight there is an announcement about seat belts, smoking, emergency exits, oxygen, et. al. I often look around to find no one paying any attention whatsoever. Some airlines beg for your attention, some international carriers use cartoon characters, but it’s all the same–done for legal reasons. If it were really for safety, they would demand you take a test before they took off. The activity is largely symbolic.
TSA is largely symbolic. There are people who could just be waived through, but we search everyone to some extent and woe to the person who has 5 ounces instead of 3 of shampoo, because that threatens national security. Perhaps we need this symbolism to feel safer, despite the inconvenience and invasion or privacy? I can’t understand why we don’t have the means to allow 90 percent through, given the fact we can obviously listen in on most private conversations these days!
We acknowledge red lights and stop signs, even in the absence of other traffic, because we attach immediate and serious significance to them. Smoking has declined because so many people understand the real hazards. Most of don’t trust milk that smells funny or meet with a green tinge to it.
As we attempt to provide value to customers and clients in return for equitable remuneration, perhaps we should be highly sensitive to eschewing the symbolic (a workshop, a retreat, an audit, another meeting) and focus on the truly meaningful and immediately useful (an improved condition, a solved problem, reduced stress).
Too many things we do by rote, whether the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord’s Prayer, or the hackneyed “Have a nice day,” are merely symbolic and empty for many of us. But the actions we take to instantiate them as positive behaviors and improved interactions are the lasting impressions.
Are your life and career symbolic or meaningful?
© Alan Weiss 2013
Print This Post
If you’re excellent at choosing horses, why don’t you just bet on them instead of selling tips at the racetrack?
Among all the SEO spam from India and inheritance fraud from Nigeria, here is a mailing which I can’t seem to escape, there’s no unsubscribe, and it’s all free! (Names and sites removed to avoid humiliation.) Note that it’s a group “devised of.” And there are “hidden and well guarded secrets.” (I wonder where “Million Dollar” came from? That would never work.) “Dons” brain apparently requires no possessive, but it may be referring to Spanish nobility. This illiterate mess apparently doesn’t matter to those who allow their names to be used. They called me a “jackass” when I asked not to receive any more. Perhaps they can sell me the secret and hidden jackass techniques, for free!
Print This Post
This is one of the wonderful, talented, and bright women I coached in interviewing skills for Miss USA and Miss America contests, Ashley Bickford (these are photos she posted on Facebook today). 
It is difficult and exhausting work, but someone has to do it.
Print This Post
• If you believe that no one will ever be able to find what you post or write on the internet, or say on a phone conversation or in a text, then you’re living in a dream world. Act on the assumption that someone may be listening to or reading about all your “private” comments.
• A New York Times columnist wrote a piece on how many black actors won Tony Awards. When does the tribalism ever end? Can we simply see people as people and leave identify politics behind?
• Note to those who loved to write about the US as a declining Rome and the end of the “American Century”: The US is poised—in a rebounding economy, and approaching energy independence, and demise in Europe—for it’s greatest economic influence ever.
• The Tesla is a fascinating and potentially exciting car, but the future of automobiles in the US in in internal combustion engines, and the future of power in this country is oil. We will not be able to power this society on nuclear, solar, tidal, wind, or other sources, due to technological limitations and politics. And we will have the ability to seriously diminish carbon emissions from better technologies and tax disincentives. Your children’s children will be driving primarily gasoline-powered cars.
• People who constantly complain remind me of poison ivy. There must have been a cosmic plan that called for their existence, but I choose not to go near.
• Small business owners, entrepreneurs, and professional services providers who can’t return your call within 24 hours aren’t slow or disorganized. They are dumb.
• I’m tired of being asked in restaurants every 20 minutes if everything is okay. I’m capable of flagging you down if it’s not. Otherwise, serve the food, remove the used dishes, and leave me alone.
• Any idiot with $250 can choose a good $250 wine. It’s finding the good $25 wine that’s the challenge.
• You know you’re on top of your game when strangers start taking shots at you. Welcome to leadership.
• The growing use of bizarre initials after one’s name reminds me of ants invading the kitchen. I want to call an exterminator before the darn things multiply still more.
• People who “tell” and never “ask” are among the dreariest I know—smug and comfortably wrapped in their own carefully defended fortress.
• I’m always impressed when someone reaches for a check. It’s a small generosity that creates huge good will.
• The amount of people applauding THEMSELVES on Facebook and “commenting on their own photo” should dispel any notion that we have a confident, high self-worth group on social media. My dogs aren’t that needy.
© Alan Weiss 2013
Print This Post
Alan’s Growth Cycle® teams meet periodically, and here is the Red Robbin team during a hard day’s work on strategy at my pool. That’s me, Gary Patterson, Jean Oursler, and Dan Weedin, with teammate Noah Fleming manning the camera. Bentley and Buddy Beagle were with us.
Print This Post
June 10, 2013—Issue #194
This week’s focus point: Home schooling, alternative education, non-traditional education, and other options are dramatically increasing in the US. Meanwhile, the notion of vast campuses–where students are housed, clothed, parked, fed, and occasionally educated (and full professors rarely teach)–at the cost of mind-boggling debt becomes increasingly tenuous. That’s because we don’t focus on the customer, but on the teacher, just as airports are overwhelmingly built for planes not passengers. Education is run with a strategic “method of distribution” driving force, through highly unionized teachers. It should be run with a “markets served” driving force, for the benefit of the students (and their parents). Crops grow best in open fields and are then stored in warehouses. Are our kids in fields or warehouses?
Monday Morning Perspective: If horses and cattle did theology, horses would draw the form of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle. — Xenophanes
How to Convert Meetings to Business: Last call for the Geometry of the Sale, June 13: http://summitconsulting.com/seminars/HowToGetInFrontOfBuyers.php
Alan Weiss’s Common Sense® World View: Five-minute weekly video on issues affecting our lives: http://www.summitconsulting.com/seminars/Alans-Common-Sense-World-View.php
You may subscribe and encourage others to subscribe by clicking HERE.
Privacy statement: Our subscriber lists are never rented, sold, or loaned to any other parties for any reason.
Contact information: info@summitconsulting.com
http://www.contrarianconsulting.com
ISSN 2151-0091
© Alan Weiss 2013. All rights reserved
Print This Post
I recently wrote a Monday Morning Memo® on what I believe to be failures in the way we educate our youth, and why schools in the US are failing. I received the following from Australia this morning:
“Hi Alan
“After much thought and reflection I am unsubscribing from your Monday Memo because I’m dismayed at you recent attacks on education. Education is not a commodity to be bought and sold, it is not a business, it is a life skill. Attending school goes beyond learning how to read and write it teaches teamwork, social skills, interacting with a group and so on.
“I can only comment on my experience with the Australian education system and here we value education. The Federal Government is overhauling the funding model to ensure that all children receive a quality education and have the ability to undertake Tertiary education if that is what they wish. In addition to overhauling the funding model they are introducing a National Curriculum from Kindergarten to Year 12.
“Your recent assertions that a people should only have to do the relevant professional entrance exam is laughable. University equips the student with skills far beyond the scope of their Degree pattern, the ability to learn, research and problem solve. This is a fundamental cornerstone of producing quality graduates. I am very proud to display my education qualifications and professional associations as a post nominal on my email signature and on my business card. It shows that I am qualified in my chosen field and am committed to continual improvement.
“In closing I have enjoyed receiving your Monday Memos over the last few years and have shared them with many friends. Many of them in the education sector. Sadly this will no longer occur.
“Kindest Regards
(I’ve Withheld His Name) BSc ME Dip Man Dip SIS CEnvP MEIANZ MIECA ARLF”
Aside from the fact that 36 initials after one’s name reflects either a practical joke or someone so insecure that they present you with their fourth grade report card when they meet you (sort of what they do on Facebook), can you imagine anyone so “involved” in education and learning that their reaction is to unsubscribe from a free newsletter they’ve admittedly enjoyed for years over one, single disagreement in philosophy? Geeze, I thought that was how educated people learned—they discussed and debated.
But my friend, here, has his hands over his ears and is screaming like a child (probably reciting all those initials from memory) so that he doesn’t have to tolerate any ideas that aren’t consistent with his agenda (like those trolls on Twitter who insist on debating your Tweets because they can find one exception in ten thousand to your point).
Folks, don’t worry about the competition, because if you focus on new ideas, innovation, and provocation, you’ll be hired and pass these frightened people by. Although it may take a slight detour to get around all the initials.
© Alan Weiss 2013
Print This Post
