If women ruled the world and the collaborative model.

I recently finished readind If Women Ruled the World. The point of the book was to get people thinking about power, what it means to them, and why women don't hold a lot of power in our current political structure. I think part of why women don't hold conventional power is that our cultural model for power is not intuitive for women. Some of this is certainly nurture, just read Odd Girl Out to get a frightening picture of the ways in which we are taught that being female means being nice. And being nice means NEVER saying what you mean or anything confrontational. But I also think some of it is hardwired into our pysche. We live with a biological reality that fosters a desire to collaborate and build community. We know there will be times we are vulnerable or in need and we work to build support structures to manage that effectively.

Practices of Highly Effective Non Profits

The Stanford Social Innovation Review published an article in 2007 about how non-profits make can really make a difference by reviewing 12 high-impact organizations to really understand why they were so successful. What was really surprising was how much conventional wisdom did NOT play a part in their ability to achieve their mission in unbelievably effective ways. While I highly recommend that you read the entire article here, I'll cover some of it for you, because it's definitely worthwhile.

The first point that I really got out of the article was success comes from know you are and what you want to accomplish. This may sound like a simple concept, but if you are working to feed the hungry then getting caught up in how to make your internal structures perfect, you need to be looking at creative partnerships to get food to hungry people, to discover why people are hungry, and how to change that. A lot of times we get really focused on the minutia of our organizations functionality when what we really need to do is start cooking.

You ARE being watched!

OK, not to sound too "conspiracy theory" here but I just saw my own car online. MY car. Parked in MY driveway. While getting ready for my week I googled an address for a meeting that I am going to tomorrow and noticed that there is a picture that I could click on to actually see the building I am going to. It was not a distorted satellite image, it was a 3D Photo of the house that allowed me to rotate the view, zoom in, and move up and down the street.

Being the curious fellow that I am, I put in my own address and sure enough, up comes a photo tour of my cul-de-sac. Complete with my house, cars in the driveway, etc. Now I know this is not real-time photos, you can't go on Google and see if I'm mowing the lawn, but that doesn't seem like it is too many steps away from this. Kinda creepy. Although I have to say it really will make finding difficult places more convenient. For instance I can SHOW you my favorite coffee shop in Boulder to work at during the day. See for yourself then come by and say hi sometime. We'll do lunch. :)

Should fun be work?

The biggest problem people seem to have with making their presentations or deliverables sparkle is they believe it will require a lot more work on their part. My cousin, who works for a large company on the east coast, recently told me "I need your help, I give presentations that I sleep through. And every time I think, next time I'll get on the stick and make it better. But I never have the energy to take it to the next level." And this really is why people often don't make their work fun. They already have enough to do, so why add on one more thing?! Not only do I have to do a presentation, now I have to make it "fun"!

Which is why we want to add a twist to your presentation. Fun doesn't require more work, it requires different thinking. You don't need to become the Martha Stewart of the business world (and look, I made all the paper for this presentation this morning to give it that special touch). In fact, fun is often less work because it's about taking what you are doing and making it yours. It's the opposite of the fast-food, cookie-cutter approach to business, where you bring your personality and you make it part of the work you are doing.

So when you are getting ready to put together your next business meeting, ask yourself, what would make this more fun for me? And then do that, I guarantee your presentation will be more effective, your audience will respond more favorably, and you will enjoy your work in a way you never knew you could.

My mother was a luddite...

My mom avoided almost every new technology that came out for most of my memory. Considering that my father started working on computers for the Navy back in the 70's this is quite an accomplishment. We had a 5 foot computer in my home when I was 4 that had 30 switches and ran giant white tape disks that you put into drawers. My mother didn't start e-mailing until after the year 2000. We forced her into the cell phone age by getting her one for Christmas years ago and slowly watched her tackle the issues of checking voice mail, and just this year she crossed the chasm into the world of text messaging.

I tell you all this to relay how much of a role model my mother is to me. In the spirit of May being older adults month, celebration of Mother's day and more, I wanted to explain why I like to celebrate my mom. She worked a variety of job over the years. She worked for an accounting firm, she was a career mother taking care of me and then my little sister. With a 12 year gap between us that puts my mom at 30+ years of being a mom when my sister graduated high school. For a number of those years she was a para-educator in the Boulder Valley School District. Add into this her passion for arts & crafts, she owned a stuffed animal business for years when I was a child making bunnies & bears and slippers, and you have one busy woman.

Well a few years ago my mom decided to leave the education field and try her hand at something more "job like" and she found a customer service job with eQuilter.com. She's always been into quilting, so why not blend some hobby with some work? In a very short time she was managing the customer service department and a short while later she moved up to being a Buyer. My luddite mother, the woman who I had to forcibly hold in front of the computer to set up her first e-mail, is now Betty Murray Buying Department Manager for one of the largest online quilting businesses in the world.

She's leaving today, travelling to Portland with Luana Rubin, the owner of eQuilter for the Spring International Quilt Market. For the weekend she will be browsing and buying the newest fabrics on the market. Speaking with industry leaders and forming partnerships that are good for her business. This is what we should all be doing for our businesses and ourselves.

She is so happy in her job. Sure it gets stressful, like any job, but she works with fabric, and she is in a field that she has a lot of knowledge in and she ENJOYS her job. She found empowerment, confidence and success in the most unlikely place, for her, the Internet. Her days now consist of work that is primarily online and communication via e-mail. She does it well, from the response of the company, and gets to bring home beautiful material to continue doing the things she loves.
She is an inspiration to me. She is part of the reason I started my own business doing what I wanted to do in the way I wanted to do it. My mom showed me that it is possible to let work be a compliment to the other things that you do in life and I am thankful for that. Her courage to overcome her resistance to new technology is a motivator to me to let go of my own fears and roadblocks that kept me from achieving my own happiness.

Mom, thank you.

The Trend of Texting Through Trainings

I've done it. My partner has done it. I've done it with my partner while she was in the same training with me. I fall asleep in most meetings. Literally just doze off while the person upfront drones away. I learned to sit in the center of the front row if I wanted to stay awake. Why do we do this to ourselves and our employees?

As a manager I sent my team to a number of trainings that they got nothing out of. They returned saying it was interesting and useful, but they did not return with passion to make a change. It was a waste of time, money and resources to send them to most of those trainings. Why? Because people often don't pay attention to the trainings. I don't really blame them, it's boring.

Vice President Cheney gets bored sometimes too.

I certainly don't want to sit through another 2 hour seminar where I watch a 45 minute video of an ex-celebrity tell me about the value of customer service. I sleep right through them. Or I used to, now I can stay awake through the marvelous invention of texting. I get to stay awake and engaged with people all over the world as I text myself through hours of training being paid for by whoever my current employer is.

This needs to stop. I know, this could just be a rant to get people to hire me to do the very things I am talking about, but the fact is the reason I want to do this is my passion for the idea. Not just helping people stay awake, but helping people change their corporate climate. This was pulled from an article about a similar topic in the Mercury News:

"It's increasingly difficult to get people's undivided attention," said Stanford University Professor Pamela Hinds, who studies the effects of technology on groups. "People would argue they are attending to the most important information without any loss of participation, but in fact they aren't fully there."

I know from experience that they aren't fully there. I catch myself texting or checking ym e-mail even at meetings where I really WANT to be there. But it is going to take more than just rules about not having your laptop in a meeting, "going topless" as it is called. It is going to take a change in how we think about our employees, our businesses and ourselves.

The Value of What we Create.

There is a powerful mythology that says in order to make money, money has to be your goal. That it's not work if you aren't miserable. That taking care of your employees is coddling them. I'm not sure where that comes from, our puritanical roots? our belief that work has to be tedious? our own unwillingness to prioritize our happiness? Wherever it comes from, it certainly doesn't serve us.

People work for a number of reasons, but at the root of it is our desire to fund the rest of our life. Money is nothing more than special paper, it's a symbol of our effort to be traded for someone else's effort. So our business goals also need to be about our life. The money we earn serves that goal. Making a profit at the expense of the environment, our employees, our health, or our quality of life is just not acceptable.

It's not enough to make a living unless we can also make a difference.

Monsters are not real

My daughter is still afraid of the dark. She doesn't like it when it's too dark outside, or in her room. Often she asks me to help with her issue and the other day it came to me that I cannot make it less dark for her. Darkness is not a tangible thing. It is a name we have given to the absence of light. And when there is not enough light, she gives the darkness power and focuses on what could be "in the dark". By focusing on the monsters in the dark, she keeps herself from actually getting to the root of the problem. She feels more comfortable, with more light.

I see this in business all the time. Managers constantly trying to get rid of the bottlenecks, or wanting to fix the negative attitudes of employees. Often we get so focused on the elimination of negative issues that we fail to recognise that often it is not the abundance of something negative, but the absence of the positive that is causing the issue. Instead of eliminating bottlenecks, increase efficiency. Try to increase happiness and satisfaction, not decrease negative attitude.

Most people respond better to positive reinforcement. I know if my boss told me that I needed to "lose the bad attitude", that would respond much less favorably that if she said something like, "You need to find a way to increase your satisfaction at work." The end goal is the same, but by increasing happiness, it naturally decreases negative attitude. Being told to remove a bad behavior, can often just leave a void that gets filled with apathy, more bad attitude, or sometimes a false sense of satisfaction. There is no direction to get better, just to stop what is being done.

I want my daughter to focus on the light in her world. I want her to find ways to carry light with her and banish the monsters from her mind. I cannot take away the darkness, but I can get her a flashlight. Do you have one?