Excerpts from the book: Great Work Great Career

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.


Great Work Great Career
As we live through successive economic earthquakes that shake the core of our society, it can be difficult to maintain one's footing. Still, Covey argues there is a positive side to these tumultuous times, provided one is willing to take a chance and go with it. Welcome this wild and demanding new world and embrace the opportunities it presents. Covey tells us, don't just settle for a job; you want a great job - Great Work, Great Career.

• A person with a great career makes a distinctive contribution and generates a strong feeling of loyalty and trust in others. Anyone, regardless of title or position or profession, can do these things.
• Dr. Fiona Wood clearly shows us what it means to have a great career. It’s not the acclaim or the fame, it’s the contribution.
• A great career is all about solving great problems, meeting great challenges, and making great contributions.
• He is not ambitious in the sense of needing the signs of external success, like constant promotions or public acclaim, but he’s making a difference.
• object of the ambition. If you’re ambitious only for the trappings of success and unwilling to pay an honest price for success, ambition can destroy your happiness over time. On the other hand, if you’re ambitious to make a real difference—a meaningful contribution—you will experience the deep satisfaction of a job well done and a life well lived. That is the kind of ambition I believe in.
• A great career does not rise from a need for outside affirmation, but from within you, from your own curiosity, from your own unique mix of talents and passion.
• It also rises from your conscience—from the whispers deep inside that point you to what you should do.
• A great career requires both of these dimensions—the desire and skill to contribute, and a character worthy of the trust and loyalty of others.
• satisfies your conscience. But it’s not just about you. It’s also about answering a significant need.
• Your great career starts, as Peter Hawkins and Nick Smith say, “when you stop asking questions such as ‘How do I get promoted?’ and start asking ‘What is the difference I want to make? What is the legacy I want to leave?’”
• “In corporate leadership roles and over 10 years in coaching and counseling, I discovered the difference I want to make—help people make their difference. In doing so, they reclaim their passion and find significance in their work.” — Julia Tang Peters, leadership coach.
• A great career comes down to making a great contribution, to making a difference that matters to you and to the people you serve. Envisioning, defining, and designing your Contribution Statement is the first step on the path to a great career. People who are only looking for a job have résumés. People who are looking to make a great career have Contribution Statements.
• Maya Angelou said, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
• Those who create a great career for themselves are those who make the time to define their contribution and plan how they will achieve it.
• The Industrial Age, people simply asked, “What’s my job description?” Now, according to Peter Drucker, “Knowledge Age workers must learn to ask, ‘What should my contribution be?’
• Intelligence has become the new form of property. Focused intelligence, the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and know-how, is the new source of wealth.”

Food for thought for the Weekend

Food for thought for the Weekend: My series where I present assorted collection of interesting blog posts, TED talks, podcast and articles I read/listened this week, some quotes that resonated with me, excerpts from my own reading.


6 Ways to Take Control of Your Career Development

This HBR article talks about six things you can do to take control of your career development.

• Understand what you’re evaluated on
• Solve for your own blind spots
• Codify your learnings
• Increase your visibility with the C-suite
• Become an expert in an area of increasing importance to your company
• Seek good counsel and mentoring

Testing The “Impossible”: 17 Questions That Changed My Life - Tim Ferris

Tim Ferris thinks Reality is largely negotiable.

"If you stress-test the boundaries and experiment with the “impossibles,” you’ll quickly discover that most limitations are a fragile collection of socially reinforced rules you can choose to break at any time." - Time Ferris

In this post he has listed 17 questions that he believes has dramatically changed his life. The questions are very powerful and many are worth answering for ourselves.

Quote of the week:
“Do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays

Video of the week:

The Surprising Habits of Original Thinkers - Adam Grant's TED Talk.

Menteeing: How I've chosen my mentors

Knowing that I always would be menteeing under someone, recently a colleague asked me how I go about choosing a mentor for myself. I have never followed a process, but based on my mentee journey so far, I seem to seek mentor for three specific needs:

1. I get a chance to work with an expert and also feel that I can/need learn something from them on their area of expertise. Some examples:

• Even after joining NI, my heart was still in start-ups and I still was nursing the dream of being an advisor to start-up. I figured I was not knowledgeable on the VC/funding part, which I found very intriguing. So, I signed up the CFO of my previous company to be a mentor. I used to have skype calls with him 4-6 times an year and usually used to go with specific questions.  
• Other one was with an expert on Innovation. This is tricky as he has been my friend/peer for a long time. But I specifically wanted it to be called that way, as I got interested in how to go about Innovation. We used to meet 6-8 times in an year and I used to ask a lot of questions and his answers made me think and I was able to implement a few of those.

Both of the above lasted for 1.5 to 2 years and I came out of it being knowledgable about the theoretical aspects of these two subjects.

2. I identify a development need (usually has come from my boss either as a weakness that needs to be fixed or a new skill to be developed for future growth) and then find out who in my circle (or usually in the circle of other mentors) can mentor me. Some examples: 

• My upcoming plan to approach a very senior person specifically on being a project sponsor from a remote site
• Few years ago, I had signed a well known Leadership/Org Development consultant in Bangalore to help me lead technical people after I moved over as a manager to Wireless domain from the EDA domain

Note that #1 above is more of an interest, whereas this one is an identified development need.

3. Finding feet in a new org and to build relationships within the org. This is most important when you join a new org. Even otherwise it is always good to have someone as a mentor outside your own BU especially for folks in remote sites. 

• Almost as soon as I joined NI, I signed up with a senior person at the HQ and it continues till day. During my initial days, this mentor introduced me to lot of people, helped me understand how decisions are made at NI, key philosophies, key decision makers etc., Over the last few years, he is mainly acting as a sounding board (encouraging me to grow and calling out stupid ideas without mincing words). He also lends his shoulders to lean on, offers invaluable guidance on org development and has been one of my big supporters along with my boss.

I owe all my success and growth to a host of my mentors (and bosses that I'm lucky enough to be coached by). When the likes of Steve Jobs and Roger Federer have mentors, why not me and you have a mentor?

Some things that I'd made sure include:

1. You want to be willing to do it voluntarily. Have a belief that there’d always be some blindspots or areas of improvement and be humble enough to acknowledge that we can always learn from others.  Many times I've not liked what I've heard or the things that mentors make me do, has taken me out of my comfort zone, but this precisely is the reason to work with mentors.
2. I always set-up the meeting based on mentor’s availability and what works for him 
3. I diligently work on things they suggest (do something or read something) and keep them posted (fair amount of email conversation between meetings)
4. I show up for meetings and own-up something that I’ve not done (don’t give excuses)
5. Sometimes mentors do ask for favours (usually for others, rarely for themselves) and since I’m taking their useful time, I’ll act on them.

Please note mentors do not get anything in return for their time and efforts. However they do get a lot of joy in seeing their mentees grow and succeed. I'm therefore very careful with their time.

In summary, I've sought mentors for the following:

• For a reassuring pat on the back
• For an unapologetic slap on the face
• To explain why my fears are unfounded
• To tell me why my excuses are BS

(and for everything else you've a friend/partner/spouse that tells you exactly what you want to hear, make you happy in the short run and therefore possibly irrelevant in the long run).

Now go find a mentor.

Excellence = Next 5 minutes

From Tom Peters book titled Excellence Dividend

Intent vs Behavior

I started noticing my own intent vs behaviour, as well as others after hearing a live talk by the great Abdul Kalam. He reasoned that we judge ourselves by intent and others judge us by our behaviour. Since we never have any intent to give less or do a shoddy job or want to give excuses or fall short of expectations, we always think we are doing fine. While others can clearly see our output (both results and behaviour) and judge us. This invariable creates a difference in perception of how we view ourselves and how others view us, particularly there is a huge difference between what we say we will do and what we eventually end up doing it. One of my boss used to ask "How do you rate your Say-Do ratio" and that makes perfect sense. And this concept is even more important if one is a leader.

The gap between impact and intent results in poor performance, personal frustration and/or self-pity. You might be frustrated that others don’t ‘get’ you. Or, you feel sorry for yourself because you’re under appreciated. You wrongly believe the real you is obvious.

Successful (Authentic) leaders work to align impact of behavior with intention in the heart. Lousy leaders ignore the perceptions of others. Any leader who doesn’t care how they occur lacks the emotional intelligence to lead effectively. This article has some practical tips on how to bridge the gap.

What has been you Say-Do ratio lately?

Excerpts from the book: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
In this must-read for anyone seeking to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth takes us on an eye-opening journey to discover the true qualities that lead to outstanding achievement. Winningly personal, insightful and powerful, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that – not talent or luck – makes all the difference.

• The highly accomplished were paragons of perseverance. Each was chasing something of unparalleled interest and importance, and it was the chase—as much as the capture—that was gratifying. In sum, no matter the domain, the highly successful had a kind of ferocious determination that played out in two ways. First, these exemplars were unusually resilient and hardworking. Second, they knew in a very, very deep way what it was they wanted. They not only had determination, they had direction.
• It was this combination of passion and perseverance that made high achievers special. In a word, they had grit. Our potential is one thing. What we do with it is quite another. Wrote Darwin. “For I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think this is an eminently important difference.”
• So what is the reality of greatness? Nietzsche came to the same conclusion Dan Chambliss did. Great things are accomplished by those “people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them.”
• They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it). … They all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole; they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole.”
• Here they are: Talent is how quickly your skills improve when you invest effort.15 Achievement is what happens when you take your acquired skills and use them. What this theory says is that when you consider individuals in identical circumstances, what each achieves depends on just two things, talent and effort. Talent—how fast we improve in skill—absolutely matters. But effort factors into the calculations twice, not once. Effort builds skill. At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.

• Accomplishment, in Will’s eyes, is very much about going the distance. “I’ve never really viewed myself as particularly talented,” he once observed. “Where I excel is ridiculous, sickening work ethic.” Asked to explain his ascendancy to the entertainment elite, Will said: The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is: I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be outworked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me. You might be all of those things. You got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there’s two things: You’re getting off first, or I’m going to die.36 It’s really that simple.
• When you permanently turn your back on a commitment—your effort plummets to zero. As a consequence, your skills stop improving, and at the same time, you stop producing anything with whatever skills you have. As any coach or athlete will tell you, consistency of effort over the long run is everything. Many of us, it seems, quit what we start far too early and far too often. Even more than the effort a gritty person puts in on a single day, what matters is that they wake up the next day, and the next, ready to get on that treadmill and keep going.
• I would add that skill is not the same thing as achievement, either. Without effort, your talent is nothing more than your unmet potential. Without effort, your skill is nothing more than what you could have done but didn’t. With effort, talent becomes skill and, at the very same time, effort makes skill productive. I was impressed and said so. But I hastened to add that grit is more about stamina than intensity.
• But the important thing is the idea itself: Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.

• You are, in a sense, pointing in the same direction, ever eager to take even the smallest step forward than to take a step to the side, toward some other destination. At the extreme, one might call your focus obsessive. Most of your actions derive their significance from their allegiance to your ultimate concern, your life philosophy. You have your priorities in order.
• Grit is about holding the same top-level goal for a very long time. Furthermore, this “life philosophy,” as Pete Carroll might put it, is so interesting and important that it organizes a great deal of your waking activity. In very gritty people, most mid-level and low-level goals are, in some way or another, related to that ultimate goal. In contrast, a lack of grit can come from having less coherent goal structures.

• Buffett takes him through three steps. First, you write down a list of twenty-five career goals. Second, you do some soul-searching and circle the five highest-priority goals. Just five. Third, you take a good hard look at the twenty goals you didn’t circle. These you avoid at all costs. They’re what distract you; they eat away time and energy, taking your eye from the goals that matter more. So, to Buffett’s three-step exercise in prioritizing, I would add an additional step: Ask yourself, To what extent do these goals serve a common purpose? The more they’re part of the same goal hierarchy—important because they then serve the same ultimate concern—the more focused your passion.
• On any long journey, detours are to be expected. However, the higher-level the goal, the more it makes sense to be stubborn.
• Degree of strength of will or perseverance. Quiet determination to stick to a course once decided upon. Tendency not to abandon tasks in the face of obstacles. Perseverance, tenacity, doggedness. In her summary comments, Cox concluded that “high but not the highest intelligence, combined with the greatest degree of persistence, will achieve greater eminence than the highest degree of intelligence with somewhat less persistence.”
• Grit grows as we figure out our life philosophy, learn to dust ourselves off after rejection and disappointment, and learn to tell the difference between low-level goals that should be abandoned quickly and higher-level goals that demand more tenacity. The maturation story is that we develop the capacity for long-term passion and perseverance as we get older.

• Any of the following four thoughts might go through your head right before you quit what you’re doing: “I’m bored.” “The effort isn’t worth it.” “This isn’t important to me.” “I can’t do this, so I might as well give up.” There’s nothing wrong—morally or otherwise—with thoughts like these. As I tried to show in this chapter, paragons of grit quit goals, too. But the higher the level of the goal in question, the more stubborn they are about seeing it through. Most important, paragons of grit don’t swap compasses: when it comes to the one, singularly important aim that guides almost everything else they do, the very gritty tend not to utter the statements above.
• Passion begins with intrinsically enjoying what you do. Every gritty person I’ve studied can point to aspects of their work they enjoy less than others, and most have to put up with at least one or two chores they don’t enjoy at all. Nevertheless, they’re captivated by the endeavor as a whole and they find it meaningful.
• Likewise, in her interviews with “mega successful” people, journalist Hester Lacey has noticed that all of them demonstrate a striking desire to excel beyond their already remarkable level of expertise:
• “It’s a persistent desire to do better,” Hester explained. “It’s the opposite of being complacent. But it’s a positive state of mind, not a negative one. It’s not looking backward with dissatisfaction. It’s looking forward and wanting to grow.”

• But seeing that someone needs our help isn’t enough, Bill hastened to add. Purpose requires a second revelation: “I personally can make a difference.” This conviction, this intention to take action, he says, is why it’s so important to have observed a role model enact purpose in their own life. “You have to believe that your efforts will not be in vain.”
• There’s an old Japanese saying: Fall seven, rise eight. If I were ever to get a tattoo, I’d get these four simple words indelibly inked. Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. I have a feeling tomorrow will be better is different from I resolve to make tomorrow better. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.
• Optimists, Marty soon discovered, are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes of their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.

• How do grit paragons think about setbacks? Overwhelmingly, I’ve found that they explain events optimistically. Journalist Hester Lacey finds the same striking pattern in her interviews with remarkably creative people. “What has been your greatest disappointment?” she asks each of them. Whether they’re artists or entrepreneurs or community activists, their response is nearly identical. “Well, I don’t really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from. I tend to think, ‘Well okay, that didn’t go so well, but I guess I will just carry on.’
• Brent and other personality researchers have found that a key process in personality development involves situations and personality traits reciprocally “calling” each other. The corresponsive principle suggests that the very traits that steer us toward certain life situations are the very same traits that those situations encourage, reinforce, and amplify. In this relationship there is the possibility of virtuous and vicious cycles.
• “My sense, from being in admissions for over forty years,” Bill concluded, “is that most people are born with tremendous potential. The real question is whether they’re encouraged to employ their good old-fashioned hard work and their grit, if you will, to its maximum. In the end, those are the people who seem to be the most successful.”
• The bottom line on culture and grit is: If you want to be grittier, find a gritty culture and join it. If you’re a leader, and you want the people in your organization to be grittier, create a gritty culture. There are standards. And the more elite the team, the fiercer the desire of those already on the team to keep those standards high.
• “So it seems to me,” Dan concluded, “that there’s a hard way to get grit and an easy way. The hard way is to do it by yourself. The easy way is to use conformity—the basic human drive to fit in—because if you’re around a lot of people who are gritty, you’re going to act grittier.”

• First, thinking of yourself as someone who is able to overcome tremendous adversity often leads to behavior that confirms that self-conception. If you’re a Finn with that “sisu spirit,” you get up again no matter what. Likewise, if you’re a Seattle Seahawk, you’re a competitor. You have what it takes to succeed. You don’t let setbacks hold you back. Grit is who you are. Second, even if the idea of an actual inner energy source is preposterous, the metaphor couldn’t be more apt. It sometimes feels like we have nothing left to give, and yet, in those dark and desperate moments, we find that if we just keep putting one foot in front of the other, there is a way to accomplish what all reason seems to argue against.
• Roosvelt "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,19 whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
• And here is how Jamie translates the poetry of Roosevelt into the prose of a JPMorgan Chase manual, titled How We Do Business: “Have a fierce resolve in everything you do.” “Demonstrate determination, resiliency, and tenacity.” “Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.” And, finally, “Use mistakes and problems as opportunities to get better—not reasons to quit.”

What RamP's Reading: Jun'18

The first one has been recommended by Bill Gates for all managers. I've been reading Tom Peter's new book Excellence Dividend and the next two books are recommend in that book. The last one is often quoted and GRIT seems to be the mantra of champions.