Quotable Quotes

• Working smart instead of hard sounds great until you realise that you're competing with a lot of very smart people that work extremely hard
• A river cuts thru the rock not because of its power, but because of its persistence. Chase your DREAMS every single day.
• We can't direct the wind, but can adjust our sails
• You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere. 
• Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lifes, but no idea how to lead their own.
• The smallest deed is better than the grandest intention
• The only person you need to be better than is the person you were yesterday.
• Where you are headed is far more important than how fast you are going
• Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere!!
• SUCCESS IS A MINDSET

Are you a wandering generality or a meaningful specific?

This is a famous ZigZiglar quote. It took me a while to digest. 

A keen study of the lives of people who excel will reveal that the main ingredient for their success is usually one thing: passion. Their dedication to a cause, belief in people and commitment to living their best life come from their passion. They find the one thing they really enjoy doing, then do it with passion. Passion is the key ingredient to success.  

Where does passion come from? How can we use it to become meaningful specifics? Passion is born out of desire – having a dream, vision or longing to see something different from a current situation. What do you see in your future? What’s your dream? Martin Luther King Jnr. was a very passionate man because he had a dream for racial equality. Princess Diana had a passion for charity work because she wanted to see a better world. Your passion will enable you to soar from obscurity and into the limelight. Your passion will enable you to realize something greater than yourself. Your passion will enable you to be a meaningful specific. 

Passion is effective when it is birthed from the inside. You must be motivated intrinsically. You cannot exhibit passion on the outside when deep down you are shallow. You’ve got to cultivate it deep within yourself. That comes by immersing yourself wholeheartedly into pursuing your vision or dream. Here are two keys to help you birth passion: 

a). Relentless Dedication – In order to become a meaningful specific, you must be relentlessly dedicated to making your dream come true. What are you doing on a daily basis that is adding value to your ability to fully become who you were born to be? Are you being true to the voice within you that is calling you to perform at your optimum level?

b). Steady Focus – Steady Focus comes from always having your vision right in front of you. Think about why you have immense success driving every day – the windshield is right in front of you and you are always looking out through it! It’s the same thing with your dream. You must keep it right in front of you. There are many ways that you can do this. Write it down and recite it throughout the day. Design your environment to remind you of your vision every day.

Are you a meaningful specific?

What RamP's Reading: Oct'15

 


Product Strategy for High Technology Companies
One of the key determinants of success for today’s high-technology companies is product strategy―and this guide continues to be the only book on product strategy written specifically for the 21st century high-tech industry. More than 250 examples from technological leaders including IBM, Compaq, and Apple―plus a new focus on growth strategies and on Internet businesses―define how high-tech companies can use product strategy and product platform strategy for competitiveness, profitability, and growth in the Internet age.

Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organization
John Wooden’s goal in 41 years of coaching never changed; namely, to get maximum effort and peak performance from each of his players in the manner that best served the team. Wooden on Leadership explains step-by-step how he pursued and accomplished this goal. Focusing on Wooden’s 12 Lessons in Leadership and his acclaimed Pyramid of Success, it outlines the mental, emotional, and physical qualities essential to building a winning organization, and shows you how to develop the skill, confidence, and competitive fire to “be at your best when your best is needed”--and teach your organization to do the same.

Thresholds of Motivation: Nurturing Human Growth in the Organization
This book explores a fundamental question for managers in today's rapidly changing, and often perplexing, business environment: What truly motivates people to function and perform at their highest capabilities within the framework of an organization? Is it man's "intrinsically" competitive nature, as Western society has believed since Darwin's time? Is it a purely materialistic craving for money, power, and status - a view that seems a lot less compelling in the 1990s than it did in the 1980s? Or is it something else - something that reveals human nature in a new and entirely different light?

Problem with anonymous feedback

I have never been a big fan of anonymous feedback. It just says that the culture might punish you if the feedback is direct. Further, I've seen too many people taking umbrage under the anonymous system and use the process to give feedback that is not actionable, or generic or in some cases even settle scores (especially if the feedback is being given on the immediate manager to the skip level manager). I've also seen people that feel very secure are comfortable sending it directly to the person in question (even when they might be giving the feedback on their manager to their skip level manager). Assuming the manager is seeking honest feedback, this works the best as it opens a direct communication channel and fosters a dialog that can benefit both and ofcourse the organization too. Finally, as managers we need to be creating an environment that values direct and honest feedback. Next time when you are asked to give anonymous feedback, please make sure you send the same to the person to which the feedback is for. Better still feel free and seek honest feedback directly from people that know your work.

Why this post now? I read a very interesting FastCompany article Why Anonymous Feedback Does More Harm Than Good. They give three reasons:

1. It reinforces the impression that it isn't safe to speak up openly.
2. It can set off a witch-hunt to find out who said what, leading away from the issues at hand.
3. It discourages the level of specificity that's needed to make real changes.

The article also talks about how to give better feedback and also has tips managers can use in order to encourage good feedback or move ahead productively with feedback they've received.

Take a look and let me know what you felt.

What RamP's Reading: Sep'15

Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and professor and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue that both business and capitalism are inherently good, and they use some of today’s best-known and most successful companies to illustrate their point. From Southwest Airlines, UPS, and Tata to Costco, Panera, Google, the Container Store, and Amazon, today’s organizations are creating value for all stakeholders—including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment. Read this book and you’ll better understand how four specific tenets—higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture and management—can help build strong businesses, move capitalism closer to its highest potential, and foster a more positive environment for all of us.

A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring
After eight books, many of them bestsellers, A Game Plan for Life was the one closest to John Wooden's heart: a moving and inspirational guide to the power of mentorship. The first half focuses on the people who helped foster the values that carried Wooden through an incredibly successful and famously principled career, including his father, his college coach, his wife, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mother Teresa. The second half is built around interviews with some of the many people he mentored over the years, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton. Their testimony takes readers inside the lessons Wooden taught to generations of players, bringing out the very best in them not just as athletes but as human beings.

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
Freakonomics lived on the New York Times bestseller list for an astonishing two years. Now authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with more iconoclastic insights and observations in SuperFreakonomics—the long awaited follow-up to their New York Times Notable blockbuster. Based on revolutionary research and original studies SuperFreakonomics promises to once again challenge our view of the way the world really works.

Craftsman mindset vs Passion mindset

Utilizing the long weekend effectively, I'm reading this book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. In this book, the author (interestingly Asst. Prof of Computer Science at Georgetown University), argues that skills trump passion in the long run with a lot of examples. According to him, the craftsman mindset “focuses on what you can offer the world” and the passion mindset “focuses on what the world can offer you.” The former is built upon the importance of consistent practice and developing your skills to do the work you want to do, while the latter believes that once you find what you love to do, you will magically succeed at it.

I find this idea very interesting. In my work, I come regularly across folks that are not happy about the job and need some advice. I used to point them out to folks that have become invaluable by the sheer amount of value they seem to be adding to the organization. I now have a better vocabulary to articulate.

Closely observe someone you think love their job and check the route they followed, was it obvious up front, following a long held passion or was it a longer, more circuitous path? Did they follow their passion or become a craftsman? Chances are most people have become a craftsman because it is hard to tell what your passion is when you start out, much less find a career around it.

The problem with "passion mindset" is that it keeps people looking outside of themselves and what they do, always looking for and expecting to find some "right" job that would provide them satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment or even help increase the value of their resume. As it is indeed difficult find such projects on a regular basis, they're never happy, never committed to doing what is necessary to excel at the work they have. Many leave their current jobs in search of their ideal job and will soon realize that it is just the case of grass being greener on the other side, if they remain stuck in "passion mindset"

The "craftsman mindset" looks at the world differently. Instead of "What can the world offer me?" it asks, "What can I offer the world?" The craftsman wonders how he can get really good at what he does, creating value with his work. They are always learning, getting better, always practicing, and quickly becomes a "go-to person. Such people while enjoying work are also constantly seeking feedback to improve and often harsh in their own assessment and Over time has become passionate about his work. The point Calport makes is that Passion didn't the person to it, it was a result of it.

What do you think? Have you seen examples where people having mastered something, have become passionate about it? Most importantly are you working with Passion mindset or Craftsman mindset? What type of people you've seen are enjoying their work - people with passion mindset or the ones with craftsman mindset in your experience? I'd love to hear.

What RamP's Reading (Jul'15)

Monsoon has set in. Bangalore is seeing incessant rains and great monsoon weather. Nothing can be more relaxing than reading a book in such a setting with healthy dose of strong south Indian coffee. Thats what I've been doing in the past week. I completed this beautifully written book "TED Talks: The Official TED guide to public speaking". Written by the head of TED, Chris Anderson, the book is full of presentation tips from some of the greatest TED speakers. Tips include detailed steps for preparation, delivery, tools available, pit falls to be avoided and even how to dress. It generously and regularly references the actual TED talk from where the example is being made. At the end of the book, there is a list of all the TED talks referenced and the TED website has a playlist of all these - this makes the book unique in that it is very easy to learn the topics. While everything is coming from how you could give a great TED talk, the principles can be applied for our day to day and mundane presentations as well.