Remember when Bambi was born and Thumper was jumping around yelling, “It’s happened! It’s happened! The new prince is born!”? Well, that pretty much describes the way I’ve been feeling the last few days and I’m really excited to share my news. No fawn, unfortunately, more like a dawn! My newest book, The Clarity Papers, has arrived! Furthermore, the Kindle version will be available for free tomorrow, January 24th, through Friday this week. I’ll post a reminder tomorrow morning with the link so you don’t forget. What’s The Clarity Papers about?
I had my first virtual reality experience at MIT recently. The program was called The Enemy and the point was to introduce us to three pairs of enemies, get up close and personal, and hear them talk about their beliefs and experiences. The three conflicts were in Israel/Palestine, the Congo, and El Salvador. As I expected, all six wanted peace and better lives for their children. And all six grew up in circumstances, mostly desperate, that defined the enemy and, seemingly, limited their options. Across the board, their actions were violent, heartfelt, and contextually defensible, if misguided. I walked out as I walked in, wishing for a better world and wondering how you get people to step out of their circumstances long enough to find common ground and peaceful alternatives that lift all people. My wishes extend to all three of these conflicts, as well as to today’s USA and beyond. Imagine a world governed by civil, rational, collaborative problem-solving! We could have left feeling pensive, I believe, but that didn’t happen. Instead, the MIT crew ushering us through this experience tainted the experience by breaking one of my cardinal rules:
“Do you want to start or should I? This is the worst possible way to open a meeting. And, yet, it is also among the most common. Epidemic, actually. I think it must be contagious. Why is it bad?
Sensationalism and outrage hurt productivity and generate bad feelings. The provocation may be our unprecedented political situation or internal decisions that suddenly become unnecessarily difficult. Let me give you a simple, unemotional example.
Clarity. If you’ve ever watched a lean assembly line, you’ve seen it. Or a busy short-order cafe. The line up process of a large well-run marathon. Even a Montessori classroom where thirty pre-schoolers excitedly and respectfully pursue as many as thirty independent activities.
Want to make me cringe and grimace? Ask me to attend an “informational” meeting. These are those anti-productivity meetings that invite everyone to talk. Without any particular purpose! They invoke the worst of all Treadmill Verbs™: inform. Inform, like all Treadmill Verbs™, has no destination. You can inform forever. There is no way to know when you are done!
As you undoubtedly know, my passion is clarity. And I’m on a mission to stamp out the confusion that erodes profits, productivity, and morale in companies like yours. Today, I want to share a couple of stories that demonstrate the power of clarity. Specifically, the power of clarity to empower! These stories involve competent, dedicated employees. People just like you. People who could have been empowered by clarity. But weren’t. People who suffered, while wasting time, thanks to a lack of clarity. A coaching client of mine recently bemoaned the fact that he had been waiting three weeks for feedback from his vice president on his marketing plan. I asked him what he had asked for. He had asked her to review the plan. I asked him what he needed. He needed approval to implement. He hadn’t asked for what he needed! That’s not clarity! And it empowers no one! The next day he asked for approval. Guess what happened?
When I hear The Star Spangled Banner, whether at a hockey game or on the 4th of July, a tear or two of pride and appreciation for the sacrifices of others appear in the corner of each eye. Today, as red, white, and blue pop up everywhere in preparation for the nation’s birthday party, my feelings are more complicated. Frankly, I am quite horrified by the divisiveness in which we seem to be swimming, maybe drowning. Strength, wisdom, and greatness come from finding common ground and working with others to make things better.This is true for individuals, businesses, families, and governments. Making it happen for businesses and non-profits is basically what I do for a living. United we stand, divided we fall. Furthermore, we need all the brain power and cooperation we can get. But it isn’t happening in the US right now. I’m not seeing any effort to find common ground. Nor to formulate some kind of shared vision for what we want this country to be. I’m not seeing an effort to work together either, though we will never, ever agree on how to make things better if we don’t first agree on what “better” looks like.
Happy February to you! Last month I shared my 10 most popular Forbes posts. Today I want to share some of my least popular posts. But not just my least popular. My least popular but very important posts. These are articles that should have been popular, and probably would have been had I given them better titles! Some of these titles are so bad you probably won’t click on them even though I’m telling you they are important!
Email consumes approximately 23% of the average employee’s workday. Or put another way, a typical employee sends and receives 112 messages each day. And the vast majority of that email is internal. This means the average employee is spending almost two hours a day writing messages that create no value for which customers are willing to pay. But here is the good news. It doesn’t have to be this way. Internal email is entirely within the control of the company. You don’t have to waste all that time! If you cut that 23% in half, which is totally possible, that’s like increasing the size of your workforce by more than 10%. Alternatively, it would allow each employee to go home an hour earlier. How can you not take such an opportunity seriously?