Business and leadership is about removing limits July 20, 2007
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.”
~ Albert Einstein
These limits might be your own, limits of those around you, limits of the industry or even limits of humanity.
A good example of this is the Medicine industry. Working towards removing the limits of illness, sickness and accidents (genetic deformities etc). Think of Cochlear implants as a specific example - removing the limits placed on individuals thanks to genetics or accidents.
It is not the development of some new gizmo that makes one company profit, it’s removing limitations. A superb example for this is the blog you are reading right now. The boom in blogs over the last few years has been because it is so easy - anyone can, within 5 minutes, have a running blog. Five years ago, you needed knowledge and experience to achieve the same result.
Henry Ford made the car. But that’s not what made him wealthy and the car such a common item. It was the Ford company consistently focusing on removing the production limitations. Little by little making it easier and cheaper to produce.
You can hold this idea for yourself every day. Focus on removing limits in what you do and how you do it. Maybe something as simple as having to open a drawer each time you need a pen. Removing that physical limitation can help your day. Maybe it’s something bigger like using a filing cabinet for your documents, or using GTD (Getting Things Done) method of time management or getting into work early to miss the traffic. When you remove or avoid a limit, your productivity increases. Removing these limits for yourself means not only being more effective with work, but also reducing your stress.
Businesses grow and improve through removing limits. Some common examples are automatic printing of invoices, just in time production runs to remove warehousing limits, and mobile phones removing the need to be near a land line. Fedex’s whole premise is to remove the time limits for delivering packages.
And I think the number one job of a leader is to remove limits of the business and their team. That’s not to say the leaders will be able to achieve zero limits, there will be contextual limits, budget limits and more. The limits leadership remove are the limits that constrain the workers within the business and also external situations that limit the business itself. These limits might be cash flow problems, team cohesion, client retention etc. Removing those limits might be a strategy change, responding to customers, or sliming the operations.
What are the limits that are placed on you (or you place on yourself) that can easily be removed? What things limit the people around you that you can remove?
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Change, Leadership, Motivation, Productivity, Stress
The risks of Leadership July 3, 2007
When I was taught abseiling, the teachers drilled safety over and over again. Ensure you are always anchored, and to check all the major parts of your gear before jumping off. Go through the ABC’s. Anchor - Is your rope secured properly? Belt - Is your harness on correctly, buckle tight? Carabeena - are you tied in correctly?
The day I was learning, one person in the group, James, was learning how to train others.
During the middle of the day, after the beginners had just finished an intermittent level overhang, I watched Gary, our lead instructor, take the rope everyone had just finished using and intentionally tie a large knot about half way down. He then instructed James to tie off and begin abseiling down. James was naturally a little apprehensive. Gary had to spend several minutes convincing James that this was part of his testing.
Gary followed James down on a parallel rope. All the while James was very concerned about the knot, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to complete the jump.
As James approached the knot, he stopped about a meter above it, secured himself then began to untie the knot. Gary quickly stopped him. “That’s not the test. What happens if you can’t untie the knot, or there is some other obstruction?”
“I want you to continue all the way down, until the knot is hard against your figure 8″ (A figure 8 is the part that connects the rope to your harness).
“No,” said James. “I can’t get out from there if I do that.”
Again Gary was insistent. “Go down the rope until the knot is hard into your figure 8.”
James was beginning to get scared. He started stating that he’d never do that, stopping before an obstruction. Every excuse he came up with, Gary came up with another explanation and again told James to comply. All the while both of them were hanging ten meters above jagged rocks.
In the end, James reluctantly complied with the insistent requests. He then used his shoelaces as a method to climb his way back up the rope, disconnect from the rope and reconnect below the knot. Each step of the way he argued, resisted and complained.
This is a superb example one of the major problems leaders experience. The leader knows what needs to be done, and (sometimes) how to do it and then passes this onto the employee. Only to have the employee avoid doing the task, or doing it poorly.
While a leader may be completely comfortable with the given task, the employee may not be. And more importantly, as in the above example, the employee is the one taking the risks. If James fell during that test, Gary would be uninjured, James would be in hospital. The risk James experienced was vastly different that the risk Gary experienced. Yet Gary continued to insist that James followed instructions that were more and more dangerous.
Remember, what you find trivial, other may find difficult, even impossible. What can you do to help people around you through their fears? Who can you contact to help you through yours?