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By Mark Truman, on June 17th, 2011
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or fill out the subscription form to the left. Thanks for visiting! People worry a lot about time when they start projects. They convince themselves that each and every new thing on their plate puts them in danger of being overworked and stretched too thin.
But time isn’t the limiting factor. Care is. And you’ve only got so much “carepower.”
The truth is that you can only care so much. You will make time for the things that matter, but you can’t force yourself to generate enough carepower to deal with projects that you really don’t care about.
The question, therefore, is not “Do I have enough time?” It is instead “Do I care enough about this to make it a part of my life?”
By Mark Truman, on June 15th, 2011
Do you want to get fired up?
Do you want to be chomping at the bit, ready to tear into a new idea?
Do you want to feel like your work matters?
Then go find those who need a little motivation. Remind them why they matter, and share with them what you’ve learned. Help them move further down their path.
And by the time you hang up the phone or get back from lunch, you’ll be ready to crush your own projects just to keep up.
By Mark Truman, on June 13th, 2011
There are more ways then ever before to keep “busy” at work. You can tweet, blog, fret, and worry without ever leaving your office.
If you aren’t careful, you can waste an entire day without generating a drop of revenue or helping a single client.
The real work is hard and makes a difference. You have to go out there and risk failure instead of wasting time productively.
Get to it.
By Mark Truman, on June 6th, 2011
Most leaders are booked up solid. We’ve got meetings to attend, errands to run, and paperwork to process. Most of my week, for example, is spoken for before it even starts.
But that kind of schedule doesn’t leave anytime to work on a vision. There’s no time to daydream about the future or examine the distant past. There is only the present, always and forever.
This week, do your organization a favor. Schedule a half day of nothing. No meetings, no paperwork, no errands. Just you and your thoughts.
I think you’ll surprise yourself.
By Mark Truman, on June 3rd, 2011
The process of finding solutions to problems is time-consuming. You have to examine the problem, understand the broken parts, propose a solution, test the solution, and evaluate the results.
For some people, this is simply too much work. They have something better than a solution: an ideology.
For these folks, the best solution to any problem is the one they proposed last time. Coincidentally, this will also be the same solution they propose next time, regardless of the outcomes that arose from the last time they held the reins.
Solutions are difficult and complicated. They require thoughtfulness and agility. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
By Mark Truman, on June 1st, 2011
We tend to think of our beliefs as empirically true. After all, it would be foolish of us to decide that we follow some ideology without testing it out in the real world.
This leads us to believe, however, that while reasonable people can disagree with us, they do so only at the margins. They might not completely see eye to eye with us on everything, we say, but they certainly don’t disagree about the facts.
In reality, reasonable people do disagree about fundamental assumptions in any serious conversation. They have different values, different experiences, and different motives that lead them down a path that can all too often lead us to describe them as “unreasonable.”
This is silly.
The key to judging the reasonableness of others isn’t to see how much they agree with you. Instead, you’ve got to take a look at how they respond to the new ideas you put forward, and how they go about explaining their own ideas. Reasonable people do so respectfully, with intellectual rigor and humility. Crazy people spout nonsense.
Crazy people are all too common. Ignore them. But don’t assume someone is crazy because they propose ideas and concepts that are more than marginally different than your own.
By Mark Truman, on May 30th, 2011
When you first started working, your boss simply wanted you to be competent. Or at least not so incompetent that your organization was better off trusting a goat to get coffee every morning instead of you.
As you’ve worked your way up the ladder at work, you’ve learned new skills. Now you have a lot more to offer an organization that hires you, and you don’t worry about being replaced by a coffee delivering goat.
Some of the growth you’ve experienced has probably resulted from giving up some of your bad habits. I, for example, used to be chronically late. Each and every activity was a struggle against the clock. That didn’t work when I started tutoring kids, and I realized that I was wasting the time of my students. I had to get a schedule and stick to it.
Changes like these didn’t fundamentally alter your personality, but it has made your time working on projects a lot less about you. In fact, your training over the first few years of working has probably been more about taking care of your rough edges than anything else. Now you can fit in to a team and do the job you’re assigned without driving everyone else crazy.
But that isn’t the final step in your evolution at work.
When you start leading at an executive level, you need to remember that you were hired because you are you, not in spite of it. Leading an organization means you have to drive it. You have to set the tone, establish a course, and push the whole organization forward with nothing but the force of your personality.
For that, you’re going to need whatever rough edges you have left. You have to stop thinking that you can “just do the job” and start realizing that whatever makes you tick needs to be what makes your organization tick.
Your values, your ideas, your personality. These are the reasons the organization chose you to lead it.
Don’t suppress them in the name of doing a good job.
By Mark Truman, on May 27th, 2011
It is perplexing, at first, that the people most likely to benefit from social equity programs are the least likely to take advantage of those programs. Why would someone who goes to a failing school, for instance, ignore the opportunities made available via transferring?
Sadly, people who need help don’t seek out the resources others want to offer them. They appear to be satisfied with the opportunities they have.
So it’s not enough to proclaim to the world that you are ready to help.
If you want to help people, you’ve got to bring resources directly to them. You have to go to the places they live and work to make the case that you can improve their lives. And you have to do this again and again and again.
Change, for anyone, is hard. We can’t expect people who are barely getting by to educate themselves about the opportunities they are missing out on.
If they had the time, energy, and human capital needed to get that education on their own, they wouldn’t need any help at all.
By Mark Truman, on May 25th, 2011
If you tell government employees not to read Wikileaks at work, they will read
Wikileaks at home.
If you tell your kids not to watch Harry Potter at your house, they will watch it at a friend’s.
If you tell anyone that something is off limits, you create an enormous pressure for them to find it and experience it right now.
And when they realize that it didn’t hurt them, your credibility is shot.
Information doesn’t work like it used to work. There are literally thousands of places for someone to find “censored” material. And they don’t need your permission to access anything they find.
By Mark Truman, on May 23rd, 2011
Prophecies of doom always get press. It’s easy to stand up in front of the cameras and proclaim that you have some secret knowledge that tells you the exact date and time at which the world will come crashing to an end.
And it’s not just the religious kooks who get our attention. We’ll listen to anyone that grabs the microphone to tell us that the world of publishing/marketing/government/education is about to be turned upside down.
But most (if not all) predictions of disaster fail to arrive on schedule.
The truth is that real change doesn’t have a schedule. It doesn’t announce its presence until it’s already upon us. We do not know the hour of its arrival.
One day…
…you stop using 3.5 inch disks.
…it’s easier to get videos in the mail than go to Blockbuster.
…everyone has a Facebook account.
And you realize that the apocalypse arrived, no one really noticed, and the world moved on. You couldn’t have prepared for it if you wanted to because you wouldn’t have understood it. The kind of change that upends the world happens regardless of how we feel about it.
No predictions required.
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