This series of complimentary webinars is focused on providing useful tips, tools, and techniques for Pragmatic Leaders.
Each webinar is 60 minutes and will be offered twice in each month for the rest of the year. The sign-up for the April webinar can be found HERE. We will post the timing for the subsequent webinars early in each coming month.
Complex business problems are increasing and middle managers are at the front line of the battle. Our position is that the work of resolving complex problems starts with asking important questions about the problems and then structuring your resolution efforts around the answers to these questions.
We are offering a free 60-minute webinar addressing the questions you must answer if you are going to resolve your complex business problems. Here are the first five questions and some of the suggestions leading to answers. We will “fill the blanks” during the webinar. Since this is a webinar and not our full workshop, the session is high-level, but valuable. It is not an infomercial!
The webinar will provide an overview of the questions and needed skills. You can learn more and enroll HERE.
If you don’t have time for the webinar, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll send the full list of questions.
Many organizations use brainstorming to work on problems or to take advantage of opportunities. However, brainstorming sessions often stop after the group exhausts all of its initial ideas.
When you sense the group has reach a dead end you might want to fire up the group by asking for illegal, immoral or unethical ideas.
People will stare at you, shake their heads, and then start to laugh. But once someone comes up with a “bad” idea the other ideas will flow. Why? because it’s “unusual” and, frankly, kind of fun.
Now, take some of these ideas and them “bring them back” into the legal, moral or ethical world.
In one of my workshops, for example, the concept of “kidnapping” customers to increase sales resulted in further discussion about making existing customers so happy that they would never leave.
Make a list; how could you cheat without cheating? Steal without stealing? Be bad without being bad? Go ahead — sometimes it’s fun to color outside the lines.
Want more ideas? Get MindLab II — A Place to Think at Amazon.
Good thinking is triggered by great questions. Anyone can find answers, but not everyone can ask questions that deserve answers.
Some questions are focused on others to answer. But the most important question are those you ask of yourself.
Balance “What don’t I know that I should?” with “What do I think I know that could be wrong?”
Now, ask yourself three questions that will drive you forward.
Do you like these little thinking exercises? You can get little workbook, MindLab II, HERE. I like writing in books, so I suggest the paperback version. It’s not expensive.
Another from the lessons-not-found-in-books series
Life is full of the Duh-factor.
What, you may ask is the Duh-factor, and why is Duh always capitalized? I am not sure I can precisely define the word and I have no idea why Duh should always be capitalized. It just seemed the right thing to do. Perhaps a couple of examples of the Duh-factor in operation can help.
Comedians, especially it seems hillbilly comedians, can make a career of the Duh-factor. Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck if …” comes to mind, or better still Bill Engvall’s “Here’s your sign” bits. If you haven’t had the good fortune to see these guys, I can’t help with that. Try Youtube.
My father knew the Duh-factor approach and used it with me when I was a kid. It sometimes remotely resembled the Socratic Method. That is, it usually, but not always, involved a question.
An example is: “Do you know what that white stuff on bird sh*t is?” Now if you have ever studied bird sh*t, you could have observed that for many birds, from sparrows to chickens, their poop consists of at least two tones, one dark, almost black, and the other white. These appear to be two parts of the same piece of poop. But, if you haven’t made it your goal to ponder bird poop before, you might simply respond to such a question as Dad posed with something like, “No, what is it?” His immediate response would be, “Its bird sh*t, too.” Duh!
There is evidence for the Duh-factor in business as well. Look at some of the failed products that abound in the marketplaces of our lives. Things are made or services developed that people do not want and will not pay for. Witness the Edsel automobile (Ford, 1958-1960), Frito Lay’s Cheeto’s Lip Balm (2005), Google+ (2011-2019) and the list can go on. The blunder by Coca Cola when they tried to abandon the original Coke formula in the mid 1980s in favor of “New Coke” is a good example of the need to listen to your clients, understand what they value and offer products that satisfy that value. Sales of Coca Cola slumped and continued to be poor by historical Coke standards until they reintroduced the original formula in “Classic Coke.” The turnaround in sales that occurred after that reintroduction was attributed to listening to the customer.
This one isn’t a question, but an axiom: If you throw it out the back door and the dogs won’t eat it, it ain’t dog food. Duh.
It always pays to ask yourself the right questions along the way. And, in our current world in turmoil asking those questions is more urgent than may have been the case ever before.
So how do I define the Duh-factor? I am still not sure I have a precise definition, but it does have something to do with trying really hard to recognize the obvious and apply, that all too often uncommon, common sense.
This is the first of a series of lessons not found in books
A Lesson in Life and Business at the Pool Hall; Or, You Can Learn Good Stuff from Unexpected Places
By: Oliver W. Cummings
Sometimes, when life seems particularly unpredictable and hard to cope with, it pays to think back to what we have already learned and put to use over years of experience.
My father used to say, “In life the strong live off the weak and the smart live off the strong.” This is a, perhaps less elegant but equally to the point, way of saying that the art of success in life (and business) is about finesse, not force.
Here is the Lesson
One of my favorite hang-outs when I was a teenager was a brightly lit, clean pool hall. The place was opened in town as a place primarily for young men of the community. The proprietor served pop and snacks, but no alcohol, and kept an orderly place.
One spring a drifter showed up and the pool hall became his place to pass time just about every day. He disappeared when the weather turned bad in the fall and then showed up in springtime in the subsequent years. His name was Norman. No one seemed to know where Norman went for the winter and I never really knew where Norman stayed when he was in town. Gossip said he slept in the barns at the fairground. He was not particularly spiffy, but he stayed clean shaven and his clothes were kept in better shape than those of other drifters that passed through in the 1960s.
Norman was pretty mysterious to the boys that hung around the pool hall. Many of them didn’t want anything to do with him, but I thought he was interesting. He talked philosophy and religion as if he were well-educated. I don’t know how schooled he was, but he went to the town library sometimes during the day, before he came to the pool hall in the evening. Maybe it was just a comfortable place to kill time, maybe he liked Miss Maude, the Librarian. But, I think he went there to read interesting things.
I learned some important things about pool from Norman. Most importantly: the art of shooting pool is one of finesse, not force.
How you hold the cue stick is the beginning of executing a good shot. Too much tension and you will be jerky in your execution and can’t hit the cue ball accurately. Too little control and you can’t hit the cue ball accurately either. Both ways you lose.
You need to think two or three shots ahead, because how you play one shot leads to the next opportunity you have. If you don’t think about your leave (i.e., where this shot will position you for the next shot), you can block yourself out, and, again, you lose.
You should never take a bank shot when a straight shot is possible. When you shoot a bank shot, it may look impressive, but the added variables of the angle of the rebound, the English you put on the ball, and the performance of the rail cushion make the shot more difficult than a straight shot, even if the latter is at a significant angle. Taking the straight shot represents foregoing showboating for a winning strategy.
It takes balance and planning. It takes knowing your equipment, the shot you are going to take, and your situation on the table to make a good shot.
Maybe these lessons came from Norman’s study of eastern philosophies or maybe it was simply that he was passing along a skill in shooting pool.
Either way these things are important to me because it is just that way in business and other aspects of life: the secret to success, as in shooting pool, is one of finesse, not force.
Taking the smart shot, stroking the cue ball so that it touches the target ball precisely and gently and lets it roll softly into the pocket, is always preferred to slamming the cue stick into the cue ball, making a jerky shot, and hoping that you get to hear the target ball rattle into the pocket.
In other words, in business and in life if you:
then you can call the shots for your own game and you will win more often than not.
