If You Are Always Right, You Are Doing Something Wrong!

There's a wealth of stories about what individuals learned from making mistakes, or how they recover from failures. Anyone who does not make mistakes (or admit them), will not be exposed to this expanded dimension of experience.

I once had a boss who would ignore an idea at a meeting this week, but would raise it at the next meeting as his idea – if it worked, he took credit, if not the original thinker would get the blame. Can't be wrong under this system.

Similar results happen when the goal is too easy or is not specific – when the bar is this low there's a danger of tripping over it – hard to make a mistake if the measure is simply coming to work.

In an early iteration of networks and the internet, my organization had an eclectic collection of PCs of various brands and capabilities, software which spanned the DOS and Windows worlds – we had 6 different versions of word processing software – a rag-tag collection at best. The equipment failed frequently and our techs could spend up to 30 minutes just figuring out the combination of hardware and software BEFORE they could work to fix the problem.

We were planning a patchwork solution for replacing network equipment and software within available budget - about to place the order - when a doer from production suggested leasing all new equipment.

With this new perspective, we worked the numbers and found we could accomplish a complete replacement of the network over 90-days by leasing everything. The monthly cost of the lease fell within our budget constraints and the savings from fewer and shorter service calls offset most of the greater overall cost of leasing.

We would not have made this decision, or moved the network forward had we not avoided the mistake of repeating what we've done before without investigating other alternatives. The outcome was better by avoiding the 'safe' do it because we've done it before approach.

Recovery is a powerful teacher – it only takes on time as a child touching the stove to develop great respect for the appliance – and we learn a great deal more if something does not come out as we had expected (or hoped). The critical element is how we use this knowledge – and, as leaders, that we permit error with recovery as a natural event of professional growth.

If you are always right, you are doing something wrong! What have you learned by mistake?

A Question About Questions

When you ask a question, are you trying to change your understanding...or theirs?

Teaching by asking questions can cause learning breakthroughs. Too often I see people trying to manipulate others, which can backfire spectacularly.

I ask a lot of questions because I genuinely want a better understanding, not for the other person, for me.

Recently I was with a person who was waiting to be manipulated. That got to be Monty Python funny.

Sometimes a question is just a question. 

Questions? *grin*

Capitalizing On Free

Free is a strong resource in this emerging economy. Since we have access to all the buyers, free is a good way to get more of them to focus on our offer. How do we then create value from free?

I’m an old time Rock ’n Roller, and I’m giddy with my ability set up set lists of the bands I listened to and even played with on Spotify. Thanks guys! I ‘m joining friends I haven’t heard since 8 track.

Best thing I learned about my bands from 30 years distance? We just weren’t that good...and it shows. Couldn’t hear that at the time.

Last week I was talking with a veteran pre-sales software engineer in New York. His work is over, from a different business paradigm, but he now has a steady stream of cloud startups asking him to demonstrate and sell their new stuff. Since their offer is for free, he should work for free. He didn’t see how any of them had the sense to make a business. What was his better strategy?

I had a similar experience in February 2010. A dozen entrepreneurs had approached me separately over the month with their solutions looking for problems. After exhaustive research, they had determined I could create a business plan that would make their fortune. If I would do that first, I was welcome to sell their product on a commission basis, details to be defined later.

After 12 in a row, I was seriously wondering what I was doing wrong. Turns out it was a temporary aberration of the law of large numbers, and I needed more prospects. I worked past the situation, but hadn’t figured out any lesson.

Back to my New York friend, we talked a bit, and finally I said, why not take the most promising solutions, and build a demonstration that he could host on his Plus page? Whether he eventually sold anything or not, he could show some tasteful work that would be valuable both for him and the startups.

He wanted to know if he could do that with more than one company?

I answered from my extensive understanding of Soviet Economics, “Hey, they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”

That structure came in handy for another friend in the financial product sales just the next week. We may be on to something.

What are your strategies for dealing with free?

Advice – The Give and Take

Do people ever offer you advice?

How valuable is it when you request it? When unsolicited?

Earlier this week I heard from an entrepreneur – he had an idea, started a company, and successfully sold it in four years. He would make a change if he did another start-up: during the planning for the start-up, he would plan the exit strategy as well. In addition to avoiding problems with exiting the business, his experience was the entry and exit planning together would have helped him better focus on how to delivery the services more effectively.

For me, this was a useful data point in business planning. My experience in planning the start-up has been total absorption in the up and running phase. Later changes were needed to complete the spin up and provide efficient delivery of services. Some in & out planning could have avoided later modifications.

Why was this advice credible and of value?

It was grounded in experience and offered as 'I would' not as a 'you should'.

Is ego the reason for resisting 'you should' advice? No – in the above story, the individual knows what his situation was and offered that he would do things differently for another start-up. How can a casual observer offer specific advice ('you should') without knowing the details of my problem?

My acceptance would be different had the individual offered his interpretation of principles or approaches done by others, suggesting that next time he would do things according to this 'new' approach. It is a data point without verification – his theory but not his experience. Is it lessons from the past – no longer applicable in the New Normal - can't tell from a theory.

Unsolicited advice often comes with a preface of 'you should'. This causes me to wonder about the underlying purpose for offering the advice, in addition to its applicability to my situation – if there is an actionable situation. There is usually an abundance of unsolicited advice offered about how to improve your golf game or to change political, corporate, or government operations – valuable?

Hearing how others have faced similar situations adds to our knowledge, but does not substitute for personal experience.

We learn by doing. We learn a great deal by avoiding or recovering from mistakes.

This is experience.

Advice: What's your experience?

Work

Jay Deragon has written a post, Social Shifts In Thinking, about how the American economy has fundamentally changed, and not for the first time! It’s a short post, well worth a read. His last sentence is You can’t see the solutions unless you change how to think about solutions.

The same day I was treated to Michael Sacasas’ Technology in America, where he explains why Americans choose Technology over Science and always have.

Their posts made me decide to write my post about work - What it is and how it should be done.

I see a lot of people faking their work. Jack lent me his book, DisneyWar, As I was pounding down the home stretch, I was asking myself how much more “notwork” could I bear to read? Posturing, wounding, accusing, guessing, and riotously screwing up. Sound familiar? DisneyWar isn’t a unique story.

Looking at all these new jobs, what is work? Especially if you believe, as Jay and I do, that we are in a different world, there is a lot of strange out there. I need the familiar to navigate the strange.

I’ve been a carpenter, plumber, welder, writer, photographer, programmer, foreman, contractor, musician, equipment operator, and project manager, and there are some common practices that simplify all kinds of work while magnifying value.

The List – whether it’s a set list, a project plan, a daily 3x5 card, or a pilot’s takeoff preparation, effective workers keep The List. I’ve see that new workers who don’t start with a daily list usually run out of tasks around 10:30 in the morning. Very few do any work after that.

One other use of The List is to keep track of daily progress to estimate future jobs. I was told, “Don’t take out your mistakes when you do the next job. You’ll make new ones.”

There’s Work and there’s Talking About Work. A certain amount of palaver can be useful to make sure we know what we are doing, but the talking is usually not the doing.

There is some new thinking that doers need blocks of time to get into a zone of accomplishment, and breaking them out for one hour meetings with watchers is strictly for the convenience of the watchers. In 1983, Blue Thunder introduced the concept of JAFO.

Layout—First we’re gonna do this and then we’re gonna do that. A key skill of a lead on any project is to have the right order of production. Either you do or you don’t. No amount of threat and spin makes up for bad layout. If someone gets blamed, the layout was bad.

Best Practices – The best line I ever heard about best practices was, “Either a best practice is blatantly obvious or it’s not a best practice.” Unfortunately the guy that said it doesn’t want his boss to know he said it. Once you find the best way to do something, publicize it so everyone does it the best way until you can discover something better. Replacing a best practice is a cause for celebration.

Mechanic is a fairly common term for someone who knows their work. Mechanic was first defined to me for plumbers, and at various times I’ve earned the right to be told what makes a truck driver, a carpenter, a welder, an estimator, a programmer and a proposal writer a mechanic. It is an honor to be inducted into the mysteries, and they all used the word mechanic.

As the work we do and the way we think about what we do changes, how the best do the work may continue to be the same. That’s what to look for to determine the competent.

Your thoughts?