Sweet Spot for Peace of Mind

#LivingStories
Beyond a certain point , money is not something you live for, feels Kumarmangalam Birla. “If I didn't have the money to buy the two works of art that I want,” he elaborates, “I'd feel pretty bad about it, but more than two  works of art and two holidays. I've no need for money.”

Coaching question
What are the things you would want to buy, after which you'd feel you do not need any more money?

Try doing
Practice cutting down on your needs and limiting your wants. Aim to choose the sweet spot between your Needs, Wants and Lacks.

Tell
How do you view your lacks?

Image:Ian Brown Lee

Goal Alignment

Lenovo's roots have been as an enterprise focused B2B business. But now, with growth happening more in the smartphone space than in the PC space, they have realised that if you have a B2B mindset and B2B structure, you cannot succeed in the B2C space. To give itself a youthful look, Lenovo's formal dress code, reserved parking space and cabins for senior managers have been done away with,  All senior managers have also been asked to be on Twitter to get a better understanding on how millennials think.

#MyLearning
For success in  work and life, align what you have with what you want.

All Play and No Rest?

For geniuses, a routine was more than a luxury - it was essential for their work…

Charles Dickens took three hours walks every afternoon - and what he observed on them fed directly into his writing. Tchaikovsky made do with two hour walks, but wouldn’t return a moment early, convinced that cheating himself of the full 120 minutes would make him ill. Beethoven took lengthy strolls after lunch, carrying a paper and pencil with him in case inspiration struck. Ernest Hemingway tracked his daily word output on a chart “so as not to kid myself”. Arthur Miller said, “I don't believe in draining the reservoir you see? I believe in getting up from the typewriter, away from it,  while I have still things to say.”

“I've realized that somebody who is tired and needs rest, and goes on working all the same”, wrote Carl Jung. “ is a fool.”

Are you?

- From the Daily Routines of Geniuses by Sarah Green

Picture Source: Wallcoo.com

What Hobbies Can Teach Us

Essaji Vahanavati is the son of the Attorney General of India and a partner at a law firm. His passion is wildlife photography which has ingrained in him the virtues of patience; given him an eye for detail; and taught him to stay cool in critical situations. During transactions, he can patiently wait for others to put their point on the table and at the same time quickly grasp the matter and come out with solutions.

Hobbies can teach us many valuable skills which can be assets to us in other dimensions of our lives. So give priority to hobbies that are both satisfying, as well as, capable of building and honing useful skills and virtues.

What's Your Blah, Blah Quotient?

Carter Murray, the CEO of ad agency Foote Cone Belding, makes for an unusual CEO. He hates buzzwords. Something that many of his contemporaries appear to find comfort and meaning in. Murray calls it "completely wanky, corporate rubbish speak." He can't stand the stuff. Asked how he gets by as CEO with such distaste for industry jargon, Murray says, "We are in the business of understanding people and advising clients on how to connect with them. I find it strange that we hide behind the corporate lingo."

What are you in the business of, and can you to get by without your industry blah, blah?

The Secret to Success is Learning from Failure

The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. Yet organizations that do it well are extraordinarily rare. This gap is not due to a lack of commitment to learning, says Amy Edmondson in her article in the Harvard Business Review. Managers in the vast majority of enterprises that she has studied over the past 20 years genuinely wanted to help their organizations learn from failures to improve future performance. The common feeling in most organizations is that failure is bad. This leads to the fear of telling the truth, which in turn, can get in the way of learning from past mistakes. The unfortunate consequence is that many failures go unreported and their lessons are lost. A story from the book The Leader, the Teacher and You, by former top Singapore civil servant Lim Siong Guan, serves to illustrate this point well.

When People are Afraid of Telling the Truth

The Singapore Ministry of Defense once decided that the SAF Singapore Armed Forces camps should plant papaya trees to enhance the use of land and provide an additional source of nutrition for the troops. As with any initiative, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) were established.

Source, Learning from Failure, NY Times

Not all camps were successful despite their best efforts, because some terrains would not yield healthy papaya trees. However, rather than declare their failure, a few units took to buying papayas and papaya trees to keep up with their regular reports of the KPIs. The experiment was finally abandoned when it was plain that some units had perpetually young papaya trees!

'The experiment," writes Lim in his book, "was a lesson in how honesty and integrity can so easily be undermined” when people are afraid of telling the truth. “The opportunity to learn and correct poor ideas in good time was missed.”

Secret of Success is Failures Learnt Well!

In her HBR article, Strategies to Learn from Failure,  Amy Edomondson, observes that in most companies, the attitudes and activities required to effectively detect and analyze failures are in short supply , and the need for context-specific learning strategies is underappreciated. Organization, she says, need new and better ways to go beyond lessons that are superficial (“Procedures weren’t followed”) or self-serving (“The market just wasn’t ready for our great new product”). That means jettisoning old cultural beliefs and stereotypical notions of success and embracing failure’s lessons. She proposes an excellent structured process to review failure and  learn lessons from it. 

Call to Action

As a Business and Leadership Coach, I found the scale of spectrum of reason for failure from Praiseworthy to Blameworthy, explained in the article, an excellent tool to flag-off and institute process to review failures within an organization. You could use it too! 

Or, call me!

Stress Free Goal Achievement

                                                                                                                                                                   Source: carmensakurai.com

You may have heard of a Harvard Business School class in which only 3% of the graduating students wrote down clear goals. Twenty years later, those 3% were worth 10 times the worth of the rest of the class combined. Compelling, right? Well, it would be if it were true. Unfortunately, it isn't. That study,  doesn't exist. It’s pure urban myth!

Questioning the wisdom of setting stretch goals is like questioning the very foundation of business. We might debate which goals to set, or how to set them, but who would debate whether to set goals at all? Would it, to paraphrase Shakespeare, make enterprises of great pith and moment turn  currents awry and lose the name of action? This native hue of resolution, to continue with the paraphrasing, made my brow sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

Making Goals Stick

Much fun has been made at the expense of the life of a new year resolution. "May all your troubles last as long as your new year resolutions! "  says Joey Adams, American comedian. Adam's new year wish is a pithy and humourous comment on the way commitment to our new year resolutions may drift over time unless we find regular ways to experience a fresh start. The 'commitment drift', of course, is as much true of the other resolutions we make. So, is the solution not to set goals at all?

Peter Bregman makes a strong case for this very solution in his HBR blog. Goals by their very nature are not bad, it’s just that they come with a number of side effects that suggest you may be better off without them. He talks of a Harvard Business School working paper, Goals Gone Wild which reviewed a number of research studies related to goals and concluded that the upside of goal setting has been exaggerated and the downside, the “systematic harm caused by goal setting,” has been disregarded.

The authors of the HBS paper identified clear side effects associated with goal setting, including “a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation.”

So what can one do in the absence of goals? It’s still often necessary to drive toward achievements, especially in business. We need help setting direction and measuring progress. But maybe there’s a better way to achieve those things while sidestepping goals’ negative side effects.

Krishna's Advise Reprised

Bergman proposes one: Instead of identifying goals, consider identifying areas of focus.

A goal defines an outcome you want to achieve; an area of focus establishes activities you want to spend your time doing. A goal is a result; an area of focus is a path. A goal points to a future you intend to reach; an area of focus settles you into the present.

A sales goal, for example, might name a revenue target or a specific number of new clients won. An operations goal might articulate a cost savings. An area of focus in sales, on the other hand, might involve having lots of conversations with appropriate prospects. An operations area of focus might identify areas you want to explore for cost savings. 

An area of focus taps into our intrinsic motivation, offers no stimulus or incentive to cheat or take unnecessary risks, leaves every positive possibility and opportunity open, and encourages collaboration while reducing corrosive competition. All while moving forward on the things you and your organization value most.

In other words, an area of focus offers all the advantages of a goal without the negative side effects.

How do you do it? It’s simple: identify the things you want to spend your time doing — or the things that you and your manager decide are the most valuable use of your time — and spend your time doing those things. The rest takes care of itself. I have found that five major things are about the limit before your efforts get diluted.

In a suggestion reminiscent of the Sri Krishna's advise to Arjuna, he recommends resisting the temptation to identify the outcome you want to achieve. Leave that open and allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised. Though this is not easy to do, Bergman's experience is that it not helps you achieve at least as much as you would have if you had set goals, but you’ll enjoy the process far more, avoiding unnecessary stress and temptation.

Focus on the task and not the fruits of the outcome, is the mantra to make our life stress free and more fulfilling