Okay, I know these caption contests might not be the most value-added for a "leadership" blog, but I can’t help it! You readers out there are too funny, and, well, I just keep coming across these hilarious photos! This one might be my favorite yet. Something tells me the name Bubba is about to be used a lot . . . .
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Following is a list of some of the books that have had the biggest impact upon my thinking regarding business. I have had countless hours of discussion and reflection on these books with Orrin Woodward, Tim Marks, and others. I hope these books will spark as much interest and discussion for you and your friends as they did for me and mine. Here they are (in no particular order):
1. E Myth, Michael E. Gerber
2. The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman
3. Good to Great, Jim Collins
4. The Wal-Mart Effect, Charles Fishman
5. McDonald’s: Behind the Arches, John F. Love
6. it’s not the BIG that eat the SMALL . . . it’s the FAST that eat the SLOW, Jennings and Haughton
7. The Change Makers, Maury Klein
8. NUTS!, Freiberg and Freiberg
9. New Rules for the New Economy, Kevin Kelly
10. Driving Digital, McDowell and Simon
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I just read a great quote by Jon M. Huntsman, billionaire founder of Huntsman Corporation:
"There are, basically, three kinds of people: the unsuccessful, the temporarily successful, and those who become and remain successful. The difference is character."
Wow! Reader comments?
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I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas. It is important to remember and celebrate our gift in Christ our savior. Terri and I want to wish everyone a happy holiday season.Now, let’s get back to the lighter side of things. Not only is there a chance this guy is one of your neighbors, but there is also the mathematical probability that sooner or later one of these photos will be of YOU! Oh, the embarassment! Allow me to apologize in advance. And a word to the wise: to avoid being featured in one of these contests, simply refrain from half-filling your pool with algea water and launching your bass boat in it! That should keep you in the safe zone 🙂
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Most everyone has heard the phrase, "Dream, Struggle, Victory." And it seems that there is a lot of literature out there addressing the first and the last of those three terms. But isn’t it interesting how little coverage is given to the struggle part?
Obviously, if we undertake some great endeavor we are going to struggle to accomplish it. What most people might not realize, however, is that the struggle is probably the most important part. It’s the struggle that makes us grow. It’s the struggle that reveals the character we have deep inside for continuing onward in the face of adversity. And it’s the struggle that makes for any good movie or story of achievement.
I even read one book where the author calls it the "gift of struggle." Perhaps some would think it going to far to call struggle a gift, but I believe it is right. If you stop and think about it, the struggle is the only place in which we grow. It’s the struggle that makes us stronger. No body-builder would be able to build muscle mass without weigths or resistance. The pushing against or raising of the weight strains and pulls at the muscle fibers, which then need to repair themselves. Only in this repair process are the muscles made a little stronger than they were before. More lifting causes the cycle to start over again, until the muscles are bigger and stronger than ever before – all because of the "damage" of the struggle and the repair that was necessary afterward. Struggles in our lives work the same way. Just like lifting weights, they don’t necessarily feel good. And they can and often do cause pain. But how we handle those struggles, and what we do to overcome them and "repair" our committment to the dream, will build us stronger than we were before the struggle hit.
In Launching a Leadership Revolution, co-author Orrin Woodward and I even give special consideration to the topic of struggle in the section on mentorship. A good mentor knows that his proteges must struggle to become great, to grow, and to maximize, so he or she allows the struggle in the life of the protege while teaching the protege how to handle it, overcome it, and learn from it. Some might call this callous or cold, some might call it a lack of caring on the part of the mentor. After all, who would let someone struggle? Why wouldn’t one want to swoop in and eliminate the struggle for the protege and make his or her way easier? It’s the same as teaching our children to walk. If every time they started to bobble we grabbed them and kept them from falling, we would appear to be helping them. We would appear to be caring. But actually, we would be hurting our child by trying to help him or her too much. One of the greatest things my parents and mentors have done for me is to give me the encouragement to try, and then allowed me to make my own mistakes and learn from them. By creating my own messes, and knowing full well that I had the responsibility alone for my actions and cleaning them up, so to speak, I was allowed to struggle and grow through those struggles. When I look back over my life, the times of struggle were not fun. But they appear in broad relief, now, as the greatest moments of change and challenge. I would not be who I am today without those trials and struggles that made me stronger and better.
So embrace struggle. It’s not a bad word. It is not to be avoided. And when you see it in the life of those you love and mentor, of course, do what you can to keep them from actual harm. But in the course of events, allow them to take responsibility for their own lives, allow them to struggle against the resistance, and therefore build their mental muscles stronger. For out of the greatest adversity comes the greatest opportunity, and in those moments the greatest leaders are made.
Ships may be safe at harbor, but they weren’t made for the harbor, they were made for the dangerous high seas. And leaders may be safe on the couch, but they weren’t born for the couch, they were born for the tumultuous waters of engagement.
Get a dream.
Embrace the struggle.
Capture the victory!
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One of my favorite Abraham Lincoln quotes:
"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
This quote is appealing even beyond the historical significance of slavery in our country. It speaks to anyone and everyone who will tell you what you should and shouldn’t do, who will represent facts as though they have experienced them, who will give advice when they’ve not experienced what they describe, and who will dare to make the rules for a game they haven’t played nor intend to play. As another quote says, "Talk is cheap, it takes money to buy whiskey." Those who are "doing" should never be at the mercy of those who are "managing." The best leaders are always those who can, and have, performed well at the endeavor.
Slavery was propogated for years in our country because good people listened for too long to those who painted it with colors other than the truth. Lincoln cut through all that with one elegant sentence. As a matter of fact, his quote is timeless and can apply to anything we might consider. Try this. Substitute anything for the word "slavery" and see how the quote works. If thinking is asking questions to ourselves and then working out the answers, and quality thinking is the asking of quality questions, then this little trick ought to elevate the quality of our thinking just a bit!
Think.
Act.
Lead.
Then think some more.
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Winter is wonderful. I think I first realized it once I learned to drive. Somewhere in the process of hunching forward trying to see out the very bottom of the windshield where the slow-to-work defroster had only begun to remove the inch-thick ice, and all this while barreling down a slippery highway at seventy miles an hour, I decided that winter is a season with its own special charms.
Take, for instance, the older gentleman two streets over from my house. If it snows during the night (when all sane people are sleeping) he fancies himself a reborn Paul Revere; pushing his five-hundred horsepower snow-blower back and forth across his postage-stamp-sized driveway at five a.m. as if to say, “There, you little snowflakes! Land on MY property under the cloak of darkness, will ya!?” all the while alerting the rest of us slumbering and unsuspecting neighbors to the imminent danger.
Clearing driveways is child’s play, however, when compared to the theatrics that develop on the roadways during winter. There’s a whole army of volunteer accident causers who immediately flock to the roads and highways to drive slowly in the left lane and brake suddenly for emergencies like clouds and distant oxygen. The more accomplished among this class can be found spun backwards in ditches with their lights still on and dumb looks on their faces as if to say, “how’d I get here!?” These traits are most dominant in the first snow fall of the year when half the population behaves as if they have never seen snow before.
Even more noteworthy, however, are the trained professionals that can be recognized by the official looking orange or yellow trucks they drive called ‘plows’. This term is derived from what they do to you if you attempt to drive near them. Plow drivers are also especially adept at spraying slush and snow at high velocities directly onto your windshield for sustained periods of time, or driving down the middle of two lanes and backing traffic up for miles. They are also among the best in the world at sitting in the median of highways and doing absolutely nothing.
And if the volunteer and professionals aren’t enough, there are the four-wheel-drivers to consider. This is a species very peculiar in its total lack of understanding of physics. Because all four (usually oversized) tires are powered or ‘driven’, the vehicles of choice in the four-wheeler crowd have remarkable abilities of self-propulsion, even in snow and ice. This mobility breeds an immediate overconfidence in the driver who quickly forgets that such performance is due his equipment and not his innate driving skills. Having forgotten this, he then assumes his braking performance will match his mobility: an erroneous conclusion commonly resulting in the transformation of a heavy off-road truck into a battering ram (an observation, no doubt, made by Dodge and resulting in the naming of their ‘Ram’ trucks). This is further complicated by the fact that most owners of four wheel drive trucks feel compelled to affix enormous and attractive sharp snow plows to the front of their vehicles. These enhancements lead to even more effective metal working when contacting smaller cars at the precise moment the four wheel driver realizes the deficiencies of his braking.*
Many additional driving characteristics can be witnessed during a snow storm. There are those that decide to drive safely by slowing down seven and a half miles before their turn, causing everybody behind them to slam on their brakes, slide out of control, and end up in the ditch just to avoid them. Others decide that since there is a quarter inch of snow on the ground, it is suddenly acceptable to drive down the center of the road, whereby subsequent motorists, spotting these tracks, decide to follow in the same path until the whole county has been transformed into single-lane one-way streets. Still others can be found driving cars with snow stacked two feet deep on hoods and trunks and windows, apparently for the purpose of transporting said snow from Point A to Point B (two towns which, mysteriously, have never been found on any map). But the most notorious of winter driving offenders is the famed ‘pull-out-in-front-of-you’ driver. This person waits until you are just a few feet away before driving directly into your path, no doubt assuming you have the stopping power of four-wheel-drivers. If through some fait-accompli of miraculous driving skill, luck, and destiny you are able to avoid slamming into the offender head first, you will receive an angry look as if to say, “Why so reckless? Can’t you see it’s slippery out here?”
So after twenty-some years of enduring these winter hardships, I did the only sane thing. I moved to Florida where everyone drives safely! (And if you believe that, you’ve obviously never been there!)
* Because of this effectiveness, there are certain neighborhoods of a rural nature where snow plows are left on trucks all year long in honor of the ‘glory days’ of winter.
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One of my favorite quotes comes from treasure hunter Mel Fisher, who would show up at the dock every day for seventeen years encouraging his employees by saying, "Today's the day!" Fisher and his gang were on a mission to find the Atocha, a Spanish treasure galleon bound for Europe with a load of gold, copper, and precious gems. It was rumored to be the richest lost treasure ship ever, and had remained hidden off the dangerous coast of Florida for centuries. Finally, after an incredible story of perseverence, unfair governmental interference, greedy competitors, and family heartbreaks, Fisher and his crew hit the mother load and found the Atocha! His daily doses of positive prediction that "Today's the Day!" had finally paid off.
I like the quote as a daily encouragement, to be sure. We all need to say something like this to ourselves when the going gets tough, when we start to feel discouraged, or when the vision starts to fade a little. It is important to develop positive "self-talk" that keeps us focused and propped up. However, I also like Fisher's quote, because it has a second meaning that I am not even sure he intended. "Today's the Day!" als
o means that we should cherish this day, and forget the past, while not living too much in the future. Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow can only be hoped for, but is not promised, and today is all we really have! As the Bible says, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof" (Matthew 6:34 KJV). I like this quote because as we repeat it to ourselves and others, it helps us to be encouraged about the great things that we can discover this day, the treasures we can experience and share this day, and the fact that we can't really become too enamored or concerned about future days, or hung up on failures of past days, because, in fact, Today is the Day!" We should certainly learn from our past. And we'd be fools not to prepare for tomorrow and dream about possibilities, but these things should never be done at the expense of today. Let's each make today count for all it's worth, remembering that indeed: Today's the Day!
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You readers out there have been cracking me up on these caption contests! And I guess a contest is supposed to have a winner, but it is so hard to choose! I have to admit, the funniest ones are the ones I couldn’t post!!!! Trust me, I wish I could share them with you!! Maybe someday. In the meantime, here’s another one. 🙂
Welcome to Chris Brady's Blog 
