Unflappability

I think that one of the keys of leadership is unflapability. To be able to remain calm as everything around you dissolves.

In reality there is no downside to this approach. You may be in a losing situation no matter what you do, but how does bemoaning the fact that the sky is falling help?

Remaining calm isn't as easy as it sounds because unless you've been conditioned to handle stress (the guys who I worked with at Kodak who were Army Infantry in Vietnam were unflappable) you're body reacts for you. It increases heart rate, secrets adrenalin, and gets you ready to run screaming from the room. All very flappable behavior.

The trick, when you feel your body prepare for take off is to take some deep breaths. This allows you time to catch yourself so you can fake it until you make it.

Self Healing Lightbulbs

The freezer light, in the fridge that came with the house, now stays on all the time after three years of flickering.

Whale Facts

Things that quite possibly only interest me....

But What About Cars Driven By Airline Pilots
Many things can cause an aircraft to crash. According to Boeing, more than half of all serious incidents are down to "flight crew error". A sixth are caused by mechanical faults, 13 percent by the weather and the rest by factors such as terrorism, air traffic control problems, bird-strikes and poor maintenance.

If you look at deaths per million journeys or per million hours - the more meaningful figures used by the airline insurance industry - flying fares rather less well, coming out worse than car or train travel, but still safer than cycling or motorcycling.1

It's Ok, It Will Help Me Get A Job In Today's Economy
New numbers from the U.S. Education Department show that federal student-loan disbursements-the total amount borrowed by students and received by schools-in the 2008-09 academic year grew about 25% over the previous year, to $75.1 billion.

Today, two-thirds of college students borrow to pay for college, and their average debt load is $23,186 by the time they graduate, according to an analysis of the government's National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, conducted by financial-aid expert Mark Kantrowitz. Only a dozen years earlier, according to the study, 58% of students borrowed to pay for college, and the average amount borrowed was $13,172.2


Notes:
1. http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=vn20090816064008701C405808
2. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204731804574388682129316614.html

Why You Get Paid

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” -Theodore Roosevelt

"It's easier to edit than create" -Pete Ritt

Often you get asked to pull together something for review and you are given little instruction as to what is wanted.

This will derail some folks.

The reason that there is an extra zero in your paycheck (to the left of the decimal point) is that you are needed to serve up clarity from chaos.

Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM once said, "I wouldn’t give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity but I would give my right arm for the simplicity on the far side of complexity."

The folks that prevail in this exercise understand three things. First, the people asking don't exactly know what they want either so it doesn't really matter what you serve up. Do your best. Two, development is an iterative process. Having something from which to discuss makes the conversation easier and it helps get buy-in. Very rarely, if at all, does something get presented and signed off on the first time. If it does, it was not that big a deal anyway. Three, preparing the documents allows you to control the conversation. After all, who understands the topic better than you?

The 3rd Way

Because we are people, pretty much every situation we encounter in life comes with a bit of drama.

Our typical reactions to such emotions are fight or flight. We either engage in a campaign to convince you how you are wrong, or we fall silent, wishing everything away.

If the topic is important enough to you than neither of these strategies will work. Odds are that if you start the fight routine you will get a fight back, then the issue becomes a battle of emotions leaving a scorched earth all around. Biting your tongue is no better as it's the equivalent of plugging the pipe. The back pressure will continue to build until you explode into a fighting stance.

That's why when you are working through a tough problem you know you haven't figured it out until you've come up with a third way.

Until you have come up with a solution that addresses your personal needs in a way that maintains respect for all involved and also gets to the difficult root of the issue you don't have the best solution.

No Way They Did This With a Straight Face

According to today's USAtoday

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that pensions at the companies, United Airlines, US Airways, Polaroid and Reliance Insurance, were underfunded by more than $11 billion when the companies turned them over to a government-backed insurance fund. The report says executives at those four companies and six others that abandoned their pension plans took in a total of $350 million in pay and perks in the years leading up to the bankruptcies.1

Seriously?

The backbone of Innovation is trust. People who do this are not trustworthy. You cannot make the argument that everyone else was so why shouldn't I? Wrong is wrong.

Don't get me wrong I am a tried an true capitalist. I love competition. I love winning. But to me it doesn't count unless it's fair.

Notes:
1.http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2009-11-18-pensions_N.htm

Inspiration Saturday