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Last week I wrote a post about meetings, that talked about a key question to ask to make your meetings most effective, the question of desired outcomes.

Stacy Brice of Virtualosophy.com commented to me that there was another question we should ask first - "Should this agenda (whatever it is) be shared in a meeting, or a memo?"

Which is a great question.

My question assumed the answer to Stacy's question, my version of which is:

Do we need a meeting?

You can read more about my thoughts on this question and our alternatives, by reading my article on it in this week's Unleash Your Potential with Kevin Eikenberry.

In next week's issue of Unleash Your Potential, I will talk more about the question of desired outcomes and how to use them as you plan and lead meetings. (Now would be a good time to subscribe so you don't miss it!)

Also posted in Leadership and Teamwork.

WIIFW, II

Posted at 6:19 AM on

Last week I wrote about a speech topic that captivated me (What's In It For We?). At that time I promised to share of summary of the talk with you here.

Guy Harris gave the talk at the monthly meeting of Rainmakers, here in Indianapolis. He told us he wanted to change our thinking about collaboration, to get us thinking about What's In It For We? His three main points were:

1. Effective collaboration is the key to your financial and business success.
2. How you think determines how others react to you.
3. Ask the wrong questions, get the wrong answer - therefore get the right answers by asking the right questions. (in this case, "What's in it for We" questions).

So, the circle looks like this...

1. You first decide you want to be a better collaborator,
2. So you discipline yourself to ask the WIIFW questions,
3. Which leads to thoughts consistent with that goal,
4. Which leads to your actions being consistent with those thoughts,
4. Which leads to people responding to your WIIFW approach,
5. Which leads to collaborative relationships and successful collaborations,
6/1. Which leads you to increase your desire for more collaboration.

I was taken by the title question, which is why I wrote the initial post. And the talk itself didn't disappoint.

Thanks Guy.

If you are reading and have ideas of ways we could collaborate, I'd love to hear them!

Also posted in Customer Service, Leadership and Teamwork.

It's All About Learning

Posted at 3:56 PM on Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Often when people ask me what business I'm in, I say, "I'm in the Learning business." I say this for several reasons:

1. It says something about what I believe in.
2. It says something about what we deliver.
3. It says something about what I personally have to do to be the best I can be at my chosen work.
4. It is different and often gets people's attention.
5. It is true.

The reality is though, that as humans we are all in the learning business. We are learning beings. To operate at anything approaching our full potential we must continue learning.

That is why I am adding, as of today, a Learning sub-blog. I don't know why I haven't had it from the start, but rather than worry and wonder about that, I'll learn from the oversight and begin adding more thoughts and ideas about learning and the learning process both in the main blog and in the Learning sub-blog.

I'll post ideas about how to become a more effective learner, research about how we think and learn, resources to help us learn more effectively and fun stuff to help us all. I expect it will be valuable to anyone who is already interested in and reads my blog.

Also posted in Learning.

Getting the Reading Habit

Posted at 4:48 PM on Monday, June 27, 2005

I am a lover of reading. Books (they are everywhere in my office, boxes, book cases, etc.), magazines, weblogs, ezines, it doesn't matter. I love to read.

I am trying to develop this habit in my children too. Parker, at 13 reads in spurts - with great enthusiasm, and then lulls... Kelsey, at 6 is learning the joy each day.

Lately I have been thinking about reading as a hobby and a habit, and so I was thrilled to read the post of Rosa Say on her Talking Story blog recently, entitled, How to Prepare yourself for Reading.

She makes several great points about why reading is so valuable to us and how to create the time for this activity. Among them, having different types of piles of different types of reading materials. This point is "inside" of her larger point that we need to use the time that otherwise just slips away to read... standing in lines, waiting for appointments, etc. With this sugestion I heartily agreee.

But it is her point, "Don't force yourself to read anything you're not interested in." that I love. Long ago, I re-programmed my head to say I didn't have to finish a book if I wasn't getting from it what I wanted or needed. But I never thought about it quite this way.

If you want to nurutre your reading habit, don't read things you aren't interested in.

Duh.

How logical.

Let me add a couple more endings to that sentance stem, as more food for thought.

If you want to nurture your reading habit, read a little everyday (even if just a few pages).

If you want to nurture your reading habit, turn off your TV.

If you want to nurture your reading habit, read to a child.

If you want to nurture your reading habit, practice DEAR (Drop Eveything And Read) at least twice a week.

Thanks for reading.

Also posted in Training.

Quotes from the Movies

Posted at 9:27 AM on Thursday, June 23, 2005

Tuesday night I watched the latest production of the American Film Institute - AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes (you can see the list HERE.) The show "counted down" the top 100 quotations from movies, and did so in a pretty entertaining way.

I watched because I was interested, because I love quotations in general (see Powerquotes and Powerquotes Plus), and because I have a project, although currently on hold, relating to movies and how we can learn from them.

I came away from the show reflecting on the list as it relates to all of us as communicators. Some of the quotes have become a part of our collective language (at least in the U.S.) and can be useful in their own right. Take #11 for example - "What we've got here is failure to communicate." (from Cool Hand Luke, 1967).

Many others can be powerful both because of the message and because those hearing the message will connect it with the movie, giving it extra power. Consider how using the phrases below, at just the right time in the right context could be useful to you:

"I'll be back." (The Terminator, 1984)

"The stuff that dreams are made of." (The Maltese Falcon, 1941)

"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" (Network, 1976)

"There's no place like home." (The Wizard of Oz, 1939)

"After all, tomorrow is another day!" (Gone With the Wind, 1939)

The list can also be a great creativity stimulator. Go to the list while pondering a problem. Read a quotation and let your mind roam to your memories of the movie, or what the words themselves conjure up for you. Then make connections between these thoughts and your problem. You might be surprised at the connections and solutions you discover.

There you have it - a television show and a list ... about movies ... and how it can help us be more productive and successful.

I'll close with one of my favorites on the list (their #95) "Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary." (The Dead Poets Society, 1989)

Also posted in Creativity, Leadership, and Training.

Powerful Leadership Communication

Posted at 7:12 AM on Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Tomorrow I will be leading the next teleseminar in our Unleashing Your Leadership Potential Series, The Communicating Leaders - Seven Keys to Getting Your Message Remembered. (As of this writing there are still seats available).

As I prepare to share this information with others my antenna are tuned for truths and examples of great communications.

And those antennae led me to notice a 6/19 post on Dan Pink's Blog titled Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish which links to the Stanford commencement address given by Steve Jobs.

Go ahead, go read it now. :)

The observation I make about the speech isn't the message itself, but how engaging it is, because Jobs uses a powerful communication technique - the story. By putting three stories together he has created a memorable talk.

As leaders, trainers and communicators of all kinds, we want to make our messages memorable. While there are many ways to do that and techniques to use, the story is one of the oldest and most powerful of them.

Also posted in Leadership and Training.

Another Unproductive Meeting?

Posted at 5:51 AM on Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Last week, I had the pleasure of helping some leaders from Chevron Phillips Chemical Company become more effective facilitators of meetings.

We talked about meetings, meeting effectiveness and the challenges of making meetings more effective.

I couldn't help but think of the group and our conversations after reading results this morning from The Microsoft Office Personal Productivity Challenge, which looked at office productivity of those surveyed from around the world. Not suprisingly, meetings came up when talking about productivity!

One of the meeting related findings is that people spend 5.6 hours each week in meetings and 69 percent feel meetings aren't productive. In the U.S. it is 5.5 hours with 71 percent feel meetings aren't productive. (Your can read more HERE)

That is a lot of time invested in something that isn't very productive, and I would guess that your experience would agree with these findings.

Meetings are complex, populated by complex human beings. Which means that there is no one silver bullet to make every meeting 100% productive. There is one thing though, that will drastically improve the results of any meeting.

In fact, I told the group last week that it is the Golden Key to meeting success.

Desired Outcomes.

Whatever your agenda looks like (yes, you need one), the key component of it should be desired outcomes.

Take your topic, and detemine what you want to have happened as a result of the meeting. Write down that desired result in a very specific noun/verb, past tense statement.

Budget reviewed.
Options identified.
Decision made.
Next step determined.

Writing your meeting outcomes this way provides focus and allows everyone to know when you have gotten there. These statements will reduce wandering conversations, help keep meetings on time, and increase satisfaction and results.

Also posted in Leadership and Teamwork.

WIIFW?

Posted at 5:35 AM on

A friend and colleague, Guy Harris, is giving a talk next week on the topic, "What's in it for We?"
Ever since he shared that fact with me yesterday, I can't get the question out of my mind.

This question puts collaboration in a great perspective. This question will:

Help you take responsibility for finding win/win situations
Help you become a more effective member of a team
Help you lead with greater clarity and compassion

... and many more things.

I can't wait to hear his talk next week. I promise to give you a summary here.

Also posted in Leadership and Teamwork.

Deep Throat as a Mentor

Posted at 7:54 AM on Thursday, June 09, 2005

That is the tile of a short article in today's issue (#1436) of the wildly successful ezine Early to Rise.

I quote a portion ...

"According to Bob Woodward's account in the Washington Post, he met Mark Felt at a time in his life when he didn't really know what he wanted to do. Feeling adrift, he began networking, hoping to cultivate - with a combination of flattery and deference ... a relationship with someone who might open the door to the world he was hoping to enter. Felt was just such a person. So during their first chance meeting, Woodward did his best to ingratiate himself to the man by asking lots of questions. 'Since he wasn't saying much about himself," writes Woodward, "I turned it into a career-counseling session.'"

Obviously Woodward didn't know what he would learn from those questions nor how impactful this first (and the subsequent) encounters would be. At least three messages come through this short story to me.

Networking is for everyone, not just job seekers and salespeople and business owners. You never know how you might benefit from the next person you meet (or how you can positively impact them.)
Questions are King. As a journalist Bob Woodward obviously had this skill. But in any networking or meeting new people situation, being truly interested in them is important, and great questions are a way to show (and be) interested.
Mentors are everywhere. Some people look for or yearn for "the" mentor. You can have many mentors in your life - at different life stages, in different parts of your life - you can even have several at once. And you never know where you might meet your next mentor.

What lessons do you get from this short story?

Bigger or Smaller?

Posted at 2:49 PM on Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Big or Small?

Posted at 12:05 AM on

When I started my business in 1993, people said, it makes sense to look bigger. People don't want to do business with a consultant that might not be around tomorrow.

So I named my business Performance Partners. And while I always said my Partners were my Customers, it still sounded like it might be big. Scalable. More than me.

After the web came along, another person in a similar business in another state emailed (actually their lawyer emailed) saying I should cease and desist using THEIR name. While they had no more "right" to it than I (and I had the web domain), I change the name to The Discian Group. I loved the Latin word discian I concocted - literally translated from the pieces as "related to learning." Notice the "group" in there.. still wanting to look bigger, as was still conventional wisdom.

For the last 13 or so months we have gone by The Kevin Eikenberry group. Yes, still a Group (and there is more than one), but much less worried about the perception of size. In fact, I love the compliments we get about our site, and the work that we do when people realize we aren't as big as they think.

We are doing some very cool stuff and we are small. We are going to be doing some even cooler stuff, and we'll still be small, as measured in people, but not in ideas.

All of this story comes from reading the last two posts on Seth Godin's blog, Small is the New Big and more on small.

Read them and ruminate on these questions, as I did:

1. Do I agree with his premise?
2. Does this premise excite or scare me?
3. What are the implications for my business, my team, my project to his premise?

Enjoy.

Also posted in Creativity, Leadership and Teamwork.

Leadership Tip #7 - It is Who Not What

Posted at 11:02 PM on Monday, June 06, 2005

As leaders we have messages we need to communicate to others. When we have those important messages to deliver, the natural thing to do is think about the message:

What are the key points?
What are the reasons?
How can I show the picture so people will get the message?
What color should my PowerPoint slides be?

In this case the natural thing to do is the wrong thing to do.

If you want your message heard, understood and remembered, think first about who is receiving the message.

Yes you have to think about the message. But if you want that message to have impact, start first with the mindset, perspective, goals, beliefs, aspirations and assumptions of those you want that message to impact.

It is who first, then what.

Want to learn much more about this key to leadership communication? Then go HERE.

Also posted in Leadership and Teamwork.

Everything Bad is Good For You

Posted at 9:57 PM on Sunday, June 05, 2005

On April 24th I wrote a post called The Sleeper Curve based on an article I read in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. At the end of the post I said I had ordered the book the further explored the thesis of the article.

I got Steven Johnson's book, Everything Bad is Good For You in the mail awhile back. I read it today.

Very cool.

It isn't a business book, per se. It is a book about our culture and the media - TV, film, videogames and the internet. The subtitle of the book - How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter - while a bit flippant, is really the point of the book.

Johnson attempts to persuade that the media we consume has become more complex and more cognitively stimulating that it used to be, and that well, media has gotten a bad rap. He isn't talking about the content (violence, sexuality, etc.) but rather the processes and complexities that give our brains more of a workout. Consider the difference between today's popular videogames and PacMan for example. Or Survivor vs. My Three Sons.

I found it interesting as the parent of a teenager who loves videogames. (Parker turned 13 last week).

And as a person who makes his living in the learning business, it raises some interesting thoughts to consider.

The book to me is much like Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or The Tipping Point in that he uses examples and research to make his points and writes in a very engaging style as well.

If you are a trainer or anyone interested in learning processes, this would be a great read, not because it has direct application, but rather because of the indirect implications that it will leave you thinking about.

If you want to explore your own assumptions about popular media, this book will help you open your mind and help your creativity as well.

Also posted in Creativity and Training.

A Post Script for Early Risers

Posted at 9:41 PM on

You may have read my post on How to Be an Early Riser last week. It was a post discussing Steve Pavlina's great post on that same subject. I mentioned there how many people had commented on that post.

Post script 1: Steve's post has been talked about, written about, and blogged about all over in the 13 days since it was written. (There are now 150 comments to his post on his site and over 9,300 Google hits for the search phrase "How to be an early riser").

Post script 2: John Richardson has been following the tremendous buzz that has been created and wrote a very insightful post comparing Steve's ideas had how they "Tipped" using the concepts from Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

Post script 3: John suggested that my post was one of the reasons for the buzz and called me a professional blogger. Cool. Thanks John.

This whole two weeks of flurry is a great example of buzz, idea viruses and how blogs are becoming more powerful by the day. If you are a casual blog reader, following these links will give you a new concept of what can happen.

Somehow, I don't think it is over, and I wonder if Steve is working on a book proposal yet. :)

Luck

Posted at 6:16 PM on Wednesday, June 01, 2005

It seems I've been asked how I feel about luck often lately.

In general, I don't believe in it.

I think that if people believe in luck, they come to depend on it ("I'll win the Lottery this time.") or use it as an excuse ("I just didn't get any luck.")

In the Kenny Chesney song "Big Star" when the girl who is the focus of the song becomes a "Big Star" the line goes,

"She doesn't care anymore that her high school girlfriends cut her down
They only thought she entertains is where they are and where she is now

All her old neighbors swear their certain she slept her way to the top
She knows you don't get where your going unless you got something they ain't got."

It isn't luck. It is determination, focus, hard work, and passion.

But before any of those, it requires taking action.

If I am walking out of my garage, and toss a Coke can towards the recycle bin, and it bounces off the wall, off the step and hops into the bin, well, there may be some luck there. But, if I hadn't shot hundreds of baskets as a kid, and shot that many more wadded paper balls into a waste basket, the odds of that Coke can going in would definitely have been lower.

Lisa Haneberg wrote a great post in her wonderful blog, Management Craft about Luck. She asks if we are feeling lucky... Then she shares ten ways to create our own luck. Creating our own luck... action...is embedded in everyone one of her delicious top ten list.

Someone said we miss 100% of the shots we don't take. It doesn't matter it those are baskets, soccer kicks, interviews, cold calls, new products or whatever.

Luck comes to those who take action.

Feeling lucky yet?

What have you done to create your luck?

Defrosting Problem Solving

Posted at 6:01 PM on

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Unleashing Your Remarkable Potential is Kevin Eikenberry’s guide to helping you have amazing success while developing your professional and personal potential.