Category: Everything else

The 100 metre sprint, the 400 metre dash and the Marathon

I was always a pretty bad athlete. Most of my time during sports meets in school went in clapping for the star athletes. As a result, I watched all these races, jumped and cheered. My favorite was the 4*100m relay and I guess watching many a race (versus running them) made me draw parallels to athletic situations.

For example, one of my theories is that a good talk/speech is like a 400m dash – you start with a bang and capture the audience’s interest, keep up the momentum and use up all your ending in a cracking ending.
This theory involves all the 3 above mentioned races in a working life context –
1. Events or 100m sprints (Duration: 1 day – 1 week. Maximum 2 weeks): Events in our lives are similar to the 100m sprint. We expend all our energy and test our ability to sustain our energy (physical and mental) in high stress.
Events can be happy, tough and sad. I think of times when we are just required to burn the mid-night oil – a crazy examination schedule, a crazy project deadline etc. It could also extend to an action packed vacation, a happening party, a trek etc on the personal life front.
2. Projects or 400m dashes (Duration: >2 weeks to 6 months. Maximum 9 months): If you are working, projects are typically common and you are always working on one, two or many – all at once. Typically, tough projects are those that take considerable amounts of energy during the period. They are like the 400m dash – good start is essential to build momentum, continuously maintaining the momentum is critical and a good ending – well, there’s never anything like a good ending, is there? :)
I feel anything above 9 months would just be ‘work’ but again, I am aware of projects lasting an extra few months. Not sure if you’d consider it or structure like you would structure a project. And besides, I picked 9 months because I likened it to giving birth to a baby on a personal front.
3. Long term work/life or Marathons (Duration: >6 months): This applies to any work and life, in general. Life is a marathon of sorts after all. You can have your desperate sprints but over the long run, it’s definitely not a few day battle – it’s a war.
A simple example is sleep and the use of time. While it may seem productive to lose sleep in a few day ‘event’, it will certainly become unproductive over time in a ‘project’ and definitely damaging if done so in long term work or life.
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I find it helpful to put a frame around common place things. Just helps me understand and picture them better and as a result, helps me do better in general as I learn how to apply myself – hope it does for you too!

CNN, Let your customers win

I tried this morning to sign up for email subscription of the news. I used to be a news hog and then found the whole system extremely negative as seeing gory pictures of people dying practically every day wasn’t my favorite tonic at the start so I unsubscribed for a while but after an embarrassing dinner conversation with a colleague where I wasn’t up to speed on an important piece of news, I decided to re-subscribe and see where we go.

It turns out that last time around, I had found CNN’s email system more reliable than the BBC so I decided to sign up. I expected it to be a 3 step process –
1. Google for ‘CNN news email subscription’
2. Enter email ID and choose preferences (i.e. type of news, delivery time etc)
3. Click on the Subscribe! button
But no, I had to sign up somewhere, click to connect my facebook account there, choose a username that took a bit and then found that every time I refreshed, there was some bug with the login system so I had to re-login. I found their email alerts button but didn’t get what I wanted.
After wasting a good 20 minutes, I felt the need to scream.
So, I decided to give BBC a shot.
And what do you know, it was a 3 step process and I’m a BBC news subscriber now. CNN just lost 1 willing customer and got itself some negative publicity.
Reminded me of this insightful piece by Seth Godin.
Why would you do this to a customer?

Three ways to help people get things done – Seth Godin

Don Meyer was one of the most successful college basketball coaches of all time, apparently. His biography is quite a sad book—sad because of his tragic accident, but also sad because it’s a vivid story about a misguided management technque.

Meyer’s belief was that he could become an external compass and taskmaster to his players. By yelling louder, pushing harder and relentlessly riding his players, his plan was to generate excellence by bullying them. The hope was that over time, people would start pushing themselves, incorporating Don’s voice inside their head, but in fact, this often turns out to be untrue. People can be pushed, but the minute you stop, they stop. If the habit you’ve taught is to achieve in order to avoid getting chewed out, once the chewing out stops, so does the achievement.

It might win basketball games, but it doesn’t scale and it doesn’t last. When Don left the room (or the players graduated), the team stopped winning.

A second way to manage people is to create competition. Pit people against one another and many of them will respond. Post all the grades on a test, with names, and watch people try to outdo each other next time. Promise a group of six managers that one of them will get promoted in six months and watch the energy level rise. Want to see little league players raise their game? Just let them know the playoffs are in two weeks and they’re one game out of contention.

Again, there’s human nature at work here, and this can work in the short run. The problem, of course, is that in every competition most competitors lose. Some people use that losing to try harder next time, but others merely give up. Worse, it’s hard to create the cooperative environment that fosters creativity when everyone in the room knows that someone else is out to defeat them.

Both the first message (the bully with the heart of gold) and the second (creating scarce prizes) are based on a factory model, one of scarcity. It’s my factory, my basketball, my gallery and I’m going to manipulate whatever I need to do to get the results I need. If there’s only room for one winner, it seems these approaches make sense.

The third method, the one that I prefer, is to open the door. Give people a platform, not a ceiling. Set expectations, not to manipulate but to encourage. And then get out of the way, helping when asked but not yelling from the back of the bus.

When people learn to embrace achievement, they get hooked on it. Take a look at the incredible achievements the alumni of some organizations achieve after they move on. When adults (and kids) see the power of self-direction and realize the benefits of mutual support, they tend to seek it out over and over again.

In a non-factory mindset, one where many people have the opportunity to use the platform (I count the web and most of the arts in this category), there are always achievers eager to take the opportunity. No, most people can’t manage themselves well enough to excel in the way you need them to, certainly not immediately. But those that can (or those that can learn to) are able to produce amazing results, far better than we ever could have bullied them into. They turn into linchpins, solving problems you didn’t even realize you had. A new generation of leaders is created…

And it lasts a lifetime.

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So true. A very very good article!

Lyndon Johnson’s 10 point formula for success

1. Learn to remember names. Inefficiency at this point may indicate that your interest is not sufficiently outgoing.

2. Be comfortable personal so there is no strain in being with you. Be an old-show, old-had kind of individual.

3. Acquire the quality of relaxed easy-going so that things do not ruffle you.

4. Don’t be egotistical. Guard against the impression that you know it all.

5. Cultivate the quality of being interesting so people will get something of value from their association with you.

6. Study to get the “scratchy” elements out of your personality, even those of which you may be unconscious.

7. Sincerely attempt to heal, on an honest basis, every misunderstanding you have had or now have. Drain off your grievances.

8. Practice liking people until you learn to do so genuinely.

9. Never miss an opportunity to say a word of congratulation upon anyone’s achievement, or express sympathy in sorry or disappointment.

10. Give spiritual strength to people, and they will give genuine affection to you.

I never thought a concept like this existed but this was a formula penned down by the man that helped him greatly in his quest to become President of the US of A. Time to start working on my formula then! :)
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