Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Anything from thoughts on leadership to endurance races

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International Travel: Caught by Customs!

I’ve been fortunate enough to have had the chance to travel internationally a fair amount. I’ve been pulled aside a time or two, once even directed to a closet sized room by a gun toting Russian military officer, but nothing prepared me for Monday’s encounter.

I confidently approached the last stop at customs, you know the one that comes after you’ve had your form stamped and reconnected with your luggage, prepared to answer the final round of questions already trying to sort out in my mind whether I’d need to rent a car or catch a cab to my hotel.

“What’s your purpose here Mr Fletcher?” the officer asked, her accent thick and suspicious.

“I’m here for work. Just coming in from the UK”, I explained that I was here to do some software consulting with Compassion. “No” I said when asked if I was directly employed by them, “I work for Hitachi Consulting and we’ve been doing this work in Australia and the UK and now here.”

“Did Compassion buy the software from you? No? Did they purchase this consulting as a part of the licensing agreement? No? Do you have a signed contract on your person? No?”

“I see. I’ll have to ask you to step into this room to your right.”

Somewhat surprised I stepped into the small cement room, walls bare but for a poster that warned against trying to smuggle drugs, and was confronted by a second officer. This one in body armor, eying me suspiciously, “So what kind of work do you do?”

I must have looked somewhat bemused because that attitude coming back at me from the officer was not one of a guy having a pleasant chit chat. Especially as he began menacingly snapping at the cuffs of the blue latex gloves he was wearing.

I tried to explain once again that I was working with Compassion on a three country assessment of some software they were using, but he seemed to want to press me into saying I was a management consultant. I finally capitulated and said, “Yes, I’ll be working with management to sort out how to best use the software.”

With a brisk nod and final snap of his gloves he stepped into another, smaller room where I couldn’t quite overhear the conversation between four customers officers. The other three having stood silently by as I was interrogated by body armor man.

Finally they reached a decision. Body armor man came back and in a thick accent advised me:

“You see Mr. Fletcher we don’t allow just anyone to come up here and do work. You need to prove that you have some special education, a unique skill set, OR you must provide a signed contract. In lieu of having any of those you must be prepared to either obtain a work permit or be turned back from the border. As there are no further flights leaving here for the US today you’d be detained over night in jail.”

SO…to make a long story short…I paid the $150 for a work permit and as a result, between now and July 2nd, I am permitted to work here…in Canada.

What’s your customs story?

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Leadership: Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing

We have family in town this week for Nate’s graduation. We’ve all been involved in sports for years as players from the time we were young, as coaches when we got older, and in the case of my father-in-law, even as administrator in athletics at the university level.

We’re were stunned this week to hear yet another story of a university that has failed a long time coach. By allowing a small group of disgruntled players who didn’t get the playing time they “thought they deserved”, backed by a group of helicopter parents who have collected their children’s participation trophies for years, encouraged by a athletic department that just wants smooth sailing, to run off a coach with 25 years tenure the university has failed.

To be clear this is NOT a Penn State situation. This is just a group of people who have gotten used to having their way at the youth level and now think they can run the show in college. Apparently they can.

We’ve heard this story a few too many time in the last couple years. When a coach consistently delivers wins and graduation rates, when a coach has developed a group of alumni fully willing and capable of funding the program, when a coach has multiple decades of investment, this is not a failure by the coach. It is a failure by the university athletic administration.

It is a failure of leadership.

How can we, as leaders, avoid looking just as ludicrous? By remembering a couple simple rules for keeping the main thing THE main thing:

1. Define it
What does success look like?
For a college coach it is wins, graduations, and fund raising. For a corporate executive is might be about top line growth, bottom line efficiencies, or people development. For a Pastor it might be nickles, noses, and congregational maturity.

In any case it is important to define success. THAT is where you should be headed. If you don’t know where you’re going you’ll never get there.

2. Defend it
Once you’ve defined success you need to be willing to stick to that course when the road gets rough. That isn’t to say we can’t change to a different target for success mid-stream, but that course change needs to be deeply considered before being made. Too often leaders change course quarterly or yearly in response to some temporary set of circumstances.

If you want to keep the main thing THE main thing you have to be more concerned with where you’re going than you are with how things are going.

3. Deliver it
Once you’ve put a stick in the ground to define direction and success, go after it with gusto! Performance reviews can almost become fully objective, did we deliver or not? The better you’ve defined success, the better you’ve stayed the course and defended that direction the easier it is to measure progress…or the reason progress has been inhibited. Deliver the main thing validates that it ought to BE the main thing.

In the case of these coaching stories the schools in question forgot all of that in favor of smoothing out the waves. The funny thing is, as any sailor knows, if you perfectly smooth out the wind and waves, you wind up becalmed and you never get anywhere.

Where have you seen leaders either fail or succeed at keeping the main thing the main thing in the midst of stormy circumstances?

Personal Note: All the best to Coach Gary Podesta. The lives you’ve changed cannot be measured solely by the number of individual players in the program. It is multiplied a hundred or a thousand fold by the lives we’ve each gone on to touch. Thanks Coach. You kept the main thing the main thing.

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Innovation = Invention+Problem+Connection=Solution

I’m currently traveling in Australia for work so I really have no idead when this post will…post. It is entirely possible that I will post it Monday night for publishing Monday morning.

As part of our endeavor to connect our body clocks to our wrist watches today we had an interesting conversation about innovation and connections. The example we used was weaponry and the simple challenge of putting a hole in a man.

The progression went something like this: rock – knife – sword – spear – lance – bow – gun – drone.

Each step recalls not onthe the original problem but it makes a connection between that first problem and the evolution of the next level problem.

  •  A rock will put a hole in a man but it takes a lot of effort
  • To use less effort put a point on it, you get a knife
  • But you still have to really close, so create a longer knife, sword, or strap a knife to a stick, spear.
  • But as armor evolves the sword or spear needs more thrust.
  • To get more thrust ride a horse and use a lance.
  • But what if you could start the same distance away and NOT have to ride at the man? You get a bow.

You see how it works? The innovation is really just evolution in response to a specific problem.

Too often people sit down to “be creative” and come up with something “innovative” and completely miss the key ingredient…the problem they are trying to solve.

This little exercise/conversation leads to a set of simple steps for innovating.

Step 1: Capture the original challenge: In the case above, how to put a hole in a man. We’re not creating something from scratch here, we’re looking at a next generation innovation.

Step 2: Identify the problem to solve: Above it is how to put a hole in a man from a greater distance. So you don’t wind up leaping to a new thing, you put a small amount of distance into the equation.

Step 3: Solve the step-wise problem: To often people kill the sword idea, no pun intended, as being “not far ENOUGH away” but it DOES solve the problem. You might choose to jump to the spear as a kind of “yes/and…” to the sword.

The key is to remember that all three ingredients are equally important. If you leave out step one you may drift too far from the original problem/solution match. If you leave out step 2 you risk getting into the creative weeds or go the wrong direction again. If you leave out step 3 you don’t land on anything.

Where are you trying to innovate? What is the original problem and what is the connected problem?

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How to Create Your Corporate Story

Since we’ve already looked at WHY you should have a corporate story and we’ve looked at the elements that make up a good corporate story I thought it might be helpful to those who find themselves stuck in the desert of creative drought to look at how get started creating your corporate story.

Remember we said that this could apply to a company, a team, a small group, or even a family.

I’ve had some interesting conversations with folks around the notion of applying this to family and to me it really speaks to the notion of legacy. How do you want to be remembered? Which is where we start…

Step one in scaling the dunes towards creating your corporate story is to Start at the End.

Imagine your group, whether it be a company of your family, has, for some mysterious reason, been removed from this worlds realm. A group of celebrants have gathered to remember your group fondly, sad that you have left, made curious by the mystery, but gathered in fond remembrance. What do they say?

  • “They really went out of their way for their customers”
  • “They really had some mind-blowingly-creative products.”
  • “They really were an amazingly generous family”
  • “They really knew how to invest in friendships”

You can see how these kinds of statements lead toward a good corporate story. They lend themselves to the kind of short descriptions from which good stories are built. Phrases like: serve customers – anticipate needs,  packaged creativity, ask how we can help, build lasting relationships.

Step two in creating your story is to Make it Personal.
By simply putting a phrase like “We’re the people who…” in front of any of those statements above you start to get a defining point in your story. This is a subtle but important difference.

Growing up my dad never told the three of us boys, “I want you to be well rounded individuals” or “I’d like you to experience a lot of things”, instead he encouraged us to be renaissance men. Try out the feel of that. Compare “I’m someone who is well rounded.” which is a description, to “I am a renaissance man.” which is a definition.

Which leads us to step three. As you’re refining your story Make it Definitive not descriptive.You aren’t looking for acute semantic accuracy here. You’re looking for something that feels like a fit. “I’m well rounded” just feels like a product label description. “I’m a renaissance man” almost sounds like a song title!

  1. So first I’m thinking through what the people gathered in celebration say to describe my group and creating solid phrases from their description.
  2. Next I’m making that into a personal statement.
  3. Then I’m refining that statement so that it is a definition and not a description.

If your family, or company, moved out of the neighborhood tomorrow and for some mysterious reason lost all contact with the neighbors, when they gathered a year from now to remember you what would they say?

 

 

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Denver Broncos: The Thrill and the Agony

Show of hands how many of you can actually hear Jim McKay’s voice when you read these words:

“Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!”

I grew up with that show. It was part of Saturday afternoons. Too bad there was no good way to record it back in the day!

This past week Denver Broncos fans experienced BOTH, the thrill of victory AND the agony of defeat as we learned that, amazingly, we’d won the Peyton Manning sweepstakes and then quickly discovered that Elway had sent our beloved Tim packing.

Before I go any further let me say this, I love both guys. I think Manning is one of the best if not the best NFL QB of all time. I think Tebow has a lot to learn about being an NFL QB but he is one of the classiest acts of all time, at least to this point.

My personal prejudices having been acknowledged let me say that I now firmly believe John Elway is an idiot. Ok, perhaps too strong on the language there but I think he’s made a HUGE mistake.

Football is, at its core, entertainment. Yes, it is a sport. Yes it is about competition. Yes, it is some weird imitation of medieval warfare boxed into a 100 yard field once a week with men playing a boys game. But it makes money because it is entertainment. So just a couple questions:

  • What Jersey sold the most last year in all cities? Tebow
  • What was the ongoing biggest story in the NFL last year, bigger than the Packers run at perfection? Tebow
  • Who was responsible for Denver being the most entertaining team in the NFL? Tebow

So if entertainment is about merchandising, marketing and market appeal and you have ALL of that in one guy, why do you trade him? And worse yet, why do you trade him for some nondescript future picks?

In week 4 last year the majority of Denver fans had given up. The cry to put Tebow in was not because we thought he’d win a bunch. It was because it was time to start rebuilding, the season was a bust. And then the ride began. It was insane. It was fun. It was ENTERTAINING. And at the end of the day it was some good football. Granted only about 6 minutes of good football out of 60 but MAN was it fun to watch.

So how do you top that?

You bring in the best QB in the game. You start him. You use him to mentor Tebow because Manning is great in all the places Tim needs work. You include some of that option package in your game plan as a change of pace. THE PRESS AND FANS WOULD EAT IT UP BECAUSE IT IS ENTERTAINING!!

Of course I’m sure those who support the Elway position will say that winning is the ultimate entertainment. I probably don’t completely agree with that but even if I did the Broncos have to make it to the AFC championship game at a minimum next year or the gamble doesn’t pay off. Anything less is a wash. A 95 million dollar wash.

I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like for a defensive coordinator to have had to prepare for an offense run in the classic Manning style AND the possibility of a Tebow style game IN THE SAME WEEK. Now we’ll never know because Elway forgot that football isn’t just about winning, it’s about entertainment.

That sound that you hear as you drive through Denver is the sound of opportunity scrambling off John Elway’s lap and disappearing into the woods.

What opportunities are sitting in your lap at the moment disguised as difficult choices?

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Leadership 101: Pronoun Guidelines

It’s funny how powerful mere words can be in shaping reality. From the Little Engine that Could, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can”, to God’s opening line in the Bible, “Let there be light!”, words shape not only our understanding of the world around us but in just as many cases the world around us as well.

It’s become a bit of a nitpick of mine lately to catch myself on pronoun use and as a result I find myself checking other folks around me as well. Pronoun use can be a HUGE indicator of insecurity or confidence, risk or reward, credit or blame. Don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely NOT the pronoun police whistle blowing and yellow carding my way through meetings. I just listen and make mental notes…copious mental notes.

Allow me then to suggest some simple guidelines for leaders who find themselves choosing which pronoun to use when communicating publicly.

Credit or Blame: Credit should always be “we”. Even if your team did nothing bringing them in on the credit speaks of confidence and, IF they did nothing, puts pressure on them perform next time.In the case where all you did was supervise and the team did all the work turning that “we” into a “they” also speaks volumes.

Blame should always be “I”. One of my greatest leadership memories of all time was being at a CU Miami football game that literally came down CU being a foot short on the last play. A bench clearing NASTY brawl ensued with players and coaches from both sides attacking viciously across 30 yars of mindless melee.

In the post game interview, before the first question was asked, coach Bill McCartney stepped to the mic and addressed the press by saying that he took full responsibility for the actions of his team, players and coaches alike, that it was HIS fault that they behaved that way and that while their would be internal discipline for some specific actions the bulk of the blame should be laid at his feet.

whoa

Risk or Reward: This one is easy to remember: When the risk is high use “I”. You can see you’ve talked it over with the team but that the decision, the risk, the iffy proposition, is your call.

Reward I tend to go straight to “they” if I can…at least in my good moments.

I’ve told my teams for a long time that when we succeed they get the credit, when we fail I take the blame, at least publicly…we WILL have a private conversation.  From experience I can tell you that that one has come back to bite me a time or two. But in the end it still made me a better leader of people.

A few more examples:

  • Innovation: They, or you
  • Difficult change: I, or me
  • Challenging authority: I…do it probably too often.

I adopted a leadership mantra from my good buddy Kurt who always says, “Listen, if I make everyone of my people successful then I’ll be successful by accident.”

The words you choose to use, even down to the smallest pronoun, have profound effect on how successful those people can become. It is also a great barometer of a leaders level of confidence, security, or ego. Who was it that once said, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”?  Listen to the leaders you’re around on a daily basis and see where they land in pronoun use. It’s an interesting pastime to be sure.

What other examples can you come up with where pronoun use can effect team performance?

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No, I’m NOT “Tolerant”, and Here’s Why.

Did that get your attention? Why? What are you expecting will come next? A rant perhaps?

Hmmm…maybe I should confess that I belong to the demographic group that is stereotypically characterized as the least tolerant of all: Middle aged, white, upper middle class, probably in the 1%, male, registered republican,Christian. If you didn’t already know that you’re now probably tempted to stop reading. 🙂 Chicken.

For me the notion of tolerance is silly really, dangerously silly. You see most calls for tolerance have somewhere in their roots the notion that we shouldn’t label people. But then as soon as the conversation moves from a mere word to a sentence the labels begin to fly.

  • I must be tolerant of Blacks and Hispanics and people of middle eastern or oriental descent.
  • I must be tolerant of Muslims and Atheists and anyone who doesn’t espouse Christianity.
  • I must be tolerant of homosexuals and bisexuals and extra-marital-sexuals.
  • I must be tolerant of the disabled and the disenfranchised and the dissatisfied.

Of course because of my demographic grouping I am readily accused being:

  • As regards race, bigoted
  • As regards religion, elitist
  • As regards sexuality, homophobic
  • As regards social justice or global warming or the plight of the poor or affordable medical coverage, ignorant

Labels, labels, labels.

And that is the dangerously silly part. All the things I am expected to be “tolerant of” are labels. So in effect the “tolerant” camp is asking me to not label people and accept them for their label. Which conveniently allows me to completely ignore them as a person and focus on the label!

I’ll tell you straight out I will never be “tolerant” of anyone because of some specific label.

In the same way that it is a shameful thing for me to label someone and thus dismiss them it is equally shameful for me to have to accept anyone because of a label. What’s really comical is how often folks who want to play to tolerance card also, at the same time, want to play the “treat me like everyone else” card.

Yes, I confess, I have made jokes about peoples race, religion, sexual orientation, and  even physical handicaps. In EVERY case those were people with whom I had great relationships.  There was no hurt intended and none taken. They shot right back and we both laughed.

But if I were to put those words into print I’d be accused of being all those labels listed above.

And that is where tolerance moves from silly to dangerous when people start getting up in arms and offended “on behalf of” someone else. Just a show of hands, who got uncomfortable when I said I joked about someones sexual orientation or physical handicap? You see unless you understand the relational context you have no excuse for being offended “on behalf of” someone else. Relationship trumps label every time.

Focusing on diversity and tolerance is a focus on what makes us different and potentially separates us. Focusing on relationship is a focus on what pulls us together and labels get in the way of relationship.

So don’t ask me to be “tolerant” or to “co-exist” for the sake of all the labels you have on your bumper sticker. Ask me instead to sit down for a beer, some decent music and some intelligent dialogue and I’m there every time.

 

As an American doing business in Europe I get labeled. As a Christian performing in local community theater I get labeled. How about you?

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Why I Love Picasa 3, Google’s Image Management Tool

One of the things I absolutely loved about using a MAC at my last job was iPhoto. It was such a great tool for managing digital photos, uploading albums, facial recognition etc that I found myself managing a ton of personal photos on my work computer. I knew that probably wasn’t a great idea so…

A year or so ago I started looking around for something akin to iPhoto that I could use on my Windows machine at home and landed on Picasa 3 from Google. For the past year or so I’ve been managing my photos in Picasa and enjoying it, until today. Today I discovered I love it.

I take a ton of pictures. The photo above, from my son’s rugby game last Saturday,  is one of about 500 I took at the game. Obviously I need an easy way to manage that many pictures. So why do I love Picasa? Let me tell you…

1. Organization
Picasa imports my photos into folders grouped by when the pictures were taken. Even if my memory card has several events still on it Picasa separates them into unique folders. It even groups folders by year. This makes is easy for me to either allow Picasa to give the folders names by date, or for me to create unique folder names based on event. Downloading from my cameras memory card into multiple folders takes all of about four clicks.

Not only that, Picasa will also look for images folders already on your computer and index those for you as well. Taking pictures with your iPhone? No worries. Picasa easily imports those too.

2. Editing
Now don’t get ahead of yourself here. I love Photoshop and will always use that for precision creative stuff. But Picasa has some quick editing tools that are pretty powerful.

I got this shot as part of a series when my son had a breakaway run through the opposing team. I’m still earning the customs setting on my new camera so some of the series were under-exposed. Bummer…

With a couple of clicks and some sliders bar adjustment in Picasa I was able to crop and correct to get a half way decent edit of the same image.

What is GOLDEN about this though is that while I could do the same thing in Photoshop I would have to save it as a separate image, doubling the space taken up on my hard drive.

With Picasa I do the edits in the software digitally. Picasa shows me my edited version, which I can export as I did for this post, but it doesn’t change the original. That means I can fiddle with edits all I want without doubling up on memory OR losing the original.

3. Sharing
Obviously photo sharing is a huge deal these days. For the rugby parents I created a group room on Walgreens Photo so that anyone could easily order pictures of their son without having to get hold of me to provide it.

Picasa has a share button that connects you to multiple options, Walgreens Photo being one of them, which allows me to, with only about three clicks, upload my edited album to the web.

I was able to crop, color correct, and edit around 85 photos today in just under two hours, including uploading the album to the web. I didn’t lose ANY of my originals and I didn’t have to create multiple folders on my image hard drive.

I thought I just needed Picasa as a viewing tool. Now it is a central piece of my work flow and I think I have probably only just scratched the surface. What more can you ask for for free?

What do you use to manage images on your computer?

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4 Reasons to Recognize Milestones

Today we reached the end of an era in the Fletcher household…we’ve most likely seen our last minivan.

With the price of gas continuing to rocket upward we traded in ol’ blue for a used Honda Civic Hybrid.  The small car payment and a month’s gas will still cost us less than we were paying per month for gas in ol’ blue. I have to admit I’m kinda sad.

I’ve been thinking about random milestones all day.

Way back at the turn of the century, funny when you put it that way, I was working as the Director of eCommerce Marketing at Corporate Express. During my tenure in that position we saw a pretty cool milestone heading our direction. We knew, probably 4 weeks out, that we were going to hit our first million dollar sales day on our eCommerce site.

As the marketing director I wanted to recognize the efforts of everyone who had made the site a success as well as generate excitement and so we started a pool to see who could pick not only the right day, but closest to the right dollar amount.

Our final sales numbers from the previous day typically came in between 10 and noon and on the day we got the news that we’d hit the mark we went crazy. Most of us has seen the first day the site launched, bringing in I believe a total of five dollars, and here we were at a million dollars in a single day!

We sent announcements out to our field offices congratulating the sales folks and throughout headquarters lauding the team that had built and maintained the site. By 3:30 it was time to really celebrate so I invited the entire eCommerce team to happy hour. Several VP’s came over to join in the fun and the CEO even came by for a beer and some congratulatory words.

As a corporate leader I learned the importance of recognizing milestones that day.

1. It honors accomplishment
Our guys were beaming that day from the newest support person to the senior most developer. They knew and understood anew that their work had created significant value for the organization.

2. It measures success
Milestones are stakes in the ground that are tangible measure of success, a goal line crossed. It’s one thing to say, “good job”. It’s another thing to have a measure of just how good.

3. It shows engagement
For a leader to pause and recognize a significant milestone shows that they’re engaged in the business and the efforts of their people. Celebrating even in small ways says more than just “attaboy” it says, “we’re in this together.”

4. It inspires effort
We hadn’t finished even the first round of libations before people were asking when we’d hit a 2 million dollar day. We didn’t dwell there, but we had already started setting our sites on what it would take to get to the next level.

Whether you’re running an organization, leading a family, or building customer loyalty recognizing milestones along the way helps inspire your people to follow your lead and strive for the next level.

What milestones do you have on the horizon? How do you think they ought to be celebrated and, more importantly, with whom?

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Peyton Place – wow

I just finished listening to the press conference where the Colts let go of the guy who made them what they are today.

First impressions are that Irsay was sincere but trite. Manning prepared better and is a class act.

I argued this past season that I could have easily voted for Manning as the league MVP even though he never played a down. It was obvious that his value to his team was unparalleled. You can’t ignore the fact that he took his team to the playoffs 11 out of 13 seasons.

I love the fact that Peyton not only mentioned his teammates but also that he wanted to take time to say goodbye to Colts employees, people around the organization. I’ve always been a fan but my admiration for the guy went up several notches when he got weepy talking about the “people behind the scenes”.

For those who think Manning should just retire I have to guess you’ve never played. When you’ve done it as long as he has, if you feel like your body can do it, you have no desire to quit. I played from age 10 through college and the first season I stopped playing I couldn’t watch a full game without smelling wet grass and getting antsy.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast what must have been an emotional business decision to Irsay’s stumbling inability to communicate clearly. It’s not so much that he’s too choked up but more that he just doesn’t sound prepared. Maybe he thought he had it together, not sure.

I think it speaks volumes to the need for preparation. Irsay stumbled though an emotional announcement that was pretty much just what everyone expected him to say. By contrast Manning had prepared statement and came off crystal clear. His emotion was evident but it didn’t detract from his message.

I suppose Mr. Irsay will argue that he “just wanted to speak from the heart”. Funny how people that say that assume the heart doesn’t show up until the 11th hour, that somehow it isn’t there if you prepare ahead of time.

I look forward to seeing where Peyton lands and in the end I hope he gets to beat the Colts in a game that counts.

What do you think? Should the Colts have let Manning go?