This month’s leadership quote:
“Today you will get something that was not guaranteed.
One more day. Out of which to create the ‘you’ that works for you.
And to decide what that day will be, and who you will be.
You can write one more blank check, and let others fill in the amount;
or, you can decide on the payees in your life, and what and how you chose to give.
No magic. We all get this choice every day.”
-Larry M. Cassidy, Vistage Master Chair
This month’s leadership quote:
“One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
-Gilbert K. Chesterton
Another way to say this, the higher we rise in an organization, the less we see. The challenge for leaders, therefore, is to spend time in the valley. Easy to say; harder to do. And, the great leaders I know spend most of their time in only three ways: strategic thinking/strategic conversations; visiting and listening to customers and potential customers; and siting down with and listening to employees.
This month’s leadership quote:
“Discovery is seeing what everybody else has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought.”
— Albert Szent-Györgyi
Albert Szent-Györgyi lived from September 16, 1893 – October 22, 1986 and was a Hungarian physiologist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1937. He is credited with discovering vitamin C and the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle.
Like all inventors, Mr. Szent-Györgyi lived this quote. The questions this brings to mind are:
This month’s leadership quote:
“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”
-Jack Welch
When things are going well, it’s easy to become complacent, even arrogant. We become married to a point of view. After all, we built our business based on these beliefs and it has worked. Often it is our own people who tell us that the old way may not be appropriate today. Their message, as Jack reminds us, is the rate of change outside might dictate the need for more change inside.
The question is, “are we listening?”
This month’s leadership quote:
“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”
-Dwight Eisenhower
Mother Theresa, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin and other great leaders, past and present, all had the same 24 hours in a day that we do. And, yet we yearn for more time. “If only I had more time,” we say, “I could accomplish so much more. I could do the things I really want to do. I could have more balance.”
What if, instead, we simply paused each day and asked these two simple questions that Benjamin Franklin asked himself at the beginning, and at the end, of each day:
• What good can I do today?
• What good have I done today?
What if we then set out to prioritize our day, according to the Eisenhower quote above. Making immediate time for the urgent/important, saving time for the important/non-urgent, ignoring the non-urgent/non-important and then delegating the urgent/non-important?
How would you feel if you could answer Mr. Franklin’s important question, to your satisfaction, at the end of each day?
This month’s leadership quote:
“Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.”
-Dale Carnegie
We can always count on Dale Carnegie to remind us, attitude is everything. In his books and in this quote Dale reminds us…when we take the time to celebrate what is, in ourselves and others, happiness is the result.
This month’s leadership quote:
“If we only focus on fixing what’s wrong, we forget to notice and build what is good and strong.”
-Rebecca Wilkinson
So often in our quest to be better, both as people and in our companies, we forget this advice. No question, sometimes fixing is what is required, technology becomes outdated, systems break down, etc.
And many times, the best approach is first to notice what is good and strong and then work to build upon it. Or as I am fond of saying, “discover both our’s and our company’s genius and then work to become excellent at what we are already good at.”
Next time, you make the list of what needs fixing, perhaps draw a line and then make a list of what is good and needs building.
This month’s leadership quote:
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
-Mark Twain
This month’s leadership quote:
“Compete with things to come – not with things that were.”
-Carlos Rizowy
So easy to look in the rear view mirror and ask ourselves, what’s coming? And, what Carlos reminds us is that what we see in the rear view mirror are only the things that are present now. The things to come require “eyes down the road”, as they say in driver training. It is only when we are looking down the road that we can see what we will be faced with and, therefore, will be competing with.
If we wait until it is in front of us, it is, at a minimum, more costly and often too late to respond.
This month’s leadership quote:
“Innovation is hard because ‘solving a problem people didn’t know they had’
and ‘building something no one needs’ look identical at first.”
-Aaron Levine
Steve Jobs is noted for “solving a problem people didn’t know they had” time after time, first with the Mac, then ITunes, the IPhone, the IPad, etc. etc. And most of us will acknowledge that Steve was a rare genius. So… what can the rest of us mere mortals learn from Steve about innovation? Here’s what I observed that Steve did:
While coming up with the innovative idea may initially seem to be the hard part, my sense is innovation is like everything else in business, it’s executing on the right things at the right time.
The initial results of my Pivot are excellent. I feel I have much greater clarity regarding the next 3-5 years.. more
