Archive for 'Distinguish yourself'
By Rajesh Setty on Thu 25 May 2006, 10:43 PM - Leave Comment
Of course, by the right people and the right messages.
I have seen many people who complain about attending seminars (leadership, self-development) and getting nothing out of it. When I probe further, half these people were making an assessment of the speaker and speculating whether to agree with the speaker or not. In other words, they had not given the full license to the speaker to influence them. The focus was more on the speaker and not on the message.
Here is something for you to consider. It requires a lot of courage to be influenced. Think about it. If you are influenced by a message fully, you will have to do something about it. Then you got to be accountable. You will have to find a great excuse when you slip on the follow through. Lets look at the alternative. If you are not fully influenced or make an intelligent comment about a situation where the speaker’s claims may not work, you got yourself a license not to act on what you learnt. Repeat this a few times and you can make a generic claim that none of these things work. Its a total waste of your time. Take it to an extreme and you can graduate to become a cynic.
Having great teachers on your side can be a competitive advantage for you. However, if you are not a good student and won’t allow the teacher to get through to you, it won’t be of much help. After some time, those teachers will disappear. They have limited time and if you don’t make good progress, it may not be a good investment of their time. There may not be a big enough ROII for them.
When was the last time you were completely influenced by something or someone? What kind of action did you take because of that? What were the circumstances under which you were influenced? If you experienced positive results, what can you do to create those or similar circumstances to get influenced again?
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By Rajesh Setty on Mon 22 May 2006, 4:36 PM - Leave Comment
Big things take a lot of time. Small things take a small amount of time. However, we do a lot of small things in our daily lives – so it all adds up.
A few examples (or questions, really) just to get you in the same frequency:
1. Where do you keep your car keys once you get back to your home?
2. When do you charge your cell phone so that its not out of juice when you need it most?
3. Where do you look up your friend’s cell phone number? home address?
4. What slot in your wallet carries your credit card? insurance card? ATM card?
Yes, some of these things looks trivial. They really may be. However, when you spend time to take care of them because you were not disciplined and didn’t setup some default rules, you are eating up from your time where you could be doing something more interesting and value adding.
Simple things need simple rules. Let me give an example. I keep my car keys in my left pant pocket. If I don’t find it there I know I that I don’t have them NOW. It may be at my table or I lost them or something but it is definitely not with me right now. I won’t bother looking in my other pockets. Same with my handkerchief or wallet or my business cards. I know where they are and if they are not there I just don’t have them. These kinds of simple rules have saved me a ton of time a number of times. I am never in doubt in these simple things. I can invest the same time somewhere else.
What are your rules for simple and trivial things? If you don’t have any rules, why not set up something and see if it really makes a difference. If it does, you can stick with them. If they don’t, you never had rules before so you can always go back to the earlier state without any loss. Does that sound like a deal?
Have a great week ahead!
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To see the other 130 articles in this series, please visit my lens on Squidoo
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish Yourself
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By Rajesh Setty on Sun 21 May 2006, 9:21 PM - 5 Comments
It is easy to NOT watch your daily vocabulary – the words that you use in your daily interaction with your family, friends, colleagues and anybody else for that matter. Everyone around you may be callously using words and sentences that are inappropriate but generally accepted. Here are some examples:
* pain in the neck
* slit my throat
* a real pain
I can go on but you get the point. We use these words and sentences as if they don’t have any effect on our body and future thinking. Wrong! It has been long proven that there are serious side effects of using these and other negative terms in our daily life. Just because people around you are using them does not get you a license to follow. Same like any bad habit (think smoking, alcohol, gambling..) You can always find justification to indulge in a bad habit. But should you?
In one of my favorite books - “Passion, Profit and Power
” (by Marshall Sylver) there is a section where Sylver asks us to make some simple changes to our vocabulary. Here are a couple of words that he asks us to change:
1. Replace “If” with “When”:
If denotes doubt. When removes doubt and pushes us to think about a plan to make it happen
2. Replace “But” with “And”:
But negates everything behind that word. And is more “accepting.”
I am not saying that by changing your daily vocabulary you will succeed faster (Personally, I think you will) but by having a bad daily vocabulary you can almost be sure that you are setting up your own roadblocks on your path to success.
Remember – it does not take a lot of effort to use bad and/or inappropriate language. It may even make you look cool. Last time I talked about it, one seminar participant challenged me saying that he has seen many successful people using inappropriate language. I don’t want to argue on such items. Since there is no scientific study on these things as related to success, it is hard to prove anything. If I say it is plain common sense, I know I will offend many people. So lets just leave it at that 
Update May 23: Scott Ginsberg follows up with an interesting post related to this –
On Using Cool Words. Take a look!
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By Rajesh Setty on Thu 18 May 2006, 11:37 PM - Leave Comment
I can safely assume that each one of you know about blind spots. Usually “blind spot” is talked about in the context of driving. It is an area of the road that disappears from your vision when you are looking at your rear view mirror. It is dangerous for a driver to not know about this concept as it can easily lead to an accident.
It is also dangerous to the person who is driving his car that at a location that is at a “blind spot” for the driver in the next car. If the driver in the next car forgets about the blind spot and makes a mistake, both parties pay. One for his mistake and the other for just being in the “blind spot” of the person making the mistake.
Accidents, as you all know, can sometimes be harmless. They can also be fatal.
The same thing can happen in your career and in your life. People have blind spots and they are walking around knowing that they have blindspots but that information is only in the background. Philosophers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (in their groundbreaking book “The Tree of Knowledge“) put this beautifully – sometimes we just don’t see that we don’t see.
When you are hurt by someone else, there is a 50-50 chance that it was unintentional. The person who hurt you never had the intention of hurting you in the first place. But it does not matter. If someone stabs you unintentionally, it still HURTS! Rather than blaming circumstances or the other person, you can start taking some additional care. Therefore, it is in your best interest to ensure that you are not in the “blind spots” of other people. You will avoid getting hurt unnecessarily.
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By Rajesh Setty on Tue 16 May 2006, 10:17 PM - Leave Comment
OK this is a tricky one. I didn’t say “Focus.” I said “Set yourself up to focus better.”
Many things in life are like this. The event in itself will be a breeze if the preparation is right. A few examples:
* You want do well on the day of your speaking; prepare well beforehand
* You want to perform better in a sporting event; prepare well beforehand
* You want to ace your exams; prepare well beforehand
Yes, they say preparation is not everything; performance on the day of the event matters. I agree. Preparation may not guarantee success but lack of preparation guarantees failure.
Now, coming back to the point: There is no question about “focus” being an important ingredient when you are at a task. However, while deciding to focus is easy, we all know that practicing it is hard. The trick is in preparing to focus. This is where setting yourself up to focus comes in. Let me give a couple of examples.
Writing: Long back I realized the powe of a computer [what an insight
] and also its power to distract me from doing what I set out to do. With broadband internet, the problem gets worse. The trick for me when I want to write is to write and not type. Since a note book is not a good multi-tasking device, I can focus just on writing.
Blackberry and other tools: Blackberry is a great tool if you can control it. Typically it controls you. Some of my firends call it crackberry meaning they can’t leave without it. It is almost like a part of their body. While a blackberry kind of tool can help you with “always on” access to your emails, without discipline, it might be a big distraction when you want to focus on a conversation or just spending time with your family.
Setting up yourself for focus requires a lot of discipline and effort. If you set yourself up well, focus won’t be a big issue.
Good luck!
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By Rajesh Setty on Sat 13 May 2006, 9:10 PM - 1 Comment
I have wrote before about NEVER to work alone. In simple terms, when you work alone, you are operating at the lowest leverage point of your life because you can only get returns form ONLY your time investment. The simple solution, of course, would be to work with teams on all your projects – be it external or internal or a combination (which will be the most common arrangement.)
It is commonly said that you should have superstars in all the key positions – right people at the right places and we are done. It is a concept that is something that is hard to argue against. Plus, the fact that people do change and past success is not necessarily an indicator of future results. [Side note: this must be the first paragraph where I have so many cliches combined - it should be a record-breaking event for me ]
While we are grappling with the above, some of the small but important things get forgotten until there is a breakdown. One such thing is the synchrony amongst your team members – once again both internal and external team members. You are always in the middle of one or more projects. Even if you don’t have the title of a a manager, you can be guaranteed
that you are managing multiple projects at any point in time – both in your life and at your work. As you know, the success of your projects depends on more factors than your hard work, skills and commitment. There are always more players involved. The ability for all these team members to synchronize their actions is extremely important.
Imagine that your projects are like rowing boats of different sizes (based on the project sizes, of course) and you have different team members on each boat (some people may be on multiple boats) and your job as a project manager is to get all these boats to the other side. It is very easy to see that even the team that is supposed to have the skills and strengths (right people on the right seats) will have a hard time if there is no synchrony in the team.
Often synchronization is taken for granted. It is almost like there is no discussion required as people OUGHT to know this basic stuff. That is the first problem. Next, remember that everyone on those boats have multiple projects that is going on in their lives and they are grappling with synchronization issues of their own. Your project MAY be the most important project (for you and them) but it is still ONE of the many projects going on and has to compete for attention from all the team members.
What can you do? There is no life changing direction shift required. Give synchrony a bit more attention than what you have already given. A few additional minutes of planning and discussion will go a long way. Just being aware of the syncronization issues will cause you to look at the right places when there is a synchronization breakdown.
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By Rajesh Setty on Sat 13 May 2006, 6:35 AM - 3 Comments
Note: I think I am spending too much time with VERY smart people (not that I am complaining) but everyone I meet has so much to share, that, really typing stuff has become a limitation for me. The credit for the idea for this post goes to Bill Wiles again.
It almost a cliche now when people say that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. A great sales person is made a sales manager and boom – he fails miserably. A technical wizard is made a project manager and boom – another failure. A star in one role within a company may be a hopeless failure in another role. So why is it hard to refuse a promotion that might push you to your level of incompetence? The world around you (your friends, family members and even colleagues sometimes) may not think that you are not making progress if there is no upward movement in your career. If so many people around you are thinking that you should move up, it may be tempting to think that – that may be the right thing to do.
It requires enormous self-discipline and courage to let go of something that the world thinks is right for you. The fact is the world does not fully know you. They don’t know that you may not enjoy in the new role. You are the only person that can really make that determination.
Now, go ahead and refuse that promotion if it does not make sense.
PS:
This can happen not only to individuals but also for companies. Some companies may grow to their level of incompetence and die. Bo Burlingham of Inc. magazine has written a fascinating book called “Small Giants: Companies that choose to be great instead of big” featuring a set of companies that have escaped this trap. I am also proud of the fact that one of the featured companmies is my friend Bill Butler’s company W.L.Butler, a highly respected construction company in the Bay Area.
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By Rajesh Setty on Thu 04 May 2006, 6:03 PM - 1 Comment
The credit for this post should go to Bill Wiles. Thanks Bill.
Bill recollected his days at SGI where he used to head International Business Development. One of the requirements for his direct reports was that twice a year, they had to come back to Bill with a “Plan B” – what would they do if their job disappeared tomorrow. While his direct reports were not warming up to the idea initially all of them enthusiastically participated in the program. Over the years, almost everyone appreciated the value of having a “Plan B.” Bill mentioned to me that many of them (who are in leadership positions) practice this in their own firms.
Before I make my point, let me share another concept. My friend Naveen Lakkur says that there are two kinds of unknowns:
a.
Known Unknown – You know what “kind” of unknowns they are and with some right configuration of help you can sort of deal with them. For a business person, an example of an “known unknown” will be new deals this quarter.
b. Unknown unknown – You don’t know what they are. One example is what happened to Naveen when he almost lost his eyesight for a few months. It’s hard to deal with them.
Now, making my point:
Having a Plan B and re-visiting it periodically will be your partial defense against “Unknown unknown.” You can never have full defense against an unknown unknown. However, something is better than nothing.
Having a plan and being ready for it is not the same as executing on it. Just thinking through options and planning will help you in times of (negative) surprises
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By Rajesh Setty on Thu 27 Apr 2006, 6:16 AM - Leave Comment
Heath Row suggested a few months
ago that I needed to do some serious work on my Distinguish Yourself
lens on Squidoo. After that I got several emails on the same topic.
Yesterday I spent a few hours categorizing about 124 items on the lens.
The re-designed lens is now live. Any comments or suggestions are
welcome.
Squidoo Lens: Distinguish Yourself
Thanks Heath for the original suggestion and push.
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By Rajesh Setty on Thu 20 Apr 2006, 8:43 AM - Leave Comment
Life is full of problems. Oops. Did I say that? For those optimists out there, re-read the sentence as “Life is full of opportunities.”
Whatever you want to call them – problems, challenges, situations or opportunities – they appear in front of us everyday in our lives. Our tendency (just like when we are posed a question) is to respond to this new problem, challenge, situation or opportunity immediately. In fact, we want to know the high-level execution details to find out whether we can get through this or not. There are a vast majority of cases where this is the right response. However, there are cases where this may not be the most optimum response. Here is a case:
One of your co-workers or direct reports presents you a radically different way of doing things at work. Since it is “radically” different, there is a lot of thought that has to go into whether this needs to be pursued or not. Should you rush to find a solution or an execution plan, you may not have the necessary background and framework to arrive at one immediately. Your past experience does not have a blueprint for this future solution. You can try to get creative and extend your imagination but you may just not get anything immediately.
So, what could you do differently? My friend Kimberly Wiefling says that the best response at that moment is “Interesting. Tell me more..” and stop and listen to what the person has to say. You may find something that you have never thought of and this new information may change the way you think.
New problems or opportunities of a reasonable size and especially those that extend longer time horizons need a different kind of treatment. There is no point in rushing to a solution quickly. You won’t find a good solution and you may dismiss the whole thing prematurely or find an alternative that is not good in the long run.
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