Here was today, for me: 1) I started focusing on creating a training program to teach managers move from Heroic leadership (saving the day, the traditional path to career advancement) to Servant leadership (selflessly serving employees by clearing the path, listening to their issues and resolving problems) to Catalytic leadership (promoting goals and constraining organizations so they are forced to learn and improve). I am half-clueless, half-clueful on this topic, but I am determined to improve managers, so I am learning, integrating, harmonizing and testing ideas as fast as I can. 2) My brother and I helped my parents wander through a confusing maze of phone number portability issues, to recover the phone number they have used for the past 50 years. 3) Someone called from FNC to ask for advice about how to classify labor costs more simply, after reading a paper I wrote on Agile Capitalization and offering a consulting engagement. I said, Before we do all that, lets just see if I can help solve your problem in 30 minutes, then gave an hours worth of advice on how to satisfy accounting law and create bulletproof records and financial reports. 4) Then a VP from a mid-sized startup sent me a metric-driven status report showing how the training Jeff McKenna and I gave his company radically transformed their results, wanting to post it to the Senex Rex web site as a demonstration of our work. 5) Then colleague Troy Magennis showed John Horton, Vince Mills and I some dynamic visualizations of the effects of dependency on communication structures in a large, 100s-of-teams company, which will motivate VPs to change the organizations of 100s and 1000s of people. 6) A friend emailed me to asked how much it would cost to do a 2 hour Scrum training for his startup company, and I said Either you write a review on LinkedIn, positive or negative, I dont care, or you pay me a pile of cash; the review is valuable because it is feedback. Then I walked home, exhausted and at a loss to do anything else, with all other family members adventuring to all corners (with my adventure to snowboard in Utah starting tomorrow) and sat down to watch a favorite series, Nova. This one about the design and construction of One World Trade Center. I realized in watching this that David Childs, the architect, is what I aspire to be: someone who explores frontiers others have never had the authority or skills to pursue. From innovative forms of concrete, to new escape-safe designs, to extraordinary challenges of water incursion, Childs has had a handful of interesting and really important challenges. His role, made possible partly due to random opportunity partly due to skillful choices, gives him a front-row seat to amazingly interesting problems and an opportunity to permanently improve many peoples lives. I am blessed, at the moment, that the world is presenting significant challenges and I am surrounded by incredibly creative people. I am not quite sure how this happened. I know it may not last, I know I may not be up to the task. But man oh man, I cannot believe what I am doing right now, and I am so grateful to everyone that helped, everyone who has befriended me, the trust people have given me. (Am I inspired by the Oscars or something, Jesus!) Still it was an exhausting and yet amazing day. I hope this lasts.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 07:17:36 +0000