I just read this in Seth’s Godin’s new and free ebook – which I think is fantastic by the way – and my only complaint is that it is in a PDF and as such it is really hard to share ideas like the one below, which I cut, pasted and reformatted to get here.
“How many times have you paid your taxes? Ever get a receipt back telling you what you bought? You’re paying for something, right? Why is everybody arguing about taxes and deficits when they don’t know how their money is being spent?
What if you went to Lowe’s, and paid to improve your home, then Lowe’s did work but didn’t tell you what they did. Would you notice if they fixed faulty wiring?
It is time for us to rationalize the debate. Let’s parse the data and free the facts.
Imagine if we organized around meaningful data instead of vapid rhetoric. What if you could see how much you spent on your commute to work this year, or defending your country, or keeping your neighbor healthy?
What if there was as much data about John Barrow (D- GA) as there was about Manny Ramirez (LF-Dodgers). There are 750 players in Major League Baseball, and only 535 Members of Congress. Most of the data exists and what doesn’t we need to demand. The answer to healthy democracy lies not in rhetoric, but in our data.
Clay Johnson is the Director of Sunlight Labs for the Sunlight Foundation. He tweets at cjoh.”
So often we move to debate when we have no idea what the facts are and this example of the tax debacle is a perfect example. How easy would it be if we the purchasers of government could understand exactly what it is we are buying and what the costs are? Imagine if all parties could agree on the reality of the situation, devoid of emotional verbs and blame games, and consider how powerful it would be if we then discussed not what the problem of the situation is but rather the goal that we would like to achieve as it relates to the situation? In other words we all recognized and agreed upon what we want and we understood exactly what we have and from that position we could agree on the discrepancies and the actions that we would like to take to eliminate them.
Imagine if life worked like this in your home, at your work and in your government.
What’s wrong with I don’t know?
We don’t like the vacuum it creates. The uncertainty it leaves us with. It makes us nervous. So we make stuff up. And then we make all sorts of assumptions and plans around the made up stuff.
What a waste of time and what a waste of energy to keep convincing yourself and others to believe in something you made up. “I don’t know” may be uncomfortable but it sure is easier and allot more reliable than pretending.
That’s why most of us make stuff up about the reality of our current situation. We are dishonest and manipulative about it to make ourselves feel better. And we will go to great pains to protect our made up version of the story – cause that is all it is – a story. It isn’t reality and it isn’t the truth.
However, what most people don’t realize is that if your on a journey and you have places to go, people to see and goals to accomplish, then fooling yourself and others about reality is a really bad idea. If I can’t describe and therefore don’t know where I am how can I possibly plot a course to where I want to go? And worse yet, if I am the leader of an organization and I convince others that my made up story is true, how can those who follow me truly plot their course?
Making up stories and defending those stories takes allot of energy. You have to first make them up, defend them, convince others, remember them and then keep promoting them. Whereas describing a situation in gory detail and dead honesty is really simple and once done you can then immediately talk about the discrepancy between your reality and goal and what actions you need to take to get rid of the discrepancies. No more to it then that. No stories. No drama. Just next steps in the right direction for the journey you want to take. Sink yourself in reality, you get used to it after awhile and it actually starts to feel really good. Honest.
I want a leader who pushes me and everyone around me to do better – to raise the bar.
I don’t want them to give me excuses as to why I can’t do it, create long stories to rationalize my shortcomings, or make it so cozy that I just don’t mind missing my targets.
I want them to tell me clearly what the goal is, describe honestly where I am at, and then demand that I get rid of any discrepancy between where I am and the objective I have. If the goal is what I want then I’m going to be into it, I’m going to be inspired to be pushed to achieve it. If I’m not inspired and I don’t really want it then a true leader is going to push me to poop or get off the pot, so to speak.
This is leadership from my perspective. It aligns mutual goals and pushes all of us to achieve more than what we could without it. Too bad it is such a rare commodity.
Live within your means or spend money you don’t have on a gamble that could pay off big.
I’ve done both and my personal experience has been that I have always done much better slow and steady, living within my means. Despite how much I hate admitting it.
There is allot of truth to the expression “necessity is the mother of invention”. Sticking to what you can afford and letting necessity drive your creativity rather than creating by throwing cash you don’t have at something seems to always work better for me – and if it doesn’t work, it is so much easier to recover from.
Our fiscal year just ended in September. And like for most of us in business this wasn’t the easiest year that I have had to navigate through. Advertising networks dried up and customer bad debts piled on, revenue targets were missed, cost over-runs and missed deliverables proliferated.
But despite all of this we didn’t run, we didn’t put our heads in the sand, we looked at the situation for what is was and didn’t fool ourselves. From this honest, albeit painful perspective, we made tough decisions and adjusted. My thanks to Robert Fritz and crew for teaching us the importance of “reality”. Can’t recommend him enough and if you can’t get to see him in person do yourself a favour and read at least one of his books – my favourite is The Path of Least Resistance for Managers.
How did we adjust?
We restructured our SaaS company, repositioned the offering and lowered our cost base.
We parked a new company with a great product that was about to launch so that we could consolidate and focus our resources. Hopefully to be reborn before the close of this fiscal year.
We invested in our complete digital signage solution product and went looking to make acquisitions (more on that soon if all goes according to plan).
And it all worked. In the end revenues beat budget by 9% and grew by 47% over last year while our digital signage management subscriptions grew by 200%.
My hat goes off to my peers! What a year, what a turn-around.
