Friday Reflections

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today

"Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today."

Point to Ponder (from Anthony De Mello, one of the greatest story tellers):

"It is a great mystery that though the human heart longs for Truth in which it alone it finds liberation and delight, the first reaction of human beings to Truth is one of hostility and fear. So the Spiritual Teachers of humanity created a device to circumvent the opposition of their listeners: the story.

They knew that the most entrancing words a language holds are 'Once upon a time...,' that it is common to oppose a truth but impossible to resist a story. Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, says that if you listen carefully to a story you will never be the same again. That is because the story will worm its way into your heart and break down the barriers to the divine.

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story."

Story Line:

Once upon a time, there was a company whose business had grown by leaps and bounds in the few years after it’s founding. The company had a unique design methodology for which it held many patents, and it was pioneer in that field.

For the first few years, it generated phenomenal revenue growth through design wins and quick turns. But lack of focus on manufacturing excellence and quality was starting to take it’s toll on profit and volume orders. The word in the hallway was that the CEO was too design and marketing focused and did not understand (or care to understand) the importance of other functions such as manufacturing, logistics etc.

There was a group of employees in there who believed that the company had an opportunity to have a quantum leap increase in revenue and profit, if it expanded focus on all functions that are critical and not just design and marketing. But how to and who will take a risk to convince the boss?

One of the employees on the team went to the CEO’s building. He noticed that outside CEO’s office, there was a framed picture of an advertisement from a magazine which showed a customer’s PC board with about 11 of his company’s chips on that board. The title of advertisement said, (the company's name) “across the board.”

He thought: there lies the solution! Since that advertisement was outside CEO’s office, it must be important to him. How about I draw analogy and create a picture of our company in form of a PC board and show different functions (design, manufacturing, logistics, sales, marketing etc.) in form of chips with interconnections between them?

To cut the rest of the story short, the picture was created and presented to the CEO in a review to emphasize the need for reengineering the corporate structure. It took less than two minutes into the story for CEO to say that he needed to focus on each part of his company to achieve optimal performance. He even joked,  "If I design and focus on my chips like the way I have focused on my organizational structure, customer’s PC board would never work.” 

Sequel: The revenue tripled in next five years with handsome profits and stock price.

Reflection: "Why was Solomon recognized as the wisest man in the world? Because he knew more stories (proverbs) than anyone else. Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories." - Alan Kay, vice president at Walt Disney.

** Quote in Title is attributed to Robert McKee.

Believe me, I have no idea what I'm talking about...

This week, we're highlighting an out-of-the-box article sent to us by one of our readers, JM from Sunnyvale.

The question: can an expert increase the credibility of their message by expressing it with less certainty and confidence?  What about someone without the expertise ... what would they do?

To read more click here

You got to do your own growing, no matter how tall was your father.(Predecessor)

Points to Ponder:

 
"What you are is the world's gift to you. What you become is your gift to the world.”


Story Line:

Once upon a time, a manager was informing his employee that the employee was in his succession pipeline. While feeling good about the opportunity, but wanting to be upfront, the employee told the boss, “But I am not just like you. I am sure that you know that I will manage with a very different operating style than you.”

The Boss said, “You don't need the same operating style as me. In fact, you don’t want to walk in some one’s shoes and copy exactly his/her brand image. You need to establish your own personal brand image with your team: employees, customers and suppliers. The key things are that you get results and do that with a set of sound principles.”

This reminded me of an incidence a few years ago. My niece and her friend were visiting from England and I had taken them on the standard pilgrimage to Southern California to visit "The Happiest Place on Earth", Disneyland. In the evening. we stayed at the place of two young aspiring actors trying their luck in Hollywood.

As soon as the visitors saw one of these two handsome fellows, they went crazy. In their British accents, they said, “Uncle, he looks just like Tom Cruise. He is so cool.”   The cameras started rolling and the rolls of film started falling; with pictures in many different poses.

On the way back home the visitors couldn’t stop talking about this guy (demonstrating incredible constancy of purpose). Finally noticing that I had been driving for 200 miles without being noticed, their British manners prevailed. Both the visitors asked with one voice (Copy Exactly!), “Uncle, wasn’t he (the Tom Cruise look alike) cute? Don’t you think he will get big roles in the movies?”

Trying to be honest, I said, “He has a resemblance to Tom Cruise, and he is trying everything possible: hairstyle, smile, walk, dressing to look just like him.”

I continued, ”Unfortunately the poor guy is doomed. The only roles he is likely to get are secondary roles as a stunt man to fill in for Tom Cruise; or a place on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard for visitors to take a picture with a look alike.”

I could see a great disappointment on the visitor’s faces, and a look indicating that “this uncle is jealous.”

Reflection:
 
Each individual brings his own uniqueness to this world: different talents, different styles and different approaches. These differentiations are the very sources of creativity and improved results. Live life with your style and your passion. Don't try to be just like somebody else. Be Just like You.

Great Blogs: "The most powerful way to get unstuck"

This week, we'd like to highlight some of the other great "Out Of The Box" bloggers on the Internet. 

One of our favorites is Leo Babauta and his site, Zen Habits.

Zen Habits provides practical advice for people who want to bring more simplicity and meaning into their professional and personal lives.

One of our favorite recent posts is about a sure-fire productivity system that can make a person happier and more productive than they ever thought possible. 

Is this a new variation of GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology?  A new desktop organizer software package perhaps?

Read on to find out ... click here

Winners are not those who never fail, but those who never quit

“Winners are not those who never fail, but those who never quit”

Point to Ponder:

Winning is not a sometime thing, it's an all time thing. You don't win once in a while, you don't do things right once in a while, you do them right all the time. Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” - Vince Lombardi

Story Line:

“Winners are not those who never fail, but those who never quit” -- proven through the ages by successful companies, people and teams.

2009 Baseball playoff: prior to this season, the Red Sox had eliminated the Angels in post season four times, including the past two seasons. They met again last week in the playoff. In the ninth inning, the Red Sox were leading 6-4 and the Angels were down to their last out. Jonathan Pabelbon, a pitcher who had not yielded a run in 26 post-season innings, was on the mound for the Red Sox. But the Angles rallied to score three runs, winning the game and the series.

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot ... and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. That is why I succeed."

- Michael Jordan, who was cut from his high school basketball team because of his "lack of skill"

When Einstein was young, his parents thought he was mentally retarded. He dropped out of school at age 15 due to poor grades. In 1905, he published four research papers that outlined his theories on relativity, equivalence of mass and energy (e=mc2), Brownian motion, and the photon theory of light. The theory of relativity was very controversial, and although it was proven in 1919, the Nobel committee did not mention it when bestowing the prize.

Walt Disney declared bankruptcy after a couple of years in business. A few years later he created Mickey Mouse.

Beethoven lost his hearing yet managed to produce great music.

Akio Morita founded Sony Corporation. His first product was an electric rice cooker that burned rice rather than cooking and was a big flop. Today, Sony is one of the largest electronic companies in the world with many great products.

Reflection:

There is a professor at MIT who offers a course on failure. He does that, he says, because failure is a far more common experience than success. An interviewer once asked him if anybody ever failed the course on failure. He thought a moment and replied, "No, but there were two Incompletes."

Out of the Box Thinking

It's that time again - watch the video above as we rotate a simple image, and let your creativity run free!  Let us know what you can see in the comments section.  The best idea (leaving an email address) will receive a free copy of Friday Reflections.

Have a Kindle or an iPhone? Try our affordable, portable, environmentally friendly Kindle Edition

The Black Swan Events and Risk Management

"I am interested in how to live in a world we don’t understand very well –in other words, while most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, I am interested in how to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of 'knowledge' into decisions – how not to be a 'turkey'. My last book The Black Swan (and the 4th Quadrant papers) drew a map of what we don’t understand; my current work focuses on how to domesticate the unknown" - What To Do In A World We Don't Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 

Story Line:  The Black Swan Events (...thanks to Mukund Shenoy and C P Low for reference material)

The term Black Swan comes from the 17th century European assumption that 'All swans are white'. In that context, a black swan was a symbol for something that was impossible or could not exist. In the 18th Century, the discovery of Black Swans in Western Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that a perceived impossibility may actually come to pass.

The Black Swan Theory (in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's version) concerns high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events (opportunities and disasters) beyond the realm of normal expectations. The theory was described by him in his 2007 book, "The Black Swan". Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as "black swans"—undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War 1, and the September 11 attacks as examples of Black Swan events. The main idea in Taleb's book is not to attempt to predict Black Swan events, but to build robustness to the negative ones, while being able to exploit positive ones.

In the following video (highly recommended), he describes Black Swan Events, consequences and remedies in a very humorous way. It is entertaining, thought provoking and educational.

Short Introduction: click here

Some Quotable Quotes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Instead of trying to anticipate low-probability, high-impact events, we should reduce our vulnerability to them. Risk management, we believe, should be about lessening the impact of what we don’t understand.

Psychologists distinguish between acts of commission and those of omission. Although their impact is the same in economic terms—a dollar not lost is a dollar earned—risk managers don’t treat them equally. They place a greater emphasis on earning profits than they do on avoiding losses. However, a company can be successful by preventing losses while its rivals go bust—and it can then take market share from them. In chess, grand masters focus on avoiding errors; rookies try to win.

Standard deviation—used extensively in finance as a measure of investment risk—shouldn’t be used in risk management. The standard deviation corresponds to the square root of average squared variations—not average variations.

We don’t appreciate that what’s mathematically equivalent isn’t psychologically so.

Most executives don’t realize that optimization makes companies vulnerable to changes in the environment. Biological systems cope with change; Mother Nature is the best risk manager of all. That’s partly because she loves redundancy. Evolution has given us spare parts—we have two lungs and two kidneys, for instance—that allow us to survive.

You often hear risk managers—particularly those employed in the financial services industry—use the excuse “This is unprecedented.” They assume that if they try hard enough, they can find precedents for anything and predict everything. But Black Swan events don’t have precedents. In addition, today’s world doesn’t resemble the past; both interdependencies and nonlinearities have increased. Some policies have no effect for much of the time and then cause a large reaction.

Sources:
1. The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management by Nassim N. Taleb, Daniel G. Goldstein, and Mark W. Spitznagel Harvard Business Review
2. Wikipedia
3. fora.tv

Gold Diggers

Hint: you can click on the cartoon above to enlarge it.

Reflection: If your team takes its eye off the ball by spending too much time arguing about who should take the credit/rewards, you may find that someone else entirely will take the opportunity instead.

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.

Story Line:

Thanks to Barry Warmkessel for sending the story published in the Telegraph.

Google is featuring the face of Mahatma Gandhi on its logo to celebrate the 140th anniversary of the birth of the father of modern India.

The face of the Indian independence movement leader replaces the letter "G" in Google's home page.

He joins an elite band including Michael Jackson, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Confucius by appearing on the 'Google Doodle'.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6253057/Google-Doodle-Mahatma-Gandhi-tribute-on-140th-birthday.html

Reflection: from Mahatma's teachings

"All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take."

"I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could."

"An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind."

"A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble."

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always.”

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

“There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.”

"It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings."

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."