Weird Al video; No Bosses – Holocracies; Free Agent Employees; Love ’em or Lose ’em
July 31, 2014Escape Overseas; Best Persuasion Technique; Customer Funded Biz; Australia, NZ, Singapore, Jakarta
August 14, 2014Terrible Bosses; Boring Bosses; Remote Bosses; Eating a Scorpion
"…keeping you great"
HEADLINES:
| No one is worthless; they can at least serve as a bad example. | |
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Terrible Bosses — notes Katherine Reynolds Lewis, in this Fortune article, "You can learn quite a bit from so-called negative mentors; the misguided, wrongheaded, or simply evil bosses." She goes on to outline in her article titled "How Your Terrible Boss Can Make You a Great Manager" examples where leaders learned lessons about the importance consistency, delegation, open-mindedness, and honest feedback from experiencing just the opposite. Not sure you really need to read the article – the title and quote say it all.
Boring Bosses — Google continues to use their "people analytic" skills to discern the best traits of successful employees and leaders. Their latest revelation "The most important character trait of a leader is one that you're more likely to associate with a dull person than a dynamic leader: predictability. The more predictable you are, day after day, the better." In other words, when managers are predictable, they remove a roadblock from employees' path — themselves. Take 2 minutes to scan this short TNW article titled "The boring trait Google looks for in its leaders" for more on what Google has learned employees want from their bosses. Thanks to Georg von Laffert, our GI Certified Coach in Germany, for sharing this recent link.
Remote Bosses — Mark Khabe, co-founder of PRIME Process Management Group with his wife, works from anywhere and everywhere. See recent photo below – Lombok, Indonesia – where he was working for 3 weeks while scuba diving. Notes Khabe, "One month I am in Indonesia, one month I am in Thailand, one month I am in India – just looking around for my next options." With 35 employees in Australia and India, Khabe feels the great part of being away from the business and always in different time zones is his team has to make their own decisions. "This is also driving accountability. They feel like this is their business rather than mine." And because he's always meeting new people and learning new things, it drives creativity and inspiration.
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Collisions — …and to drive innovation, where you locate the restrooms is one of many "physical" decisions that the boss must get right. This week's Fortune article titled "What architects don't get about Steve Jobs spaceship" highlights several key decisions leaders make about where people sit. Jobs understood the importance of upping the accidental collisions of people to drive creativity and communication, lessons he first applied in designing Pixar's innovative HQ. Take 2 minutes to scan through the article (and there's a link to a much longer video recording of Jobs' presentation of Apple's new HQ to the Cupertino city council – it's worth watching if you have to win over the local authorities).
Eating a Scorpion — You thought you had a bad boss. My son Cameron's "boss" on the first stop of his gap-year (jungles of Panama) had him eat a scorpion on his 18th birthday. If you have a teenager thinking about taking a year off between high school and college, Cameron has a blog titled "Filling the Gap" which might be of interest to them (including a photo of the scorpion-eating episode). And he'll be attending the Growth Summit in Vegas. Any executives wanting to expose their children to some outstanding biz education are welcome to bring them for just the cost of meals (and many do!).
COACHING:
