All in Life
Episode 27 of the podcast is now available and today I close out this month’s focus on Management Consulting war stories by talking about Starbucks Lemon Loaf Incident - an incident that taught me a little bit more about this idea of character and who we are.
I don’t think there is anything or anyone that operates at one polar extreme versus another. Sure, some folks veer more in one direction than another, but rarely, always and only at the extremes.
But you wouldn’t think so from most of the public rhetoric which, by definition, is driven by a desire for attention and alignment (with a predefined ideology - ours or someone else’s).
It seems to me that there are two kinds of people when the going gets tough. Those who panic and freeze. And those who manage their emotions and keep doing. This latter group is the group I think we all want to be part of.
Now, note that I didn’t say they stay calm, rather that they manage their emotions. Getting emotional and stressing out is, at least to me, a pretty natural human emotion. I’m not sure we can completely eliminate that response reflex. But I do think we can learn to manage those emotions, and thereby keep them in check.
Episode 26 of the podcast is now available and this episode continues this month’s theme of Management Consulting war stories, specifically the lessons I learned working with difficult people.
If there’s one thing that social distancing has re-emphasized, it’s the power and value of social connection. That community matters - and not only does it matter but it’s, frankly, more important than it ever has been. We’re all experiencing that, regardless of whether or not we’d conceptually bought into the idea before.
In fact, I’ve been heartened by the virtual outreach that I’ve seen everywhere - from family to friends to celebrities, in real life and across social media.
There’s that old saying that it’s easy to have principles until you have to practice them. Well, it’s the same thing with partnerships, especially when it comes to buyers and suppliers.
We like to throw that word around, especially during the early days of a relationship, during a QBR or during renewal times (by both sides). And that’s easy to do. It’s no sweat off anyone’s back to do it then. And we probably believe it, too.
In any business, you have to deal with odds on a day to day basis. Nothing is for certain, so you do the numbers, work out the scenarios and then take a call. Some of those times, things will go better than expected, some will go as expected, and other times, things will be worse than expected.
But however things end up, not taking action is NOT an option. You have to act and do.
If there is any consistent counsel, it is that we need to make decisions on the basis of facts. Hard, objective, scientifically-based information that provides us with a solid understanding of the situation at hand, the magnitude of the issue(s), the possible actions we can take and the relative weightage or prioritization of each.
This type of information ensures that we minimize the impact of emotion - subjective ideas based on our fears, our histories, our prior baggage and “what others are saying”.
Episode 24 of the podcast is now available and this month, I share stories from my life in Management Consulting, where I spent a decade prior to my entrepreneurial journey. And some of my most interesting lessons from that time had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with people.
We’re in an age of division. Everything seems to be either one side or the other. Red or blue. Black or white. With us or against us. You can’t read or listen to the news without hearing about it.
But while the social and political divisions in our discourse feel so much more pronounced these days, the fact is that this type of ‘one or the other’ mindset has been there all along, not least in our economic and personal lives.
If you ask me for my opinion on a particular topic, I like to think I’m level headed enough to tell you if I have a perspective worth sharing or not. If I don’t know much about the subject, it doesn’t bother me to say I’m not up to speed, or it’s not really my area of expertise.
And the reason I do that is because I recognize - and am quite comfortable with the fact - that I don’t know everything. (Hard to believe, I know.)
The word “partnership” is used quite liberally these days, across just about all aspects of our lives - from the personal to the professional, whether we’re talking about our relationships, about our work colleagues or our suppliers and customers.
But what do we really mean, in any of these contexts, when we use that term?
Cas Hardware - a small hardware retail business in my neighborhood - closed its doors recently after 41 years. It had become a fixture of the Andersonville community and was a place where “the management” was folks you could get to know, who would be on hand to answer your questions, give advice if you needed it and take care of any purchases you needed to make.
If you’ve ever committed to learning a song on a musical instrument, you’ll know that there’s a certain amount of struggle that’s involved in the process.
Part of this struggle is knowing the technical details - where do I put my fingers, what chords do I play, what are the timings and how should I think about the phrasings here or there.
It took me a while to get to grips with the fact that “learning” needed to be a continuous process in life. That is, the idea of “learning” isn’t something that is one-and-done but rather is an ongoing activity, a muscle that I should constantly flex and use and build throughout my life.
The other learning that I had about learning was that it could be on any manner of subjects and topics that interested me. It didn’t have to be on subjects that were considered ‘conventionally useful‘ or that didn’t mean much to me.
Back when I was in Business School, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Michigan/Ross Business School universe was a gentleman by the name of C.K. Prahalad. In fact, forget the Ross world, Professor Prahalad was, alongside Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, arguably the best thinker in the world on the subject of Corporate Strategy.
I mean, this was the guy who gave us the term, Core Competence of the corporation, and got us thinking about what it was that a business really did.
The song “Born To Run” is probably one of, if not THE, most popular Bruce Springsteen songs ever. Written in 1974 and released in 1975, the song became famous as much for its lyrics as its “wall of sound”. Ostensibly, it’s a love song that, at its core, is about a young man’s desire to get out of Freehold, New Jersey, but, really, it’s about our desire for freedom, our passions and going after whatever we believe in.
It’s one of the most played songs by The Boss and it’s highly unlikely that anyone reading this hasn’t at least heard of the song. In fact, particularly in the days before digital media, when live radio was in its prime
Episode 19 of the podcast is now available and this episode kicks off this month's focus on Sales and Marketing - subjects that are both loved and hated.
“Is a dream alive if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Bruce’s words from The River. There’s a gravity in them - a sense of frustration, but more than that, a sense of finality and hopelessness.
Now, I know the specifics of that song and the context within which he sang those words, but as with all things Bruce, his words apply to so much of how we live our lives and the paths we choose to take and the people we choose to love.
