What makes God laugh?

People making plans!

We have a strategic plan. Its called doing things. things.

Herb Kelleher

Its so simple its almost funny but, you only find oil if you drill wells. wells.
Source: The Hunters, by John Masters, Canadian O & G wildcatter

Experiment fearlessly
Source: BW0821.06, Type A Organization Strategies/ How to Hit a Moving TargetTactic

#1

Reward
excellent failures.

Punish mediocre
successes.
Phil Daniels, Sydney exec

In business, you reward people for taking risks. risks. When it doesnt work out you promote them-because promote themthey were willing to try new things. If people tell me eop they they skied all day and never day fell down, I tell them to try try a different mountain. mountain.
Michael Bloomberg (BW/0625.07) (BW/0625.07)

Screw. things. Up.

Fail . Forward. Fast.

High Tech CEO, Pennsylvania

FAIL, FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER.

Samuel Beckett

You miss

100% 100% of
the shots you never take.
Wayne Gretzky

Intelligent people can always come up with intelligent reasons to do nothing. nothing.
Scott Simon

Andrew Higgins , who built landing craft in WWII, refused to hire graduates of engineering

He believed that they only teach you what you cant do in engineering school. He
schools. started off with 20 employees, and by the middle of the war had 30,000 working for him. He turned out 20,000 landing craft. D.D. Eisenhower told me, Andrew Higgins won the war for us. He did it without engineers.
Stephen Ambrose/Fast Company Ambrose/Fast

Life 101: A 40-year Reflection 40Go on offense. Give everybody a shot. Decentralize. Try a bunch of stuff. Make it up as you go along. Get some stuff wrong. Laugh a lot. Get some stuff right. Become a success. Extract lessons learned or best practices. Thicken the Book of Rules for Success. Become evermore serious. Enforce the rules to increasingly tight tolerances. Go on defense. Install walls. Protect-at-allProtect-at-all-costs todays franchise. Centralize. Calcify. Install taller walls. Write more rules. Become irrelevant and-or die. and-

Think!
vs.

do!

Every child is born an artist. The trick is to remain an artist. artist. Picasso

Muhammad Yunus:

All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we entrepreneurs.

were in the caves we were all selfselfemployed . . . finding our food, feeding ourselves. Thats where human history began . . . As civilization came we suppressed it. We became labor because they stamped us, You are labor. We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.
Source: Muhammad Yunus/2006 Nobel Peace prize winner, father of micro-lending /The News HourPBS/1122.2006

A leader is a dealer in hope.

Napoleon
(+TPs writing room pics)

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

You must

be

the change you wish to see in the world.

Gandhi

Being aware of yourself and how you affect everyone around you is what distinguishes a superior leader.
Edie Seashore (Strategy + Business #45) (Strategy

The most successful people are those who are good at plan B.
James Yorke, mathematician, on chaos theory in The New Scientist

The one thing you need thing to know about sustained individual success: Discover what you dont like doing and

stop

doing it.

Marcus Buckingham, The One Thing You Need to Know

"The reasonable man adapts The himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man. GB Shaw,
Man and Superman: The Revolutionists' Handbook.

One who does less than he can is a thief.

Gandhi

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
Michelangelo

Excellence can be obtained if you: ... care more than others think is wise; ... risk more than others think is safe; ... dream more than others think is practical; ... expect more than others think is possible.
Source: Anon. (Posted @ tompeters.com by K.Sriram, November 27, 2006 1:17 AM)

When The Enemy Really Wins

Obsessing about your competitors, Obsessing comp trying to match or best their offerings, spending time trying offering spending each day wanting to know what they are doing, and/or day wanting they doing measuring measuring your company against themthese activities company them have no great or winning outcome. Instead you are simply winning outcome.
Lose Your Nemesis: prohibiting your company from finding its own way to be truly meaningful to its clients, staff and prospects. You block your company from finding its own identity and engaging with the people who pay the bills. Your competitors have never paid your bills and they never will. Howard Mann, Your Business Brickyard: Getting Back to the Basics to Make
Your Business More Fun to Run*

*Mr Mann also quotes Mike McCue, former VP/Technology at Netscape: At Netscape the competition with Microsoft was so severe, wed wake up in the morning thinking about how we were going to deal with them instead of how we would build something great for our customers. What I

realize now is that you can never, ever take your eye ey off the customer. Even in the face of massive comp competition, dont think about the competition. Literally comp Literally dont think about them. them.

I [will] not accept the explanation of a recession negatively affecting the [new] business. There are still people traveling. We just have to get them to stay in our hotel. Horst Schulze, on his new chain,
Capella, from Prestige (06.08) The Return of History and the End of Dreams

You have to treat your employees like customers.

Herb Kelleher,

complete answer, upon being asked his secrets to success

Source: Joe Nocera, NYT, Parting Words of an Airline Pioneer, on the occasion of NYT, Herb Kellehers retirement after 37 years at Southwest Airlines (SWAs pilots union took out a full-page ad in USA Today thanking HK for all he had done; across the fullway in Dallas American Airlines pilots were picketing the Annual Meeting)

Allied commands depend on mutual confidence [and this confidence] is gained, above all through the development develop of friendships. friendship
General D.D. Eisenhower, Armchair General * (05.08)
*Perhaps his most outstanding ability [at West Point] was the ease with which he made friends and earned the trust of fellow cadets who came from widely varied backgrounds; it was a quality that would pay great dividends during his future coalition command.

What I learned from my years as a hostage negotiator is that we do not have to feel powerlessand that powerless
The 95% Factor*:

bonding bonding

is the antidote to the hostage situation. George

Kohlrieser, Hostage at the Table *95% of Kohlriesers negotiations ended successfully

THE PROBLEM IS RARELY/NEVER THE PROBLEM. THE RESPONSE TO THE PROBLEM INVARIABLY ENDS UP BEING THE REAL PROBLEM.* ** PROBLEM
*Watergate, M Stewart, BR **And: PERCEPTION IS ALL THERE IS!

THERE ONCE WAS A TIME WHEN A THREETHREE-MINUTE PHONE CALL WOULD HAVE AVOIDED SETTING OFF THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL THAT RESULTED IN A COMPLETE RUPTURE.
Relationships
(of all varieties):

Success

Consult everyone on everything Thank you note carpet bombing

Source: Roger Rosenblatt, Rules for Aging

The four most important words in any organization

What do you think?

are
Source: courtesy Dave Wheeler, posted at tompeters.com, source of original unknown (0609.08)

You can make more friends in two months by becoming becoming interested in other people than you can eop in two years by trying to get other people interested in you. Dale Carnegie

People are always ready to tell their story!

TP:
See also: The story leaners edge (Steve Farber) The dream manager (Matthew Kelly)

It was much later that I realized Dads secret. He gained respect by giving it. He talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids in Spring Valley fourthwho shined shoes the same way he talked and listened to a bishop or a

He was seriously interested in who you were and what you had to say. say.
college president.
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect

Single greatest act of pure imagination

Does your project portfolio have a dubai?

You know a design is good when you want to lick it.

Steve Jobs Source: Design: Intelligence Made Visible, Visible, Stephen Bayley & Terence Conran

Hug Huge: Customer

Satisfaction

versus

Customer

Success

The Value-added Ladder/TRANSFORMATION ValueLadder/TRANSFORMATION

Customer Success/ Gamechanging Solutions

Services Goods Raw Materials

The business of selling is not just about matching viable

Its equally about managing the change process the customer will need to go through to implement the solution and achieve the value promised by the solution. One of the key differentiators of solution.
solutions to the customers that require them. our position in the market is our attention to managing change and making change stick in our customers organization.* organization.* (*E.g.: CRM failure rate/Gartner: 70%) 70%)
Jeff Thull, The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale

The Value-added Ladder/TRANSFORMATION ValueLadder/TRANSFORMATION

Customer Success through Imp Implemented Gamechanging Solutions*

Services Goods Raw Materials
*Subject-matter Professionals and SubjectOrganization Effectiveness Experts (Degree: MBA, Organizational Psychology)

Sarah:

Mom, what do you do? Im overhead. overhead.

Mom:

You dont get better by being bigger. You get worse.

Dick Kovacevich:

Mr. Foster and his McKinsey colleagues collected detailed performance data stretching back 40 years for 1,000 U.S. companies. They They found that of the longlong term survivors managed to outperform manag outp the market. Worse, the longer long comp companies had been in the database, the worse they did. Financial Times they did.

none

Do one thing
every day that scares you.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Im not comfortable unless Im uncomfortable.

Jay Chiat

Kevin Roberts Credo

1. Ready. Fire! Aim.

2. If it aint broke ... Break it! 3. Hire crazies. 4. Ask dumb questions. 5. Pursue failure. 6. Lead, follow ... or get out of the way! 7. Spread confusion. 8. Ditch your office. 9. Read odd stuff. stuff. 10.

Avoid moderation! moderation!

Try it. Try it. Try it ry it. Try it. Screw up. Try it. Try it. Try it. Try it. Try it. Try t. Try it. Screw it up it. Try it. Try it. try t. Try it. Screw it up

We have a strategic plan. Its called doing things. things.

Herb Kelleher

We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didnt think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design

perfect, were already on prototype version

#5 .

By

the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version

#10. It gets back to planning 10.

versus acting: We act from day acting: one; one; others plan how to plan plan for months. Bloomberg by Bloomberg months.

Culture of Prototyping

Effective prototyping may

the most valuable core competence an

be innovative organization can hope to have. Michael Schrage

Experiment fearlessly
Source: BW0821.06, Type A Organization Strategies/ How to Hit a Moving TargetTactic

#1

You miss

100% 100% of
the shots you never take.
Wayne Gretzky

Reward
excellent failures.

Punish mediocre
successes.
Phil Daniels, Sydney exec

Execution is strategy.
Fred Malek

The leaders of Great Groups

love talent and know

where to find it. They

revel in the talent of others.

Warren Bennis & Patricia Ward Biederman, Organizing Genius

The Dream Manager

Matthew Kelly

An organization can only become the-best-version-ofthe-best-version-ofitself to the extent that the people who drive that organization are striving to become better-versions-ofbetter-versions-ofthemselves. A companys purpose is to become thethebest-version-ofbest-version-of-itself. The question is: What is an employees purpose? Most would say, to help the company achieve its purposebut they would be wrong. purpose That is certainly part of the employees role, but an employees primary purpose is to become the-bestthe-bestversion-ofversion-of-himself or herself. When a company forgets that it exists to serve customers, it quickly goes out of business.

Our employees are our first customers, and our most important customers.

If there is nothing
very special about your work, no matter
how hard you apply yourself you wont get noticed, and that increasingly means you wont get paid much either.
Michael Goldhaber, Wired

Nobody gives you power. You just take it.

Roseanne

The only thing you have power over is to get good at what you do. Thats all there is; there aint no more! Sally Field

When was the last

time you asked,

What do I want to be? be?

Sara Ann Friedman, Work Matters

Joe J. Jones
1942 2008 HE WOULDA DONE SOME REALLY COOL STUFF BUT HIS BOSS WOULDNT LET HIM!

Excellence can be obtained if you: ... care more than others think is wise; ... risk more than others think is safe; ... dream more than others think is practical; ... expect more than others think is possible.
Source: Anon. (Posted @ tompeters.com by K.Sriram, November 27, 2006 1:17 AM)