Right Attitudes

Change Your Perfectionist Mindset (And Be Happier!) This Holiday Season

November 25, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Perfectionism can inspire you to deliver top-quality work, but it’ll cause needless anxiety and slow you down, especially over the holiday season.

Even for the more fastidious among us, a spotless home isn’t always achievable. Everywhere you look, there’ll be something to straighten up—unfolded laundry, kids’ toys on the floor, piles of unopened mail.

Embrace the mess. Recognize that not all will get done on time. Tolerate some clutter from time to time and excuse yourself for not getting all the chores done or having a perfect home.

Don’t cling to your perfectionism even when it’s counterproductive. Put things away when you’re able to, but don’t feel like you have to dedicate many hours to tidy up, especially when that time can be better spent relaxing and rejoicing with family.

Idea for Impact: Now is a good time you cut yourself a break. There’s no need to feel less-than-great about the state of your home over the holidays.

Even the Best Need a Coach

November 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

As the saying goes, it’s what you learn after you know it all.

Top athletes rely on coaches to push their performance to new heights. Even Tiger Woods had a swing coach at the top of his game.

Many corporate executives seek out several advisors who help frame ideas for them and play a point of critical thinking. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch worked with Ram Charan, the eminence grise of business advisors, for many years.

“It’s not how good you are now; it’s how good you’re going to be that really matters”

In a TED2017 speech, the American surgeon Atul Gawande—author of such well-received books as The Checklist Manifesto (2011)—emphasized how coaching helps individuals and teams execute better on the fundamentals:

Having a good coach to provide a more accurate picture of our reality, to instill positive habits of thinking, and to break our actions down and then help us build them back up again.

There are numerous problems in “making it on your own.” You don’t recognize the issues that are standing in your way—or, if you do, you don’t necessarily know how to fix them. And the result is that somewhere along the way, you stop improving.

That’s what great coaches do—they are your external eyes and ears, providing a more accurate picture of your reality. They’re good at recognizing the fundamentals. They’re breaking your actions down and then helping you build them back up again.

Sometimes you can be too close to things to see the truth.

Blind spots are less obvious when things are going well. It is very easy for you to become inward-looking, particularly when you’ve been very successful. However, these blind spots can become destructive when performance moves in the other direction.

A third-party, fresh-eye assessment is an obvious reality check. Coaching is a whole line of way that can bring value to what you do and excel at it.

If you’re successful and want to get better, you’ll need to look at your situation as an outsider might. Coaching can help you get perspective and see things in a more detached manner.

It’s Lonely at the Top

Executives need a valuable ally and a resource for professional growth. They hire coaches to help explore their strengths and vulnerabilities.

Coaches are also valuable allies in decision-making. Many executives find it helpful to talk important decisions over with a trusted coach—just the process of talking can help sort out and clarify thoughts and feelings. Not to mention how another person’s views may illumine aspects of a problem that you may have missed.

Besides, many a coach’s specific arena is one of interpersonal relationships, office politics, and corporate culture. To be effective in our work, you must be effective in building relationships with your bosses, subordinates, peers, and other organizational stakeholders such as customers and suppliers. Management and leadership are all about influence.

Idea for Impact: Coaching is how people get better at what they do

You too should consider a coach to look at things with a fresh eye, improve your performance, and help with interpersonal relationships in the workplace.

Inspirational Quotations #920

November 21, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi

Truth cannot be memorized. Truth has to be discovered now, from moment to moment. It is always fresh, always new, always there for the still, innocent mind that has experienced life without needing to hold on to what has gone before.
—Barry Long (Australian Spiritual Teacher)

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (Science-fiction writer)

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
—Charles Mackay (Scottish Poet, Journalist)

He that spends more than he is worth spins a rope for his own neck.
—French Proverb

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
—Groucho Marx (American Actor)

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.
—James Madison (American Statesman, President)

Fear makes liars of us all.
—Carmen Maria Machado (American Author, Essayist)

If one asks for success and prepares for failure, he will get the situation he has prepared for.
—Florence Scovel Shinn (American Spiritual Writer)

Strong people are made by opposition like kites that go up against the wind.
—Frank Harris (Irish Writer)

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.
—Margaret Sanger (American Social Reformer)

One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.
—Rosamond Lehmann (English Novelist)

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
—Margery Allingham (British Author)

Irony is a great help in helping to penetrate fraudulent language.
—Paul Fussell (American Historian)

In worrying about the future, I despoil the present; in my escape, I leave a true freedom behind.
—Peter Matthiessen (American Naturalist, Novelist)

I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently.
—Pedro Almodovar (Spanish Filmmaker)

The only people who like rules are people who lack imagination.
—Simon Sinek (American Motivational Author)

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.
—Nancy Friday (American Feminist Author)

When to Send Customers Gifts

November 20, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Gifts are crucial marketing tools, which can help customers remember you throughout the year, not just during the holidays:

Send a gift after a sale. Saying thank-you does more than complete the sale—it helps build the relationship.
Send gifts after receiving referrals. One of the most rewarding compliments a salesperson can receive is a referral. Send a thank-you soon after getting a referral.
Commemorate anniversaries. Observe the day you signed your first contract with a customer, making it a special date to celebrate each year.
Remember birthdays. Send customers some birthday cheer, not just a card. Be creative and personalize the gift—send tickets to a sports event that the entire family can enjoy, for instance.

Idea for Impact: Business gifts can help solidify sales relationships and earn even more business. Pay attention to the things your customers enjoy and show your appreciation. As long as your gifts don’t seem patently insincere, they’re likely to welcome them.

How to See Opportunities Your Competition Doesn’t

November 19, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Harvard strategy professor Youngme Moon’s Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd (2010) describes how many companies pursue the same opportunities that every other company is chasing and thus miss the same opportunities that everyone else is missing.

In category after category, companies have gotten so locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate—which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become … Products are no longer competing against each other; they are collapsing into each other in the minds of anyone who consumes them.

Moon argues that the companies and brands that see a different game win big. Such innovators don’t just try to outcompete their rivals at the margin. Instead, they redefine the competitive landscape by embracing unique ideas in a world crammed with me-too thinking.

European airline Ryanair unleashed a new wave of relentless cost- and price-leadership by charging customers extra for everything beyond a seat itself. If you want to check a bag, you pay extra. If you want an airport agent to check you in and print your boarding pass, you pay extra. If you want food and drink, you pay extra. Later on, Spirit Airlines took the price-obsession further by charging for carry-on bags too. After a rough rollout and customer defiance, paying for carry-on bags has become the new normal.

Idea for Impact: Being different is what makes all the difference. If you do things the same way everyone else in your field does things, why would you expect to do any better? What are you doing to raise your game—not just to stay in place, but to get ahead?

Each Temperament Has Its Own Language

November 18, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

From Dr. Irmgard Schlögl’s The Wisdom of the Zen Masters (1976) (she was later Ven. Myokyo-ni, Rinzai Zen Buddhist nun at the Zen Centre in London):

An elder Zen monk on his pilgrimage put up in a monastery. He came across another monk who was also on the pilgrimage. The two discovered that they had much in common, and decided next morning to continue together.

They came to a river where the ferryboat had just left. The elder took a seat to wait for its return. His new friend continued however, walking over the water.

Halfway across, he turned around and beckoned the elder to follow, “You can do it, too. Just have confidence and tread on.” The elder shook his head and stayed put.

“If you are scared, I’ll help you across. You see I can do it without much trouble.” Yet again, the elder shook his head.

The other reached the other bank of the river. He waited there until the ferry had brought the elder over. “Why did you hang back like that?” he asked.

“And what have you gained by rushing like that?” replied the elder.

“Had I known what you were like, I would not have taken up company with you.”

Wishing him farewell, the elder resumed his pilgrimage on his own.

Temperament clashes exist to some extent in almost all relationships. The language of camaraderie that two people share so effortlessly at some moments can unravel at others.

Sometimes each person believes they are deliberately communicating their needs and values, when indeed little gets through because each is working from different core assumptions and expectations—conveying and interpreting language, gestures, and intent differently, or seeking a different set of signals.

Idea for Impact: Each temperament has its own language.

Each of us has our own expectations of relating in an interpersonal relationship. When there are problems, don’t always attempt to “fix” them or back off and distance yourself. Simply give the other more space to be who they are. Seek to understand.

Let’s Hope She Gets Thrown in the Pokey

November 16, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

The Elizabeth Holmes-Theranos criminal trial hasn’t been without its share of theatrics.

Yes, Holmes’s massive fraud is obvious. She entranced (read WSJ reporter John Carreyrou’s excellent chronicle, Bad Blood (2018; my summary)) journalists, investors, politicians, and business partners into believing her fantasy science. She may even be responsible for negligent homicide if people died because of her company’s fake test results.

Then again, these sorts of cases generally hang on subtle distinctions between hyperbole and outright dishonesty and whether such deceit was deliberate.

Holmes’s lawyers will argue that she was merely an ambitious entrepreneur who failed to realize her vision but wasn’t a fraudster. Her lawyers will make a case that she is not to be blamed because people took her puffery and exaggeration as factually accurate. At what point do her wishfulness and enthusiasm go from optimism to intentional fraud? That’ll be the critical question.

At any rate, the Theranos verdict is unlikely to deter others from the swagger, self-assurance, hustle, and the “fake it till you make it” ethos that is so endemic to start-up culture. Investors will never cease looking at people and ideas rather than the viability of their work.

Idea for Impact: Don’t be so swayed by story-telling that has a way of making people less objectively observant. Assemble the facts, and ask yourself what truth the facts bear out. Never let yourself be sidetracked by what you wish to believe.

Don’t Be Deceived by Others’ Success

November 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Imitating successful competitors is a leading pathway to business innovation. Benchmarking can offer meaningful insights into comparative performance and help discover learnings for improvement. However, adopting others’ best practices can be surprisingly misleading and ineffective.

Four perception biases that come with benchmarking other companies can fail to make yours any better.

Many companies luck into success.

As I’ve noted before, you can’t reproduce others’ luck. Successful companies tend to significantly overvalue the effect of their leaders’ deliberate decisions on their performance and understate the role of chance—being at the right time, at the right place, with the right people. Alas, what worked in their circumstances may not work in yours.

The set-up-to-fail syndrome.

Benchmarking can be remarkably misleading when you make oversimplified comparisons to superstars who may not represent your situation. You could sink your business if you blindly copy celebrity leaders’playbooks in the wrong context, product, strategy, or market.

Companies that benchmark Apple and Steve Jobs and sidestep market research often disappoint themselves when their product launches fail. The leaders of these companies neither have Jobs’s brilliant intuition nor his extraordinarily talented creative team to build what customers want but didn’t know they wanted yet.

In the same way, companies that imitate the 20-70-10 “rank and yank” processes from Jack Welch’s playbook often fail to realize that several factors contributed to their success at General Electric. Welch had a robust organizational culture that insisted on regular and candid employee feedback and robust personnel processes for recognizing and developing the best talent within the company.

Corporate culture is a tricky business.

Your company’s culture—the prevailing way your people feel, think, behave, and relate to one another—cannot be changed easily. One industrial company aborted trying to imitate Google’s culture. This company couldn’t get its managers and employees to be more autonomous and innovative because the company’s and the industry’s ingrained culture did not lend itself to experimentation, risk-taking, and the celebration of fast failure.

Benchmarks look backward, not forwards.

In a competitive, ever so fast-changing world, what has succeeded in the past ten years may not necessarily do so in the next 10. The management guru Tom Peters once warned, “Benchmarking is stupid! Because we pick the current industry leader, and then we launch a five-year program, the goal of which is to be as good as whoever was best five years ago, five years from now.”

A strong focus on “quick wins” can turn out long-term losers.

Benchmarking can make short-term gains but have adverse long-term effects that may not manifest until many years later. By imitating an industry leader, a capital goods company decided to boost efficiency by outsourcing design to its suppliers. Years later, it discovered the debilitating effects of the loss of vital technical knowledge.

Idea for Impact: Best practices only add value when applied in the proper context

Applying best practices in the wrong context is a sure-fire way to hold your company back.

Pay attention to all ideas, mull them over, test what makes sense, adopt what works, and discard what doesn’t.

Sure, help yourself to great ideas wherever you can get them, but be mindful of the context. Try to understand how the top performers’ circumstances and culture may be causing their success. Think through the long-term consequences of any decision you take or any practice you adopt.

Inspirational Quotations #919

November 14, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi

In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
—Robert Ranke Graves (British Writer)

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
—Robert M. Pirsig (American Writer)

The forces of things, the beings of the Universe, interpenetrate, divide and unite themselves according to eternal laws. But the laws of Nature are, to speak after the manner of men, Thoughts of God, in which all lives, that is to say, He is.
—Heinrich Zschokke (Swiss Writer, Reformer)

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.
—Sheryl Sandberg (American Executive, Author)

Organization can never be a substitute for initiative and for judgment.
—Louis Brandeis (American Jurist)

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!
—Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) (American Labor Activist)

A belief which does not spring from a conviction in the emotions is no belief at all.
—Evelyn Scott (American Novelist)

We keep going back, stronger, not weaker, because we will not allow rejection to beat us down. It will only strengthen our resolve. To be successful there is no other way.
—Earl G. Graves Sr. (American Entrepreneur, Publisher)

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.
—Gerry Adams (Northern Irish Politician)

Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
—Baruch Spinoza (Dutch Philosopher)

One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home.
—Pam Brown (Australian Poet)

The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination.
—Tommy Lasorda (American Baseball Player, Coach)

Our great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are.
—Alexander Hamilton (American Statesman)

Great control of every motion and placement is a kind of self-care. It’s self-love in the best sense. I make a contract with the dancers (not literally, of course) to keep them alive and well and progressive—doing level best to see that they’re not injured. Dancing is not normal, that only a strong, knowledgeable body can protect against damage.
—Bella Lewitzky (American Choreographer)

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.
—Claude M. Bristol (American Self-Help Author)

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Wondering what to read next?

“It’s not how good you are now; it’s how good you’re going to be that really matters”

Sometimes you can be too close to things to see the truth.

It’s Lonely at the Top

Idea for Impact: Coaching is how people get better at what they do

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Idea for Impact: Each temperament has its own language.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Many companies luck into success.

The set-up-to-fail syndrome.

Corporate culture is a tricky business.

Benchmarks look backward, not forwards.

A strong focus on “quick wins” can turn out long-term losers.

Idea for Impact: Best practices only add value when applied in the proper context

Wondering what to read next?