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Jun
30
South Africa, Here We Come
Filed Under Abare News | 1 Comment
Jamaica and I have been saving up airline miles for several years so that we can get to South Africa. We love to travel and Africa has been on our list from day one. It helps that we have a few friends over there who can show us around and that this summer is our last hurrah before Jamaica starts law school.
So today, we’re taking off from Los Angeles and making the 21-hour journey to Johannesburg. We’ll be in Joburg for a few days and then fly to Port Elizabeth for a one-of-a-kind arts festival in Grahamstown. From there, we’ll do a road trip along the southern coast through wine country and then spend several days in beautiful Cape Town. We’ll finish our two-week escape with a safari in Kruger National Park where we’ll spend three days looking for the big five.
For the past few months we’ve been immersing ourselves in the amazing story of South Africa. In addition to reading books, blogs and biographies, we watched several great movies, including Yesterday, Amandla! and my favorite, Tsotsi.
South Africa, here we come!
Jun
25
I Love Magazines
Filed Under Media, Stuff I Like | Leave a Comment
Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve had a peculiar interest in the magazine publishing industry. I remember taking advantage of free subscription offers before I would cancel after the trial period to avoid incurring bills at such a young age.
I was 15 when I started selling advertising for a niche magazine and by 16 I wrote my first business plan for a student magazine. It would launch a year later and continue until I was 20.
I’ve continued to love magazines and I subscribe to at least 20, including Fast Company, Time, Fortune, Christianity Today and Adbusters. I’ve seen many come and go over the years (George, Life and Portfolio have been missed) and many more struggle their way through tough times (Paste and Relevant are recent examples).
One of the trends I’ve noticed lately is the idea of having a celebrity editor. A magazine will turn an entire issue over to a “guest editor” and infuse their personality into a particular issue. Wired teamed with mister mystery man J.J. Abrams and Newsweek teamed with satirical news host Stephen Colbert in what was a hilariously historical moment.
It’s an obvious and admittedly planned publicity stunt intended to sell more copies on the newsstand. I kind of like the idea.
Tip: I read the majority of my magazines when I’m on the dreadmill (er, I mean, treadmill) at the gym.
I love magazines!
Jun
22
Kevin Kelly helped to launch Wired magazine back in 1993 and served as its executive editor until 1999. His blog gets a million visitors a month. The guy is super smart.
I’ve had the opportunity to be with him a couple times. This past May he and I served on a planning team for a nonprofit we’re both very fond of. In addition to talking about an article he had just submitted to Wired (see below), Kevin spent an hour talking to me about his forthcoming book. He says the book will make a moral case for why we need to create and use more technology, not less. That should be interesting!
His latest article in Wired makes another bold argument, this time about a “new socialism” of sorts. The rise of open source, crowd sourced social networks, “suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.”
We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.
Kelly continues…
Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.
“We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds,” he says. “Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective?”
Jun
17
How the Mighty Fall
Filed Under Inspiration, Leadership | Leave a Comment
“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” — Dick Clark, former CEO at Merck
Jim Collins initially thought that How the Mighty Fall was a simple magazine article. An opportunity to rest his mind from six years of research working on his next book following Good to Great. I’m glad he didn’t try to fit this interim book into an article! However, if you’re looking for an article excerpt, Business Week did a decent job.
I love the way Jim Collins organizes information. His well-researched principles are so palatable and practical, mostly because he lets the story stay at the steering wheel. How the Mighty Fall is a darker book of sorts, spending the majority of its pages studying the five stages of decline, outlined here.
Stage 1: Hubris born of success
- Success entitlement, arrogance
- Neglect of a primary flywheel
- “What” replaces “why”
- Decline in learning orientation
- Discounting the role of luck
Stage 2: Undisciplined pursuit of more
- Unsustainable quest for growth, confusing big with great
- Undisciplined continuous leaps
- Declining proportion of right people in key seats
- Easy cash erodes cost discipline
- Bureaucracy subverts discipline
- Problematic succession of power
- PErsonal interests placed above organizational interests
Stage 3: Denial of risk and peril
- Amplify the positive, discount the negative
- Big bets and bold goals without empirical validation
- Incurring huge downside risk based on ambiguous data
- Erosion of healthy team dynamics
- Externalizing blame
- Obsessive reorganizations
Stage 4: Grasping for salvation
- A series of silver bullets
- Grasping for a leader-as-savior
- Panic and haste
- Radical change and “revolution” with fanfare
- Hype preceded results
- Initial upswing followed by disappointments
Stage 5: Capitulation to irrelevance or death
Whenever I read Collins’ stuff, I am always drawn to his repeated admonishment to stay true to your core values and principles.
“Discontinuous leaps into arenas for which you have no burning passion is undisciplined. Taking action inconsistent with your core values is undisciplined. Launching headlong into activities that do not fit with your economic or resource engine is undisciplined. To neglect your core business while you leap after exciting new adventures is undisciplined.”
“If you’re struggling with the tension between continuing your commitment to what made you successful and living in fear about what comes next,” says Collins, “ask yourself two questions:”
1. Does your primary flywheel face inevitable demise within the next five to ten years due to forces outside your control—will it become impossible for it to remain best in the world with a robust economic engine?
2. Have you lost passion for your primary flywheel?
“The #1 ingredient for a culture of discipline,” says Collins, “depends first and foremost upon having self-managed and self-motivated people.”
“The best leaders we’ve studied had a peculiar genius for seeing themselves as not all that important, recognizing the need to build an executive team and to craft a culture based on core values that do not depend upon a single heroic leader.”
“Reorganizations and restructurings can create a false sense that you’re actually doing something productive.”
At the conclusion of How the Mighty Fall, Collins channels the spirit of Winston Churchill and his famous “never give in” commencement speech from 1941. “We all need beacons of light as we struggle with the inevitable setbacks of life and work,” says Collins. “For me, that light has often come from studying [Churchill].”
Never give in. Be willing to change tactics, but never give up your core purpose. Be willing to kill failed business ideas, even to shutter big operations you’ve been in for a long time, but never give up on the idea of building a great company. Be willing to evolve into an entirely different portfolio of activities, even to the point of zero overlap with what you do today, but never give up on the principles that define your culture. Be willing to embrace the inevitability of creative destruction, but never give up on the discipline to create your own future. Be willing to embrace loss, to endure pain, to temporarily lose freedoms, but never give up faith in the ability to prevail. Be willing to form alliances with former adversaries, to accept necessary compromise, but never—ever—give up your core values.
Jun
11
Henri Nouwen on Leadership
Filed Under God, Faith & Spirituality, Leadership | 1 Comment
After nearly 20 years of teaching, including stints at Notre Dame, Yale and Harvard, Henri Nouwen moved to Toronto, Canada to live the rest of his life with mentally handicapped people at the L’Arche community. He moved “from the best and the brightest, wanting to rule the world, to men and women who had few or no words and were considered, at best, marginal to the needs [of] society.”
Upon moving to the L’Arche community, Nouwen would later say that “their liking or disliking me had absolutely nothing to do with any of the many useful things I had done until then.” “I was suddenly faced with my naked self, open for affirmations and rejections, hugs and punches, smiles and tears, all dependent simply on how I was perceived at the moment.”
In one of his most widely read books, In the Name of Jesus, Nouwen shares his thoughts on Christian leadership from a talk he gave in Washington, D.C. during the fifteenth anniversary of the Center for Human Development.
Nouwen begins this short book with three assumptions he had about leadership. A desire to be relevant, a desire for popularity and a desire for power was his prescription for leadership.
Nouwen came to understand that these three things were actually temptations. Instead, our approach to leadership should be a direct response to the question Jesus asks all of us: “Do you love me?”
Jesus sends us out to be shepherds, and Jesus promises a life in which we increasingly have to stretch out our hands and be led to places where we would rather not go. He asks us to move from a concern for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people.
The “Christian leader of the next century,” says Nouwen, “is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross.”
“Power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God.”
“Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broken my leg.”
“When [Christian leaders] live their ministry mostly in their heads and relate to the Gospel as a set of valuable ideas to be announced, the body quickly takes revenge by screaming loudly for affection and intimacy.”
Nouwen begins and ends the book with a very moving story about Bill Van Buren, one of the mentally handicapped people he lived with at L’Arche. Bill and Henri traveled together on this trip to D.C., which is the backdrop for the whole speech/book. The experience they shared together is powerful. I’ll let you discover it for yourself.
Jun
8
What Am I Afraid Of?
Filed Under Life's Journey | Leave a Comment
“The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything.” —Charles de Foucauld
I’ve been thinking about fear lately. What am I really afraid of? A plane crash? Losing my job or a client? Getting old? The economy? My wife leaving me? Being wrongfully accused of a crime I did not commit? The list could go on about all the things we have feared, do fear or could fear.
Tim Ferriss did a TED Talk at the EG Conference a few years ago about smashing our fears. Ferriss said that sometimes fear shows you what you shouldn’t do, but more often than not, fear shows you what you should do.
A couple months ago I started writing down a list of the things I fear. The things that keep me up at night or worried about. As I worked my way down the list, I started framing my fears as a call to action. Instead of letting fears become obstacles, I’m attempting to use them as launching points.
Forgive me if this post sounds a little Tony Robbins-ish or like a Successories poster.
Speaking of things that scare me…