Music is the cornerstone of my work now. U2 was formed by people who were, like me, actually not great musicians. Larry played the drums “wrong” and The Edge was at best a rhythm guitar player when they started, to say nothing of Adam who only learned the Bass because they needed one. Even Bono wasn’t that sure of his own voice – both writing and singing. Can we learn something about partners and Cleaning Up – only from the music?
I didn’t even bring blank paper with me. Thinking about leaving behind the only reality I had known as a working manager for nearly 40 years, I knew I needed to get some clarity. Offsites were by now second nature, mostly done poorly, and frankly one of the things I found myself Cleaning Up for other teams. And here I was sitting in our recently purchased Mountain House, a little dizzy from the altitude, and more from what the heck was I thinking?
Happy Boxing Day! Sorta Christmas Lite for the poor and the working-class across the British Empire, it is now a holiday that has turned into something much more American – a huge post-Christmas Sale 😉 So In both contexts, it is bringing home “boxes” of goodies that you may not have gotten last week. One year this week between Christmas and New Year’s, our hot water heater went out, requiring us to Clean Up the whole back basement area … and sparked another way to think about Boxing…
My early church experience includes another basic Belief that many find somewhat hard to believe: Fun. For example, on New Year Eve we would always have a party – at the Church. We would have dinner together late as Church family, watch a cheesy family movie (16 mm projected…), and then at Midnight, an old man would walk through the door one way, and another man+ would come back – dressed up as a baby 😉 A bad visual, but characteristic of that group of people that formed my Belief that Fun is needed to renew us…
Before your day gets off to a roaring start of execution, let me say Merry Christmas!! Filled with lots of traditions that come from Beliefs modeled around you, hopefully, yours are as fun as mine are. Our home had a completely separate living room that was divided from the house with a solid sliding door. Thus access was “limited” until we had gotten completely dressed, had a full breakfast, and then Dad would go in and prepare for our entry – with his light bar of Four Thousand watts…
“You are really odd!”. That was the greeting from a fellow coach standing outside of the conference room at Darden Business School. You might think that was a bit harsh, but the wonder is that is a compliment to me. Literally raised to be “different” for as long as I can remember, it is ironic that now I am known as a great connector of people and friends. And the real wonder is that without the early Church’s most radical stance, you wouldn’t be reading this…
Looking back, it is no wonder I have such different Beliefs. Having moved to Tyler in my teen years, we again found a Church home that had a lot of things going on. The big “downtown” church had a gym/roller rink, a large almost Cathedral building, and a very active Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) group. Mirroring The College Kids we have been discussing, Sunday evenings were started with Vespers, and then dinner and fellowship, with some light lessons to think about. And in the mid 70’s they decided to offer Sex Education – at church…
Integral to forming and managing my Beliefs was sailing together with The College Kids. Dad’s engineering background, of course, brought him to sailing – one of the most technically challenging sports around, and yet, also the most simple. Can you as a Team organize yourselves and the boat to take advantage of the wind and events to be first across the line. Simple – not easy, as with most discussions of Beliefs. The model we use to talk about it is also from sailing – an Iceberg…
Born only a few years after the Staple Singers started, my home was a constant hub of activity from our Church. I have never asked why, but my parents managed the College Kids group at First United Methodist Church of Richardson, Texas. So many of my basic Beliefs came from this season, it is hard to even remember where things started. Certainly, I have always thought of Church as a fun place – we had big parties both at the house and at Church, and as my Dad would always add, without the need of alcohol to have fun 😉
“What do you Believe?” It was a very direct question, from a very direct woman. My wife’s “great aunt” asked me … just as we were leaving from her small apartment. I had been helping her write her memoirs, which turned out to be much more coaching than either of us had anticipated. As she would tell her stories, I would simply listen and try to write as fast I could to record these stories that were amazing, raw, and very engaging. And a question that you should always be ready to engage – actually, what DO you Believe?
Faith, fundamentally, is belief in something you can’t see, but you know is there. As the results of Project One spiraled out over the last year I was there, I knew that it was time to take a leap of faith into something that I had never really contemplated. The dream of owning my own business was never a thing, and yet, that was what was on the horizon. If I really believed in what I was seeing both as a need and my talent, I had to act. On Faith, or In Faith but either way, how?
Through daily iterations of a spreadsheet of 1765 engineers around the globe, we were as ready as we could be to launch Project One on January 1. If someone ever suggests you do a massive corporate reorg at the first of the year, just say the sentence that I work with leaders on the most. A complete sentence that, as they say in Charades: 1 word, 2 letters. “No”. I would love to tell you we were confident this would be executed well, but honestly, we were really never sure what the real objective was in the first place, so we would hit something…
Arriving on a late afternoon flight to Mountain View, we had to save our energy for the return flight… in only 5 hours. The Red Eye home was required to keep a meeting with a key customer that could not be moved. And we wondered and worried about this meeting, mysteriously called with only 24 hours’ notice, mandatory, and with an attendee list that was not clear. Luckily the business leader I was scheduled to meet in that customer meeting was on the flight out and back… so we would be in whatever this was together. And that made all the difference…
Engineers LOVE problems. Nothing can bring us more joy than a big, complicated problem, with lots of loose ends. And, soon you observe that business people do not like problems. Not in the least – not big ones, not small ones, nothing that resembles them. They like things to run smoothly, with smiles all around. And having just come from a season of EVERYTHING was a problem, which even the business people were in agreement with, I was stepping into a completely different world and observed…