renew... planting Seeds you will never see grow?There is paint on the kitchen table...There is...
Leadership topic - Blues
The Thrill Is Gone… execute at 4 in the morning?
execute at 4 in the morning?"Your job is to last more than a year""Well. You will be the 5th head...
To Know You Is to Love You… wonder how Seeds are built?
wonder how Seeds are built?I paid 50 bucks for something I could have done myself..."We can't fix...
Lucille… what do you observe?
When Seeds are burning... A vice president stopped at my door...The stereo in my office played...
Riding with the King… partner… before the Seeds show?
partner... before the Seeds show?... barely 5 feet tall with a burr haircut...Walking into debate...
Paying the Cost to Be the Boss… manage what Seeds cost?
manage what Seeds cost?My review came in the mail...I was 19, and I opened my performance review...
Three O’Clock Blues… engage the Seeds someone planted in you?
engage the Seeds someone planted in you?2 men who could not have been less alike...I found out at...
Time to renew your perfecT Team?
Screaming from the back of our Team was the most passionate member of the team. The bad news is that he was from Peru, spoke very little English, so we rarely understood what he was saying. HOW he was saying it was CRYSTAL clear. His energy was contagious as he lectured us on the sideline at halftime, which I delegated that Time to him, and simply observed how he renewed the Team, words not really being needed…
Count on executing perfeCT…
“Johnny try harder!!” One of the shorter members of our team was not able to keep up with the boys as they were becoming young men. His parents were hoping their voices would “help” him to be a more PERFECT player… and I could Count on it making him execute worse. He knew that there was no way to catch these bigger kids, and eventually, he left the team. Having been short my whole life, I understood, but that didn’t make it easy for me…
wonder how to make perfEct Easy?
“Play the Simple Ball”. Standing on a field that cold March morning, it was my admonishment to the young men preparing to play the game they love and qualify for the Finals – if we could win this match. We had jelled well this season, but this last hurdle was to beat our archrival – the wonder of which were mostly our close friends, including the Coach of the other team…
Focus and observe Radical Collaboration with PERFECT
“Could you possibly finish a thought?”. If you know mathematics, you would observe my sentences involve a lot of “open parentheses” – the start of something, and then something else, and then something else. Closing parentheses, which allow thoughts to be processed and considered – those are not easy for me to do. What I look for in teams are people who observe that, and “help me” Focus … and be more PERFECT…
Reframing PERFECT partners
Walking into our Executive’s office that afternoon, we were in big trouble, summoned by our boss to join him – NOW. As we came in, we were scolded that the Safety Engineer had turned us in with a memo. A large computer Terminal was on top of our bookcase – 6 feet in the air – and weighing nearly 60 lbs, had a coax cable wrapped around it that was about to be caught in the door, which could have killed us…
Examine the management of PERFECT
I had reached the point in the day’s interviews to meet with the Senior VP who would potentially be my manager. It was a large company, growing fast, and more than likely, you are reading this from a server that is hosted in their cloud. I asked: “How do you handle mistakes?” His confident reply – “The people we hire do not make mistakes”. I did not take the job…
Pausing to engage PERFECT
“What you are reading is PERFECT!” You know that is Looney Tunes – and if I could get you to read that in my favorite character, Foghorn Leghorn, “It’s a joke son! You missed it!” it would be perfect. Early in life, I ran across many characters like this, and eventually came to be a student of them, adopting some of their best (and worst) mannerisms, including what people say about me all the time: “Often wrong, never in doubt”.