Have you been executed?
6 months. That is exactly how long I lasted as the VP of Global Engineering at a mid-sized imaging company. I was the 6th head of engineering they had gone through in 3 years, so I suppose I was right on schedule. Being fired was amazingly freeing… once I got far enough from it to see that. It was the bottom… a very good place to build your calendar…
I hope you never hit it… and you won’t. You’re too good for that, which sounds like a compliment… and is also the problem. Nobody is ever going to hand you a blank week and make you decide what goes back in first. You will have to do that on purpose, or not at all.
Alive was more than a song to Pearl Jam…
Mike McCready’s version of this story is better than mine. In the middle of 1994, everything in Mike McCready’s world was coming apart at once. Kurt Cobain had died in April. The summer tour was canceled. The band was in Washington fighting the ticketing company. The drummer was about to be fired. And Mike checked himself into an alcoholism rehabilitation center in Minneapolis in about July of that year.
He was not run out. “I think they actually thought I was going to die, but they never took steps to kick me out of the band, which I can’t believe.” Stone visited him there. The others called. “They called me all the time,” Mike said, “and it was cool because I really needed their support.”
He came back different. When he picked his guitar back up in Pearl Jam, he said, “Once I cleaned up, I couldn’t play for a week and a half. I’d been so used to being screwed up and playing. Now we’ve become a band again, whereas we hadn’t been for a long time.” He told Eddie, plainly, “I want to reestablish the relationship that we had in the beginning.”
That is a man coming back Alive to a team that held his seat. My company had a pattern, and I was the 6th data point in it. Both are ways to run a business. Only 1 of them still has the same guitar player 30 years later.
…and what do you put back first?
“Yellow Ledbetter” is the song Mike came back to. It was never a single. It was an outtake from the first record, Ten, that got tucked onto the B-side of “Jeremy” in 1992, and Mike remembers it as “the second thing Ed and I wrote together.” The words are famously hard to make out … the title is the name of a friend of Eddie’s from Chicago, and Mike has said, “I still don’t know what it’s about and I don’t want to..I love it!” Radio played it anyway. In 1994, the year Mike went away and came back, a song that had never been released as a single reached number 21 on the rock chart on its own.
And it became the closer. Most nights, the last thing a Pearl Jam crowd hears is Mike bending that outro toward Hendrix’s “Little Wing,” a little differently every night. The tone on it is the thing. Warm, silky, unhurried, a guitar player with nowhere else to be. If you want to know what coming back sounds like, it sounds like that.
What should be Alive on your Calendar…
My boss was absent, the kind of absent that shows up in the org chart and nowhere else, and about 5 months in I did the thing you should never do: I confided in the head of HR about it. A few weeks later I walked into a meeting, and my boss was sitting in the room. It was brief. It was what the HR people call an “execution meeting”, which is a phrase I still admire for its honesty. I packed my box and left.
After the box, I had Zero on my plate for the first time in my career. I did not enjoy it. But I did something with it that I have taught to every leader since, and it is the execute practice for this week. I built the week from nothing, in the right order: the Big Rocks first, the things only I could do, then the people that mattered the most, then the rest. I call it the Ideal Work Week. My best boss ever made a joke that is so true: leadership is about being lazy. Your job is to make everyone else productive. You are aiming to end the week with Zero on your plate … on purpose this time, not because somebody handed you a box.
So I hand the leaders I work with Mike’s version: the week and a half where he could not play. That was not lost time. That was the calendar clearing so the real work could come back in the right order. Build the week you would build if you had just been given the box, and then live in it while you still have the job.
So… if they cleared it tomorrow, what would you put back first, and why isn’t it there now?
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: open next week’s calendar. Delete 1 recurring meeting you attend for someone else. Put 1 Big Rock of your own in the hole, first thing, and protect it like it was the show closer.
Rebuilding that week with a leader is the fastest work I do, and it holds. We can build yours… Schedule that here.
The band held the seat, the guitar player came back, and most nights since, the last song has been the one that was never supposed to be a single at all … Yellow Ledbetter.
