Category: personal AnGoL

There are proven ways to reskill your workforce, level up your people and encourage them to continuously learn and evolve. Enter The Home Depot. Yes, that Home Depot. After more than four decades in business, the company has adopted a strategic framework and revitalized culture that promotes and actively encourages learning at all levels of the organization. It’s called the Orange Method. Catchy and on brand, right? During last month’s Cloud Foundry Summit, I had the pleasure of speaking with Anthony Greg

Source: What Home Depot Can Teach DevOps (and Anyone Else) – The New Stack

As for the Navy:

The LCS was the first class of Navy ship that, because of technological change and the high cost of personnel, turned away from specialists in favor of “hybrid sailors” who have the ability to acquire skills rapidly. It was designed to operate with a mere 40 souls on board—one-fifth the number aboard comparably sized “legacy” ships and a far cry from the 350 aboard a World War II destroyer. The small size of the crew means that each sailor must be like the ship itself: a jack of many trades and not, as 240 years of tradition have prescribed, a master of just one.

And:

Minimal manning—and with it, the replacement of specialized workers with problem-solving generalists—isn’t a particularly nautical concept. Indeed, it will sound familiar to anyone in an organization who’s been asked to “do more with less”—which, these days, seems to be just about everyone. Ten years from now, the Deloitte consultant Erica Volini projects, 70 to 90 percent of workers will be in so-called hybrid jobs or superjobs—that is, positions combining tasks once performed by people in two or more traditional roles.

Source: Is the generalist returning? – Marginal REVOLUTION

You can see where this is going. The answer lies, as it so often does, somewhere in the middle, in a balanced approach. It’s absolutely critical to stay open minded, flexible, and to check your ego at the door to reverse your previous opinion if warranted. But at some point, you and the team must lock in and move forward.

Here’s a simple trick I used to use to maintain the right balance. I took an old saying and put a twist on it, sharing it with my team as a mantra: Debate 70: Decide 30: Commit 100.

It means that we first allotted a certain amount of time to decide on something important. We’d spend 70 percent of that time debating differing points of view in a healthy, productive fashion and 30 percent of our time carefully funneling toward a decision. Then, after we’d decided (again allowing for a fair amount of back and forth per Bezos’s point), we 100 percent committed to the decision. Debate. Decide. Commit.

We set very strict rules at that point for what could open up a decision made; it was primarily only new and obvious pivotal data that could do so.

The approach really worked. People felt heard but also felt the herd was moving forward. You can apply this approach too to get the best out of the spirit of what Bezos said.

Source: Jeff Bezos Says This Is the Single Biggest Sign That Someone Is Intelligent (It’s Counterintuitive) | Inc.com

“We are, finally, all wanderers in search of knowledge. Most of us hold the dream of becoming something better than we are, something larger, richer, in some way more important to the world and ourselves. Too often, the way taken is the wrong way, with too much emphasis on what we want to have, rather than what we wish to become.” — Louis L’Amour

https://blog.coleadership.com/self-sacrifice-is-not-how-you-grow-as-a-leader/
Embracing a growth mindset can sometimes be as simple as asking ourselves, “What can I learn from this experience?” Other times, it’s helpful to have a more guided set of questions to help us learn from difficult situations:
What’s holding me back from thriving in these situations? Being honest with ourselves by acknowledging where we are is the first step toward growth. Very often, the biggest obstacles to where we want to be is ourselves, and we need to start by naming any beliefs we hold about ourselves that are getting in the way.
What’s possible if I could handle these types of situations easily? This type of visioning into the future keeps us motivated in the day-to-day. It gives us a destination to work towards.
What has to be true for this discomfort to instead feel easy? Identifying the gap between where are we and where we want to be gives us a path from our starting point to our destination.
What help do I need to ask for? When we realize that sustainable leadership isn’t about self-sacrifice, then we also allow the possibility of others helping us on our journey. Asking for help can be hard — and another area for growth — and effective leaders ask for help.
What can I do to systematically improve my ability to handle these situations? We’re not looking for overnight changes, just how we can be even just 1% better every day — that’s a large part of why I turn my journaling into a daily practice.
Over time, as we keep learning and growing, those 1% improvements compound into differences that look like night and day. And what was once hard and uncomfortable can become easy and normal.

I feel so sad right now. Hay. I miss my kids. I miss my wife.

The reason most people get stuck in mediocrity is because they refuse to fail. The reason people refuse to fail is because they associate failure with defeat. Their fear of defeat paralyzes them to the point that they won’t move forward.

People are not finished when they’re defeated; they’re finished when they quit.

People equate failure with rejection but adversity is required if we want to succeed. We’re conditioned at a young age to be afraid of failure so we tiptoe into the world with the backbone of a wimp.

Source: This is the reason most people get stuck in mediocrity

Why does all of this matter? “A bachelor’s degree is the single most influential determinant in multigenerational change and ending the cycle of poverty,” Catherine Suitor, an administrator at Alliance, a network of Los Angeles high schools, told me. Jasmine Pachnanda, another Alliance administrator, had this to say about high-school graduates: “We need to make sure we are guiding them toward colleges where they are going to be successful.”

I hope you’ll read the piece — or play around with the graphics. And if you have suggestions for future higher education work we should do, we’re all ears. Drop me a line at leonhardt@nytimes.com.

Sum up

Here are the 4 irrational beliefs that cause you a lot of problems:

• “This shouldn’t be happening!”: Do you really expect to always get what you want? No. But if you really believed that you wouldn’t be shouting.
• “I must be perfect.”: Not possible. And it’ll kill you. You can control effort, not outcome. “I will do my best” is rational. “I must be the best” is not.
• “I should worry about this.”: Set a time to worry, to dispute, and to replace. This lets your brain know it doesn’t need to be reminding you 24/7.
• “It’s because of my past.”: If that’s really the case, then you should be in therapy. But your problems are rarely due to dire past traumas, they’re usually due to some outdated, irrational belief you still hold. Get a friend to help you dispute and replace.

Source: Changing these 4 beliefs will make you surprisingly happy

Ezra Klein: 2020 Democrats Need a Power Agenda, Not Just a Policy Agenda: “Concentration of power is the problem, so redistribution of power is the policy…. The Roosevelt Institute’s manifesto-ish new paper, ‘New Rules For The 21st Century: Corporate Power, Public Power, and the Future of the American Economy’…. Concentration of power is the problem, so redistribution of power is the policy…. TThe traditional economic analysis is that growth comes from innovation, innovation comes from competitive markets, and competitive markets come from government getting the hell out of the way. The Roosevelt authors say we’ve gotten that dead wrong. Yes, growth comes from innovation, and innovation comes from competitive markets, but competitive markets—be they economic or political—don’t come from a laissez-faire government. They come from policymakers breaking up concentrations of power, because the last thing power wants is competition…