WIZE TIME MANAGEMENT

So . . . you’ve got an idea – fantastic!

Maybe or maybe not . . . it depends.

The Gift of Great Ideas

Ideas have given us the wheel, steam engines, televisions, telephones and trips to space – you’d think that having an idea is terrific!

And we do applaud the great inventors of the world, and we shower great praise on some people who have come up with some people in our “entourage” too!

The Danger of Having a Great Idea

However, be careful . . . not everyone may like it when you present a great idea – that’s right – they won’t.  As surprising as that might seem, many, many people have experienced the wrath of those who feel “threatened” by a new and better idea in their workplaces or your homes.  Danger!  Danger!  Danger!

If someone feels threatened by your fabulous creative mind, at the least, they’ll laugh at you or try to discredit you and your idea right there and then.   Remember what happened when it was suggested the earth was round instead of flat?

The more dangerous are the “subversives” – those people who seem to welcome your new idea but who plot and scheme to make your life miserable or get rid of you.

Why?  Because they somehow interpret the presentation of your great idea as a personal attack on them and see it as something which makes them look bad.  Looking bad for some people is worse than death itself!  Their insecurities simply cannot afford to applaud the gifts of others.

One of the greatest landmine locales exists in the workplace where you never really know who is for or against you. People smile, go for a drink after work and are even pleasant to all around them.  But which ones are wearing the “smiling mask” and which ones have a “genuine smile” – you can’t tell.  The phony mask people expect others to support them and compliment them but when the praise and adulation goes to someone else, they are incensed – quietly and lethally!  They will do all they can to sabotage your work and your status in the organization – slowly but surely.

What To Do?

So what do you do with your great ideas?  Keep them to yourself until you have made a thorough assessment of who is who in your workplace, how they react to others introducing ideas, and who can receive ideas well with the power to act upon them.  It’s not always obvious.  In other words, you really, really have to get to know people you work with very, very well = what lurks in their hearts and souls!

Yes, it seems odd, doesn’t it?  A lot of management books talk about how ideas are critical to business and how ideas power the enterprise.  In real life, however, it’s much different.  And you’d think that the non-profit or government would be the safest place of all to present great ideas – you’d be dead wrong!  There is no safe place.

Your Alternatives

a)  Observe and learn all you can about the “players” in your company.  Slowly, develop relationships with people whom you have identified as possible supporters with the power to move forward with ideas.  Carefully craft a plan on how you will introduce your ideas and how you will benefit from them.

a)  Research and connect with people in other companies until you find an environment which is open to ideas and the development of those ideas.  Once you find such an enterprise, secure a job.  However, you’ll have to do the same – learn the politics of the workplace.

c)  Take your ideas, write them down and develop them on your own while you are still employed.  Today, there are many outlets for doing precisely that on the internet.  You’ll benefit personally from all your “intellectual property” and offend no one because no one needs to know.  Imagine an idea of yours creating a second income for you or possibly setting you on a better financial footing!

You don’t believe me?  Take a look at the info commercials or go to your county fair in the marketplace section where people are selling incredible new products outside the mainstream.  You won’t find the big corporations there but you’ll find innovation.

At our fair this year, I saw something quite common and yet someone “packaged” it differently — a one-person operation displaying the ingenuity of a single idea.  There he was standing in his booth and his product was flying off his stand.  What was it?  A bird house – that’s right a bird house.  He had pre-cut the pieces to making 3 styles of birdhouses.  People selected the style they wanted and inside the plain plastic bag were the pieces, the instructions, the hanger and the nails.  All people needed was something to pound the nails in – and . . . voila! a birdhouse for their backyard or local park – ready to go!  They were made of cedar wood which would withstand all weather conditions and the birdhouses could even be painted.  A simple idea.  Imagine presenting that to a big corporation.  This man made a lot of money – he was at his stand for 2 weeks with masses of people passing by and buying.

What could you do with your idea?  Write an ebook?  Create a product?  Create a workshop?

Yes, there is danger in expressing ideas and there can also be vast rewards if you are protective and cautious about protecting your ideas and possibly turning them into a money-making enterprise outside the workplace.

What will you do with your idea?

Lorraine Arams

http://www.wizetime.com

Is it time to change fundamentally?  How do you know when that might be?  Should you effect change now or not?  Why are you changing?  What will the costs in time, money and energy?

When life goes sideways, we think we need to make a change.  Often, we have no idea what change we should make or how to go about making that change but we think fundamental change is the answer.  How do we know?

Solution?  Clarify and Understand. 

What’s the problem exactly?  Once the problem is clearly stated, preferably on “paper”, it is time to search.  Clarity leads to focus.  And hopefully, it also leads to open minds using eyes and ears to support an open mind.  And here’s a trick to clarify:

in 60 words or less describe the problem – not more than 60 words – if you can explain an issue in 60 words or less, you understand it and it will be crystal clear what the issue is

Does anything fundamental need to change or is it just a matter of finding a new approach?  Answers don’t always mean change; sometimes, it just means applying what you know in a different way but that’s not the same as change. For example, if you look at sports.  The game is the same.  The rules are the same.  But a new technique of accomplishing the same thing – one hand basketball shot as opposed to a two-handed approach to score – does not fundamentally change the game of basketball – it just adds another method by which a player scores.  The goal is to score and win.

Here is an example of change.  Coca Cola wanted to solve a problem.  What was the problem in the first place – did they know? 

They chose change.  So they brought in a new coke.  It bombed.  Coke lovers around the world wanted their “Classic Coke”, not the “New Coke”.  Obviously, the coke formula was not the problem – they still had plenty of people who drank Coke in the first place.

A fundamental change was not necessary.  

What were they trying to achieve?  Greater market share?  Adding to their line of products?  Retiring old products?  There were many other ways Coke could have achieved what they wanted without changing the fundamental formula of their product – more creative promotional ideas, maybe a new way of  communicating with the marketplace or hundreds of other “answers” as opposed to “change”.  It cost Coke plenty in so many ways to make an unnecessary change.

Fundamental change, therefore, is often unnecessary.  Stats and strategic planning and analysis and . . . . . all the other paraphernalia taught in high-priced universities and colleges cannot replace the ability to achieve clarity based on experience,  imagination and teamwork (education is a place to start, not a set pattern of making the right decisions).

There was someone in the Coca Cola company who was saying it was a bad idea to change fundamentally (there always is), but none of the decision-makers chose to listen to any argument against their “idea” - often that is the case. 

So, when there is a problem to solve:

•  clarify the problem – know exactly what is to be resolved - it’ll save you a lot of money, energy and time in the long run
• listen to all ideas - you never know who will be offering the best one
• make the atmosphere safe to present contradicting opinions and consider every person’s opinion at all levels of the organization as a valid point of view – the one opinion disliked the most could be the key to resolving the issue – there is wisdom in every corner of an organization 
• keep asking the most important questions of all:  Is fundamental change really necessary or is there something else we should be thinking about?

Lorraine Arams
http://www.wizetime.com

DO – stop talking about it! Just get the job done!

How many times does Tom Peters have to say it? 

Are managers hard of hearing?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UyvJgOCS1w[/youtube]

I was amazed to see a video on YouTube with Tom Peters still preaching the same message, ‘Don’t talk about it – do it’.  And here we are decades later after Tom Peters first started delivering that message still on the same track of the same record!  What is it about managers who have learned that meetings are the be all and end all?  How is that efficient?  How is it cost effective?  Where are the economics?

In the health industry, it was meetings from morning til night.  I was drained.  I had never ever been in an environment with so many meetings to accomplish so little.  And yet people continued to meet day after day, week after week.  What a waste of valuable time and what a waste of the taxpayers’ money!   Yes, of course it is necessary to have some meetings but meetings on purpose for information, to address a problem, to find a solution or whatever but . . . there is no necessity to be in meetings day in and day out.  When does the managing part of the management job get done?  Yes, I know, that’s the hard part!

Imagine how much it costs to have a boardroom full of managers sitting around meeting and accomplishing nothing except scheduling more meetings – the cost is astronomical!  It was a habit in the health industry as it was in government and big corporations  - nothing more.  They truly believed that’s “how business is conducted”!  Of course, there’s a status symbol attached to it too – if you’re in meetings all day, you must be important!  Not.   

Let’s simplify this notion: 

Imagine if a farmer said to his/her family, “It’s time to plant the seeds but let’s talk about it first”.  Because of the numerous meetings, the seeds are planted late or not at all.  Where do you think we would get our food from?  Absurd to think about it, isn’t it because we expect the farmer to know his/her business, get the crop planted on time for maturity during the growing season.  Yet, we accept the notion of late planting or not planting at all in boardrooms – odd, isn’t it?

You don’t have to believe me – there’s a guru who knows the subject much better than I could ever.  I believed in what Tom Peters had to say when I first read his books.   I believe that, today, more than ever, his message must sink in especially in North America where we have seen a lot of shenanigans at the top but little in the way of productivity – a few getting extremely wealthy while thousands are losing their jobs!   Could you expect anything else when people are meeting just to meet – eventually, like little kids in an unsupervised classroom, they’ll eventually get into trouble out of sheer boredom – much more exciting to plot than to actually do work! 

Go, Tom Peters, go!  One day the message will get through . . . . we hope!

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