Bunnies & Duracell Batteries

Bunnies & Duracell Batteries

By Ricardo Andorinho

An astrological crisis is installed since it was reported that Ophiuchus would become the 13th zodiacal sign, pushing all the other signs a month forward.

On this side of the planet, this discussion has a lighter weight since until now, nobody has pointed out the existence of a thirteenth animal sign in the Chinese horoscope. Consequently, we are about to leave the ferocious Year of Tiger and enter into the “mild-mannered” Year of the Rabbit.

During this festive season you should expect to see rabbits, bunnies and fluffy tails everywhere you go and, at night time, while you have a drink, you may also watch them on their hutch at Sands Macao.

The rabbit, bunny or hare are similar creatures which essence derives from the Moon. Being the icon of longevity they have been the chosen animal to represent and promote Duracell brand batteries.

As you may recall, the commercial advertisements of Duracell present several pink rabbits and the “Duracell Bunny” also known as the “Energizer Bunny”. This fluffy fellow is powered by a Duracell battery that allows him to win all races or games against his pink rabbit opponents powered by rival batteries. The point of the advertisement is that the bunny powered by a Duracell battery can continue functioning for a longer amount of time before its battery runs down.

However, and since these little creatures also symbolize graciousness, good manners, sound counsel, kindness, and having a huge sensitivity to beauty they have also been selected to be Playboy´s fantasy archetype.

According to the experts in Chinese Astrology, in each and every rabbit individual there is a strong will and a great self-assurance. They believe in their own ability to survive, relying on their judgment, which makes them at peace with themselves.

They might appear slow or over deliberate at times, but this is most likely due to their sense of caution and discretion. They never use harsh words or vulgarisms, which make them having their credentials flawless.

They jump any obstacles that come into their paths and recover from catastrophes with extraordinary resilience. No matter how the rabbit is tossed he always land on its feet and that is probably why in cartoons, Bugs Bunny always gets his carrots!

So, to benefit from this rabbit wisdom here are some tricks to get your carrots:

1. Admit your mistakes and quit trying to cover them up;
2. Stop blaming other people;
3. Return everything you ever borrowed;
4. Give things away to people less fortune than you;
5. Be kind to the unkind people in your life;
6. Wherever you go, always show up on time;
7. Be positive and speak in the positive language;

We strongly believe that in the long run, those small actions will unlock your potential, making you live a happier, bunny kind, inspired and longer life.

Life is nothing more than a daily race or fight. So, please make sure your batteries are Duracell and that you will take the batteries charger everywhere you go…

Pulling a MacGyver

By Ricardo Andorinho

According to the website cracked.com, the Portuguese word ‘desenrascanço’ is one of the ten coolest foreign words the English language needs, and it means “pulling a MacGyver”.

If you have ever seen an episode of the 80s-TV adventure series named MacGyver, you already have a clear picture of what ‘desenrascanço’ is. In this American TV series, we have the opportunity to see how effortlessly MacGyver fishes car keys out of the toilet with a coat hanger, or how rapidly he takes down a helicopter with a fan, a dough-scraper, and some duct tape. In fact, this miracle man seems to be able to handle any kind of situation with just what he has around him and his Swiss army knife.

Generally speaking, ‘desenrascanço’ is the art or ability to, at the last possible minute, strike out a solution to an urgent problem with scarce, or no resources at all. Portuguese people are known to be able to find these kind of last-minute solutions.

So, what do you need to ‘pull a MacGyver’ or, to use the Portuguese term, what do you need to be known as “desenrascado”, someone who has the ability to find solutions to difficult problems at the last minute? In our opinion, you don’t need real weapons, but you certainly need to make use of your mind, your creative imagination and, perhaps… a Swiss army knife.

If ‘Swiss army knife’ plus ‘use of your mind’ plus ‘use of creative imagination’ equals ‘pulling a MacGyver’, and assuming that you have, or you know where to buy a Swiss army knife, and that you use your mind on a regular basis, creative imagination should work as the unknown factor of the equation.

How to be ‘desenrascado’?

Some might say that creativity or creative imagination is an inborn ability usually found in people that use the right side of their brain more.

It is a fact that right-brained people think and learn in visual terms and that they don't memorize well and need to visualize a picture so that they can recall facts. But we tend to disagree that creative ability is exclusive to right-brained individuals, or at least that it is an inborn ability.

Recent medical research proves that neurons can be created at any time and that the human brain can be reprogrammed at any age. Therefore, we believe that you can start to develop your mind and abilities, including your creative imagination, whenever you want to.

But how can we define this ability? Or, more importantly, how can we develop creative imagination?

Creative imagination is the power to envision a future result, to create something in your mind and to solve problems in a synergistic way. Creative imagination enables you to write your personal mission statements, goals, or simply plan a meeting without the conditionings that ground people to think small.

Consequently, this endowment empowers you to pursue your wildest dreams and goals and to fully realize your personal mission, even in the most challenging circumstances.

A word of advice

Since creativity is directly linked to positive thinking, psycho cybernetics, the magic of believing and neurolinguistic programming, we would like to challenge you to exercise your mind according to the so-called “Blue-Sky thinking”. The aim is to imagine that there are no obstacles, that there is nothing clouding your mind or conditioning you to follow a particular dream or goal.

So, visualize yourself as the master of your own destiny, or as someone that was born to be the happiest person on Earth. Then, just write down the things you envision.

As to enhancing creativity in your family or within your organization, here are some tips:

1) Think ahead;

2) Ask “why” and “what if” more often;

3) Value different views from others;

4) Disentangle yourself from your conditionings;

5) Motivate discussion;

6) Suspend judgment: sometimes the most absurd idea is the one that leads you to the most adequate solution or moves you beyond the attainable;

7) Be optimistic;

8) Laugh as it lifts enthusiasm and improves communication and openness;

9) Invest your time and energy until you reach your goal.

If you are a MacGyver enthusiast, or if you just admire the Portuguese people for their ability to be ‘desenrascados’, just follow our tips! With the formidable power of creative imagination and through visualization, you will start to conceive possibilities way beyond your direct experience that will help you reaffirm and realize your goals.

What are you here for?

By Ricardo Andorinho

For centuries, people have been struggling with the purpose of their existence.

Maybe you have wondered, you are wondering, or you will one day in the future, wonder what your purpose in life is, what your true north is, what gives your life meaning or simply what you are here for.

The truth is only some of us are living a life of purpose and these people are easily identifiable.

Just think about a particular person, past or present, who has achieved great things... Now, consider what is behind such accomplishments? Don’t you recognize passion and love as his or her drivers? Once you identify such emotions you will probably find out that they were aroused by a compelling purpose.

Not an easy task

Finding your life meaning is often tougher than it might sound. Chances are that you are always busy with your professional life, that you don't have time to stop and think about what your purpose might be, or actually what you want to do with your life.

So, we are here to ask you now: why do you do it? Why do you have that particular job or activity that takes up most of your time? Is there some part of it that you absolutely live for?

Professionally speaking, are you doing your job because you are passionate about it, or are you doing it because of the money?

If you find something in the job that keeps you coming back, day after day, that is probably your purpose. From there, can you identify your gifts and passions? Can you identify how you can serve others, how you can add value, how you can provide solutions to the problems of others?

Once you are able to discover your gifts and passions, your values and roles will be the way through which you express them; or in other words, how you operate daily will reflect those gifts and passions. That is why people who are living a life of purpose are easily identifiable!

Some guidelines

Here are some tips to assist you in living a life of purpose:

1) Imagine you are at your funeral and ask yourself how you would like to be remembered.

2) Write down how you want your parents, your siblings, your co-workers, your friends, your spouse and children to remember you.

3) List what you consider to be the three or four priorities in your life.

4) List the most important relationships in your life.

5) For each priority and each relationship, write down a purpose statement, your current reality and your goals.

6) Think about how you would like to spend the week if you knew that you only had six months to live.

7) Take action!

Do yourself a favour: unlock your gifts and passions and start living a meaningful life!

Living a life of purpose is being in tune with who you really are. It is a spiritual or mystical experience that everyone should allow him or herself to live.

Busyness kills business!

By Ricardo Andorinho

Assuming that we are complying with the eight hours of sleep that most doctors recommend, we have 16 hours a day to fill in with activities. From the 16 hours we have, eight of them have to be spent at work and, if we are lucky enough, we have eight remaining hours to juggle between our partner, our kids and other family members and friends.

Add value, not chores

It would definitely be easier to restrict the “busyness analysis” to our work functions only, but doesn’t the busyness standard affect all roles we play in life? Can we actually segregate our roles, or do we believe in the holistic and interdependent dimension of human existence?

Everyone must have felt overwhelmed or scared by the five or six roles which each of us needs to perform regularly. But, have you thought that busyness might be one of your biggest enemies? Don’t you believe that busyness kills business?

Busyness means paperwork with the appearance of work but which doesn’t add or deliver value, or in other words, it means urgent but non-important activities with which people fill their days.

So, if a business is being run by busyness standards, it means that the really “important activities” are left behind. Consequently, in the long run, busyness leads to the death of the business and the reasons behind such a fact might be one of the following: a lack of vision, mission, strategic goals or values or, simply a lack of good managers!

But if you want to run away from busyness and substitute it with really important activities, here are some tips:

1. Analyse your routines and write down the activities which you spend your time on;

2. Determine which activities are important and not important in relation to your goals or objectives;

3. Stick to the important activities, and stop wasting time with busyness and trivia or pleasant activities;

4. Among the important activities, start working on the urgent ones doing each one of them until they are done;

5. Set aside some weekly time to deal with the important but non-urgent activities such as self-development, relationship building and envisioning or planning the future;

6. Try to apply this framework to each and every role you play in life (parent, student, employer, employee, etc).

Most to least

There are definitely too many tasks or activities that we need to “tidy up” in each of our twenty-four hour periods. To stay away from busyness, we should be measuring and prioritizing each activity with reference to both its importance and its urgency.

We understand that sometimes it might be difficult to draw the line between urgency and importance, but don’t worry, with practice you should be able to put first things first using as a weighing scale your own vision, mission and goals! By that time, we believe you will start experiencing some quality-of-life results!

No pain, no gain!

Ricardo Andorinho

It works well as an advertising slogan for fitness centres or gyms and is currently seen printed on colourful T-shirts, but the origin of “no pain, no gain” takes us back to the eighteen’s century. Its founding father is Richard Sauders, better known as Benjamin Franklin, a self-made successful editor and publisher, statesmen and diplomat.

He published Poor Richard's Almanac, an immensely popular book filled with clever aphorisms and wise advice such as “There are no pains without gains”. Perhaps some of the book’s quotes were not his, being popular sayings at the time, but he certainly gave them credit and made them instantly recognisable worldwide.

Today, in our opinion, this quote should have assumed the role of a recognised self-management principle.

As we all know, “things” do not fall into your lap. People have to combine dedication, effort, strengths, abilities and capabilities to create, construct, design or give rise to new ideas or concepts, products or services.

If you have already noticed that things do not fall into your lap and you are willing to work towards your goals, keep going. It means you have the right attitude. If you want to win a marathon, you are certainly aware that you need to spend hours every day working out over a considerable period of time. But what if you want to become an exceptional husband or wife, an admirable parent or an excellent professional? You definitely need to work hard as well. You need to believe in yourself and you need to sacrifice! After all, no pain, no gain.

Pain is the key to succeed. Pain does not necessarily have to be physical but it could be if you feel sore because you have been working out to improve your health or to win a marathon.

However, most of the “pain” is psychological. It is the anger or frustration that you commonly feel when you have to work over a weekend to meet a deadline when what would you really wanted was to be with your loved ones.

Don’t be afraid of the pain. Don’t worry, be happy. What does not kill us makes us stronger. Statistically, 96 percent of the things people worry about never happen.

So, do not act as a spoiled brat or a victim of circumstance. You can choose to honour all your contracts; to under commit and over deliver; understand, respect and trust people; and be honest even when it hurts.

Obstacles appear in our lives for two reasons: to make us prove that we really want a particular thing and to keep others that don’t want such thing as bad as we do, away from having it!

Therefore, if you have run into an obstacle that you have not yet learnt to overcome, don’t panic. It is almost certain that your life is not the mess you imagine it is. Running into an obstacle often indicates that you are on the right path to achieve your goal and that success is dead ahead.

Notwithstanding, do not feel surprised if you see people around you changing only if the Pain not to change exceeds the Pain to change. It is a common mistake proper from human beings!

However, don’t let them influence your believe system! If you believe in the principle of no pain, no gain, and if you feel that you need to sacrifice for a particular cause, just do it. Success is on the way.

The Hidden 20 - 40% Of Peformance

Quality of people's relationships

The Hidden 20 - 40% Of Peformance

View more presentations from fourgroups.

Shifting the People Management Worldview

Gary Hamel recently wrote about a survey that found that only 20% of employees are truly engaged in their work — heart and soul and yet he goes on to say that

I talk to a lot of CEOs, and every one professes a commitment to building a “high performance” organization

So why this huge, 80% discrepancy? I think Dan McCarthy get’s pretty close when he talks about helping leaders to ‘connect the dots’, writing that the biggest reason why we can’t seem to see what’s right in front of us is that our own “worldviews”, or “paradigms” obstruct our vision Shifting the People Management Worldview.

Other people have suggested similar things, Julian Birkinshaw at London Business School, Richard Donkin, Umair Haque and Lynda Gratton have all talked about new perspectives on management.

Why the 80% Discrepancy?

In my mind, the 80% discrepancy between what CEO’s say they want and what their employees report is due to the methods and means (i.e. the paradigm) available to help manage people. The methods and approaches that are used to bring out the best in people are very different to those which are used to run everything else in a business.

What do I mean by this? If you look at the history of organisations (Managing Value Based Organsiations by Dr. Bruce Hoag is one very thorough view), you tend to find the following themes emerging;

* The methods and technologies to do things define people’s day job
* These approaches are more useful if they are objective and can scale
* Subjective approaches are rarely as valuable or important
* New approaches only endure if they have advantages over the old ones
* People with P&L responsibility have the greatest power to decide things
* They also gain the greatest recognition from their decisions (if they go well)!

If we look at current examples of new methods and technologies, many suggest improvements for the organisations which choose to apply them. Improving knowledge management, green strategies, engineering influencing design, full body scanners, more powerful computers and improvements in transportation all correspond to the themes above.

How is this Different to how People are Managed and Empowered?

The biggest difference between the examples above and how people are managed and empowered is between;

* Approaches that are objective or subjective
* Approaches that are perceived to be valuable or not
* Approaches that improve P&L or not

If one looks at the myriad of methods and approaches that contribute to the management of people, it is hard to find any that fulfil the three criteria above completely. This is why there is no shortage of information along the lines of;

* Besides the transformation, why are there massive gaps in HR?
* It’s time for new thinking. It’s time to take note of new ideas
* HR = Hardly Relevant
* Critical HR Challenges for 2010
* Are Current Selection Tools up to the Task?

While there are many good things happening in people management and HR, I ultimately believe that right now, practitioner’s own world views remain unchanged. Hence the status quo endures, depsite calls for something different.

While practical, micro-level details may well be expanded upon later, I think the recognition of the different paradigms above might be a starting point, or perhaps a stepping stone on a bigger journey…

In FourGroups

CEO

Why great sport players are good references to teach some management skills?

My short answer is because they are able to integrate a huge amount of variables into performance.

If you go to www.Youtube.com and search for CEO you will get a video of Michael Jordan playing with a group of managers. Here is the video (very funny and useful).

My opinion is that CEO (Chief Executive Officer) should mean Chief Execution Officer in an attempt to Link strategy to operations and therefor to results. Every world class CEO has a pattern that responds towards several aspects that can be isolated. The Key elements I identify over these superformers (Dave Guerra) are:
1- Core Business expertise - the main revenue driver - the activity. The product, the service.
2 - Leadership skills - the ability to drive a team towards a goal.
3 - Communication skills
4 - Great balance between a particular vision and the operation needed to accomplish that vision.
5 - Fast Learners
6 - Luck = hard work

And don't forget. Every move counts!
Goldratt says that every move that doesn't put the company closer to it's goal it's not productive. I agree.

Video

My video conclusions are:
1- Competition is present every day in every activity. Some, are more visible than others.
2- 2 competitors in a market controlled by one player
3- Market risk that Jordan faces challenging John Rogers
4- Preparation is the key for competing in the marketplace. Self-confidence over the skills you mastered should drive to results. Be humble because if you aren't the market will get a competitive advantage. To have results in the long-term you can't stop training your skills, because you will loose efficiency as worker tomorrow.

Your thoughts are welcome!

happy new year
Ricardo Andorinho
MBUintelligence

Leadership, Intangibles & Talent Review Q1 2009

Hi everyone, the financial crisis is still uppermost in people’ s minds and new ideas and insights in HR are slowly emerging, interestingly not always from organisations which one would term the “HR establishment”. If you are interested in a review of the research and commentary into leadership, intangibles and talent during Q1 2009, feel free to have a look at our work at http://www.fourgroups.com/link/?50
Bruce Lewin

A Change of Venue

I have had the opportunity to spend the majority of this week in the desert. I like the desert, I think people either like it or dislike intensely. Few are ambivalent about it.

In a strange kind of a way I see the desert as a metaphor for where we can go next with the economy. Many people think of the desert as an absolute arid wasteland with nothing to offer. I recommend to people that if they are within a hundred miles of Tucson to stop in at the Desert Sonora Museum. They call it a museum, but in some ways it is much closer to a zoo where the flora and fauna of the region are viewable in their native habitat. I can tell you that the variety of flora and fauna will astound you.

Similarly I look at places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs that were "carved" out of the desert. Where some saw nothing but sagebrush and cactus others saw opportunity. I am not promoting the "instant community just add water" model, but these areas until recently experienced enormous growth.

As I was reading the newspaper this morning two stories also particularly struck me. The first story was where a team of surgeons removed six major organs from a seven year old girl in order to remove a baseball sized tumor, they then replaced many of her organs. I see this as an example of American health care at its best.

The other story was about some business owners who took a stand to "pay it forward"

• A pharmacist who split $16,000 among his 24 employees. He asked each of them to donate 15% to their favorite charity and spend the rest in local businesses to stimulate the economy.
• A florist who surprises 1 to 3 random customers per week with a free bouquet to brighten their day.
• A CEO of a small business who offers each employee $2000 towards the purchase of a new car or $1000 towards the purchase of a used car. The car dealers in his community are among his customers so he is trying to help them stimulate sales.
• A city councilman in California started a prom dress drive for young women who can't afford a gown. Local businesses joined the effort donating dry cleaning and free hair styling, and the local Elks Club is collecting shoes.

What is interesting here is that in each case these are small businesses. This is an example of personal competency and responsibility. These people didn't receive a bail out. They also aren't "turtling", they decided to take a personal stand.

I have said before that maybe the current economic situation will cause us to stop, pause, and reevaluate. There is plenty of "contributory negligence" to share with how we got where we are. As you know I am a huge believer that the answer is people, and I think some of these stories make my case.

For today anyway the market is up and all the news isn't negative.

Mark Herbert

MBUintelligence countdown

Dear friends,

MBUintellenge web site is already structured in his spanish version. In January the english version will be available.
Thanks for your help and support. During the next week you can visit www.mbuintelligence.com

Best regards,
Ricardo

The Tension in Collaboration

Hi everyone,

I've put a post up on the Four Groups blog called The Tension in Collaboration. Rather than post the whole text in here, I've just added the summary...

There is a tension at the heart of our efforts to collaborate. This tension and its possible resolution is best captured by the following questions.

• Should we be putting people first, before technology, in our efforts to collaborate?
• Does collaboration benefit from a more formal process?
• Can collaboration be encouraged in a replicable and systematic manner (as much as anything concerning people can be repeatable and systematic)?
• Does the lack of a formal process for optimising collaboration hold back productivity and performance?

This article attempts to answer these questions and shine new light on what constitutes successful collaboration.