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Illusions in the Workplace 1

Lately, I’ve been reading the book Communion with God by Neal Donald Walsch.

The author talks about the usefulness of illusions — 10 in all — that are part and parcel of the human experience. The illusions are actually meant for us to re-experience who we really are and who God really is, and life is about working through them and arriving back at where we started, i.e. the Truth. However, once we’ve come back home to the truth, we return with a new experience, which actually adds to what God knows of himself.

This is a powerful, grand concept.

Perhaps that same concept can be expanded to include the workplace, and that there are illusions that we maintain in the working world that are useful, but only to a point.

The First Illusion I’d like to explore is that of competition.

It is an illusion to think that out and out war exists between companies. In fact, there is far more cooperation than there is competition.

We are taught that business is about the survival of the fittest, and that companies are fighting with each other to survive, and that their focus should be on the destruction of their competitors.

Let’s look at some examples of what also seems like competition, but it actually a carefully crafted case of cooperation.

Athletic Competition

In sports such as boxing and track and field, at one levels it’s all about the competition between the competitors. Obviously, one person is out to “beat” the others.).)

Yet, in order to have a competition, until the boxers step into the ring, or the athletes step onto the track they must cooperate in order to allow the competition to proceed. They must show up at the same time and the same place. They must allow each other to train, and to do so with the best resources possible. They must follow the rules, even the seemingly meaningless ones. They better they are at getting people interested in the competition, the more tickets will be sold to the event.

In other words, they must cooperate to assist the other athletes in showing up as prepared as they can be to engage in the competition. Why?

To put it simply, a boxer needs an opponent. He or she cannot show up for the fight and claim victory when their opponent either fails to show or does so in poor condition.

Also, in the case of the athlete, he or she needs top class competition in order to do well, and to break records. Even if the athlete is good enough to break records on his/her own, no-one would show up to see them compete with themselves, and that would be the death of that sport.

Clearly, the destruction of one’s opponents is not in the best interest of an athlete, which is why competition only makes sense against a background of broad cooperation.

The same is true for corporations that compete in business.

Monopolies, or companies that have the least competition, are probably the most inefficient companies. They are despised the most by their customers (witness TSTT in Trinidad and other Cable and Wireless companies across the Caribbean, before the advent of competition in the cellular market). Their employees (anecdotally) appear to be the least motivated (after all, if you don’t like it here, then “tough luck” to you).

The demise of one’s competitors, or absence of the same is simply bad for business and leads to a propensity to fool oneself (no-one at Cable and Wireless believed that a competitor with no history in the Caribbean would gain 60% market-share in 3 years in the way the Digicel has).

It is much wiser to have competitors, and to foster their entry into markets, and to hope that they prosper. When there is broad cooperation, everyone can win, and do so at a much increased level.

In the airline business, it is an article of faith that one should never advertise one’s safety record or compare it against one’s competitors. Why so? The reason is that reminding the flying public that fling carries with it some risks, is a sure recipe to reduce overall flying, which would reduce the profitability of each airline.

Airlines, therefore, must cooperate in what they use in their advertising (even while not appearing to do so).

This is not to say that competition is not a useful illusion. It’s very useful when trying to serve customers better than the shop down the street. It’s useful in coming up with new ideas and product innovations. It’s also quite useful when it comes to treating stockholders and employees well — in some countries, awards are given to companies that are able to create extraordinary work cultures.

But executives need to understand that competition is actually an illusion, which exists to teach us an important lesson — there is much more to be gained from broad cooperation, and competitive impulses are only useful when everyone can remember this bigger truth.

An acquaintance of mine is an “ultra-competitor”. When she plays any board game, she plays to win, and if she loses she is prone to throwing nothing short of 4-year old tantrums (including cursing, stamping feet, throwing game pieces, etc.) The net result of this behavior is that no-one wants to play with her… She doesn’t get that competition is just an illusion, and that the real enjoyment comes from elsewhere.

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Adjusting for Caribbean Companies

I woke up this morning to read the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review. This particular issue caught my attention as it is focusing on “The Human Element.”

The articles were quite interesting, and there were a few that caught my attention as they echoed to some degree my own experience. At the same time, I could see where further work was required to make the basic idea work in a Caribbean context.

For example, one article spoke about the need to build social networks in the workplace, and how important they are to getting work done. While I can see how this is truly a revolutionary idea in the U.S., given its culture, I know that this idea would seem obvious to managers and employees in Caribbean companies. If anything, this is something that workers in the Caribbean who move to the US often complain about.

By comparison, the US workplace seems cold, dry and distant. In other words, the social networks are not valued or even acknowledged to be important.

In the Caribbean, one might argue that they are TOO important, and that not enough emphasis is placed on working hard to produce results (and there is some validity to that.)

These differences are important, and there just has not been enough research or original thinking in what it takes to make the Caribbean workplace function at a high level. My hope is that this blog and other fora can make a positive contribution in this regard.

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Today is my wedding day

Today is My Wedding Day

I’m back in my room at the Runaway Bay Heart Hotel in Runaway Bay, Jamaica. My new wife is sleeping off four months of hard work that culminated today in a wedding that was simply one of the highlights of my life, and the best wedding I’ve ever been to!

I could go and on about the things that went well, and how easy it seemed to go. Sure, there were a lot of people who worked very hard to make the event a success, but that is true for every wedding that I’ve been to. We had nothing too spectacular in terms of entertainment, food, music, dress or any of the other things that go together to make up a good wedding.

I clearly had something to do with the people that were there.

In the past, I would say that the people that came just happened to “click.” We got lucky to have the right combination in the same place at the same time. But this time, I know that that’s not true.

In this case, my wife and I created something that was different for us – an explicitly, worded “Outcome.”

Now this is probably not news to anyone reading this – after all, aphorisms like Covey’s “Begin with the End in Mind” have been repeated forever, and he certainly was not the first to give voice to that piece of wisdom. I have given this advice to many, in fact, in coaching situations.

Yet, I learned a lot from doing it myself, with my then fiancée. This Outcome struck such a chord, and felt so important that it seemed as if it were worthy of …. not protection per se….. but something like caring nurturing.

Once the Outcome was designed and we started acting on it we found that it was much easier to take some of the following actions, which were essential to having the day turn out the way it did. (At the same time, we used a word that comes from some things I learned about right-brained thinking – “space.”)

To create the space we wanted we ended up:

Deciding on who to invite based solely on the Outcome (which lead to the wedding being very small in numbers)

  1. Finding vows that fit the Outcome
  2. Creating a practice of reading the Outcome together periodically
  3. Sharing the wording of the Outcome with a few trusted advisors and friends
  4. Choosing music, the musician, the hotel, the setting of the wedding, the dress, the minister…. All of it.

This helped us to keep things focused on what we wanted, when there were many competing points of view from friends, family, traditions, cultural norms, personal whims and fancies at the moment…. It required discipline to keep this particular infant (our Outcome) alive, when things were going crazy!

And, it all turned out beautifully – to be immodest! We heard the words of our Outcome used by our guests to describe what they felt about the day, without our giving it to them, which confirmed for us that we had done what we had set out to do.

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Gaps, Savannahs and Pens

Things that make you go hmmmm…..

Only recently, driving in Jamaica with my fiancee, she asked me about all the different “Pens” that we have in Jamaica.

You know… Tinson Pen, Faith’s Pen, May Pen, Androus’ Pen, Comma Pen, etc. She asked me what a “pen” is, and I told her that it used to be a place where they would pen up animals for sale. We have lots of them in Jamaica… and nowhere else that I can find.

Then, I was in Bim (Barbados) last week and heard of yet another “Gap”. Now, we have a gap or two here and there in Jamaica (e.g. Hardware Gap near Hollywell), but not as many as they have in B’dos, and we don’t have our Gaps in town, only someplace in the hills. They have the famous St. Lawrence Gap, Pickwick Gap, Alleyne School Gap, Gowdy Gap, South Gap, Carter’s Gap, et al..

It might surprise a Bajan to learn that we, in Jamaica, have only one or two “gaps” that we all know about. They’d probably think that we have a hard time getting around without the assistance of “gaps.”

In Trinidad the other day, my fiancee and I were liming with her father and his wife, and they pointed out a piece of what we in Jamaica call “open land,” but they referred to as “The Savannah.”

Now, this was no Queen’s Park Savannah. It looked like a piece of bush to my untrained eye. They explained that the developer of the area had carefully set aside the land to be a savannah for the neighbourhood — a purposely created piece of green, open space created for the enjoyment of the residents. They used to play cricket and football there, take walks, pick fruits from the trees, and maybe exercise horses while sipping tea and eating crumpets. You could almost hear the crunch of little children’s teeth as they bit into the crumpets (having never actually eaten a crumpet, I can only imagine, but they do sound crunchy).

But all there was left of that grand time was a piece of open land. An enterprising neighbour decided to capture a piece of it and placed her greenhouse on the property, in plain view, without repercussion or resistance.

It made me ask the question… how many Savannahs are there in Trinidad?

Well, it have the Queen’s Park Savannah, Aranguez Savannah, Mausica Savannah, Couva Savannah, Aripo Savannah, Caroni Savannah, and more.

In Jamaica, we only have Savannah-La-Mar – a town in the west of the island. In Barbados, they have the Garrison Savannah which looks huge, until one considers the Savnnah in Trinidad.

Why the difference? Who knows, but it does make me go Hmmmm….

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Living the dream life — blogging from the beach

Yes, it’s true — I’m writing this blog from Jamaica. And last week I updated it from Trinidad, and then from Barbados.

To anyone in North America and Europe who is celebrating the arrival of 50 degree weather, I am living some kind of dream, and MUST be loving it.

Well, I am loving it…! I have to tell you that triathlon training takes on a different spin, when I’m cycling down to Port Royal with the sea on both sides, and the John Crow mountains in the background, or running on the Savannah and having a cold coconut water to refresh myself afterwards, or swimming at 5:30 am in the clear, blue waters of Rockleigh.

Hey, I’ve worked in London, Austria and Toledo, Ohio in the dead of winter. There’s a reason it’s called “dead!”

At the same time, giving up an apartment in Florida and having one here in Jamaica (i.e. really moving back) has its challenges that I won’t go into in a broad way, but I’d like to share in some of the small ways.

— yesterday I went to the plazas in Liguanea and was pleasantly surprised by the very friendly customer help I received. I mean, it was GOOD. Kudos to Western Sports for having more Pumas than any shop I’ve seen in the US, including my blue and yellow track shoes. Now, how did they figure out how to price them at about 60% of the price I paid online??????

— at the same time, I went into Sugar and Spice/Tastee Pattee shop where the staff manifested that “I don’t give a rat’s ass that you’re a customer” attitude…” that I’ve seen at the worst stores in every country I’ve been to (Brazil not included — they seemed to be universally friendly there).

There will be more on this topic to share as time goes on, and what I’d love to do is explode some of the myths about moving back to Jamaica, and the differences regarding doing business in Jamaica and North America.

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Differences in culture between Caribbean countries

I’ve had the privilege of working in depth in the 3 major English speaking Caribbean countries. When I say “in-depth” I mean to say that I’ve lead personal transformation courses in companies in Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados.

Before leading those courses, however, travelling to Trinidad and Barbados taught me a great deal about myself, and about the people from my own country — Jamaica. As a Yardie, I’ve learned a lot from visiting and working with these cultures that are somewhat like my own, but not exactly the same (more than I’ve learned from working for years in the U.S.)

From Bajans and Trinis I’ve learned that we Jamaicans are an aggressive, assertive bunch of people. We speak out much more, we put up with very little, we argue, fight, create conflict, curse, shout and resist at every opportunity. They look at us in amazement… where did we get all that “fight” from?

Our industrial relations and politics look to them like all out war, and our crime levels look nothing short of barbaric. They shake their head in amazement, and fascination, because they love our culture… our music, our nerve, our rastafarianism — a religion that did not exist before the 1920’s.

In the workplace, Jamaicans are either the rebels (the type who always get elected to union leadership) or the innovators (the ones who head up the creative teams that have the courage to think really big.)

To Bajans (Barbadians), we look something like them, and nothing like them — at the same time. I remember travelling to Barbados for the first time, and asking a colleague of mine how often Bajans have strikes. He told me that the last time they had a strike was in 1960 something.

By contrast, in Jamaica, we have (it seems) weekly industrial strikes, and a full-blown riot every 2-3 years or so (which have an annoying way of making international headlines that strike Jamaicans as a case of exaggerated news coverage.)

As a Jamaican visiting Barbados I’m shocked at how civilized the place is, and the people are. Politeness is the order of the day. In Barbados, when there’s an accident, the cars stop in the middle of the road, in situ. The cars remain in place until the police arrive.

In Jamaica, the same behaviour would elicit very, very loud cursing, aimed at the drivers of the cars in the accident, who would be told about their body parts, clothing, sexual preferences and types of behaviour they should be engaging in instead of driving.

Why the difference? That’s for another time, and another discussion.

Bajans are very, very well educated. Much more than Jamaicans. In fact, they are so well educated that they know better than to speak up in group settings… or at least, they know how to follow what they’ve been trained to do, which is to keep quiet in public settings, and they know when other Bajans expect them to be polite.

We Jamaicans seem to revel in being rebels, by contrast.

When I lead transformation courses, it was not an unusual thing to ask a question of a group of Bajans only to be met with a quiet, but thoughtful, silence. I could wait 5 minutes in silence easily before having someone answer… Courses were invariably conducted in a kind of quiet, classroom atmosphere.

The exact same courses conducted in Jamaica, were noisy affairs, with a constant effort needed to cut side conversations, and to ask participants to respect each other’s contributions. It was a little like trying to speak to teenagers brimming with energy — an energy that could either be expressed as action, or distruption.

Bajans and Jamaicans share some important features — majority black Christian populations, a long heritage of British colonialism and a certain conservatism found in mostly the rural areas.

To Trinidadians, in particular, Jamaica has some of the love of life that they live for. We seem deadly serious to them — MUCH too serious. We show an anger that is not just acting or what they call “mama-guy.”

Whereas it seems to me that we Jamaicans know how to enjoy life by doing interesting things and going to interesting places, Trinis know how to enjoy each other… i.e. to lime. In Jamaica, the word “lime” doesn’t exist for those of us who don’t have extensive exposure to Trinis. (Or is it “lyme?”)

Trinias are the real socialites — they know how to stir things up to get a laugh, and then how to bring them back down so that all the tension can go away when “we go out and have some drinks later.” The danger, from a Jamaican point of view, is that nothing gets taken seriously, and everything is just too easily… negotiable with a smile and a laugh.

In courses with Trinis, there are more jokes per hour than anywhere else, and more humor and general good feelings, and a real sense of comraderie. That humor can also be used undermine, as only cutting humour can.

In the workplace, Trinis are the easiest to be around and to be on teams with.

A CEO of a cross-Caribbean conglomerate said the following:

If you want the idea and the vision for a new business, ask a Jamaican. If you want someone to work with a team to take the vision from just words into something the team would call a success after working hard for months or years, ask a Trini. If you want someone to run the company after it becomes stable, ask a Bajan.

There’s some truth to that…

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Getting married

Today is exactly 7 days from when I get married here in Jamaica, to a wonderful woman I met in Florida. The great thing is that I met her on match.com, which turned out to be the best system I discovered for meeting women, getting in communication with them, and then deciding to meet them based on the interaction.

It’s a great example of a shared community — one that does not have completely open, and public communication, but instead has many, many shared communications.

(If you’re someone looking to meet a significant other, then… yes, I strongly recommend the service.)

But the point of mentioning it is to highlight the power of an invented, online community. If the product of match.com is dates, long-term relationships and marriages, then it’s doing a great job at providing exactly what is promises from my point of view.

This is actually a more measurable outcome than other sites that are only about sharing ideas, some of which are useful, and the majority of which are not. Does this make match.com more relevant or important?

I’m not sure… but I do know that I’m getting married next week, and it’s due to match.com, and it would not be happening otherwise.

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Designing a new website

I’m in the throes of designing my new website, and have been doing more and more work on the web as a result.

The explosion in blogging has been phenomenal since the start of 2005, as has the growth in the number of sites that are attempting to be “wiki” in outlook, if not in actuality.

These trends have made me rethink what a website is for, and how users can interact with it — it actually can have a “personality” that is brought to life in the way that the site is designed.

On my new site, I’ve created some new ways for visitors to interact with the ideas that I create. On one extreme there is this blog, which has new ideas in a rather raw form. At another extreme, there are standard-looking white papers and research reports. At yet another extreme, there is an open invitation to take me out for drinks, or a lime, so that we can share ideas.

Why this approach? I guess that I’ve been bitten by the bug of transparency and collaboration. When combined with a new commitment to give away and receive as many new ideas as possible, I’ve tried to create as many opportunities for sharing ideas as I can.

The truth is, that this approach flies in the face of the supposed “basic assumption” of business — competition for scarce resources between firms.

So what?

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Books I’m Reading

I don’t know about you, but I always have several books going at one time…

  • A Course in Miracles– I just finished up the year-long Workbook
  • The Energy of Money (audio, and paper) — deep, excellent thinking. Not light reading (for me anyway) as the topic brings with it a lot of baggage that must be dealt with for me and maybe most people
  • I Need Your Love — Is that True — (audio and paper) — follows up on one of my all-time favorites, Loving What Is… amazingly simple process to use that brings moment to moment peace
  • The Power of Now — (audio and paper) the perfect companion to the former, and focuses more on the end result
  • Freestyle Made Easy — DVD/paper — swim training for the next IronMan starts in earnest
  • some other novel — on audio — haven’t gotten into it yet
  • Large Account Sales — on paper
  • Unlock behaviour, Unleash Profits — I wish I had this book 5 years ago (before it was written…)
  • Going Long — IronMan training book

In general I try not to carry around too many paper books due to how much I travel — if it’s available on audio, I get it there first and load in onto my mp3 player. But now and again, the book is either not available on audio, or after listening to the audio book I want to read it also in print.

There are so many good books out there right now, and so little time to read them all… sigh.

Francis

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Inspiring Action as a Manager

In thinking of what kind of communication or dialog a manager could have with his staff that would motivate and inspire, we have come up with the following:

  1. The manager must be speaking about something that is different (otherwise, why speak at all?)
  2. The change is best expressed as a change in thinking
  3. The kind of thinking before the change should be spoken in the first person
  4. The kind of thinking that is being done after the change should be spoken in the first person
  5. The content must reflect some new “zone of responsibility” that the manager is claiming

For example:

Manager speaking:

“I want to tell you about a new realization that I’ve had. We’ve been working hard on project A, but all the while I’ve been thinking to myself that it’s truly a waste of time. I finally decided to share my thoughts with my own boss, and he said that he felt the same way.

We talked for awhile and have decided not to kill the project, but to make some substantial changes with your help .”

Another example:

“For the past few years we have been talking and talking about the importance of customer service. Yesterday, in a conversation with a consultant, I saw that while I’d been talking up a storm, I had not been leading the company in way that would allow you to get the training that was needed to positively impact the customer’s experience. Well, now that I’ve realized this, I’ve decide that this must change, and I’d like to launch a new program…”

A contra-example in response to a Senior Management Approval rating of only 36%:

“I recently read the employee feedback survey, and I think that we have done some very good work that has gone unrecognized. We should not be so down on ourselves, and criticise ourseves so much. In fact, we need to focus on the positives and I’d like us to focus on some of the good things that have happened in the past year.”

The last comment is the most telling. A manager seeks to deflect criticism by using his position to add good things on top of bad,without telling the truth about his/her real thinking or emotions. The result is a communication that leaves people flat.

A manager’s job in any communication is not to seek praise, even if it is shared with others. A manger’s job is to give praise, and take responsibility.