by Matt Perman
From Henry Cloud’s book The One-Life Solution: Reclaim Your Personal Life While Achieving Greater Professional Success:
The most effective people I know are people who have times when they give their entire focus to whatever they are working on — and there is no way they are going to stop what they are doing to see what just showed up in their in-box or on their BlackBerry. Certain blocks of time are guarded, and an e-mail or a phone call is not going to interrupt them or change the agenda.
by Matt Perman
Harvard Business Review has a good article on Google’s ecosystem of innovation. For a quick overview, here is the idea in brief.
Also, here are two very dense and interesting sentences from the article:
“Every piece of the business plays a part, every part is indispensable, every failure breeds success, and every success demands improvement.”
“If the company’s expressed mission is to organize the world’s information, it has a somewhat less exalted but equally important unexpressed commercial mission: to monetize consumers’ intentions.”
by Matt Perman
This is a paragraph from a recent article in Wired. I like Wired and find it helpful for keeping up with technology as it affects society. In this case, though, I’m not helped. I’ll quote the paragraph and then tell you what’s wrong with it.
Attention, Iowa shoppers: If you eat standard supermarket produce, figure an average transport distance of 1,500 miles (and that’s just for stuff grown in the US). Such is the price you pay in cash and carbon emissions — not to mention the tax dollars spent on repairing highways chewed up by behemoth trucks. In general, a longer, more global supply chain is also vulnerable to strikes, gas hikes, political turmoil, and contamination. All so you can eat what you want when you want it.
Do you see what has happened here? Something that is quite remarkable — something that is really good, and a blessing of God — is presented as negative, destructive, and even selfish (“all so you can eat what you want and when you want it”).
In actuality, we should look at these realities and say “what an amazing blessing. This is God’s providence at work to feed His world — and with food that is far better and varied than the nutraloaf he could have gone with if his aim for us was mere nutrition rather than enjoyment and culture.”
The fact that “supermarket produce” is brought from an average distance of 1,500 miles, and that trucks transport it over an incredibly efficient interstate transportation system, and that as a result we get to eat food that we like, and at times that are convenient to us — this is a good thing. It is a blessing. It is not something to be demeaned, as though humans are a plague on the planet. It is a reflection showing us the remarkable goodness of God.
And it is what we pray for when we pray “give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11), as Gene Veith points out very effectively in God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life:
When we pray the Lord’s prayer, observed Luther, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. And he does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meail.
We might today add the truck drivers who hauled the produce, the factory workers in the food processing plant, the warehouse men, the wholesale distributors, the stock boys, the lady at the checkout counter. Also playing their part are the bankers, futures investors, advertisers, lawyers, agricultural scientists, mechanical engineers, and every other player in the nation’s economic system. All of these were instrumental in enabling you to eat your morning bagel.
Before you ate, you probably gave thanks to God for your food, as is fitting. He is caring for your physical needs, as with every other kind of need you have, preserving your life through his gifts. “He provides food for those who fear him” (Psalm 11:5); also to those who do not fear Him, “to all flesh” (136:35). And He does so by using other human beings. It is still God who is responsible for giving us our daily bread. Though He could give it to us directly, by a miraculous provision, as He once did fore the children of Israel when He fed them daily with manna, God has chosen to work through human beings, who, in their different capacities and according to their different talents, serve one another. This is the doctrine of vocation.
The way that food is brought “from afar” to people all over the country should not be looked down upon because of the carbon emissions and interstate wear-and-tear it creates. Instead, it should be marveled at as God at work to provide for His creation through the doctrine of vocation.
by Matt Perman
This is funny, from a recent issue of Wired. I had no idea that nutraloaf existed:
Could science build a completely nutritious space food? Sure, but it’d be a lot like nutraloaf, a substance served to prisoners in solitary in some states.
It’s so unpalatable that it’s the subject of several lawsuits.
The ingredients are ordinary enough, and Vermont’s version of the recipe (this makes three 1,000 calorie loafs) is balanced for fat, protein, carbs, and vitamins. So how could such a harmony of food and science constitute cruel and unusual punishment? Because it tastes like cardboard, smells like rotten eggs, and looks like baked vomit.
By the way, the ingredients are: whole wheat bread, canned spinach, great northern beans, powdered skim milk, potato flakes, tomato paste, nondairy cheese, raw carrots, seedless raisins, and vegetable oil.
by Matt Perman
Harvard Business Review has an interview with historian and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough, author of books such as 1776 and John Adams, on leadership.
You can also read the executive summary.
Here’s a section on why he thinks it critical for all leaders to have a sense of history:
You are passionate about the necessity for history education. Why do you think it’s so important for a leader to have what you call a sense of history?
Leadership, then, partly has to do with luck. And luck, chance, the hand of God—call it what you will—is a real force in human affairs; it’s part of life. Washington might have been killed; he might have gotten sick; he might have been captured; he might have given up. Besides being fortunate, he knew how to take advantage of a lucky moment, because he was blessed with very good judgment. Luck provided the opportunity, but Washington’s night escape across the East River—made possible by the direction of the wind—after an overwhelming defeat in the Battle of Brooklyn would never have succeeded had it not been for his leadership and the abilities of Colonel John Glover. Glover was a Massachusetts merchant and fisherman who, with his Marblehead Mariners, knew how to do the job.
I like to remind people of something General George C. Marshall said. Asked once whether he had had a good education at the Virginia Military Institute, Marshall said no, “because we had no training in history.” He knew that a sense of history is essential to anyone who wants to be a leader, because history is both about people and about cause and effect. The American historian Samuel Eliot Morison liked to say that history teaches us how to behave—that is, what to do and what not to do in a variety of situations. History is the human story. Jefferson made that point in the very first line of the Declaration of Independence: “When in the course of human events…” The accent should be on “human.”
History also shows how the demands of leadership change from one era to another, from one culture to another. The leaders of the past experienced their present differently from the way we experience ours. And remember, they had no more idea how things were going to turn out than we do in our time. Nothing was ever on a track, nothing preordained. The more you study the year 1776 and the course of the American Revolutionary War, the more you have to conclude that it’s a miracle things turned out as they did. Had the wind in New York City been coming from a different direction on August 29, 1776, Americans would probably be sipping tea and singing “God Save the Queen.”
by Matt Perman
A. G. Lafley, the CEO of Proctor & Gamble, has a good article in Harvard Business Review called What Only the CEO Can Do. This article may be helpful for those working in business or in the non-profit world.
You can also read a quick summary of the idea in brief and the idea in practice.
by Matt Perman
Harvard Business Review has a good article on how five discovery skills distinguish true innovators.
Here is the idea in brief, from the site:
The habits of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and other innovative CEOs reveal much about the underpinnings of their creative thinking. Research shows that five discovery skills distinguish the most innovative entrepreneurs from other executives.
Doing
• Questioning allows innovators to break out of the status quo and consider new possibilities.
• Through observing, innovators detect small behavioral details—in the activities of customers, suppliers, and other companies—that suggest new ways of doing things.
• In experimenting, they relentlessly try on new experiences and explore the world.
• And through networking with individuals from diverse backgrounds, they gain radically different perspectives.
Thinking
• The four patterns of action together help innovators associate to cultivate new insights.
by Matt Perman
Every business and organization needs to anticipate the future. Failure to anticipate where things are going often results in outdated models that hinder organizational effectiveness. But how do you predict what is going to happen?
You can’t. But one part of the solution is found in the title for a book that Peter Drucker once said he wanted to write: “The Future that has Already Happened.”
Joseph Pine, co-author of The Experience Economy, put it this way: “We see what’s going on in the world — not what will happen, but what is already happening that most people do not yet see. Then we develop frameworks that enable others to see it too and determine what they should do about it.”
In other words, the critical skill for anticipating the future is actually the ability to understand the present. That is, to understand the present in a way that goes beyond the obvious. The way things will go tomorrow is to a large extent a function of what is happening now, but which most of us just don’t have the frameworks to see.
by Matt Perman
Marvin Olasky has a good column from last summer on how the demise of newspapers creates great opportunities.
by Matt Perman
Should you hold back high performers from promotions until they have “paid their dues”? Jack Welch answers no. “That uncompetitive practice is a throwback to the days when an employee’s time served could, and often did, trump his value added.”