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Why Acknowledging Mistakes Increases Trust

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From What Would Google Do?:

We are ashamed to make mistakes — as well we should be, yes? It’s our job to get things right, right? So when we make mistakes our instinct is to shrink into a ball and wish them away. Correcting errors, though necessary, is embarrassing.

But the truth about truth itself is counterintuitive: Corrections do not diminish credibility. Corrections enhance credibility. Standing up and admitting your errors makes you more believable; it gives your audience faith that you will right your future wrongs.

When companies apologize for bad performance — as JetBlue did after keeping passengers on tarmacs for hours — that tells us that they know their performance wasn’t up to their standard, and we have a better idea of the standard we should expect.

Also: “Being willing to be wrong is key to innovation.”

Lessons from Apple on Innovation

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This is from my notes — I think I got these from an article a few years ago:

  1. Innovation can come from without as well as within. Apple’s real skill lies in stitching together its own ideas with technologies from outside and then wrapping the results in elegant software and stylish design. Apple is an orchestrator and integrator of technologies, unafraid to bring in ideas from outside but always adding its own twists. This approach is known as network innovation.
  2. Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology.
  3. Apple teaches us that smart companies should sometimes ignore what the market says it wants today.
  4. Fail wisely. Learn and try again.

Is Attending Conferences an Unnecessary Expense?

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Keith Ferrazzi makes a good case that the answer is no, in Never Eat Alone.

The reason that conferences are not unnecessary expenses is because it is actually revenue generating to attend. But this is often overlooked because only the cost is tied to the conference in an organization’s budget, but the productive outcomes from the conference are not.

First, here’s how Ferrazzi decides whether to attend a conference:

“Conferences are good for mainly one thing. They provide a forum to meet the kind of like-minded people who can help you fulfill your mission and goals. Before deciding to attend a conference, I sometimes informally go so far as using a simple return-on-investment thought process. Is the likely return I’ll get from the relationships I establish and build equal to or greater than the price of the conference and the time I spend there? If so, I attend. If not, I don’t.”

Second, here is Ferrazzi’s very good case on why cutting out conferences is a bad way to cut costs:

“Right after we sold YaYa, the new owners instituted a set of cost-cutting policies relative to travel and conferences. I thought the policies were fundamentally off the mark. The owners saw conferences as boondoggles–pleasant affairs for indulgent executives rather than as revenue generators. To our new parent company, the costs of sending people to a few events each year seemed like an unnecessary expense on the start-up company’s balance sheet.

“I strongly disagreed and promised to convince them otherwise. I set about recording the actual number of revenue-generating projects that came directly from people I had met at conferences. The owners were stunned when I presented a spreadsheet showing successive deals and how a significant chunk of revenue could be traced back to one conference or another.”

Third, here’s a good summary from Fast Company on the value of conferences and conventions: They enable you to (1) make contacts and (2) share ideas.

What Do Leaders Produce?

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Clarity.

Marcus Buckingham:

“Clarity is the preoccupation of every effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.” — The One Thing You Need to Know

Andy Stanley:

“As leaders we can afford to be uncertain, but we cannot afford to be unclear. People will follow you in spite of a few bad decisions. People will not follow you if you are unclear in your instruction, and you cannot hold them accountable to respond to muddled directives.” — Next Generation Leader: 5 Essentials for Those Who Will Shape the Future

The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Leaders

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From Dave Kraft’s Leaders Who Last (Re: Lit Books), here’s his list:

  1. They spend too much time managing and not enough time leading.
  2. They spend too much time counseling the hurting people and not enough time developing the people with potential.
  3. They spend too much time putting out fires and not enough time lighting fires.
  4. They spend too much time doing and not enough time planning.
  5. They spend too much time teaching the crowd and not enough time training the core.
  6. They spend too much time doing it themselves and not enough time doing it through others.
  7. They make too many decisions based on organizational politics and too few decisions based on biblical principles.

He then adds:

Notice in particular numbers 2, 5, and 6, which have to do with the kinds of people you spend time with. I say it again: the people you spend the majority of your time with can and will determine whether you are an effective or ineffective leader.

The fact is that many people in leadership roles gravitate toward hurting, draining, time-=consuming people because they have a need to be needed. They want to help people, to be there for people. If a leader has strong mercy gifts, leading becomes more difficult. Simply put, if you need people, you can’t lead people. There is an inability or lack of desire to make the tough calls, speak the truth, or do the hard things. Motivated by a fear of disappointing people, this inability will seriously hamper and work against your ability to lead.

Don't Fill Up Your Calendar

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Some good advice from The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success:

When you think about it, absolutely everything anyone does starts with a thought. Becasue the quality of the thought has a large influence on the quality of the outcome, it makes sense to do what you can to think clearly. In a world in which technology provides the capacity to reach out and be reached anytime, anywhere, finding space to think clearly is more and more of a challenge. A lack of white space on one’s calendar correlates with a lack of white space in one’s brain.

The author then recounts a story from his former boss to illustrate this:

I can remember one time talking to another executive who said he was in meetings from morning until night and I asked, “How can you do your job?” and this guy just looked at me. I said, “I see part of my job as leaving enough space to think about what the next issue or problem is that lands on my desk.” He just looked at me like I was nuts. It is very counterintuitive, but I think if you leave some white space on your calendar you tend to get more done.

A full calendar may give the appearance of getting things done, but being able to see that next competitive thing coming down the line or being able to see that we’ve got two groups that are fighting here and we really need to invest in getting them to work together — those are the critical things that executives need to do.

It is about having the capacity to see further out or to deal with that big threat to your bottom line. The easier issues will get managed below, if you are doing your job right. The higher you are in the organization, the tougher the issues are that come to you. You have to have the space and perspective to deal with those tougher issues.

I think a lot of people measure their worth in a corporation by how many meetings they attend. It depends on the culture of the organization you are in, but often it is a huge mistake to fill up your schedule with meetings.

The Four Categories of Information You Need to Pay Attention To

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There are four categories of information you need to pay attention to when embarking on any significant endeavor:

  1. Things you know and know that you know.
  2. Things you know but don’t know that you know.
  3. Things you don’t know and know that you don’t know.
  4. Things you don’t know and don’t know that you don’t know.

Category four is what can be the real curve ball. The early space program is often given as an example of this: before we went into space, there were certain things we knew and could plan for (radiation, re-entry, etc.). But what were the things that we didn’t know that we wouldn’t even know were factors until encountering them? That was the challenge.

Which is why experimentation and trying things, sometimes in small steps, is so crucial. Since you can’t discover the things you don’t know that you don’t know any other way than by experience, taking action and embarking on paths of experimentation are essential to learning, for individuals and organizations.

This means that, to a certain extent, we need to be willing to tolerate risk and we need to be willing to tolerate failure.