Archives for 2012
An Evening on Gospel-Centered Productivity in Orange County
For those in the Orange County area next week, I’ll be speaking at Sovereign Grace Church on gospel-centered productivity on Thursday night, June 7. I’ll be giving two messages:
- Why We Need to Think Theologically About the Practical for the Sake of Love
- Overcoming the Greatest Challenges Christians Face in the Marketplace
It would be great to see you there, and also feel free to bring your hardest questions. You can find out more details and RSVP (it’s free) on their site.
(I’ll also be speaking at the Biola Digital Ministry Conference next week as well — would be great to see anyone there also.)
And the Greatest Enemy of Creativity and Innovation Is…
Efficiency.
Patrick Lencioni makes the case very well in his article, The Enemy of Creativity and Innovation. Here’s a great part:
I’ve become convinced that the only way to be really creative and innovative in life is to be joyfully inefficient….
Efficiency requires that we subdue our passion and allow it to be constrained by principles of logic and convention. Innovation and creativity require us to toss aside logic and convention, even without the near-term promise of a payoff. Embracing both at the same time seems to me to be a recipe for stress, dissonance and mediocrity, and yet, that is exactly what so many organizations—or better yet—leaders, do.
They exhort their employees to utilize their resources wisely and to avoid waste and redundancy, which makes perfect sense. They also exhort them to be ever-vigilant about finding new and better products or processes, which also makes sense. And yet, combining these two perfectly sensible exhortations makes no sense at all, and only encourages rational, responsible people to find a middle ground, something that is decidedly neither efficient nor innovative.
This is why I don’t talk about efficiency a ton. It matters and has its place. But my goal is effectiveness, and often times the greatest path to effectiveness is quite inefficient.
More on this in my book.
The Job of Top Management is Not to Sit in Judgment on New Ideas
I’ve seen this happen, and it’s not pretty. It’s a waste and it’s a tragedy. Peter Drucker:
“Professional” management today sees itself often in the role of a judge who says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to ideas as they come up…A top management that believes its job is to sit in judgment will inevitably veto the new idea. It is always “impractical.”
Managing Your Weaknesses
A few thoughts:
1. Avoid working in your weaknesses if at all possible.
2. If you can’t, then seek to become competent in your areas of weakness. You won’t become extraordinary in areas of weakness, but competence is sufficient.
3. Continue to spend the most time sharpening and harnessing your strengths. This is where your contribution will shine. As long as you are competent in your weaknesses, they won’t detract and your strengths will stand out and make an extraordinary contribution.
An example (a slightly risky one since I’m not huge into basketball, but you will get the point): Let’s say you are a basketball player and you are great at making baskets but pretty bad at getting rebounds. You need to become solid at getting rebounds when they come your way, so you don’t do harm. But your focus should be on putting yourself in a position to take shots, not get rebounds, if that’s where you make an incredible contribution.
And here’s an example of avoiding your weaknesses altogether: if you are a great quarterback, it doesn’t matter if you are terrible at defense. Don’t play defense. This is so obvious as to be completely undisputed.
Why, then, do we feel like there is some sort of virtue in focusing on our weaknesses in our work?
Seek to contribute where you can make the greatest contribution.
Does Listening to Music While You Work Hurt Your Productivity?
For the last few months, I’ve started listening to music more because I’m mostly working from my basement. Here are my informal conclusions on whether listening to music helps or hurts your productivity.
First, it depends on what kind of work you are doing. For some kinds of work, it doesn’t hinder your productivity at all and makes it more pleasant. Obviously.
Second (and this is the important point), I’ve found that for intensive work that requires focus and great concentration, listening to music keeps me from getting into the zone and thus causes my work to take a lot longer. Further, there are some breakthroughs that probably don’t happen because of the fact that you aren’t able to concentrate fully — thus decreasing the quality of your work.
This happens in spite of intentions, and you largely have no control over it. In other words, even if you have high energy and are ready to get into the zone, music will often prevent it from happening.
This applies only to music with words, and there are of course some exceptions. But in the main, I’ve found that if I need to get dialed in and concentrate, music with words is a big stumbling block.
That’s what I’ve found. What have you found?
A Few Odd, Possibly Advanced, Yet Simple Tips for Writers
A few random tips for those who write long things (namely, books), gathered or reinforced from my own experience in writing What’s Best Next:
1. Starting is often the hardest thing
The best way to start is to just start. That is, don’t wait for a special burst of energy or insight — though, when those things do come, seize them to their max.
2. You have to jump start yourself in the moment of performance
That’s a quote a read somewhere a few years ago. It’s a helpful reminder. When you just start (point 1) and don’t have the burst of energy or creativity, you don’t simply go into your writing cold. You jump start yourself, like starting a car in a freezing Minnesota winter.
To jump start yourself, there are many things you can do. Pray, read some of the Scriptures, do jumping jacks (to get your physical energy up), read a few pages in an author you find inspiring like Seth Godin, review your notes, or do a number of other things. To “just start” doesn’t mean you don’t warm up.
3. Don’t bury the lead
Lead with your most important points rather than starting with something less relevant or irrelevant in an attempt to build up to your most important point. Burying the lead is one of the greatest temptations in writing.
The one exception: John Piper does a great job in many of his books of creating a problem and then resolving it. That’s helpful and interesting and memorable. In those cases, the most important point is the resolution that comes after the problem has developed, which is typically half way through the chapter or so. But even in these cases, you need to start with something super relevant and helpful; the lead in this case should often be the interesting problem you are raising.
More could be said, but these are the top ones that come to mind right now.
(By the way, I call these “advanced” because, although you can easily know these things right from the start, you don’t truly get them until you’ve been through it!)
The Five Cs of a Healthy Vision Statement
Chuck Colson Resource Page
The Acton Institute has put together a resource page on Chuck Colson. They write:
From the earliest days of the Acton Institute, Charles W. “Chuck” Colson was a staunch supporter and dear friend to many. On this page, we have gathered a variety of content including speeches, interviews with Acton publications and multimedia. As Prison Fellowship Ministries and the Colson Center put it, in a joint statement, “Chuck’s life is a testimony to God’s power to forgive, redeem, and transform.”
The page also has an excellent, 8.5 minute video the Acton Institute did on the life of Chuck Colson.
Be Ambitious AND Humble
Keith Ferrazzi has a good post summarizing a study IBM recently did to identify the traits of their highest impact employees.
Their findings were very interesting. Here’s how Ferrazzi summarizes them:
The term originated in an IBM study that sought to identify the traits of their most high-impact employees. Turns out that ambition alone is mediocre; ambition plus intellectual humility is the winning combination.