Saturday, August 20, 2011

The Shortcut to Success



I just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers: The Story of Success”.  I am happy to report that I have finally found the equivalent to the Fountain of Youth; the shortcut to success. 

Our blog is dedicated to creating happiness and building business value.  However, I only occasionally remember to really think about success itself.  This is important as happiness is a close relative to success.  If you are careful about how you define success then becoming successful can lead to a sense of happiness.

In one of my prior periods of reflection, I realized I had never defined the word success.  This led to a series of blog posts relating to John Wooden’s definition of success and his Pyramid of Success.

http://buddhaceo.blogspot.com/2011/05/like-minds-lessons-from-wizard.html
http://buddhaceo.blogspot.com/2011/05/coach-woodens-pyramid-of-success-part-1.html
http://buddhaceo.blogspot.com/2011/05/coach-woodens-pyramid-of-success-part-2.html

But here is the really interesting part; Malcolm’s book does NOT contain the shortcut to success.  Quite the contrary really, he actually describes how much effort goes into success.  Malcolm’s research sets the bar very high.  It turns out that we need 10,000 hours of perfect practice to reach the mastery of a single subject.

However, Malcolm’s book does get credit for being the inspiration for my discovery of the shortcut to success.  A light bulb turned on as I contemplated the requirement of 10,000 hours of prefect preparation for skill mastery. 

I realized this is why people will pay for franchises, cookbooks, teachers, coaches and tutors.  These are the ways we pay for a shortcut to success by leveraging off of the mastery that someone else achieved the hard way by putting in their 10,000 hours.

So the path to success is simple.  Start by defining success for you.  Then either put in the 10,000 hours of perfect practice that is required to achieve the success you define or purchase a shortcut through the use of someone else’s’ system, recipe, pay for coaching, etc. 

So all of this leads me to the following question: If you are a business owner, a member of a management team or if you aspire to become either one, have you put in your 10,000 hours of perfect practice as it relates to the business of business? 

Not practicing what your business does, but practicing how to run a business that does what you do.  Being a plumber and managing a plumbing business require two very different skill sets.

Our goal at Buddha CEO is to help your Company create happiness and build business value.  So if your organization defines success in this way; we hope you consider this blog as part of your shortcut to success.

Please post a comment relating to your favorite recipe for success.

We would love to hear from you!

Saturday, August 13, 2011

You Can’t Manage Change

The Buddha CEO blog is dedicated to "creating happiness and building business value”.  This process will necessitate some type of organizational change.

An email exchange I had with a client this week really got me to focus in on this age old problem of change management.  Please see the content of that email below:

No matter how well intentioned, it is very easy to fall back into predictable familiar patterns.  It takes roughly 21 days to build a sustainable new habit.

Organizational change is a little like going to the moon.  Most of the thrust is needed from takeoff until you break the Earth's atmosphere.  Takeoff for you was Friday the 30th.  Breaking free of the Earth's atmosphere for you will occur after approximately 21 days of sustained effort to integrate the new tools you have learned into your daily routine.

Once you get into outer space or your new frontier of change, really all it takes is constant, little, minor adjustments, but very little thrust.  Moon missions were only on their intended paths about 3% of the trip.  Therefore, they required constant checking and re-checking of the flight path. 

However, the adjustments needed to get the flight back on track were minor and took very little energy as long as they engaged in the constant checking and re-checking to make sure they were not too far out of their plan. 

If you let your change initiative, get too far off track, it is almost like starting all over again.

As I reflected on the massive difficulties and frustrations organizations go through to evolve and change and the resulting amount of headache and heartache involved it occurred to me that we are using the wrong tool for the job.

For those of you who attempt home improvement projects around the house, you can well appreciate the value of having the right tool for the job.  It makes the job at hand infinitely easier and more enjoyable.

So, let’s make organizational change easier and more enjoyable and more successful by making sure we are using the correct tool.

The light bulb that went off in my head is that you CAN NOT manage change because change is largely a people function.  Stephen Covey has always taught that you manage things and you lead people, but you can’t lead things or manage people.

Yes, change is process oriented as well and that requires management.  But the fundamental determinant of success of a change effort will always lie with people as opposed to process and so the dominate force in the change effort must be leadership and NOT management.

To see how wrong we are on this look at the results of my recent Google searches below:

Results 1 - 10 of about 27,700,000 for Leading change. (0.19 seconds) 

Results 1 - 10 of about 75,000,000 for change management. (0.18 seconds) 

Results 1 - 10 of about 18,300,000 for change leadership. (0.42 seconds) 

75M hits for change management vs. only 18M for change leadership of 28M for leading change.

Now, let’s look at the results from a Wikipedia search below:

Change Management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. The current definition of Change Management includes both organizational change management processes and individual change management models, which together are used to manage the people side of change.



There are no Wikipedia page titled “Change leadership” or "Leading Change"!

No wonder we experience the degree of angst and gnashing of teeth that we do.

Please STOP trying to manage change and start LEADING it instead.


How do you lead change in your organizations?  We would love to hear from you!

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Take Austin Power’s Advice and Behave!


Who would have thought that Austin Power’s would be a role model for realizing your full potential, but it is true nonetheless as we can see from this guest post offering from our friend Hans.

Contributed by Hans | hans@hansyoga.com | hansyoga.com

A very simple way to put all of these together is “Learn to behave”.

Simple words, a vast spectrum of meanings as you will see.

Before we understand right behavior with others, we have to learn right behavior with our own selves.  The world is our extended self.  If I want to get along with others, I must first learn to get along with myself. Now, to get along with myself, I have to know myself.  Most of us are 'strangers' unto ourselves - how can one get along with a stranger?

In the scriptures of my homeland in India, we compare human beings with a chariot with 5 horses.  The 5 sense-faculties (of seeing, tasting, hearing, smelling and touching) are the 5 steeds, wayward and unruly, running amuck towards the sense-objects.  To control them, we have a rein which is our sensory mind.  It is called the lower mind (Manas) because its domain is just two-fold, "I like it" and 'I don't like it".  It is pleasure-driven, being sense-enslaved.

The rein is necessary but not enough.  There must be an able charioteer to hold fast the reins.  He is our higher mind - the reason, the discerning or discriminating faculty.  It is called Buddhi in Sanskrit.  Its domain extends to deciding whether what is pleasant is also good, and whether the unpleasant things the lower (sensory) mind is rejecting, could actually be good for us. 

The creamy cake may look temptingly pleasant to the diabetic, but reason tells him it is bad.  Early morning walks look so unpleasant, so unthinkable, but if you make it, you are empowering by discriminating reason, that which eventually benefits you. When anger comes on, you want to slap the other person, but reason tells you to hold.

Let us see what right behavior means at various levels of our being - Physical, Mental, Emotional, Intellectual & Spiritual, etc.

RIGHT BEHAVIOR FOR YOUR BODY

Your body is not you, you have it but you are not the body.  Treat it like a good employer would treat his employee.  Giving it its rightful dues, but not pampering it.  For example, when you want to eat, find out whether it's your body's genuine need (appetite) or your mind's endless desire (greed).  When the body feels tired, find out if it is actually fatigued from over-work or just being lazy, and so on.
A saint called his body 'brother donkey'.  Indeed, the body is the animal in us, our dear beast of burden.  Since our aim is to love all, we cannot ignore the body, but we have to remember to treat it wisely - without cruelty, without indulgence.

RIGHT BEHAVIOR FOR THE MIND

The mind is a drunken, drugged and devil-possessed monkey, unless we learn to control it.  The body is much simpler in comparison.  We can dominate the body through will.  But managing the mind monkey is not a game of just will power.  We need wisdom - a wisdom-guided will.  For example, if you order the mind not to think any more a particular thought that it has been chattering about, it is unlikely to obey unless you know the subtle rules. 

Why is it so difficult to control the mind? If you know the reason, you will know the cure.  The reason is, the sensory mind is hyper-active and restless by nature.  The mind's restless habits of thought and action get programmed or hard-wired in the brain which is the seat of energy or life-force (Pranayama).  The brain then drives further reactive actions. 

My Master (Paramahansa Yogananda, author of 'Autobiography of a Yogi') explains that the energy in the brain is spent in various bodily functions like blood circulation, breathing (movements of diaphragm), digestion, chemicalization, excretion etc., but that most of its energy is wasted in processing our useless or misguided thoughts, feelings and emotions that our big brother mind indulges in.

If somehow the mind's excessive energy (energy is where the consciousness is), routed through the brain,  can be regulated  and harnessed, not only will the monkey-mind get quieter, there will be energy available for so many worthy tasks.  So we have an energy crisis at micro-level too! 

This taming of energy or life-force (Prana) is called Pranayama in Yoga which is a marvelous super-science for body-mind-soul harmony, but many in the West think Yoga is just about some Yoga postures for bodily cure.  Yoga is about mind technology, which then permits tapping the soul-resources.

We must raise our self-awareness that gives us valuable feedback about our conduct.  We can then learn to be, as my Master taught me, "Calmly Active & Actively Calm".  We can then work smart, not just hard which even donkeys can do.

Emotions are Ego in MOTION.  They are not our highest faculty; even animals have emotions, but they have no guiding reason, no self-awareness and hence no self-control.  They have no wisdom which is much higher than reason.

Thoughts shape our destiny.  They create our outer and inner conditions. By Yogic mind management, we can choose right thoughts and thereby create right conditions.  The Law of Attraction is based on this. 

Questions are welcome from readers.  It is a vast and interesting subject, that has power to transform humans and through their optimization, it can optimize workplaces.  Stephen Covey rightly says that the way we look at the problems IS the problem.  We need to have holistic perceptions. Life's highest truths are the simplest.   There is too much of intellectual jargon in modern management.  We need wisdom, we need values and we need self-management.  You don't need to manage people, just empower them to manage themselves. 

Please browse http://www.hansyoga.com or write to me at hans@hansyoga.com to know more. 

Have a good day!