E-M8 Entrepreneurial Management for Eternal Mission

Over the last few weeks, I have been studying up on Crucial Conversations. It is great content. If you, per chance, have not read the book, do. It is absolutely a great read.

As I read it, a desire for crucial conversation with the rest of the world arose: why are we not teaching this stuff in school? Why is content like Crucial Conversations, TGROW model, TRIZ, Theory of Constraints, etc. not part of every first grade curriculum. Surely, being able to resolve our most difficult issues, and being aware of our limitations, learning how to learn and interact, learning how to be excited about life and learning is more important than even being able to read or do math. Surely, we can teach these concepts, at some level, without sacrificing writing or math skills taught in school.

How is it possible that most of us enter workforce, or live our whole lives with the ideas so obvious and practical not being a part of our tool-bag? And in what way would the world be different if all of us knew how to engage in tough conversations, how to analyse our thoughts and problems in general, how to find points of greatest leverage?

This is the crucial conversation for getting the world into the information age and out of the mindset of poverty. I hope I find my place in that conversation.

I promise to get back to blogging at least once a week, once I settle in on my new project in Russia. Meanwhile, I am studying up management cybernetics, systems thinking, performance coaching and lots of other good stuff. I’ll be sharing my insights soon.  Thanks to Tim Syth, new leader of Bucketworks, for suggestions on Systems Thinking topics and thanks to my new employer for awesome access to study materials.

Thanks everyone on your farewells and gifts. I will be back soon, I promise.

Writing this from Washington D.C. airport, over and out.

Oleg

What if we could measure and review decisions that were made based on emotions or intuition in the same way we can review decisions made by fact? What would we learn?

There is an old fairy tale about a goose that laid golden eggs. Eventually, the guy who owned him, killed him hoping to get the gold out, but found just a dead goose. Today I’ld like to consider the perspective of the goose. Goose thought that he would never be made in to soup, since so long as he can produce golden eggs, he was golden. But since he failed to communicate his value in such a way as to explain that he would not be worth much dead, he still got slottered. The moral of the story: don’t just lay golden eggs, make sure everyone understands, you laid them, and as long as you are alive you will keep laying them. On the other hand, slottering you will not help anyone. And be prepared for reality that people can slotter you anyways.

Golden Calf was erected when Moses spent too much time up at the top of the mountain conferring with God, without having adequately prepared his replacement Aaron to lead the people. Sometimes, a manager or a consultant can become the Golden calf, sometimes it is some kind of a practice or belief that seemed to have served us well in the past. When we see one emerging, we need to slotter it.

But how do we make sure we don’t confuse golden goose with the Golden Calf? Goose does not look special, he just lays eggs, he produces results. Calf just stands there, demanding to be worshipped, with no result to show for.

There is something brewing that is even more drastic than economic crisis of  1907 or 1913. A period of transition to a information economy that will cause more radical economic, political and cultural change than the change that transpired in the period from 1890 to 1950.  Most important of these changes has to be a change in how we learn, otherwise we will suffer even greater disasters that 2 World Wars and periods of 25% unemployment.

We are moving in to information age in which such concepts as labor hour, assembly line, 40 hour work week, can go right out of the window. In many fields, already we encounter a situation where one person can do more in a week than an entire company can do in a year. Labor is increasingly becoming less relevant, another factor… ability to think is rising to the surface. To be sure, it always mattered, but today it is getting to the point where soon it will be the only thing that really does.