It is an old saying, but so often true … “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” So true, unless we refuse to snooze. Five years later, so much has changed … yet so much remains the same.
Silent Alarm … five years later. A message more relevant than ever!
So often, when we come upon disruptive circumstances in our life, we just want to hit the “snooze” and just “get back to normal.” We think the change, and the process of that change is going to be painful. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was an unexpected gift? My friend, Nancy Berry, didn’t choose her job transition. It chose her, as it has so many in the last 18 months. But she didn’t hit the snooze. And as she nears the end of this transition, she decided to reflect on her experience and to share it with those who helped her along the way. She shared a copy with me. I was so taken by reading it, I asked if I could share it with you. I hope you will enjoy letting it sink-in to the circumstances in your life:
So often in the recent years, I longed for the opportunity to step off the treadmill and catch my breath. I never really thought it would happen so I hadn’t considered how that dream might actually come to fruition. If I had planned it, I would have won the lottery I never play or I would have married the wealthy man I haven’t yet met but I certainly wouldn’t have wished to be laid off. While the means through which my prayer was answered certainly wasn’t in my master plan, the experience has turned out to be one of the greatest gifts and opportunities of my life.
From the very beginning, I was able to focus on the silver linings of this experience - a quality to which I owe my always optimistic mother. Far and away, the best part of this experience was spending 11 months as a full-time mom - there to get my boys off to school in the morning and to hear what was on their minds when they walked in the door after school. I have enjoyed beyond measure the ordinary moments and tasks that everyday life brings with them in it and I was able to enjoy infinitely more of those moments over the last year. What a blessing!
I met over 100 new people through my networking efforts. These people opened my eyes to the wide world that extends beyond the legal industry as they talked to me about their work, their organizations and their industries. I reconnected with countless people who I am thrilled to have back in my life - mainly former colleagues but a few old friends as well who I won’t lose touch with again. I took a class to prepare me for the Senior Professional in Human Resources certification test, which I passed in January. While I didn’t want to become an HR generalist, I wanted to shore up what I considered to be a lack of HR knowledge in my background. I extensively researched a topic about which I have become passionate - that law firms need to have more rigorous interview techniques like those utilized by top accounting and consulting firms and UK law firms. I have spoken on that topic a few times and have written a soon-to-be-published article for Am Law Daily. I worked on several projects that I was interested in for different firms and organizations and I was able to do so at my pace. I attended two conferences, numerous webinars and monthly professional group meetings on recruiting and professional development to keep myself immersed in the industry to which I became so eager to return. So many opportunities!
It wasn’t all work - I took naps and lots of them and have the worn couch cushions to prove it. I became reacquainted with the gym. I got to breath fresh air in the middle of the day. My faith was tested. I often passed but occasionally failed. I learned to single task and even enjoy it. I stopped driving 10 miles (ok, often more) over the speed limit at all times because I was no longer in a perpetual hurry, though I admit, I was awfully slow to realize that. I read voraciously, enjoyed every word along the way, learned so much and was reminded of how little I know. I started writing for pleasure and for profit. I learned I am passionate about painting - but can only do so with a paint by numbers kit typically used by young children. Seriously. I was reminded there are some things I can control and many more I can not. I was able to be still - a skill I did not know I had. I was able to think - sometimes too much. I was able to reflect - again, sometimes too much. I was able to plan. I was able to organize - but not enough. And I did an awful lot of nothing. Such gifts!
No one has been more surprised than me at the quiet confidence I had throughout this journey that everything would work out and for the best. That said, there were some days when my confidence wavered and others when it flatlined. i have been carried along this journey over the last eleven months by the cheerleading, support, generosity and kindness of so very many people. Some people who had never met me and many who had just met me went out of their way to help me even when I could offer them nothing in return. There are 76 of you who have gone above and beyond on my behalf and for that, I’m genuinely eternally grateful. Whether you introduced me to people with whom I could network, watched my kids while I was networking, asked how you could help and meant it or sent me an email out of the blue asking how I was doing and encouraging me to hang in there, I want you to know how much your efforts were and are appreciated by me.
I have said … “often times the circumstance in which we find ourselves is beyond our control, but the response we choose is not!” Nancy chose not to snooze, but to wake-up to her experience … and it has paid-off. Nancy will begin the next chapter of her professional life later this month as she joins Katten Muchin Rosenman as the Director of Professional Development. Fire up the treadmill … I think she is ready to jump back on … with a whole new perspective. In fact, reading her reflection today has refreshed mine. Thank you, Nancy!
Five years later … Silent Alarm is a message more relevant than ever. Do you hit the snooze with hopes to return to norm … or do you strive to transform?
We continue the 5th year celebration of “Silent Alarm” … a milestone five years later … a message more timely than ever! What milestone should you be celebrating? Celebrations have a way of reminding us to “stay-awake!”
In this month of May … we are celebrating the 5th month of the 5th year of Silent Alarm. So much has happended since Silent Alarm was originally published, making its message all the more relevant. All aspects of “The Front Porch” … blogging, JOHN TV and the newsletter … will be dedicated to Silent Alarm thoughout the month of May.
In March 2002, so much had happened in the prior six-months … The terrorists’ attack on September 11th, Enron, Worldcom, and the related implosion of Arthur Andersen. I so clearly remember wondering if we would learn anything from these experiences … or if we would simply hit-the-snooze and go back to sleep in our desire to get back to “normal.” I knew there was so much to be learned … and it was that desire which gave birth to Silent Alarm: A Parable of Hope for Busy Professionals. As a parable, it was not designed to be a recipe to fix our business community or the world … but rather a story to create an experience to look inside. In the last five years, many lives have been touched … because readers have allowed the story to touch them. And some of them have been nothing short of a miracle. I know, because they invited me in to participate in the miracle.
I also clearly remember my very first breakfast meeting with Clint Greenleaf who would eventually become the publisher of Silent Alarm. He described Silent Alarm as a powerful “evergreen” story … meaning a message that would always be alive. Five years later, Clint has become a great friend. And five years later … the message of Silent Alarm is more relevant than ever. If the great recession has proven anything, it has proven that in 2002, most hit the snooze and went back to sleep.
A publisher typically doesn’t celebrate the 5th year Anniversary of a book in a society that thinks only the most recent publications could be relevant … unless its message is evergreen! And if it is … then five years is only the beginning! And so in this upcoming 5th month of the 5th year we are celebrating in five ways in May:
1. Five for Fifty For the first-time ever … and only through May 31st, we are offering a special 5-for-50 package … five autographed copies of Silent Alarm for $50. This is only available by calling our office at 630-357-7897. We hope you will be part of our wake-up call by sharing the message in a meaningful way with those you care about most!
2. Special Postings and Give-Aways The Front Porch will be packed with celebration. All blogs, JOHN TV and our May 2010 Issue of “The Front Porch” newsletter will be focused exclusively on Silent Alarm throughout the month. We hope you will join the conversation by posting your comments and becoming eligible to win one of the 25 personalized copies of Silent Alarm to be given away throughout the month of May.
3. New Formats for Waking-up We will be busy throughout the month working with Greenleaf Book Group and BackThird Studios on the upcoming summer release of the Audio, Ebook and Large Print editions of Silent Alarm.
4. Free Discussion Guide Many small groups and book clubs have experienced some amazing conversations by using Silent Alarm. The Silent Alarm Discussion Guide is available to download for free in the hopes that it will encourage group discussion or continued personal reflection.
5. Finally … Silent Alarm in a “flash” This summer we will release a “flash movie” in celebration of the fifth year of Silent Alarm. With music, pictures and words of inspiration … we hope it will serve as a gentle alarm for waking-up … that can be passed person to person via the internet. We hope you will enjoy it when it comes to or in-box! There has never been a better time for waking-up … than there will be this summer!
Today’s post is the featured article from the April 2010 issue of The Front Porch Newsletter. If you would like to automatically receive The Front Porch e-newsletter on the last Thursday of each month just click here to sign-up for your complimentary subscription.
I was in my hotel room in New York and had just tuned into Anderson Cooper’s AC360. His guest was Michael Lewis (author of The Blind Side) and he was being interviewed on his newest book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. As a analysis of how this latest economic crisis evolved, his book sounded interesting. So I decided to log-on to Amazon.com to check it out. It already had a number of reviews posted, so I clicked on the link to check them out.
I was surprised. I had never seen reviews seem so far apart.
At the time, they were almost equally balanced between those who rated it as a 5-Star (Outstanding) and those who rated it as a 1-Star (Poor). The 5-Stars were praising his insights. I read some of both … but it was one of the 1-Stars that got me thinking. Frankly, it got me thinking about something that had nothing to do with Anderson Cooper, Michael Lewis or The Big Short.
One review hammered Michael by noting that those he was naming as “pointless skeptics” in 2007 were his “voice of reason” in 2010. It seemed to be accusing him of a flip-flop. I didn’t have the facts or background to know if the 5-Star ratings were most accurate or this 1-Star rating. But it was this 1-Star rating that sent me on a tangent. What if Michael did do a flip-flop because in 2007 he was just wrong. He had made a mistake in how he saw things.
My thoughts quickly moved from Michael … to all of us. To a culture that simply doesn’t like to admit … I was wrong. I made a mistake. Maybe it is one of the by-products of a society that has become so driven by lawsuits. Maybe it is the human-nature of individuals that don’t want to face the consequences of their mistakes. Maybe it is a little of both. I am not sure …
… but what I am sure of is that an avoidance, of admitting our mistakes, prevents us from learning and growing.
It also costs us enormous energy. Think of all the creative effort that goes into spinning the story … the diversion away from the truth of our mistake. It creates an illusion, void of truth, and results in a confusion that ultimately destroys trust. But we weave anyway … and what a tangled web we weave.
Let’s admit it. Smart people with incredible values make mistakes! We know that those most likely to make no mistakes are those who accomplish nothing. But often, smart people in the midst of mistakes, do some stupid things … like not admitting they simply made a mistake. Instead, they order the asphalt to cover their tracks … to make things look all smooth again.
And I am not talking about Wall Street here. I am talking about you and me. In everyday decisions … at work, at home and in our community. I challenge each of us to step back and think of the times where we have simply made a mistake … and have never admitted it. I don’t mean to stir the pot to bring-up old problems … but rather to reveal the lessons we have missed. It might do us some good to rethink some things.
Generally attributed to poet and philosopher, George Santayanna, it has been said … “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The same could be said when we do not learn from our mistakes. Sometimes our problem is not that we can’t remember the past … but rather we have rewritten it. And once rewritten, the powerful lessons to be learned lie sealed beneath the asphalt.
Which may be the worst consequence of all.
Before you accuse me of being naïve, I realize the wrong-doings of some leaders are no mistake at all. But if the truth were truly known … more problems than you can imagine are simply mistakes. And we would know just how many, if only they had the guts to admit it … instead of spinning it.
If, in fact, there are some flip-flops in Michael Lewis’ The Big Short … maybe they came from new insights that helped him see some prior mistakes he had made in his thinking. I have no idea. But let there be no mistake … I loved The Blind Side. And I will check-out The Big Short. As I read it, I will be reminded that within the book there are likely a few mistakes. For just like those who wrote those 5-Star and 1-Star reviews … I have made a few myself.
This morning, I was attending a breakfast meeting for the Chicago Executive Forum. After listening to a thought-provoking presentation, we were given some questions to discuss at our table. The presentation and the questions triggered some meaningful conversation. My friend, Tricia Krohmer, was sitting at our table … and one of her comments really got me thinking:
It was simple and powerful … knowing the difference of having intentions vs.being intentional.
Just a few letters different … but worlds apart. Both take effort. Both require some level of focus. But one is a way to set some goals … and one is a way of life. One depends on the hope of someday … and the other is about making the most of this day.
In a world that is exponentially moving faster … I think it would do us well to recommit to being more intentional. Maybe then our good intentions wouldn’t be needed at all … for they would, most likely, have already been done!
Maybe it would do us good to keep a measuring cup on our desk.
Maybe it would remind us, we measure what we value.
And we get what we measure!
Personal values are … well, so personal. Or are they? Every organization is fully dependent on the personal values of their employees. Makes you wonder why so many organizations think it is just that touchy-feely ”soft” kind of stuff. Maybe it’s because the commitment to values is just too hard!
Today’s post is the featured article from the March 2010 issue of The Front Porch Newsletter. If you would like to automatically receive The Front Porch e-newsletter on the last Thursday of each month just click here to sign-up for your complimentary subscription.
Having core values is all about choice … if you don’t choose them, they will choose you. In the end, it is impossible not to have them. The question becomes who is choosing whom? Since the release of GOOD to the CORE, I have become increasingly aware that values are more often choosing individuals and organizations than vice versa. In many cases we unknowingly help this process along.
We have become far more sophisticated in business planning and execution. Tremendous energy and focus have been devoted to the development of organizational visions. We have made great strides in understanding the need and development of effective business strategies to direct our path towards the vision at-hand. Technology has provided us the will and the way to create detailed measurements of numerous daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual metrics. And we have clearly learned you get what you measure.
But have we really understood the lesson learned?
We have taken vision, strategy and measurement dead-serious. The question becomes, have we taken core values more serious … or have we seriously considered them at all. Some organizations have considered them to be the “soft touchy-feely” kind of stuff. Hardly!
Core values, thoughtfully chosen, create rock-solid foundations upon which visions, strategies and measurements can stand. It is in not choosing them … letting them choose us … that we create the soft touchy-feely. As in … soft touchy-feely foundations.
Clear visions, sophisticated strategies and measurements will propel you. We can teach them in the classrooms of our most highly-regarded business schools across America. We can refine them in boardrooms and at business retreats of the most intelligent executives. And, I propose, the better we become with them the more dangerous they become with us … unless we are, first, more dead-serious about our core values than any of these business tools.
I have learned the concept of core values is simple … yet from that point forward, are anything but easy. I have also learned that we are easily deceived into thinking we are more on top of this than we really are. I have now seen hundreds upon hundreds of very thoughtful people run head-on into the sudden reality that maybe they really don’t know their own personal values as well as they thought they did. I have lost count of the employees that simply don’t know the values of the organization where they show-up to work each day. It would have been easier to keep count of the employees that did. And these are good people … dedicated to the vision, strategy and measurements of their employer.
Today’s workers are very smart. But they will respond to what organizations deem to be important.
If an organization is dead-serious about defining, communicating and holding everyone accountable (top to bottom) to a set of core values … you can bet employees would respond.
By definition, core values have to come first. They have to supersede. They have to trump any vision, strategy or measurement. Otherwise they are of no value at all.
We have seen the results of a few well-educated executives who were too smart for their own good … too advanced to want to master anything as simple as core values. Or maybe they were just no good at all. More likely, they were actually very good … but they blindly let enticing visions, intellectually-stimulating strategies and carefully designed metrics pull them. And with the pressures of the pull they began to drift. Eventually a set of values chose them … and not the ones they would have chosen.
The same holds true for our personal dreams and aspirations. Dream big … but without values … you may very well wake-up to a nightmare.
For organizations to truly benefit from the value of values, I am coming to realize each of the following must simultaneously exist:
1. Owners and employees,alike, must first understand their own personal values. Organization values are empty when not systemically connected to an initial understanding of our own personal values. It must be clear that, organizationally, personal values are anything but personal.
2. Leaders must lead the way in developing, understanding, communicating, and driving the core values of the organization. They must first hold themselves accountable … and then hold everyone else accountable.
3. Everyone must realize that visions, strategies and metrics are important … but must always be at the mercy of a clearly defined set of core values.
Otherwise … you may very well be asking to be one of the chosen!
