What I Read – “A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative” by Roger von Oech

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A whack on the side of the head, book, creativity, experience, innovation, Roger von Oech

I’ve finished that book some time ago already (four years, to be exact) and here is what I noted:

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Nonetheless, knowledge alone won’t make a person creative.

The real key to being creative lies in what we do with our knowledge.

We have a situation where people know more and more about less and less.

Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experience. But if you have the same experiences as everybody else, you’re unlikely to look in a different direction.

The truth contained in those short four sentences above is already widely known, but worth repeating over and over again. It is highly unlikely, especially now, that one person alone will make a groundbreaking innovation. At any rate, it is very difficult. Easier is to build on each other’s ideas. For that, you need to keep an open mind and respect experience of others. This, in part, is also what the below quote says:

Luciano de Crescenzo: “We are all angels with just one wing – we can only fly while embracing one another.”

 

What I Read – McKinsey Quarterly, January 2015 Issue.

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character, experience, leadership, learning, McKinsey Quarterly

Recently I read somewhere, that I should make notes of what I read and review them from time to time. I decided to give it a try, since I read a lot and I think making such notes will be for me a way of remembering best ideas, quotes, or whatever from my books and magazines. I also decided to share those notes with you, in edited form as some have gotten pretty long. In many cases I copied whole passages without noting the page numbers, which is against good reference practices, but of course I will list title and author of a book (or article) where I got the notes from.

I do that with hope that at least some of you will reach for mentioned magazine or book when you will find my notes interesting. Ach, one more thing: small number of notes do not mean that the book or magazine was not good…

Here is what I noted from the article “Decoding leadership: What really matters” by Claudio Feser, Fernanda Mayol, and Ramesh Srinivasan:

Telling CEOs these days that leadership drives performance is a bit like saying that oxygen is necessary to breathe. Over 90 percent of CEOs are already planning to increase investment in leadership development because they see it as the single most important human-capital issue their organizations face.

Our most research suggests that a small subset of leadership skills closely correlates with leadership success, particularly among frontline leaders.

What we found was that leaders in organizations with high-quality leadership teams typically displayed 4 of the 20 possible types of behaviour. […]Those 4 explained 89 percent of the variance between strong and weak organizations in terms of leadership effectiveness:

• Solving problems effectively. The process that precedes decision-making is problem solving, when information is gathered, analysed and considered.
• Operation with a strong results orientation. Leaders with a strong results orientation tend to emphasise the importance of efficiency and productivity and to prioritize the highest-value work.
• Seeking different perspectives. This trait is conspicuous in managers who monitor trends affecting organizations, grasp changes in the environment, encourage employees to contribute ideas that could improve performance, accurately differentiate between important and unimportant issues, and give appropriate weight to stakeholder concerns.
• Supporting others. Leaders who are supportive understand and sense how other people feel.

For organizations investing in the development of their future leaders, prioritizing these four areas is a good place to start.

I personally find that leadership many parts experience, some patience, some character and only a little training. Unless that training was done in form of mentoring by someone already possessing qualities we seek. I also think that not everyone can be a good leader, despite notion that it can be learned. First item in the list above is grounded in experience, third in part as well. Second and fourth is a character trait. Look for people who already have those things and let them work. Teaching someone to be result oriented when he is process oriented makes not that much sense… at least to me. I guess that this is why most of the funds spent on leadership courses are wasted.

Going… Going… Gone.

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age, experience, life, memories, midlife crisis

I wrote previously about experiencing life – I even counted how many bits of information I have left (you can find that older post here). Now I am three years older and still feeling pressure of passing time. Especially when that time was wasted.

But what is a waste? Recently I saw photos which I took 10 years ago with my friends… We all look different. I am still fat, one of the other guys has leukemia, the other got skinny, last one has three kids and a wife. Oh, yeah, I got married too. I almost forgot 🙂 But if I would really look hard, we are all pretty much what we were and where we were. Pretty much. But where would I like to be?

I know now that all this is not about places you have been to. I am of course not going to tell you with any conviction of a tv preacher what life really is about, the only thing I can say is that it is about different things in different stages. Maybe. Maybe not.

My life was once and still is about making mistakes. About learning new things. This learning did help me to feed me, no doubt. Got a place to live too. Let us say, that at this stage I collected things. Stage two (although the mistakes stage somehow still is ongoing) is presumably over. At least I have no idea what other things I would want.

What stage I am at now? I am close enough to be old – and I mean really old, pissing your pants old, or not being able to walk or see old – and somehow I have a feeling that time is running away. What to do with it? Now that wasted time becomes stressful. I am myself making it so. Unnecessarily, maybe…

I think that now I am in a stage where I have to live life. Collect experiences. Strive to LIVE. Thinking about it I realized that this could go too far – so I added a sentence: strive to gain new things, experiences, moments – but respect the ones you already have. Don’t throw them away. In my quest for filling up my memories with things to ponder and reminiscence about when I will drool sitting on my wheelchair I should not destroy life I built. Somehow strike a balance. Stage three – live, but balance. I am supposed to be wiser now, I should be able to do it. I will have to – each second the bits I have a chance to process are going, going… gone.

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adventure, experience, life, values

I could not agree more. Actually, many adventures will not make sense to other people not only because they don’t understand them. Sometimes it is because their set of values, beliefs, experience, courage etc will not even prepare them to understand. It is possible that they will – with time – but then it will be too late…

Looking for People

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applicant, CV, experience, job interview, job seeking, test

Recently I had a privilege to participate in few job interviews, where I was sitting on the “better” side of the table, on the side offering the job. I will of course not share details of those interviews, but I wanted to share on reflection associated with this experience. Namely, I think that all written job applications are worthless. Which maybe is not such a new thing, but I don’t mean here how those applications are written, only what is in them and what purpose those applications are to serve.

In my opinion, regardless of the job offered, you should look for two things: that the person will fit into the existing group (meaning that you should look for specific character traits) and that the person is intelligent enough and possess enough base skills to give you hope that she will perform required task as needed.

How should a person show those things in an application? First one is impossible to show, as the candidate does not know your team. Second is theoretically possible through a list of educational achievements, mastered skills etc. Applicants know this and they use standard terms in order to satisfy first requirement listing everything what sounds good (innovative, energetic, resistant to stress, dependable, team player, friendly, honest etc) and in order to satisfy the second requirement they list all possible school achievements, language proficiency and skills which they allegedly possess (master of SAP or Microsoft Office, fluent in French, etc). In consequence, all CV are pretty much the same. Especially now, when you are not supposed to pay attention to photos or you should not even ask for them on the basis of possible racial discrimination.

When it comes to the interview, you find out that the person listing as being “active” or “energetic” is actually really phlegmatic. French, well, it was fluent, but on mother’s side about 15 years ago, but applicant is sure that with some practice it will all come back. In the rest of the allocated time for the interview, you are trying to judge person’s true character while taking nervousness into account. And based on this, you make your decision if the person is suitable or not, hoping that her college diploma was earned, not bought.

Since the decision is based on the character traits more than anything else, why all this crap in the CV? I think that education and language skills – the tacit knowledge, the one which can be easily checked – should be listed, but listed truthfully. So should be the work history as it is helpful (applicant may already have required experience). The rest should not be. Instead, applicants should be given psychological tests easy enough for us to evaluate (based on pre-defined criteria). You, or your HR department, should also devise short and practical tests (written) to check listed tacit skills. In essence, you would have two stages job application – one consisting of tests, results of which would qualify (or disqualify) applicant for an interview. Results of both would be enough to give you a base for eventual decision much better than it is the case now.