Promoting Value is Exactly Why No One Is Listening We live in a world of innovation. Every day something new is created. So why is it then that so many great ideas die? Sell the features. Sell the benefits. Sell the value. The right way to sell is to show how good your service, product or idea is. Wrong. Those things are necessary, but they are not what is essential for new ideas or innovation to catch on. Changing The Frame I have spent the majority of my career making things better. Continuous improvement, network design, process re-engineering — it has many different labels. It’s all the same. Make changes to what is being done to generate better results. The single biggest key to my success in implementing new ideas? Lower the barrier for entry. We like to believe we are organic computers. Rational to the end. That given the right information and the correct inputs, people will produce the best output. To get someone to actually change, give up on that idea immediately. In the...

 Why Diversity Is As Important As Intelligence It was 2005. I had graduated university and was six months into one of the most entertaining jobs that I have ever had. I worked retail, like a lot of people in my situation. Working part time (or full time) while going through school was not uncommon. From 2000–2004 I worked at Staples. The store was fine. Pretty much what you see today when you walk into a Staples. A little bit less flashy, a lot more grey. Their bread and butter was business clients after all. I worked in the computer department. I'm sure that it had a special name, but I've long since forgotten that internal acronym. This was the start of the computer craze. The internet was drawing everyone's attention, every month there was a newer and faster computer released. Keep in mind, it was only in 1995 that Java was first announced; and by 1999 AMD was releasing the a 750mghz processor.  Impressive. With so much activity in the market, you can imagine customers s...

  People hate to fail. We drive ourselves crazy trying to avoid it. The irony however, is that we are natural experimenters. Our ancestors started roaming the planet about 6 million years ago, modern form humans back 300,000 or so, with civilization starting about 6,000 years ago. The constant through all of that has been trying out new ideas, methods or activities. Do you know what happens when we experiment? We get things wrong. If We’re Built for Experimentation, Why Do We Hate It? While failure comes with experimentation, it has an unfortunate connection to our fundamental needs. Originally developed in the 1940s, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps us identify and rank core human requirements. Level one being were most of our trouble resides when thinking of failure. Biological and physiological needs — air, food, drink, shelter, warmth, sex, sleep, etc. Our earliest memories set the stage for our future. We go to pre-school to succeed in kindergarten. From there we move through...

 The Opportunity That Almost Everyone is Missing For the majority of the population, the 40 hour workweek is here to stay. I sit in the contribution/results camp vs clocking time. Forcing anyone to live by the ticker is a remnant of the past. Unfortunately my opinion won’t change the world. Have you ever thought about how much time you spend working?  How about you work 7.5h a day, meaning 37.5h per week. You are a little ahead of the filthy forty. Good for you. Before you start smiling, did you know that a 7.5h workday is 31% of your ENTIRE day. I’m being generous unfortunately. Remember you sleep 7h a night (you do sleep 7 hours a night right?) leaving you with 17 waking hours. With that new base, work now takes up a whopping 44% of your day. Gross. But wait, there’s more! It’s the roaring 2020s baby, let’s not pretend your nine to five is really all the work you do. Side hustle? A start-up? Gigwork?  Even sitting here now, writing this for you, do you classify th...

 How Measuring Differently Helps You Stand Out In a digital world, information is everywhere. At work, at home or at play, you have more access to information than ever. Use it. Below you will find some things I have learned leveraging data to keep making improvements in anything I do. Data is not something only for the office. When you realize how much information is out there, your world starts to change. Feedback is the secret to success. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Tik Tok - they all provide services. The platforms and devices aren't the only reason their are winning. Data is their real advantage. It should be yours as well. Measure What Matters Whatever it is that you are about to do, if there is a path in front of that needs to grow or get better you HAVE to think about what to measure. Some of what you need to measure is easy to understand. These are the things that everyone else is doing. Those core key performance indicators that start the journey. Here are some examp...

Building for Success on the Back of Change Usually when people think of 3 words that have a huge impact on your life they have more of a romantic connotation.  I suppose both phrases carry with them the idea of a change. I wrote a post yesterday on LinkedIn related to my field of work. I have been in Logistics and Last Mile delivery for 15 years now. Needless to say, I’m pretty comfortable in my thinking and confident in my understanding. I took a strong position against Ultrafast delivery and presented my case. The posted ended with me saying “Share your thoughts, change my mind”. There was nothing cheeky about it. It was a true desire and an honest comment. This was a response someone made on that post: Love this example of a strong belief weakly held, inviting real discussion and co-discovery. So rare. It surprised me. I have been like this for as long as I can remember. It’s a fundamental pillar of my leadership style and I am not sure I could be different if I tried. I ab...

  I love how Rita McGrath shares her frame on blind spots, seeing around corners. It's a great way to think of these types of opportunities. In business there is always that point when something new is starting to take hold. It could be a new technology, a new service or a dramatic shift in consumer or market expectations. We can get stuck in the trap of what we are doing and how we have been doing it. This limits our ability to properly assess the situation. It is not always a lack of ideas that leaves us caught off guard, rather inadequately addressing the problem. This is one of the reasons I love working with younger teams.  People that are new to the workforce, new to a new company or industry see things as they are. They don't have years of experience that is guiding their thinking or altering their perceptions; they are free from the workplace biases we create and support by having to execute day in and day out. Because of this gap in knowledge or understanding of the c...

Every organization rates their employees. Every organization identifies high-potentials (HIPOs) within their ranks.  Usually part of an annual review process, managers are asked to rate each member of their team against a pre-determined scale; and while programs, criteria and assessment cycles change, these reviews are all essentially the same. A high-potential employee (HIPO) is someone with the ability, engagement, and aspiration to rise to and succeed in more senior, critical positions. Where you get classified within a matrix influences your career. Those identified as high-potential are given the opportunity to take on more projects, they work on more challenging problems and benefit from wider exposure to the business.  If your aspiration is to rise within an organization or find yourself with a senior level role at some point, it is essential that you be seen as a HIPO.  Disclaimer: There is absolutely nothing wrong taking on a role as a key player / regular cont...

If you have a problem and you can't solve it, it's time to reframe it. Reframing a problem is simple. You force yourself to look at it from another perspective. Why would this help? Because most of the time the problem is a result of how you are seeing or understanding the problem. You are using your own assumptions and experience to solve what's in front of you, however these are often the same things that created the environment where the problem is thriving. People will often confuse problems, causes and effects. We take for granted our own default node network and the role it plays in everything we perceive.  The best approach to reframing a problem has two elements. First you need to understand how something got to the way it is today. Second, you have to drop everything you already know about the situation and start with a beginner's mind. Innovative solutions are a result of thinking about a problem differently than you (or other people) already have been. You ha...

  We live in a world that is obsessed with solving problems with a system or technology. How many times have you hear someone [basically] say "let's get an app for that"? Crazy. I'm all for shiny new things. I love my toys as much as you do.  Rarely however does that new systems, application or software suite fix any of the underlying issues. When was the last time you started using something new, either in your personal or professional life, and it immediately fixed your problem and you changed nothing about what you are doing. Often, what ends up happening, is that as businesses look to implement some new tech, they also end up having to change HOW they are doing things. The changes that are made to core processes is what drives the success. Using your phone to track your steps, your sleep, your workout or to even help you write. Pause for a second, think about any of those situations.  Tracking your steps and setting daily goals means that you are actually walking ...

    I'm writing today inspired by a post I saw by Chris Walker - on LinkedIn . It resonated with me personally and professionally. There is a dichotomy between having a vision and seeing what others don't while also needing their approval and trying fit in. We are often asked to solve problems and come up with new and innovating solutions to what we see in front of us. Rarely are you asked to implement a dated and by the book strategy, everyone wants to be on the cutting edge. Oddly enough, the more your ideas or approach differ from the status quo, from what the people within the organization has succeeded on, the harder it gets to take those new roads. It feels like most of time, people want you to take the same path and miraculously see something that no one else before you saw, hang a right and boom ... you are at your perfect oasis. Ridiculous.   Here's a fun list for you: Apple Tesla AirBnB FedEx KFC Evernote Blogger Amazon   Wondering what the list is about? A...

  Have you ever wondered why we get stuck on the concept of making the right or wrong decision?  Have you realized that thinking a decision either leads to the right path and that the other leads to the wrong one is binary? How limiting. I appreciate the picture for this post is exactly that; it was by design to re-enforce what most people go through when making decisions. We get stuck trying to settle on whether or not we should do a particular thing. This simple lens, while easy to process and helps us feel in control, usually results in a failure to consider other alternatives. Rarely are our choices black or white, yet we spend so much of our time trying to decide against one single thing. This is to to our detriment in two major ways.  First, we are limiting our our choices. We don't consider alternatives that could be equally rewarding and adequate to solve the problem. Second, causes us to miss out on the experience of trying and testing alternatives, which could l...

  Do you know what I did last week? This will sound crazy and you might think I need help (honestly maybe I do!). I have been struggling to manage my time and responsibilities lately. Not so much in terms of knowing what I need to do, more balancing what I need to do with what I want to do. What had been happening was that too many things were pushing off, "Oh, I'll get to that tomorrow" or I was allowing myself to think that "I don't have time for that". The consequence was that every few days, things would stack up and the biggest place that was suffering was my sleep. Now, I appreciate off the bat that might sound lazy AF to some people. Thinking "Is this guy really whining because he's not able to sleep ... come on dude". I get it, our society has created a culture around how much you can do on the fewest hours of sleep. I bought into that, big time ... hell I was captain of the team. At one point in my life I was flying 50-100 times a year...

  Making decisions and getting consensus is the most common activity that every person goes through. Whether in your personal or professional life, we are all selling, all the time. Selling? I'm not selling anything! Actually, that's not really true. At the most fundamental level, selling is about the transfer of belief. You are trying to get a person or a group to see things the way you do. If they accept that, you make the "sale" (i.e. you have transferred your idea/belief) as another has chosen to accept it. Where things get hard is when people hold onto certain ideas, frames or positions around a circumstance. It's interesting how little people realize what they share related to their position without even knowing it. The information is there, as long as you are listening. Always be listening. When someone repeats a variable or constraint that is a difference, that has major impact. They themselves they may not realize that they are essentially confirming what...

  2022 is upon us and I have decided to pick back up with my writing ... resolutions, gotta love them. The quote above is overly dramatic, however this post was inspired by Dr. West. One of the biggest success factors in my career has been asking questions. That may sound simple, however you will see as you progress through your career the amount of people that don't ask questions. They would rather guess, figure everything out on their own, or hope that they correctly understood from the start (rarely happens when you aren't able to ask good questions). In the opening of his Master Class, Cornel West frames a philosopher in the following context. I've been blessed to teach philosophy for 44 years. And in each one of my classes, I tell my students, you have come in this class to learn how to die. And they say, oh, Professor West, I thought I was just here to get a grade and try to get my degree. No, no. That's just the professional, formal dimension of it, because dying...

 I have been spending a lot of time lately doing discovery. Have you come across a process or workflow that has a gap or a problem and when you ask about it, the response is either "this is just how it works" or you are given the "reason" for it. I'm always surprised about how often we take the response as a concrete or unchangeable component. We seem to figure that since someone can explain or give an answer, surely they must have explored the alternatives. While this can be true, very often you will find that the reason that is given was more dependent on the thinking or options available at the time versus a pure problem / gap / deficiency in the actual process. Working with my team, I enjoy engaging them with a lot of how and what questions, I keep pushing to the next level, not immediately accepting the response. I am not being difficult and they know that I am asking to really understand, and they do great job explaining. It is always rewarding when you c...

It's been a while since I have written anything new. As I have started and gotten into a new role with a new organization, finding time for other interests has been harder. I had couple of events over the last two weeks however that found me back in a place to share. My new role is all about Continuous Improvement. Working with my team and the broader operations teams to drive a lot of change. This is not a new world for me or aren't responsibilities that I haven't had in the past, however it is the first time I find myself in a role completely dedicated to it. The most important thing that you need to be able to do in order to drive change is to understand what is going on. You HAVE to ask A LOT of questions, to keep asking "... and what else?", to keep pushing past the first answers and responses you get (often these are what the business has always done, or what individuals have been doing based on their understanding). Asking questions and pushing ...

Coming from an operations world, you are always on the go. While you might work 8 or 10 hours a day, the other parts of your business and/or your responsibility are usually going 24 hours a day. This is one of the most challenging things for people to manage as they get into an operations world. At first you simply believe that you will do more hours, get ahead of the curve and then you will be able to slow down and relax. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. The more you get accomplished, the more 'opportunities' you seem to have. Added to this, you start to deal with the matrix above more often then you realize. The biggest trap that people fall into with their work and responsibilities is not taking the time to understand where each task / problem / responsibility fits. The other major challenge is that we often take on what 'seems' to be urgent and important ... for other people and not necessarily ourselves. With so many people working from home right now, I...

Today's post was inspired by the following quote from the book "The Dichotomy of Leadership": "Every leader must be willing and able to lead, but just as important is a leader’s ability to follow. A leader must be willing to lean on the expertise and ideas of others for the good of the team. Leaders must be willing to listen and follow others, regardless of whether they are junior or less experienced." One of the best ways a leader can truly lead the team is to also follow them. It is extremely empowering for your team to know that you not only listen, but trust them to make important decisions and that you are going to have their back and let them take charge. Some people think that being the leader means you make all the of the decisions all of the time, and if you think your idea is best, to just pull rank and make it happen. Like everything in life, it is better when people CHOOSE.  The autonomy and flow it provides your team is extremely importa...

One of the most interesting things to me is how we can be so sure that we are being clear, or that we are communicating our position perfectly, yet someone else interprets it in a totally different way. The image linked to this post is one of my favourite visual examples of this. In both cases, the person is completely right ... based on their perspective. I recently had an experience where I was trying to explain and show my understanding of the last mile space. That my experience deploying and managing last mile in one context, easily and logically translates to another. For me, I was being crystal clear. My examples clearly demonstrated my mastery and understanding, the way I was framing my points was relevant. And then "Can you highlight how this relates to last mile ..." My initial reaction was to simply restate what I already had (since I had done such a 'good job'). Then I paused. I took some time to step out of myself, and take a different approach. The fac...