The Business Sensei

Enter the Manager

The story is told of the late martial arts master and movie star, Bruce Lee, that one day he came upon one of his students arriving early at the dojo.

“Why so early?” the master asked.

“I need a good hour to limber up enough to throw high kicks,” replied the student.

“And how long does it take you to prepare for low kicks?” asked Lee.

“Oh, those are easy,” said the student. “A short warm-up, at most, is all I need.”

“Practice your low kicks and forget about the high kicks,” advised Lee.

In response to the student’s shocked expression, Lee added: “Focus on your strengths and they will overcome your weaknesses.”

In making this comment, Lee contradicted a piece of common wisdom in both martial arts and business. Of course, just because something is labeled as “common wisdom” doesn’t mean that it’s wise or accurate; it may just be common. In this case, the persistent belief that the way to success is to focus on weaknesses is a both extremely attractive and subtly destructive.

The idea that if we could just take each person and “fix” each of their weaknesses we would end up with a team of super performers is highly alluring. The problem with this idea is that strengths and weaknesses are sticky: they reflect the complex facets of each individual. Bruce Lee’s student had a body that was not suited to stretching in a certain direction, and no amount of exercise was going to change that. What made Bruce Lee a skilled instructor is that he recognized that one size does not fit all. You must teach the actual person in front of you, not the theoretical person or the ideal person.

The simple reality is that each person has their own unique profile of strengths and weaknesses. A tall man with long legs may find head-high kicks relatively easy, while trying to get low enough to execute a hip throw would be extremely difficult. For the short person, however, the opposite is likely true. In a business environment, each particular profile may not be so obvious, but it exists just the same.

Now, I do get asked if there’s ever a situation in which everyone has the same profile, the same set of strengths and weaknesses. In fact, there is one group where this is true: the clone army in Star Wars. Because they are all identical, with identical profiles of strengths and weaknesses, it might not matter whether one fixes their weaknesses or builds their strengths. That said, their primary weakness, being unable to shoot straight, seems to be unfixable.

Star Wars aside, in the real world we’re dealing with individuals, not clones. No two individuals are identical, which is an important component of building successful teams: a baseball team that was comprised entirely of excellent pitchers and no outfielders would be at a serious disadvantage. Because each person is unique, not everyone will be able to do the same things: when we assume that every weakness can, and should, be fixed, we are implicitly saying that we’re dealing with clones, not individuals. In reality, each member of the team has different strengths, enabling the team to tackle a variety of different problems and develop different, innovative solutions.

You don’t get that by focusing on weakness. Rather, the secret is to build strength and figure out ways to render the weaknesses irrelevant: in other words, get away from the cookie-cutter approach to management and pay attention to the people in front of you. For example, at a certain service company, one sales team had an amazing “opener” combined with an equally amazing “closer.” The first guy was remarkably good at opening conversations with complete strangers and getting them interested, but couldn’t finalize a deal to save his life. His partner, on the other hand, was terrible at making those initial calls, but given an interested prospect, could close almost every deal. Individually, they were mediocre performers, together they were incredible! Rather than try to force to closer to become an opener or the opener to become a closer, their manager let each one develop their strengths and created a situation in which each one’s strengths overcame the weaknesses of the other. The team really was greater than the sum of its parts.

The reason this works is quite simple: people’s strengths and what gives them a real sense of accomplishment and satisfaction for a job well done tend to go together. When it comes to employee engagement and effective goal setting, we know that people engage more deeply and passionately with goals that are personally meaningful and personally rewarding. Attempts to fix weakness generally fail because the person doesn’t find success in that particular area personally rewarding. Focusing on strength, on the other hand, means that you are always encouraging people to build up the things that they most enjoy, and that enjoyment motivates them to constantly work harder. When you “reward” someone by making them do tasks that they don’t find satisfying, you are destroying their motivation: instead of success being associated with a sense of accomplishment and enjoyment, it becomes associated with drudgery. Also, on a purely practical level, a ten percent gain in something that is already strong yields a much larger actual return on the time and energy invested than a ten percent gain on something that is weak.

It’s also worth noting that, as psychologists Gary Locke and Ed Latham point out, the high performance cycle of business is triggered in part by people feeling personal satisfaction and gaining increased self-efficacy from accomplishing challenging goals. This requires, however, that the goal be personally relevant as well. Building and developing strengths are almost always personally relevant goals, whereas goals focusing on weaknesses are generally imposed on someone. This latter, of course, reduces people’s sense of autonomy in the workplace, increasing stress and reducing motivation, thus short-circuiting the high-performance cycle.

Building strength also increases an employee’s feelings of competence, another key element of effective motivation. When people work hard and can see real success, they feel more competent. When you work hard at something and see little gain from that effort, a common result when focusing on weakness, your feelings of competence and self-efficacy are decreased. It’s hard to feel competent when you’re working extremely hard at something at which you simply never do well, and feel little sense of accomplishment in even when you do manage something that isn’t awful.

Another interesting side effect of focusing on strengths versus weaknesses is that people generally feel happier and more energized when they are recognized for doing well at something they are passionate about. When people are constantly being praised for working on weaknesses, the praise feels hollow or pointless. If you simply don’t value the result, doing it well doesn’t feel particularly praiseworthy. On the other hand, praise for excelling at something you love is highly energizing. Granted, it’s important to understand how each employee likes being praised: publically or privately, but that doesn’t change the basic point that praise for excelling at something you love is more valuable than for excelling at something you hate. The former builds feelings of competence, while the latter undermines them.

A team of clones may look like a great hammer, but not every problem is really a nail. A team with a variety of strong performers is capable of shifting and adjusting to meet each challenge in front of them. With practice, the team almost instinctively adjusts to put the right combination of people in the right place at the right time.

It is exactly for this reason that the best managers, like Bruce Lee and other master instructors, focus on developing strengths, not weaknesses.

Difficult decisions or difficulty with decisions?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Some years ago, when I was getting married, my wife and I engaged in the traditional ritual of the Choosing of the China. After trying to choose between china patterns all afternoon, the thought of being eaten alive by creatures from another planet was looking more and more attractive. Fortunately, it wasn’t an available option! By the end of the day, I just wanted the choices to end. I was ready to agree to anything. Indeed, I’ve often wondered if the reason police shows never use choosing china patterns as a form of interrogation is that it is seen as just too cruel.

In their book, “Willpower,” psychologist Roy Baumeister and NY Times reporter John Tierney discuss the phenomenon of will and decision making in great detail. From an organizational perspective, though, there are some key points that we need to consider as they have far reaching effects on organizational effectiveness.

As anyone who has ever had to choose china patterns can attest, the process is exhausting. We can only make so many decisions in a day before we start to feel like our brains are turning to goo and are trickling out of our ears. Part of the problem is that decisions are not always obvious: you’ll recall in chapter 11 we discussed the point that part of focusing on a task is being able to distinguish what is important from what is not. That separation is a form of decision making. Tuning out that annoying coworker in the cubicle down the hall is a decision. Indeed, what Baumeister found is that our decision making and our overall willpower are inextricably linked. The more decisions we have to make, the less willpower we have left for other things, like focusing on a problem or being creative.

Part of why decision making in groups works the way it does is that the energy people have determines the types of decisions they can make. In stage one groups, people are spending most of their time and energy just figuring out how to work together; thus, we end up with directive leadership being the most effective style in that situation. The group members lack both the decision making skill and energy for more sophisticated decision making techniques. As the group members become more comfortable with one another, the combination of learning to work together and increasing skill at decision making enables the group to develop and move to higher levels of performance.

Unfortunately, unlike physical tiredness, the sort of mental tiredness that comes with decision fatigue isn’t always so obvious. It’s not like we stop making decisions; rather, we just make increasingly poor decisions. When we’re mentally tired, we have trouble making the types of decisions that involve risk. We’re much more likely to just choose the thing that’s easy, which is generally to do little or nothing; to not try that new initiative or explore that new product idea. The planned bold new leap forward at dawn becomes a hesitant shuffle by the end of the day. Whether at an individual or a group level, we are subject to decision making errors of this sort. With groups, though, the poor decision is then amplified by the echo chamber effect of group polarization.

Riveting!  Yes, I called a leadership book riveting.  I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next.  The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom

President

Manager Mechanics, LLC

Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

Creating effective routines

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Basically, a routine is a series of actions that we perform so often that they become automatic and which often produce a particular mindset. The more we practice the routine, the more rapidly we create the mindset. Eventually, merely contemplating the routine will initiate the mental state, although performing the routine is still essential most of the time if we want it to last. When an athlete executes a pre-performance routine, that routine is intended to get them physically and mentally prepared for competition. Many people create morning routines around breakfast, coffee, and reading the news as a way of mentally preparing to focus on the day’s work. My first jujitsu sensei used to tell us that the reason we bowed as we entered the dojo was to leave the day’s baggage at the door so that we could concentrate on the workout. If we practiced the routine with that image in mind, it worked. If we didn’t, it didn’t.

Quite often, though, routines are created less carefully. They just build up over time: for example, the student I described in the opening to this chapter was in the process of building up a routine around her throws. Throw, focus on the negative, produce a negative, pessimistic mindset, repeat. Of course, as she built that mindset, her throws would get worse, there would be more negatives to focus on, and so it went. When this process isn’t interrupted, students start dreading the practice of throwing because they’ve built such negative associations.

I’ve encountered this phenomenon in jujitsu, and also when conducting seminars on mental skills techniques for athletes in other sports. It comes up in the business world as well: as I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, in one particularly dramatic example, a software engineering team at one major company would conduct a post-mortem review after each product ship. Unfortunately, as we know from chapter three, group polarization can produce extremes of behavior in a team. In this case, team members all wanted to demonstrate that they were serious and dedicated and open to giving and receiving criticism. It wasn’t long before each product ship was followed by a laser-like focus on the flaws, while the very real successes were minimized or ignored. Over time, the ability of the team declined simply because they convinced themselves that they just weren’t all that good and eventually product quality followed. Then they really did have something to complain about! Performance reviews are another area in which routines develop over time, a point well illustrated by the number of managers who complain to me about how unpleasant it is to even contemplate the review process!

Riveting!  Yes, I called a leadership book riveting.  I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next.  The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom

President

Manager Mechanics, LLC

Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

The Power of Routine

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

My son takes Kenpo Karate. At the end of each class, the instructor has the kids bow and then recite the rules of the school, a short bit about effort and character. The kids then remove their belts and leave the mat. One afternoon, though, instead of the head instructor, one of the other black belts was teaching class. As the class drew to a close, the head instructor stepped onto the back of the mat, kneeled down, and bowed with everyone else. Instead of having the kids recite the rules, the black belt teaching the class told the kids to turn and bow to the head instructor. What followed was a moment of pure confusion: some kids started reflexively reciting the rules. Others half turned, then hesitated when they saw other kids not turning or starting to take off their belts. It took the assistant instructor several tries to get everyone to turn around, bow, and then end class normally.

Classes normally follow a very predictable routine. It always begins and ends the same way. Changing that routine, as the instructor found, isn’t easy. This is true for all manner of organizational routines. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about kids or adults: routines are powerful. As we discussed in chapter eleven, athletes use routines all the time to help them focus and prepare for competition.

There are fundamentally two different types of routines: routines that we deliberately create and routines that we just fall into. Both types are equally powerful. However, while deliberately building a routine is generally beneficial, routines we just fall into are as like as not to be counter-productive.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

Frog Soup

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

As we can see, stress can be one of our most effective tools. The key is learning to use it well. As we saw in chapter 9, performance is all about being able to develop effective strategies and measurable goals. As we see from examining the dynamics of performance, success in this endeavor is not based on what we can do in a few minutes, a few hours, or even a few days or weeks. Performance is determined by how long and how steadily we can work. We get an amazing amount done when we can work in ways that take advantage of our innate productivity cycles! The old aphorism that, “success is a marathon, not a sprint,” isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law (at least metaphorically!).

It’s when we let stress get out of hand, or when we allow the wrong kinds of stress to dominate the environment, that we start to undermine our natural productivity cycles. Once stress becomes destructive, we rapidly enter a destructive cycle that can transform even the best organizations into miserable places to work. Unlike our mythical boiling frog, which has the sense to know when to jump, all too often we allow ourselves to be trapped in those cycles, not realizing just how bad it is getting.

While the stress and performance management techniques we looked at will help, it’s even better to develop the habits of thought and working that prevent destructive stress cycles from occurring in the first place. The more we avoid destructive stress, the more our performance management techniques serve to increase our performance, rather than merely maintaining it. Learning to avoid destructive stress, also known as developing a success mindset, is the topic of our final chapter.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources. Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications

Techniques for managing performance

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

At this point, we now understand that managing stress is really the art of managing performance. Managing performance, in turn, requires that we recognize what sort of performance we are after: do we, like a sprinter, need to perform at an extremely high level for a short time? Or, like a marathon runner or endurance cyclist, do we need to maintain strong, consistent performance for a long period of time? In the course of our day, do we need to frequently deal with unexpected or unanticipated problems that have the effect of distracting us and raising our arousal outside the optimal zone?

The key to using the various techniques for stress management, or, more properly, performance or arousal management, is recognizing that:

The techniques are flexible; how you choose to apply them determines the results you get.
They take practice. Remember that under stressful conditions, we revert to our rehearsed, trained behaviors. What we haven’t rehearsed we don’t use or it doesn’t work when we need it most. Top performers in all domains practice the skills necessary to maintain that performance. Put another way, the will to win is useless if you don’t have the will to prepare.

Remember, when you find yourself always feeling tired or waking up in the morning not feeling rested, that’s an important clue that you are draining your reserves faster than you are replenishing them. No matter how much we may feel like we’re running around being productive, actual quality performance is rapidly declining under those conditions.

Riveting!  Yes, I called a leadership book riveting.  I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next.  The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.
Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

Control Over Space

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

As we’ve discussed in several chapters, the feeling of control is important. One of the key messages of the organizational narrative is autonomy: how much control do members of the organization have over their schedule, how they do their work, even when and where they work. Leaders need to foster a sense of autonomy and control amongst the members of their team for the team to achieve the highest levels of productivity and performance. We seek to exert control over time, and we seek to exert control over the space we are in. One easy, and powerful, way of doing this is putting a picture of a spouse or other important person on your desk, as we discussed in Chapter 5. However, that is not the only option.

As much as possible, we want to let people have control of their personal space; indeed, we want to make sure they have personal space to have control over! Not having a fixed working area is disorientating. You don’t really feel like part of the organization. Even when you have a fixed working area, be that an office or a cubical, how much control you have to arrange it to your liking or decorate it with personal effects varies from organization to organization. If you want everyone to think alike, a good first step is to make sure everyone’s office looks exactly alike. Of course, they will also tend to be less engaged and less likely to commit to the really difficult goals. Giving people control over their space makes them more engaged and helps them feel that they have more control over their ability to solve the organization’s goals. Control, or its lack, in the small areas of organizational behavior spreads outward to the big areas that businesses really care about.

It is also worth noting that wide open working areas and the lack of even the illusion of privacy can reduce people’s feelings of control. While there are some organizations where this is inevitable due to the nature of the work, much of the time cubical farms and pods are unnecessary and counter-productive. What they save in short-term costs they make up for in reduced concentration and increased distractibility. It’s hard to feel in control of your space when you can hear everyone talking or tapping on keys.

“…[Organizational Psychology for Managers’] combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.” – Eric Bloom, President, Manager Mechanics, LLC

Being Fred Flintstone

Remember the classic kid’s TV show, the Flintstones? Fred and Wilma Flintstone are a stone age couple who live in something that looks oddly like the 1950s with rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Despite this, the show had nothing to do with either rock music or getting stoned. It did, however, have an episode which predicted that the Beatles were a passing fad. So much for prognostication! Fortunately, that episode is not the point of this article.

In one episode, Fred complains to Wilma that he can’t understand what she does all day. How hard can it be to take care of a house? Of course, as Fred swiftly learns, after he and Wilma make a bet, the answer is very hard. Fred, of course, makes a total mess of the whole thing. Now, obviously, the cartoon was playing off of social issues of the time and was intended to make people laugh. The obvious lesson, that a “non-working mother” is a contradiction in terms, is hopefully one that most people have figured out by now. The less obvious lesson is the much more interesting one: it is often impossible to gauge from the results, or from watching someone work, just how difficult a job actually is or even how hard they are working! Conversely, how people feel about the results has little bearing on how hard you worked to get them.

At one company, a manager told an employee that he wasn’t going to get a raise because he made the work “look too easy.” Of course, one might argue that most people who develop their skill in a field eventually become good enough that they manage to make the job look easy. It’s not until we try to imitate them that we realize just how hard it is to do what they are doing.

In another situation, the Principle Investigator in a biology lab had an employee who wasn’t producing results. He first told the employee that she wasn’t working hard enough and quickly moved to haranguing her to work harder. She quit and was replaced by another scientist. He also failed to get results and the process repeated until he quit. So it went through another two employees before the PI, quite by accident, discovered that there was an error in a protocol the scientists were required to follow. Each one had tried to discuss the possibility with him, but he consistently refused to listen, taking the attitude that any problems were purely a result of their lack of dedication. They simply weren’t working hard enough and if they just buckled down and took the job seriously, they would get results! This attitude cost the lab four excellent employees and set them back over a year on one of their projects.

On several occasions, when I’ve stood in front of audiences ranging from management students to senior executives, I’ve presented the following scenario: “Someone at your company isn’t completing their work on time. Why not?”

Invariably, the responses I get back are: “He’s not dedicated,” “he doesn’t work hard enough,” “he’s goofing off,” and so forth. Eventually, I point out that they really have no information from which to draw a conclusion. Occasionally, someone beats me to the punch, but it always takes several minutes before that happens. After the point is made, the number of dumbfounded looks is amazing.

Fundamentally, when we see something not working or something not getting done as fast as we’d like, we tend to blame the person doing the work. The tendency is to assume that they aren’t working hard or that they don’t care or some other fault in the person. We often assume that the difficulty of the task is proportional to how hard someone appears to be working, not what they are actually accomplishing. We tend to ignore the situation, often to the detriment of our companies. In that bio lab, if the PI had been willing to consider other possibilities than blaming the scientists, he could have saved a year of effort and not potentially damaged people’s careers.

By extension, there is also a tendency to assume that when the result looks small or insignificant, that the effort involved in producing it must have been lacking. Large and clunky is thus appreciated more than small and elegant, particularly in software. Unfortunately, this runs afoul of the Mark Twain principle: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” Transforming something clunky into something well-built and efficient is not easy! Most corporate vision statements are wordy, vague, and meaningless. It actually takes a great deal of effort to create a short vision that works and that can inspire people for years.

Now, let’s look briefly at the converse: that how people feel about the results has nothing to do with how hard you worked to attain them. At one startup company, the VP of Marketing told me that she expected everyone to work long hours because “our customers will want to know that we worked hard to produce this product!” Actually, with apologies to Charlie Tuna, what your customers want is a product that will work hard for them. They really don’t care how hard you worked to make it. They only care that it meets their needs. If it does, they’ll buy it. If it doesn’t, you’re out of luck.

The fact is, it’s very easy to underestimate both how hard the work actually is, and how much work went into producing something. In both of these situations, the key is to figure out what feedback is really important. Results are a form of feedback. However, as long as you’re on track to accomplish those results, then it doesn’t much matter how hard or how easy it looks; as Fred Flintstone discovered, you probably can’t accurately gauge that anyway. When something doesn’t work, then you need to know the process so you can figure out why.

In other words, you need to clearly define your expected results and also clearly define meaningful and useful interim steps that should yield those results. The advantage of having those interim steps is that you can recognize fairly quickly when something is going wrong and you can figure out the real cause. A failure to achieve results is not necessarily the problem: it’s the symptom. Perhaps it’s because the person didn’t work hard enough. Perhaps it’s because the situation was untenable. Treat the symptom and not the problem and before too long you’ll be right back where you started from.

New Year’s Resolutions? Forget it!

It’s barely the start of the new year, and I’ve already received half a dozen identical articles touting the benefits of SMART goals as the solution to all my New Year’s resolutions.

Now, to be fair, they have a point as far as it goes: New Year’s resolutions have a shorter half-life than champagne at a New Year’s party. However, that’s about as useful as these articles get.

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound, SMART goals are often touted as the secret to personal and business success. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty safe bet that most of these goals will go the way of all New Year’s resolutions. Why? Because none of these articles actually tell you how to make SMART goals work. In fact, most people who try the SMART approach for any but small and relatively easy goals frequently find themselves frustrated and disillusioned.

Well-constructed goals are extremely powerful tools for getting things done, increasing concentration and motivation. Successfully completing a well-constructed goal builds self-confidence. Unfortunately, creating a well-constructed SMART goal is not quite so simple as the average article makes it out to be.

To begin with, a specific goal is only useful if it’s something you can control. Although this may seem obvious, the fact is that far too many people set goals that appear to be under their control, but really are not. For example, consider the athlete who sets the goal of winning an upcoming tournament: it’s specific, it’s measurable, it has a time of completion associated with it, and presumably it’s highly relevant to the athlete. Is it achievable? Depending on the athlete’s level of skill, very possibly. However, the athlete has no control over the difficulty of the competition. He may simply be outplayed by a more skilled opponent.

Furthermore, although the goal is measurable, in that the athlete will know whether or not he accomplishes it, the measurement is not particularly useful. At no time will he know how close he is to accomplishing the goal, where he needs to focus his energies, or what else needs to be accomplished. The athlete is far better served by setting the goal of exercising certain key skills in the competition, skills that have a high probability of leading to a victory. Not only will he gain the self-confidence boost of accomplishing his goal, he may just win the tournament. Whether your goal is winning a competition, selling a product to a particular customer, or getting a specific job, focusing mainly on outcomes only gets you in trouble.

Another problem is that a goal may simply be too big. If a goal takes years to accomplish, it can be extremely difficult to maintain motivation. Big, ambitious goals are wonderful, but they need to be carefully structured. It is vital to break them down into subgoals that can be accomplished in a much shorter period of time. The perception of progress is critical to maintaining motivation, whether for an individual or a team.

Having too many goals is another common problem. Well constructed goals are great, but if you have too many of them at once, they become a distraction. Many people can focus on three to five unrelated goals without a problem, but not ten or twenty. Keeping in mind that each goal might generate numerous subgoals along the way, it’s easy to see how having more than a few key goals can easily balloon out of control.

Is the goal something you really care about? Many people have goals that they don’t really care about. Perhaps they’ve been told it’s something they ought to do or they believe they should do, but they don’t really care about the outcome. If you don’t care whether or not you accomplish a goal, it’s hard to find the motivation to do it.

Used properly, SMART goals can be a very powerful and effective tool. Well-constructed goals can increase motivation, improve focus, and build self-confidence. Used improperly, they can decrease motivation, and destroy self-confidence. If you’re using SMART goals, here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do I control the outcome?

Can I measure progress in a meaningful way?

Is my goal too big? How can I break it up?

Do I have too many goals? Is there enough time in the day/week/month to work on each one?

When will I work on each piece of my goal? How will they chain together?

Do I really care about my goal? Is this something I genuinely want to accomplish?

Good luck!

A Tale of Two Light Bulbs

As published in the CEO Refresher