by Tony Mayo | Quotes and Aphorisms
I use Twitter to share brief messages, not more than two per day. You can have them delivered to your cell phone by text message (SMS) or view them when you visit your free Twitter web page. Create a Twitter account and “follow” TonyMayo.
Here are my recent tweets (messages):
A mood of resignation is an evasion of responsibility. –Tony Mayo
Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. –Jean-Paul Sartre (attributed)
Unless you love, your life will flash by. —Terrence Malick
We have career lattice, not ladder. People move not just up or out but sideways. —Deloitte CEO: Salzberg
Battles & businesses have been lost in the classroom but are won only in the field. –Tony Mayo
Career Insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting the same results. Today, you must get better just to stay even. –Tony Mayo
Prior tweets are here, at Twitter Logs.
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©2011 Tony Mayo
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, How to Set Goals
Making change in organizations is central to my work. The nature of organizations, however, is to resist change. That’s why we call them organize-ations, not random-izations or adapt-ations,
One common way for organizations to resist innovation and change is for people to collect evidence that any novel tool or procedure is causing problems–even if the problems predate the change.
Waterless Urinals
Craig Hansen, the Army base’s energy engineering technician, decided to retrofit all 740 of his urinals over the objection of local plumbers. “The plumbers felt that these things were a threat to their livelihood,” Hansen says. “They don’t like change.”
Hansen heard a flood of complaints early on: The urinals stank. They were dirty. Where was the flush handle?
In one building, the complaints were so vociferous that Hansen started an investigation. He found that the bathrooms did indeed stink, but the urinals appeared clean. He suspected there was something else going on and decided a little experiment might flush out the problem. He bought a smoke bomb, lit the fuse, dropped it down the main sewer line, and waited. Hansen observed that the sewer vent outside the building was placed directly in front of the structure’s air intake. Smoke flowed out of the vent and was immediately sucked back into the building. He also found a cracked toilet in the women’s rest room that spewed smoke. The urinals, however, emitted nothing. The cartridges were doing their job.
Hansen concluded that the smell had always been there, but people didn’t have anything to blame it on until the new urinals arrived.
—Pissing Match:
Is the World Ready for the Waterless Urinal?
WIRED Magazine
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
I encountered today a wonderful expression of the same insight that I shared in my video, Roadwork for Enduring Success.
You may recall that in 2003 the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude created in New York’s Central Park a huge art installation called The Gates. You may not know that it took more than twenty years to get permission to erect this work; they began in 1979. HBO produced a documentary that covers the decades of work and persuasion that ensued. The film includes a conversation early in the process in which the artists were sternly warned about the many steps and barriers likely to occur, given the state of NYC politics and finances–despite the fact that the artists would pay all of the millions of dollars the project cost.
Christo invited those cynical insiders into his point-of-view. “The project is growing from the bottom. That is the very point. Think of it positively.” Please do not regard this as a bureaucratic horror or a political monstrosity. Art is not about the final object seen at the end. Art is a creative process. The preparation, the protests, the persuasion, and postponements are all part of the poetry; necessary and constitutive parts of the artistic expression.
So much of daily lives, our families and careers, can be regarded either as delays and obstructions or as essential parts of the process, lines in the poem, the second act of the drama, the background that makes the foreground visible –and beautiful.
If you can swing and you’ve got your health, you can get through things. If you view the antagonist as cooperative, struggle becomes opportunity. Is the jazz soloist struggling or is he being creative? Why was Louis Armstrong always smiling?
—Albert Murray
More on Christo here on Artsy, a great site with an customizable email service that lets you follow your favorite artists.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
Knowledge at Wharton published a very well-done summary article on the problems with and alternatives to the traditional annual performance review. Here are my favorite excerpts.
“an overall performance management process — one that focuses on goal setting, feedback, coaching and clear statements of the company’s performance expectations — is absolutely critical” and indeed, is found in the highest-performing companies.
–Sibson Consulting/WorldatWork survey
Good managers provide feedback and direction that will help individuals achieve success. Bad managers don’t. They worry about (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
Wired Magazine published a fascinating photograph of the high-technology, luxurious bridge aboard the world’s longest cruise ship, the 1,187 foot Oasis of the Seas. Even more interesting is the leadership wisdom the ship’s captain shared.
How does the captain steer? “The port and starboard command chairs have built-in joysticks for controlling the ship,” Wright says. But those are typically operated by other officers. “Captains should be mentoring and teaching.“
by Tony Mayo | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners, For Salespeople, Meetings, Sales Techniques
Participating effectively in trade shows and conferences requires significant investment of time and treasure. I always encourage my clients to do only as many as they can afford to do thoroughly. What does “thoroughly” mean?
Essentially, have a plan and a purpose. Start early, months before the conference. Have the right people at the conference with the time, attention, and resources necessary to work the plan. Be ready to follow up after the conference. Everyone returns from these with lots of ideas and good intentions that whither the first day back at the office. It’s up to you to pick up the thread and maintain the momentum.
Have a clear goal or purpose that is consistent with your marketing message and sales targets. One way to formulate the goal is to answer the question, “If I (more…)
by Tony Mayo | Client Comments, For Business Owners
I have been working with Tony for years to increase my ability to make an impact in my personal and professional life. With his coaching and through his GS:VSOP course, I have articulated my life purpose, focused on ways to lead a more vibrant life, and am achieving things I never thought possible.
Thank you, Tony!
–Nancy Belmont, CEO Belmont, Inc.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Team Manager Skills
People continually and automatically evaluate situations and objects for their relevance and value …
The evidence suggests the real possibility that there are no emotion mechanisms in the brain waiting to be discovered, producing a priori packets of outcomes in the body. Emotions may not be given to humans by nature …
If the clearest evidence for the distinctiveness of anger, sadness, and fear is in perception, then perhaps these categories exist in the perceiver. Specifically, I hypothesize that the experience of feeling an emotion, or the experience of seeing emotion in another person, occurs when conceptual knowledge about emotion is used to categorize a momentary state of core affect…
Categorizing is a fundamental cognitive activity. To categorize something is to render it meaningful; it is to determine what something is, why it is, and what to do with it. Then, it becomes possible to make reasonable inferences about that thing, predict how to best to act on it, and communicate it to others. In the construction of emotion, the act of categorizing core affect performs a kind of figure-ground segregation (Barsalou, 1999, 2003), so that the experience of an emotion will stand out as a separate event from the ebb and flow of an ongoing core affect…
The conceptual act model suggests an intrinsic role for language in perceiving emotions in the behaviors of other people (see Lindquist et al., 2006). It is consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956), which states that language forms the basis of experience. In the case of emotion, language shapes (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches
Scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don’t want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness.
…
We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.
–Jonah Lehrer
The New Yorker
The Truth Wears Off
December 13, 2010, p. 52
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Fun, Quotes and Aphorisms
Why I’m Here
by Jacqueline Berger
Because my mother was on a date
with a man in the band, and my father,
thinking she was alone, asked her to dance.
And because, years earlier, my father
dug a foxhole but his buddy
sick with the flu, asked him for it, so he dug
another for himself. In the night
the first hole was shelled.
I’m here because my mother was twenty-seven
and …
It’s right to praise the random,
the tiny god of probability that brought us here,
to praise not meaning, but feeling, the still-warm
sky at dusk, the light that lingers and the night
that when it comes is gentle.
“Why I’m Here” by Jacqueline Berger, from The Gift That Arrives Broken. © Autumn House Press, 2010. (buy now)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, How to Set Goals, Quotes and Aphorisms
If you’ve done any white water rafting, you know how exciting it can be. On the first rapid of my first trip I remember the guide yelling, “Row. Row! Row fast!!!” But I did not want to go fast. I wanted to slow down, I preferred to try passing through the rapid “nice and easy.”
That was a mistake. We spun and bounced and nearly capsized. On the next rapid, I dug in with my paddle and rowed like mad. We shot through like an arrow.
I learned the hard way that if you travel down a river at or below the speed of the river’s current, you have no control over where you’re going. You can see the rocks and whirlpools ahead but you have no say as to whether you hit them or go around. Plus, it takes more energy to slow your boat than to speed up. By going slower than the current, you might get through the rapids unscathed but you will feel as significant as a leaf in the wind and know, “I was lucky that time.” By exceeding the speed of the current, the person operating the rudder can give direction to the raft and make sure the raft takes the safest route through the rapids. I remember after that first run, we gave each other “high fives” like a bunch of kids. We were proud and excited, not merely lucky.
That’s called taking control of your life. Your direction. Your destiny. We are only victims if we choose to be. Everyone encounters rocks, rapids, and whirlpools. It’s a fact of life. The choice is to work with the power of the river to make our own path, to exhaust ourselves resisting the flow, or to let it toss us randomly. I prefer to add my own preferences and efforts to the circumstances.
I may not control the outcome but I do have a role.
by Tony Mayo | Quotes and Aphorisms
I use Twitter to share brief messages, not more than two per day. You can have them delivered to your cell phone by text message (SMS) or view them when you visit your free Twitter web page. Create a Twitter account and “follow” TonyMayo.
Here are my recent tweets (messages):
What am I attached to? I can free myself from identifying with this outcome and turn my attention toward my true values. –Top Executive Coach Tony Mayo
If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward. — Martin Luther King Jr.
The first rule of long-term planning is, “Survive the short term.”
Listen before speaking, empathize before judging, join before leading. –CEO Executive Coach Tony Mayo
Why am I soft in the middle now? The rest of my life is so hard. —Paul Simon
Prior tweets are here, at Twitter Logs.
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©2011 Tony Mayo
by Tony Mayo | Communication, Conversation, & Confrontation, For Business Owners
Could a simple five-minute interaction with another person dramatically increase your weekly productivity?
…
employees who know how their work has a meaningful, positive impact on others are not just happier than those who don’t; they are vastly more productive, too. … “Even minimal, brief contact with beneficiaries can enable employees to maintain their motivation,” the researchers write in their paper, titled Impact and the Art of Motivation Maintenance: The Effects of Contact with Beneficiaries on Persistence Behavior, published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
…
the one-two punch of knowing the beneficiary’s needs and meeting him in person generated the largest impact on motivation.
—The Art of Motivating Employees
Knowledge@Wharton
See also, on this blog, step-by-step conversation instructions with video here:
The Conversation Contract.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Team Manager Skills
The New York Times recently ran a nice article about how Google–in its usual highly-analytic, data-driven way–measured the results of different management behaviors amongst its own workforce. The recommendations that emerged from this research will be familiar to readers of this blog.
I wish these were practiced as often as I preach them!
Google’s Project Oxygen
Eight Good Behaviors
Be a good coach
Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the negative and the positive.
Have regular (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
Revolution is in the air around the world. People everywhere are fed up with having arbitrary power exercised over them, with 
impractical limits placed on their everyday actions, with living in constant fear that someone in power will frown at them and destroy their livelihood without warning or objective justification. This global revolution differs from the Marxist model of the dispossessed and disaffected rising up from poverty to overthrow the business class. This time, educated professionals are actively engaged in the resistance. As a result, people long accustomed to wielding authority and position are rapidly changing the way they run things. Suddenly, leaders in many countries are peacefully giving up some of their power in hopes of participating in a new, more prosperous and humane community.
I am not talking about foreign countries. I am talking about where you work.
For as long as I have been in the business world employees have been mystified and upset by the performance review process. The managers conducting the reviews find them arbitrary, uncomfortable, and (more…)
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