by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
While driving home from a client’s office, I felt some strange symptoms. The kind of symptoms that could mean nothing or could be signs of impending death. The kind of symptoms you would feel foolish wasting the hospital’s time with or could burden your family permanently. What to do?
Luckily, I have a great relationship with a first-rate internist and his office was near the next highway exit. I didn’t go there directly, of course. I telephoned my wife to let her talk me out of being concerned. Instead, she met me at the doctor’s office.
My doctor immediately (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Recommended Books
My friend Andy Sherman has collected a life’s wisdom accumulated from years of advising businesses into his 18th book, Road Rules: Be the Truck. Not the Squirrel. Learn the 12 Essential Rules for Navigating the Road of Life He has allowed me to make the first chapter available for free here. Read, enjoy, and prosper.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms
Optimism is a strategy for making a better future.
Because unless you believe that the future can be better you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.
If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope.
If you assume there is an instinct for for freedom, there are opportunities to change things, there’s a chance you may contribute to making a better world.
The choice is yours.
–Noam Chomsky
American linguist and political activist
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Salespeople, How to Set Goals
Why plan? So much changes, so many things are unforeseen. The world is unpredictable and out of our control. The people we depend upon are fallible and have free will. There is no telling what they will do, how they will react to us.
Any airliner spends most of each trip off course and pointed in the wrong direction. Wind, weather, and traffic are constantly diverting the vessel from the perfect path. Rather than being discouraged by the impossibility of staying on course, the pilot and the instruments are continually working to compensate for these random and unforeseeable influences. After a trip of “unplanned” but expected diversions, airliners almost always arrive at their intended destinations. What would be the result if the pilot did not declare where and when he would land? How would he react to the distractions and diversions? Would you buy a ticket on that plane? Rather, could that pilot enroll you in his project?
You have many choices each day–even if they don’t seem like choices–and a consistent target will give you a ready reference for making those choices. Your plan is useful not because it is a description of what will happen, but because it provides a reference point to evaluate and respond to the inevitable circumstances that differ from the plan.
Planning is not Predicting.
The value of a plan is not as a guarantee that things will happen exactly as you expected, but that when the unexpected does -inevitably- occur, you can notice and respond to the deviation.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development, Quotes and Aphorisms
An organization is a community of discourse.
Leadership is about influencing the nature of the discourse.
—Robert Kegan
Harvard University
See also, on this blog, step-by-step conversation instructions with video here:
The Conversation Contract.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
Someone exercising leadership is orchestrating the process of getting factions with competing definitions of the problem to start learning from one another.
— Ron Heifetz
Harvard University
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, Stress Management
I was in a training last week with Richard Strozzi-Heckler. The first exercise he led the group in was a centering practice I also teach. You can listen to the podcast here: Find Your Center Before You Act. The next day, Richard told us a story in which his centering practice saved a presentation–and his lungs.
While studying ai-ki-do in Japan, Richard was asked by his instructor to come with him to help with a demonstration for a group of teenagers. At the school, Richard donned a heavy leather shirt. His master handed him a sword and told him, “When I fire this arrow at you strike it with your sword.” Strozzi had never seen, much less been instructed in or practiced, this procedure but one does not quibble with one’s Japanese ai-ki-do master.
As he stood on stage while the master spoke to the teenagers, Strozzi’s head was filled with (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Recommended Books, Team Manager Skills
My mother, my wife, my sister, and Oprah recommended Ellen Foster to me. Ellen Foster is a very young, very mistreated Southern girl who tells her story in simple, compelling language. She takes us energetically into her world and lets us see adult behavior through her worldly but never cynical eyes. Her saga is funny, clever, and heart-rending. But most of all, it is a true human experience.
I read Ellen Foster in between reading (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Leadership Development
Years ago, an experienced coach and mentor began our meeting by asking about my first child. Just 18 months old, he was eagerly crawling and using a few words.
“It’s a fascinating time,” I replied. “You can almost hear the wheels turning in his head as he experiments to find out what combination of noises and movements is going to get him what he wants.”
I heard myself and paused to absorb the insight.
“Wow!,” I continued. “That is still how I spend most of my day.”
But not every day. How often do you actually examine how well your “noises and movements” are serving you? Don’t we all expend a lot of energy just repeating tired and familiar strategies rather than observing our results and experimenting with new communications?
It is rare to be as eager and innovative as a baby yet how can we fail to be impressed with the child’s rapid progress? Experimenting, responding, growing, moving forward, relentlessly alive–children know how to learn.
How do you stay green and growing? One reliable technique for enhancing our learning, of course, is to work with a supportive and insightful executive coach and surround yourself with people who share your commitment to conscious development.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners
It is extraordinary to think you can be excellent at something without a coach. The notion that Roger Federer would not have several coaches is ridiculous.
One of the best things that happened to me was to get a coach.
–Richard Baker
Former CEO
Alliance Boots
Recent Comments