As your shock settles in, let me pause here to briefly note that since that time my wife has led our family, including our child, to a much healthier lifestyle of more informed food choices, including her now multi-year quest for her own physical fitness.  And while that pair of jeans never made it home from the vintage clothing store, I have always adored my wife in any form, including her sense of humor and love of irony that helped us decide to recount our memory of that day.

Back to the day in the store, my wife took the news as intended.  Her face adorned with her dimple-dipped grin, she closed the gap between us, gently kissed me on the lips and disappeared behind the hippy bead and aborigine colored fabric drapes of the dressing room to change back into her vacation clothes.   I stared at the curtain, wondering if anyone would see me slip inside the dressing room with her.  As I surreptitiously glanced side to side, I found a woman appearing to be in her mid-fifties, dismissing unsatisfactory garments at a wall rack some ten feet away.  My sense was she was incongruously dressed to make unambiguously clear to others how structured and righteous her life was.  She had donned a practical dress of appropriate length, hosiery and sensible rubber soled shoes, her ensemble topped with a plastic raincoat the color of mayonnaise which has been left to brown in the sun.   Her face shone with the conviction of someone who has rarely spoken anything in absence of moral certainty.  In just that moment’s glance I could see she was preparing to enlighten me with the fate I had evidently assured myself, brought about by my morally reprehensible private comment to my wife.  “You will end up in hell,” she informed me with the tone of someone who had just documented an irrefutable fact.  Her manner and tone were clearly chosen to ensure I understood that I was to gratefully accept the words of eternal damnation, as if the veritable morning sky clouds had suddenly parted to allow the disembodied voice of Charlton Heston to bestow them unto me.  Just as I was about to engage this God’s angel on Earth with one of the undoubtedly witty retorts I was mentally selecting from, my lovely and graceful then-Rubenesque wife slipped from the dressing room.  She was as she had been when we arrived, infectiously engaging, beautifully dressed in beach wear, and every bit the women that I still deeply love to love.  She grabbed my hand, my heart raced and I instantly forgot about the morality prophet.  She and I bounded out of the store to continue our vacation together.

Strangely I found myself thinking of the other woman in the store that day.  I should note that have no new fondness for stale mayonnaise colored rain ware.  Rather, as our United States Constitution requires, President Obama came before Congress a few days ago to deliver the State of the Union address.  He spoke of our need to do, as we have done more or less (sometimes much less) since our founding, to take on the hard challenge to invest in our future, and to dig deep within ourselves to contribute to our shared success through valuing education and science.  What he did not do, although I must admit it was not cognizant of this fact until the choral drone of the pundits so informed me the next day, was to say that we Americans were an “exceptional people.”  Quite literally, from their ego-bruised vantage, he failed to state as fact that we are a people who are blessed by our Judeo-Christian (but of course not Muslim) creator with fundamental characteristics that make us individually and collectively an exception to the rule of the lamentable commonness. Such commonness, they were careful to note, which evidentially exists everywhere outside our one chosen country.  The President did use some pesky data to note how we have abysmally fallen behind in our health care and education systems as compared to other industrial countries, but like the servant of a higher moral plane that found me that morning in Vintage Rags, exceptional people need not be burdened with facts.  We are, because we say we are, and not because of any rational data-driven comparison to others.

Is this truly who we have become?  Are we now the laughable naked Emperor who tirelessly stands on the public stage professing the beauty of our exceptionally fashionable clothes?  Does anyone else feel the draft?

Over the last decade I have studied and lead corporate programs designed to bring about product and process development innovation.  This work and my study have enabled me to explore what are some of the reasons for the failings of so many organizations’ attempts to bring about the creative best from their teams.  One distinct and repeating pattern, I have come to learn, is that we are an exceptional people.  You see exceptional people do not have to learn how to do things, neither through burdensome science, nor elitist methods for improving how we do our work and create ideas.  Exceptional people are, as I have now seen so very many times, capable of divining the “one right answer,” and are then more than capable of explaining to others that no additional work is required to refine that answer because each idea was, as with its source, also exceptional.  I am constantly astounded how often genuinely intelligent people come to the conclusion that hard work and, dare I say, a course of rationally challenging one’s first thought is simply not necessary.  Why follow a multi-hour or multi-day methodology to produce results when one can just think one exceptional thought, and then go about their day spreading the joyous news that we, who are exceptional, do not have to dig deep and find the intestinal fortitude to work hard. What a time saver that is.

Although I recognize such facts would have been wasted on my exceptional eavesdropping co-shopper, what my wife was really asking that morning was, “I know these are the wrong size pants and will look bad. On a scale of, let’s say a tightly wrapped Costco-size package of fifty rolls of toilet paper, to perhaps a cargo shipping container stuffed into a lunch sack, how bad does my otherwise voluptuous rosy bottom look in these pants?”  In essence, my wife was asking me a gag question, because the irony of the response was one of the joys of being married to someone who loves you for who you really are, sense of humor and all.  She was spending time with someone to whom you can display ill-fitting clothes on a vacation day romp, simply because the experience is amusing.  Of course our divinity-as-a-sword wielding onlooker had no use for such inconvenient information.  Because she believed, as you might have surmised, she was exceptional.  She was imbued by the universe’s one and only God with the moral right and capability of passing judgment on anyone who was far more common than was she, without that nasty information and context that elitists seem to love.

So who were those exceptionally well compensated pundits preaching to about our need to be told we are exceptional?  I’m certain many of their target audience spent part of their day standing in line at a local fast-food spot to consume a week’s worth of calories at a single sitting of refined starch, near limitless quantities of sugar, water, gas bubbles and food coloring, all topped off with nutritionally devoid, but decidedly tasty fried sticks of what look disturbingly like potatoes.  Now I am the first to say have been known to filet o’fish now and then, but what I do understand is that by ingesting twelve to twenty times the calories I can utilize in a day, I will become obese and generally unhealthy.  If that is at all a frequent experience for me, I will, without a doubt, cause myself to be super-sized.  I also realize that I have more than enough information to come to that fact-based conclusion.  Do I have some secret knowledge that the line filled with three to four-hundred pound people cannot have?  Of course I do not.  Should I conclude that each of those massively obese people desire to live a shortened and burdened life of disease?  Again, I do not believe that is the case.  I think the problem may be far more sinister, and that is that by thinking of one’s self as exceptional, it suggests that one is relieved of the burden of understanding information, occasionally making harder choices and taking the less trodden path of knowledge, learning and practice.  Is there an app for that?  How about a pill, which of course someone else should pay for, but definitely not through universal health care? That would be Socialism. (Scamper away now pesky facts about what Socialism really is, exceptional people “don’t need no badges.”)

When President Obama noted in his State of our Union address that American industry in the 1950’s had been lifted by the government infrastructure investment in freeways and power grids, this seemed a simple fact to understand.  This infrastructure had, as he noted in part, been used to easily move commerce around to consumers, and to inexpensively power factories and stores built for the local consumerism that such factory salaries created.  He further noted that our failure to continue to invest (much less maintain) that infrastructure now makes it much harder and more costly to create and operate businesses in America. That too seemed easy to understand.  His was a cry for investment in us.  Work which could be done by our unemployed and under-employed workforce, which would also make it easier and more cost effective for Americans and others to build and operate companies in America.  I thought this was a message we could all understand and rally around.  I was, as you might have again surmised, quite mistaken.  Evidently exceptional people do not invest, which I learned is really called raising taxes (silly Democrats), nor do they care about what it takes to create jobs in America (silly unemployed people).  Surely by now there is an app for that which doesn’t require effort.  Clearly there must be a pill that our divine creator can provide to us, so as not to be burdened with the effort of understanding, compromise and (oh please forgive me) some hard work.

Am I an elitist when I state that Americans are not exceptional?  Does this bit of electronic pen to paper drip of bitterness directed at those who have divine faith or body weight challenges?  In both cases I would sincerely say no.  I believe religion is only harmful when it asks one to put themselves above others.  When it suggests the members of the speaker’s religion are not bound by the same cosmic burdens of others by virtue of being somehow righteously special.  I believe everyone can stand in line at McDonalds and see that this is not a place where healthy people congregate, and perhaps they should wonder why.  I also believe there are millions of people who stoically work hard more hours each day than I can imagine, and then come home and into their communities extol the virtue of education for themselves and children?  I also believe these dedicated souls are the rule, not the exception.  What I find tragic is the pervasiveness of the talk of exceptionalism, as though it is an effort free cure (like fat-free salad dressing at McDonalds).  I find it tragic when used as an excuse that takes people away from digging deep within themselves to stop pretending that fast and cheap food is really going to be healthy, when nearly every consumer in the restaurant is so tragically and obviously on a path to obesity and death.  I find it nearly beyond comprehension that politicians can walk their districts without exclaiming our health care system needs all of the overhaul it can get, and that left to our own devices most will so clearly not make the best choices about what we need to be healthier.  You want fries with that?

What is exceptional to me is that there are “political” commentators who make multi-million dollar salaries by convincing people in need of having faith that it merely takes someone to tell them that they are exceptional to make everything in their often painful lives better.  What is exceptional to me is that so many intelligent people of means and access to nearly limitless fact-based information can look at the tasks before our country and conclude that something other than a dedicated course of hard work will get us back on a sound economic track.  What remains exceptional to me are those who think saying they are exceptional actually makes them superior to those who ignore the temptation to suggest they are better than others.  What I also find exceptional are those who can pass judgment without any thought that a quest for knowledge might help one appreciate a long hard journey of learning before judging.  And finally, what is truly exceptional to me is a desire to want to be pacified with mere words and simple labels, so one can be easily convinced someone else will provide.  How exceptional indeed.

I am proud that I am not exceptional.  I want to be educated and thoughtful, and I am willing to gain less excess for myself if I can help others reach their aspirations of success through hard work and continuous self-improvement.  Thank you, but no, I do not want my President to tell me that I am somehow exempt from the burdens of my fellow Americans, nor exempt as a member of the community of beings on the Earth.  I wish to be part of the rule that says we must help each other learn more; to invest for our children and in our communities, so they can employ our families.  I wish to surround myself with those who dedicate their lives to learning, doing and then teaching.  My sincere hope is we, as a society, will embrace the notion that to pretend we are better than others is foolish, childish, and destructive.  It is my hope that these sad and close-minded souls are the genuine exception, and not those who will bring about the rules that my family, my community, my country and my planet will be bound by.

I will stand for my judgment and profess my willingness to have been of the people who did what they could to help when they had the opportunity.  I will sink or swim with those who believe that knowledge, dedication and effort are my path to a better life.  And I will try to understand those who stand apart from us, espousing their exceptional superiority, while they thoughtlessly benefit from the increased burden and efforts of others.  I will do these things in part because I believe it would be the more tragic result if I were to live in a land of exceptional people who become the general rule.

To fire that igniting spark, creative business cultures often rely heavily on a common language.  They are the verbal secret handshakes of those sharing in the hard work.  We love our TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms), littering the frontal lobes of everyone who has ever been part of a tech company, or the legal or medical communities. They help keep our minds engaged and are used to speed up conversations.  Lessons learned if you have ever known the nightmarish first month at any lingo-centric business, if you are not speaking the same language as everyone else, you are not fully communicating.

I think one could contend this is what Omar Ahmad has tapped into in his very short (6 min) TED Talk. Is there a common language which will work to truly communicate with politicians? It seems almost too unlikely to accept, but it is worth your keeping an open mind, Ahmad is persuasive.  In a linguistic conundrum, Ahmad contends the common languages of email and voice mail are not working.  Rather, he says here the common language of genuine communication with Politicians is by the nearly flickering art of – handwritten letters.

“Politicians are strange creatures, says politician Omar Ahmad. And the best way to engage them on your pet issue is a monthly handwritten letter. Ahmad shows why old-fashioned correspondence is more effective than email, phone or even writing a check — and shares the four simple steps to writing a letter that works.” – TED.com

What Quirk of the Brain Turns People Into Compulsive Hoarders?
Mental Health | DISCOVER Magazine

“Hoarders cannot stop themselves from accumulating stuff—even if they live in fetid, rotting homes that ruin their lives. Visit Discover Magazine to read this article and other exclusive science and technology news stories.” – DiscoverMag

You can imagine how were elated we were then when her cousin, younger by a few days and watching from a different vantage, offered the minor correction to finally connect ball to bat.  “Aim a little higher,” were her cautious words of intended encouragement.  That moment time moved in slow motion.  Our daughter’s upper arm moved almost imperceptibly more than before, her raised elbow caught the gleam of the summer sun, and the bat followed a plane only two inches higher.  For a moment the ball lay quietly motionless in mid air, pressed against the face of the iridescent green plastic bat. The sound alone told us she had done it, even before our eyes found the unexpectedly vacant space behind our daughter.  We scanned our heads around trying to take in a new reality.  There in the warm hazy air of the summer day, the ball seemed to take the time to stretch out its arms in the sky before lazily falling to the ground.  From at least a Dad’s perspective, it fell to the ground a very satisfying distance away.  Moments later our daughter and her cousin had returned to where we had been sitting.  The sky was a little bluer, the air was a bit sweeter.  We were giddy.  She mindlessly played with the ball in her palms like a Labrador puppy ensuring that it had adequate slathering of saliva before dropping the trophy at our feet.  “You did it!” we whaled and hugged, “Great job you two.”

Now I can’t say with certainty that the temperature actually dropped to freezing, nor can I recall if cartoon steam actually poured from our daughters ears before the tears ran down her cheeks, but in that instant we knew things had changed.  Various emotions surged in competition to take possession of her face; Shock, betrayal, anger and perhaps a smattering of disgust.  We only had the most fleeting of moments to ask ourselves what had we done before a tiny finger was aimed between the eyes of her cousin and the trembling words, “What did she do?” made it past our daughter’s quivering lips.  And there it was; A foundational life question.  In an instant we had moved beyond a batted ball or the smart advice from a childhood peer.  Unknowingly her question was foundational to all moments of inspired creativity and brilliance. Her life question to us was a seemingly simple one, “What credit for success is owed to the Muse?”  Her question has been with me ever since that day.

What credit to the Muse?

Wikipedians tell us the ‘Muses’ in Greek mythology, poetry, and literature are the goddesses or spirits who inspire the creation of literature and the arts. They were considered the source of the knowledge contained in poetic lyrics and myths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muse

What an interesting time it must have been for someone creative, innovative, or one of the other wonderful terms we have for those who are modernly credited with inspiration.  How natural it must have seemed to credit something so undefinable as inspiration to a supernatural source.  How comforting to attribute a lack of inspiration to want of the help of a muse, and still allow personal ownership of the hard work it takes to bring an inspiration to fruition.  New York Times best-selling, and notably first time author, Elizabeth Gilbert talks of the pressure to be “brilliant” in what would be her second book. She uses her circumstance of prior success and now potential peril at having to repeat that success when she speaks of the ancient notion of a “genius” as being an external force like a muse.  That someone or something with whom she shares the credit and also the burden of creativity.  [See Elizabeth Gilbert in the OnTheShelf.com video post The Burden of Genius]

Gilbert’s perspective distinctly inspired me.  She was not my external genius, nor did she reach me in the form of a Greek Muse.  She was a genuine inspiration to me, however, and is deserving of some shared credit.  Gilbert’s ideas caused me to think about others who perhaps deserve inspiration credit for much of my work.  When I first set fingers to keyboard this post was originally to be entitled, An Ode to Shelia.  An account of how a brief email from a relative of mine inspired this whole site, OnTheShelf.com/journals/.  Shelia was the muse of my creative work, and for that she deserves both some credit and an expression of my appreciation.

Shelia’s Ode

This brief ode to Shelia takes the form of a chorus of my appreciation to all of those who inspire me to personally aspire to be even just slightly better at each thing I do, each time I do it.  In leadership contexts we describe this reaching to do each thing a little better each time we do them as continuous improvement, but we have few words to describe those who inspire our action.  In life we occasionally call these people mentors, but more commonly they go unnamed with their ode’s unsung.  It is my contention here that these people are our modern day muses, as fleeting and ethereal as any inspiring apparition and equally worthy of praise and my appreciation.  And so to Shelia.

After a lovely Sunday spent with my wife, undeniably one of my most trusted and valued muses, I wrote a blog-post entitled The Memory Collector.  [Read the OnTheShelf.com post The Memory Collector]  At the time I had no blog space, so for my want of feedback I posted it to Facebook where, as you might have surmised, Shelia read it and commented.  It was not the genuinely appreciated acts of her actually reading my work nor her effort in commenting that so moved me.  Her inspiration was the term she used to describe my work.  “This was lovely,” she wrote.  “You should write more.” Her words offered no recitation of my labor (‘you must have spent a lot of time working on this’), but rather she offered  a few words that described my work as a thing which was, in her kind words, worth admiring.  I was quite taken by the thought that my idea had become a thing which could now exist.  In a way it was now on its own, and it could have an existence potentially beyond me.  It was a thrilling notion to have once again created a thing from an idea, but with it came a burden that to have such an existence it required a place to live.  This was the motivation for creating OnTheShelf.com as a place for my ideas.  It would be a place for those things which, in part I owe in part to my muses, to live on without me.    In this way it has become our museum.

The Burden of being Inspiring

As with many things in the complex nature of human interaction, there is a second edge to the sword of being someone’s inspiration.  As we can inspire without intention, so to can we crush inspiration from others without the realization that we have done so.  As parents, as managers, and when we act as mere sounding boards in conversations with others, we routinely have the opportunity to inspire.  All too often, however, we miss that mark of being a muse and we recklessly snuff the spark of inspiration.

I have the pleasure of working in a company filled with exceptionally smart people. I have experienced the contrast of working in intellectual wastelands, and I am thankful each day to have arrived at such as place.  My exhilaration is tempered, however.  As a company we suffer from regulating inspiration and exercising a prowess for killing innovation.  This is the cultural fluency in our dialog about innovation.  In the last few months alone I have listened to senior executives bestow the virtue of “copying the features” of other successful companies, I have listened to them describe part of our product creation workforce as “creatives” and the remainder as “non-creatives” (this was said to someone that the manager deemed a non-creative), and witnessed another leader comment that one should not speak truth to power until one had been with the company for “at least ten years.”  Each of these callous remarks killed ideas and dissuaded future inspiration and innovation from the recipients of those messages, and the people those recipients would no longer inspire.  In some cases their snuffing of innovation will have been their recipient’s final straw, an the case of those for whom this was one in along string of subtle rebukes this is merely an affirmation that they are simply not innovators.  Those messages were wrong, and at their best irresponsible.

Innovation is a team sport, and inspiring others should not be limited those that someone arbitrarily decides are or are not creative.  The beginning of a team opportunity to score does not start with the person that cracks the ball with the bat nor the one who puts the ball into the net.  There is a tendency to mistake group effort with the last mile scorer, the designer who ultimately dressed the concept well, or the programmer who produced good quality code on time.  The reality is that each, but no more so than any other, had the opportunity to foster tens of dozens of other ideas and use the best ones contribute to the best final success.  To the extent the executives in my example wantonly killed the start of a thousand ideas, they did so in the misconception that you can identify where a good idea starts from.  You simply can not.  It is impossible to tell what idea will be used as the stepping stone to create another, perhaps the latter one closer to a product the company can benefit from. When we kill good seeds of innovation and inspiration we fail to recognize that in nature we don’t evolve into exactly the next perfected version we need to survive, but rather a million good ideas are given room to grow and evolution takes it from there.  When we unnaturally select who will be selected to create our next great concepts, and extinguish the spark from everyone else, we are left with the least innovative and most repetitive producers.  We rob ourselves of improved results, but far more insidiously, we rob people of the inspiration to listen for their muses.  Individuals no longer presume they have the ability to create and so they stop listening for the seeds of ideas that may grow into truly wonderful things.  Eventually those seeds become scarce to a point of being exception and not the rule.  It is incumbent for each of us to look for opportunities to be inspiring and to help grow ideas from others.  Review by others is often enough of a reward.  When appropriate, a kind word of encouragement may change that person’s life or may even give birth to what will be the next seed of something wonderful.  We need not walk through our lives stomping on the ideas of others when encouragement is so easy and ultimately holds such incredible rewards.

A final salute to my muses

It has been several years since that summer day when the ball journeyed with new freedom into the sky.  The tears are dried and the moment has been nearly forgotten.  Perhaps we were remiss in not giving the muses their due. And so to the muses, I thank you for more than you may know.

To my niece who was the muse of that nearly forgotten day; To my daughter who inspired this post and a thousand things more; To my wife who inspires me beyond my measure; to Shelia for her effort in reviewing my work and in taking the time to encourage.

This is to those muses and perhaps to those future muses, both at my work and in my personal life, who encourage others to create through their support and inspiration. Yes it is time consuming work.  It is often that much more difficult to find ways to encourage others and to even teach processes which can produce innovation.  It is, however, what genuine leadership is all about.  For those like me who occasionally fail to reach their goal of being someone who inspires, I implore you to reexamine your biases, habits, expressions and understanding of inspiration and innovation.  The rewards for encouraging ideas from others are too great to not risk a bit of self-reflection.

While it is likely that no one may ever view my work and wonder if there was a genius inside or beside me, please know my pride of creation is shared with all of you who have encouraged, inspired, tolerated my early ideas and ultimately trusted me to listen to your ideas, each of them, good and bad.  Thank you for all you have done and I hope you will continue to do.

Most of us have witnessed first-hand how effective a small sign can be to communicate a deliberate message. Despite the veritable parade of people wanting into my hotel room as I desperately try to sneak in another hour of sleep while traveling, each of them elect to be respectful of the small “Do Not Disturb” sign I hang on the door. It’s a simple arrangement we all enter into. I make the small effort to let them know my preference, and they are kind enough to respect my preference. How very decent of all of us. Yet as my memory of hotel stays past fades from memory, my colleague was still choking in diligent work ethic silence.

My colleague and I set out to create some signs for the proverbial hotel room door that was her work schedule. We decided to use Microsoft Outlook to manage our calendars, and Microsoft Exchange to covey to others our “free” and “busy” time signs. When people wish to, they can see our free or busy status before they send us a meeting request. That is a pretty clear sign, if only we would use it to the full effect possible. And while, as with choking, there is no universal response to seeing another’s free/busy information, most people would prefer to honor our signs and choose not to “disturb.” As we began our journey, our first task was to find a way of organizing the full range of messages we wanted to covey to others. Cleary the do not disturb sign can’t always be up. Occasionally someone else needs to get into your hotel room, or schedule some time with you — perhaps to assist with that slightly too big a bite of steak now occluding your wind pipe. We want to be clear in the messages our signs are conveying, and also ensure that sometimes the sign reads “welcome.”

The Beat of My Heart:

I use a “heartbeat” method of scheduling my calendar. Much like a human heart which must have various exertion periods of resting, filling, and pumping, so too do I have times when I am available, more protective, and entirely unavailable. For those who work with me regularly, I try to give them a repeatable and predictable heartbeat of the times that I will be happy to meet with them, and the times when I and my DND sign are out of reach. I also try and show them times that I am being protective of my time, but open to the idea that this time can be utilized if something seems very important to the requestor. Below are some examples of the signs I hang on my work calendar.

In my case, I am extra protective of my Mondays and Fridays. I mark each of those full days in Outlook as “tentative,” which is my version of a sign that would read “I would prefer you not ask for time” in that block. Yes, some people will ignore it, just as there will occasionally people who don’t care you hung a do not disturb sign on your door. They will even knock with extra fervor to ensure your non-distrurbable time is thoroughly interrupted. At least you learn something about that person through this process.

Monday-Monday: (A gratuitous esoteric reference to an old song by The Momma’s and the Poppa’s)

[Sign: Tentative] I use my Mondays to kick-start my week with some high-volume but easy “sorting” tasks; I look at my full week calendar and adjust for conflicts. I ensure that for each event that week I have completed or scheduled time for any necessary prep-work. Monday morning work is like stretching for me. By mid-day I want to feel in control of what is going on. I have a sense of what might “pop up” that week and what my game plan is to deal with them.

Fridays: (I will have to owe you a gratuitous esoteric Friday song reference)

[Sign: Tentative] I use my Fridays marked as tentative on my calendar to have priority meetings that could not be scheduled Tuesday – Thursday. I try to move multi-hour meetings, and/or brainstorm meetings to Friday, so I can feel the luxury to think only about the dialog in the room. I don’t want to be thinking about what is piling up in my Inbox, or the meeting tomorrow I haven’t prepped for.

I focus on two key goals for my Friday time. First is to look at my calendar for the following week. In particular I make my adjustments for the following Monday, so I’m not sending meeting changes last minute on Monday morning. Second is to leave quiet work time to see if I can make enough progress on my “plate” to enjoy the weekend.

Mornings:

[Sign: Busy] The middle days of the week are fair game, but they also have their signs. In order to ensure that I am not asking anyone to wait for a response from me which might be block their day, I schedule myself several quiet hours every morning. That is my default recurring appointment, and I only adjust it if I must. This is my rapid pace email time, and my time to take in and process long form written information such as reading articles and presentation decks people send me. In my case my busy morning time is generally 6am to 9am (or so), ideally quietly with my morning coffee. To any onlooker it is just another occupied block of time on my calendar. That time is marked busy, so if someone schedules over that time they at least had a clear sign that I did not consider myself available. Again we all know those who are indifferent to your choices and signs, but those anomalies are not the people you are trying to communicate with using your signs.

Evenings:

[Sign: Out of Office] I aspire to end my day at 4pm, which often means 5pm or 6pm before I leave the building. My goal for my evenings is to dedicate that time to my family. So the sign on my calendar to my co-workers is, “I’m not here, please don’t ask to keep me here during this time.” Do I stay later on occasion? Absolutely. But from 4pm through 7pm every night my calendar has an Out of Office recurring meeting entitled “Daddy Time.” My sincere thanks to most of you who help me respect that goal.

Fair Game:

[Sign: Free] You might have concluded that I don’t allow much time for people to schedule with me, but that’s really not true. Tuesday through Thursday, from 10am through 4pm is time when I am more than willing to collaborate. I let that time book as “busy” on a first-come, first-served basis. For most of us, however, we can’t just afford to lose that middle 18 hours of work time. Rather, we need to manage it just as carefully as our other blocks of time. Here are a few suggestions from my use:

Overruns:

Have a chatty manager, peer, or do you know how you can run on a bit too long with some people? Set up a shorter meeting (say 30 minutes), but schedule an overrun time in the following half-hour. That way you don’t blow your next meeting and you can enjoy the conversation you’re in, but can also share the sense of there being a limit to your/their chat time.

Travel Time:

No teleporter available? No, me either. When I do my week look ahead at my calendar, I often find I am scheduled to end one meeting in one location, and then in the next minute start a meeting in a distant location. Schedule that gap, even if it just means starting the next meeting ten minutes after the hour. Note that in my opinion trying to end early to travel has a very low success rate, but your mileage may vary. My preference is to leave a 30 minute scheduled gap, just like an overrun, so I can think through the last meeting, use the restroom, get a drink, and get my head ready for the upcoming meeting.

Lunch:

I’m a lunch eater, which not surprisingly means I would like time to get it and eat. Every few months I re-test the theory of scheduling or not-scheduling time for lunch on my calendar. The results are the same every time (which means I am exhibiting the very definition of insanity – trying the same thing over and over, but expecting a different result.) The obvious is the right answer here, meetings fill all gaps. If you don’t schedule yourself a few minutes for lunch, that time will show up as “free” and will be consumed (a small lunch pun for you) by others.

Special Blocks of Time for Projects

For those who wondered how I found time to write this, for the last hour my calendar read “Writing Time” – and I was busy. YOU are in control of (most) of your calendar, and you need to allocate time when you need to focus and make progress. Don’t be shy about it. Others who feel they need that time will ask, and you can then decide the level of flexibility you have. While I left this suggestion as the last of my list, it is quite easily the most important. Don’t wait until you are choking to put out a sign that you need to work quietly for a few hours. Everyone else feels at least essentially the same way. Maybe you will teach them something about time management that will help them as well.

My hope is that you will find some time to read through and even try some of these suggestions. Also see if you can see the signs that others are putting out.

Signs you Should Avoid

I should note that I was raised in Los Angeles, where one routinely sees a driver giving a sign to other drivers. Let me just say that this would be a very different blog if I were recommending you add that to your public communications repertoire. Let me instead offer you a link to an irreverent comedy bit of how a particular type of signs might make our lives with one another a bit less ambiguous: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU4VL6jnJMA

As for this author, the calendar hung on my virtual office door now reads “Gone Fishin.” Hopefully the fish aren’t using Exchange.

This is that place.  Feel free to roam around, play with the ideas, and please feel the freedom to leave some of your own ideas playing here on the shelf.

http://ontheshelf.com/journals

Building our memory room was simple; it already existed and had (at least in my opinion) a very important role in our lives. Now transformed by nothing more than a few picture hooks, each morning I find myself seeing memories from our past. A certificate of an associate’s degree that has fallen off my resume, in a frame that I now think of as almost too hideous to hang even in a bathroom, but nonetheless reminds me of my first apartment. At the time that degree represented the most significant educational accomplishment of my life, and literally hundreds if not thousands of hours of effort. Next to it hangs a well-framed picture of the U.S. Army’s C-17 transport plane, which my wife and her team whose signatures adorn the picture’s matting helped to bring into existence. On another wall in our small memory room hangs a candid snap of my then twenty-something wife having a moment mixed with horror and exhilaration, shooting the rapids of a river and generally trying to not becoming “one” with what must have been a blur of passing river rocks. It is that last memory which I often think of most fondly, as I was not there to have experienced it. And yet I can see on her face in the picture from that particular day that it was, at that time in her life, a very important moment. We have come to conclude that it, and the others, are memories worth not losing to the passage of time in our busy lives.

I particularly love the idea of Rowling’s pencive, in part because one’s memories can be “relived” by others. Not long ago I lived that experience myself as my young daughter, my wife, my seventy-something father and I sat reading the poems of a grandmother who I never knew. She died before my memories had a chance to form, but she left behind her poems. It was her collection of her personal poems, elegantly bound by her family upon her death, which my wife was reading aloud to my daughter. They spoke of her thoughts, her dreams, and her fears. In one of her poems of note she talked of her brining home her first child, my father, now the old grandpa to my child. My wife’s soothing voice brought us all into the memories of my grandmother, and for a time we shared her memory with her. That seventy year old “memory” is now with us, as real as something that I experienced myself, and preserved within the pages of that collection. I found myself wondering how my grandchildren will know my memories, my perspectives as they changed and grew over time, and how my priorities have developed with my world view. Where will they turn to find my memories, and what have I done to ensure they will be there to be found?

My grandmother’s memories found their voice in her poetry, yet I am no poet. I have marveled at the letters from soldiers who have penned letters in foxholes from the wars of our founding fathers, to the equally brutal fields of Indonesia, and from the deserts this very day in another part of the world far away from my keyboard. With sincere gratitude to those making such sacrifices I do not find myself in the peril of war, but rather in the comfort of my home on the weekend enjoying an exquisitely beautiful day in Washington. Where then are the moments which will give birth to the records of my memories, which I can only hope will someday adorn the memory room of someone who cares about me. If not me, who will record the pictures of my memories, or mix ink with paper to record my thoughts? Upon melancholy reflection I realized that I do, in fact, record my memories. My ink has been replaced with bits in electronic memory and my paper merely exists in our now virtual world, but my blogs have become my snapshots to be returned to like the tattered photographs of my ideas, my emotions, and the signposts of what was important to me on that day. I find myself rereading blog posts only one season old, and yet they bring me back to ideas that would otherwise have been fleeting and perhaps lost. I find comfort in knowing that they are there, and that someday perhaps I may find a way to gather them into a collection even if only for someone to look back and say, “It’s time for me too to start gathering my memories.”

My thought for you today is your ideas today are your memories of tomorrow, and my hope for you is that they too become recorded in a way that enable you and your future loved ones understand who you were, what were then your priorities, and what you were thinking about. If my memory room is any indication, such written narratives, photographs, collected documents are worth keeping, even if they only find themselves adorning the private space that you occasionally visit. Your walks down your memories’ road may be short or merely occasional, but in my opinion well worth the effort of your travels.

One Sunday morning in September, near Seattle, WA.

Much like my inner chocoholic, I find myself somewhat addicted to participating in interesting discussions with smart people, especially with those of whom I occasionally disagree. I love the surprise of finding out that there was more to their feedback than just my initial bitter reaction. And like my consumption of dark chocolate, I have found that there is a fine line between giving and getting just the right amount and the right type of disagreement, before simply feeling ill from overindulgence.

If “Snarky” were a brand of feedback, it would definitely be my choice to both give and receive. It’s an acquired taste to be sure, but like a good beer, cognac, dark roast coffee, or my friend dark chocolate, once you develop an appreciation for it, most find that there is more to appreciate from snarkyfeedback than meets the eye (or insert appropriate sense here). For those who prefer for a definition, I have excerpted the definitions for “snarky” from the Urban Dictionary and included them below.

It is my opinion that snarkiness requires a level of dedication which some are unwilling, or perhaps unable, to allocate. Effectively contributing in a snarky manner means you must have paid attention to the contribution that you are responding do, you thought about it (even briefly), and thereafter put in the effort to say something more than the obvious “no” or “you’re wrong,” etc. Consuming snarkiness equally requires some dedication to look past the initial bitterness to see if there are layers of complexity to appreciate, as you simply can’t reasonably judge a snark without first thinking a bit about it.

So where is the downside to this world made of fine dark chocolate feedback? As you might expect, there are times and places for snarky dialog, and not all snarks sit as well in the stomach. The fine line I will attempt to draw here is the difference between “fits” and “snarks.” While I note that snarks may have a tinge of bitterness in their taste, in my opinion they are not delivered with an intent to be negative or self-serving. Snarks are not merely an outburst of bile, misdirected animosity, nor an excuse to simply be abusive; rather they are a thought provoking manner of communication which demonstrates a dedication to the topic at hand and to the person with whom you are communicating. Fits, on the other hand, or their less professional cousin the temper tantrum, root themselves in venom and a goal of something other than being helpful or productive. I must say here that I find no value in fits, and little value in people who make it their habit to routinely communicate in that way.

Fit happens!(ok, fits happen). With the regularity of the phases of the moon and the orbit of the earth around the sun, we all have our bad moods and those moods give rise to the occasional fit. For those who know me well, let me state the painfully obvious that I occasionally overshoot snarky and fall into the realm of a fit. It is never my intention to indulge in this fit-ish behavior, and so when receiving the occasional venom infused fit from someone else I try to make my first thought: They probably didn’t mean it, or at least not as much as I’m reading into it.

To be sure, this blog is meant to be aspirational. It was inspired by a fit which arrived in my inbox sill dripping in venom. As they sender described later, they were clearly having a bad week. This person is not one of the jerks we all know; they were truly simply having a very bad week. What I should have done was follow my own advice and simply say, “They probably didn’t mean it, or at least not as much as I’m reading into it.” I was close, I got there after a brief fit of my own which I delivered to their manager, who was a better person than I was that day and recognized that I “probably didn’t mean it…” The take away, however, was that I came back to that email the next day with a more understanding perspective and consumed it again with a desire to taste the subtle flavors that were buried under the burnt crust. There were great points in there, some of which I used to modify our standard practice for the benefit of the team. If I had just thrown away the remarks as a fit, or the contributor as a jerk, I would have lost out on something really valuable.

So let me offer this encouragement to you. Know your real jerks, and frankly do what you can to limit their time in your life. Know that good people have fits, some of which cause you to lose some respect for them. Try not to make that a permanent loss, as we all have those bad days. Have some thickness to your skin and shake off the smattering of venom sprinkles before you dive in and consume. If that doesn’t work, try and save your response for another day. When you can, invest the time and thought into a witty snark. It’s far more satisfying than just telling someone they’re wrong, and since telling them they are wrong rarely gets your point across in any event, you might just get them to understand the valuable nuance of your point.

Look for dark chocolate. I have the pleasure of being surrounded by peers who work for me, and for whom I work, who are as snarky and complex as any I have ever met. Most have their fit laden and occasionally jerky days, but with rare exception has any permanent loss of respect occurred (at least that is my perspective). If you live a life of milk chocolate and watery light beer, let me beseech you to contribute some dark chocolate of your own. People will respond in kind (after a suitable period of shock because you were snarky for the first time), and it will have been worth your while. I look forward to reading about your experience in the rich and complex world of snarkiness.

Definitions of Snarky from the Urban Dictionary

Snarky

A witty mannerism, personality, or behavior that is a combination of sarcasm and cynicism. Usually accepted as a complimentary term. Snark is sometimes mistaken for a snotty or arrogant attitude. – Her snarky remarks had half the room on the floor laughing and the other half ready to walk out.

Adjective – Any language that contains quips or comments containing sarcastic or satirical witticisms intended as blunt irony. Usually delivered in a manner that is somewhat abrupt and out of context and intended to stun and amuse.

Origin: Snark=”snide remark”.

As I have written about before, I have a daughter. She is seven as I write this, a fact that she would adamantly correct to be seven and three quarters. You can see that from the start my perspective about her as a user and her perspective as an individual were slightly off base, but all will end well I assure you. As I love to do, I occasionally buy things for my “eight” year old, both for her enjoyment and also for my enjoyment of seeing how she will use them. This last Friday one of my friends and mentors, as well as being a fellow dad, took me over to the Microsoft employee store to talk video games. I am still debating and X-Box, but opted this week for a relatively inexpensive sim (simulation) game called Zoo Tycoon 2. As he and I discussed, I was concerned that it might be too complex for my daughter (another underestimation), but since she loves animals it would be good fun (oh, what was I thinking).

Home I rushed, traversing Friday night traffic and calling home to forecast the “present” I had bought for her. A brief few bites of dinner stuffed down, we rushed from the table, loaded up the game, and we started to play. To speed things along I skipped the instructions, set up her zoo in the Savannah and populated it with lions. It was very exciting for the first fifteen minutes until I put too many lions in pen (hint: don’t double click) and one of them killed and ate the other.

Now I’m not sure if any of the Zoo Tycoon engineers (versions 1 or 2) considered that my daughter wouldn’t expect one of her new “pet” lions to be killed and eaten by its brethren, but let’s just say both my daughter and I were equally startled. Her emotion was punctuated by her running from the room screaming and leaving a trail of heartfelt tears. All was better a half hour and several Lion King “circle of life” references later, but it was clear to me that it was time for me to stop superimposing my user perspective upon her and time to see how she would use the game.

Several hours later…

I should here stop and note for you non-Tycoons that you can also drop amusement park characters into your zoo. Specifically the adults walking around in really bad animal costumes type, who occasionally launch into the spontaneous break-dance. Regrettably, from my perspective, the lions will not eat them. When left to her own devices, at evening’s end my daughter had mastered building pens, placing animals and other objects, and…here it comes…, decided that she would build a pen of amusement park characters, each of whom she named “Bob.” Fifty of them in a small pen of dirt, fighting for room to break-dance. Oh I’m so proud.

So what did I learn and what would I hope to teach from this experience? Certainly never say seven without including and three quarters; And of course never underestimate the software ability of an eight year old raised in a family of techie geeks; What I really want to covey, however, is that the software let her have her fun in her own (albeit somewhat disturbing) way. Did she build the zoo of my estimation? Certainly not. Did she have fun and get value from the purchase? Yes, without a doubt. Therefore was the software then well written? Yes, I think so.

As we design I believe we must expect that users will do the unexpected. We must accept that for sure, but also try to encourage it and embrace it. If a given feature will only let them do it our way and they don’t want to, we have missed the point. If they want to spend hours herding and penning a gaggle of Bobs (hmm, Flock of Bobs?) then so be it. Our goal is not a specific behavior, but customer satisfaction. We don’t have to know better than our users, just enable and empower them to use the products as they deem appropriate. Good for them and good for us.

Note: no amusement park characters were harmed in the making of this blog.

After flailing about, however, I did remind myself of several lessons which I have learned in my past, and about which I needed to again remind myself.

The first lesson is that even though I am often in the role of teaching the principles of management, I need to remember that the act of doing from the “Learn / Do / Teach” model is often how I learn. It is a virtuous cycle, and needs to be continuous. In addition, part of my learning often comes from my making mistakes, sometimes big ones. It is a loose paraphrase from Thomas Edison, but I do believe that I make mistakes so I can tell by contrast when I make the right decision.

The second lesson I had forgotten was to listen for the theme. I have various trusted advisors who I try to truly listento, even when I don’t share their perspective. Some of those advisors are my management, some of them are from my team, some are my peers including my wife, and all of them are my teachers. Each began saying things to me in their own words this week which I failed to stitch together as a theme. If I had just heard and listened to that theme, it would have told me I was on the wrong road. One said to me, “Did you mean to kill that fly with a brick?” Another wondered aloud with me if my team saw my actions as fighting for them, or just fighting to be a fighter. One of them suggested that I may have hurt the feelings of someone on the team by inadvertently suggesting they may have done something wrong, a message I never meant to convey. And one finally had to bluntly say to me, “That was a mistake!” as well as some less flattering, but no less incorrect descriptions.

How Did I Get Here?

There are a lot of reasons I ended up in the weeds this week, but two that were both entirely within my control to have changed.In part I simply let myself get exhausted. I had a few fifteen hour days this week, perhaps only one of which was trulynecessary. I ignored the symptoms of exhaustion, then spent even more long days working on items that seemed more critical than they actually were. I started getting sick, and then once again ignored the advice of my advisors to “Go home and rest.” One of them actually said to me, “We tell people to go home and take care of themselves when they are sick. Is thisyour idea of leading by example?” Hmm, do you hear the theme?

I also ignored one of the principles that I teach which is, “Know when to take your foot off the gas.” This week I found myself focused on small tactical issues rather than overall strategy. Some days and even weeks can be like that, and we need to be able to adjust the energy and focus we apply to any given task. When I am working on strategy and trying to motivate people I can be pretty high energy. When I am dealing with someone on a simple tactical task, hitting them with all of the energy that I use for strategy is like, “killing a fly with a brick” – or more than a little overkill. Task work at full force is also frustrating to me because I don’t see results as fast as that much energy should be producing, and it is totally exhausting for everyone involved. The advice I offer is that sometimes what is truly important is just coastinginto a turn, so you can hit the gas later on the straightaway. Ok, that racing analogy is worth briefly elaborating on, as it is part of the theme I missed. One of my trusted advisors let me play their Xbox racing game this week. It was my first time playing, and I found myself actually refusing to take my foot off the gas pedal (literally the gas pedal this time). As a result I repeatedly smashed myself into the wall. WOW, can I miss a theme or what?!

Apologize

This week in the weeds and smashing into the walls also reminded me of something equally important when you do make those inevitable mistakes, at that is to be the first to apologize. I take this lesson from Dr. Gordon Graham, a captain from the California Highway Patrol, who later in his career became an expert on managing risk, and ultimately a renowned risk management consultant who among other successes has changed dozens of CHP’s guiding policies. Gordon is a tall burly man, just the kind you want to be there to protect those in need and to ensure justice is done, even if by force. His top point of advice for individuals and companies trying to reduce and manage risk, “Teach people a willingness to apologize.” Yes really, that is his advice. Gordon noted that some may think you are weak for apologizing, but to ignore them. Risk will eventually weed those people out. The mistakes you make, but which can be corrected or at least mitigated by immediately recognizing and apologizing for your mistakes are WELL worth the scorn from the few folks who will never get it. I’ve written two apologies resulting from this week, with another one left to go. Some will I’m sure be less appreciated than others, but each will be my way of saying that I am committed to continuously learning while I do, and this was clearly a learning week.

Reminders to Myself

Rest before you exhaust yourself. Some things really can wait until tomorrow or next week. Ask for help if you can’t find the time to rest. Being tired makes it harder to find those opportunities.

Listen for the themes. Every time you hear someone say something and you think, “that was an odd thing to say to me,” stop for a minute or two and ponder why. Were there several comments like that? Can you find the theme? Is it time to ask a trusted advisor what they think of what was just said to you?

Some tasks are just simple tasks, and they don’t need your 100% passionate effort. I gave myself one hour to write and post this blog. If it is not done by then, I will be done with it for now. That’s OK.

Apologize. Do it immediately, don’t worry about being viewed as week, and don’t look back. The odds are with you that you did the right thing.