Ho‘ohana Aloha

Add this one to your Ho‘omau index (Chapter 4 in Managing with Aloha: Bringing Hawaii’s Universal Values to the Art of Business

The Banjo Player

Steve Martin made the comments around twenty minutes into his 2007 interview with Charlie Rose. They were talking about how Martin learned the banjo.

“In high school, I couldn’t play an instrument,” Martin admits.

“I remember getting my first banjo, and reading the book saying ‘this is how you play the C chord,’ and I put my fingers down to play the C chord and I couldn’t tell the difference.”

“But I told myself,” he continued, “just stick with this, just keep playing, and one day you’ll have been playing for 40 years, and at this point, you’ll know how to play.”

… If you collapse Martin’s skills into a flat list, he sounds like a Renaissance man, but if you take a snapshot of any particular point of his life, you’ll encounter relentless, longterm focus on a very small number of things… Read more

My Ho‘omau Index is here, on Talking Story. Most recent article there: Ho‘omau, as nature teaches us to do

Excellent article by Scott Belsky. Sharpen your own vocabulary with this understanding on the difference between criticism and cynicism.

Have a Kindle and love/admire Stephen Covey?

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is the Daily Deal at $0.99 today!

I have no idea how many times I have read, annotated, and referred to my dog-eared copy of this CLASSIC book, and I still grabbed this digital copy (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

If you want a quick reminder, these are his 7 Habits:

• Habit 1, Be Proactive, is the Habit of Personal Vision.
• Habit 2, Begin with the End in Mind, is the Habit of Personal Leadership.
• Habit 3, Put First Things First, is the Habit of Personal Management.
• Habit 4, Think Win-Win, is the Habit of Interpersonal Leadership.
• Habit 5, Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood, is the Habit of Communication.
• Habit 6, Synergize, is the Habit of Creative Cooperation.
• Habit 7, Sharpen the Saw, is the Habit of Self-Renewal.

Received these questions from a friend of mine, a professor teaching a college course on the “Emotional Health in Organizations” and thought I’d share my answer with all of you who read Talking Story as well:

How does one effectively “lead up” in their organization, if it is still managed like the Industrial Revolution? How does one BEST change the culture from within? Is it REALLY possible…since the key leader always defines the culture of the organization????

Yes, it’s possible, if you are willing to do what it takes…

I’m giving myself a Goodreads challenge again, and this was book 5 for me this month. I tend to read more early in the year, and my challenge is to read books more consistently. The Kindle Daily Deal helps immensely, for it constantly adds to the queue in an easily affordable way. So many books, so little time…

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In a word, exceptional.

I greatly appreciate authors like Johnson who are ‘slow hunch’ cultivators, thorough researchers, and articulate explainers.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation is a focused celebration of the phrase “hindsight is 20/20.” The scientific history of innovation is curated to support Johnson’s thesis, which is his answer to this question: What kind of environment creates good ideas?

There is another, more subtle question which lurks throughout the book as well: Are you open to sharing your ideas before they’ve fully formed? (…for here are the reasons why.)  …More

The more I read, the more I’m convinced that reading is a habit Alaka‘i Managers must cultivate. You must. You need to read for your own good. Reading is your window to the rest of our fascinating world, and the world is a wonderfully big, and varied place.

Management consumes us (managemeant even more so). As we dig in to all the details of our daily work, we tell ourselves to “focus, focus, focus” and we get isolated despite all the people who surround us in the workplace.

They’re in the same boat: Our company and its existing network insulates us in a cocoon of directed attention, and we don’t fight it. We may even be grateful: We feel it’s all we can handle right now anyway, and we aim to get better with whatever’s currently at hand.

But we can’t lose sight of this caution: If we aren’t careful, insulation will stealthily morph from comfort to incestuousness and isolation. We hear about certain things in passing, and we say, “When in the world did that happen?”

Love articles like this which challenge convention. It’s a great thing about the times we live in: Everything can be questioned by the thinking mind, comfortable in the skin of their own values.

This one starts:

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

Found via: Office Space: Defending the Cubicle on The Etsy Blog

Photo post for Talking Story today:

The value which gets highlighted the most in Managing with Aloha (by Kindle readers, enabling me to notice it) isn’t Aloha or Ho‘ohana: It’s Ho‘omau, the value of persistence, perseverance, tenacity and resilience.

“Renew. Anything worth having is worth working for. Persistence is often the defining quality between those who fail and those who succeed… There is never much satisfaction in giving up, and Ho‘omau is the value that will cause you to continue, to persevere in your efforts, and to perpetuate those that have worked.”
— Managing with Aloha, Chapter 4

Ultimately, the quality of life is what’s “worth having” and “worth working for” and these days I’m seeing fabulous examples of that thanks to Mother Nature…

Long article, but please make the time to do so this weekend or the next.

Adam Davidson:

In the past decade, the flow of goods emerging from U.S. factories has risen by about a third. Factory employment has fallen by roughly the same fraction. The story of Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run manufacturer based in Queens, sheds light on both phenomena. It’s a story of hustle, ingenuity, competitive success, and promise for America’s economy. It also illuminates why the jobs crisis will be so difficult to solve.

…I came here to find answers to questions that arise from the data (Even if you know the rough outline of this story, looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data is still shocking.) How, exactly, have some American manufacturers continued to survive, and even thrive, as global competition has intensified? What, if anything, should be done to halt the collapse of manufacturing employment? And what does the disappearance of factory work mean for the rest of us?

Found via this commentary by JD Meier: Productivity is a Remarkably Good Thing:

“Productivity, in and of itself, is a remarkably good thing.  Only through productivity growth can the average quality of human life improve.   Because of higher agricultural productivity, we don’t all have to work in the fields to make enough food to eat.  Because of higher industrial productivity, few of us need to work in factories to make the products we use.  In theory, productivity growth should help nearly everyone in society.   When one person can grow as much food or make as many car parts as 100 used to, prices should fall, which gives everyone in that society more purchasing power; we all become a littler richer.  In the economic models, the benefits of productivity growth should not go just to the rich owners of capital.  As workers become more productive, they should be able to demand higher salaries.”

What happens when millions of people spend 10 percent less on new things and 10 percent more sharing old things or getting sophisticated deals? It’s easy to say that sharing is good for efficient markets. It’s not so easy to say that sharing is good for a growing economy that depends on new shoppers.

The pessimist would say that the sharing economy is a smaller economy. The optimist would respond that by spending less money on homes, cars and clothes, we could get back to focusing on new projects. More family savings would find their way to banks and investment firms. That capital would flow into exciting entrepreneurial projects looking to answer more big problems. Young start-ups waiting to change the world with their new ideas would benefit from the capital that flows from all this new investment.

I say, let’s all be optimists and go for “The Great Reset” which the recession has made possible in more minds.

I wholeheartedly agree with Marco Arment on this: campaign finance reform, and reform of congressional lobbying practices, is where we must focus our attentions, curtailing their insidious reach so more democratic balance is restored.

Bonus Link: Video of the Day: Did Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Break Campaign Law?