Public Relations & Social Media Insight

Even avid readers may be missing a genre valuable to their personal and professional development.

...I've written in the past about how business leaders should be readers, but even those of us prone to read avidly often restrict ourselves to contemporary nonfiction or novels. By doing so, we overlook a genre that could be valuable to our personal and professional development: poetry. Here's why we shouldn't.

For one, poetry teaches us to wrestle with and simplify complexity. Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman once told The New York Times, "I used to tell my senior staff to get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand." Emily Dickinson, for example, masterfully simplified complex topics with poems like "Because I could not stop for Death," and many poets are similarly adept. Business leaders live in multifaceted, dynamic environments. Their challenge is to take that chaos and make it meaningful and understandable. Reading and writing poetry can exercise that capacity, improving one's ability to better conceptualize the world and communicate it — through presentations or writing — to others....

[Poetry in PR or your business? You may not want to present this idea to the CEO just yet. But if it gets results, it's a winner. A tantalizing and poetic approach to management. ~ Jeff]

To innovate, stop worrying about "failure" and start thinking of "learning."...

...For me, the most important insight from design thinking was that you have to make sure you've defined the right problem before you try to solve it. So, you act like an anthropologist to understand human needs and problems before jumping to solutions. Most of us in business, if we need to discover how to do something new, use PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheets to rationalize our approach. This is what I call "the illusion of rationality." Whether motivated by a lack of insight arrogance, or stupidity, the illusion of rationality is a waste of time and resources — yet one that keeps a lot of people employed in management consulting, as I learned first hand.

Instead, if you don't have the data, you have to create the data. That does not mean plugging random numbers into your spreadsheet. It means generating real insight, from nothing. Designers and bootstrapped entrepreneurs I've worked with use rapid low cost experiments to create data. I refer to these "affordable losses" in the interest of learning, creativity, and discovery as "little bets."

This seems like common sense; so why is it so hard? Three words: fear of failure.

If you're an MBA-trained manager or executive, the odds are you were never, at any point in your educational or professional career given permission to fail, even on a "little bet." Your parents wanted you to achieve, achieve, achieve — in sports, the classroom, and scouting or work. Your teachers penalized you for having the "wrong" answers, or knocked your grades down if you were imperfect, according to however your adult figures defined perfection. Similarly, modern industrial management is still predicated largely on mitigating risks and preventing errors, not innovating or inventing....

Bland mission statements are worse than boring; they confuse your strategy.

Let's start with a game. Below are three mission statements from three Fortune 500 companies. Try to match each company with its mission statement...

How did you do? The largely indistinguishable statements make the task almost impossible. Such statements may still be considered "best practice" in some quarters but in so many cases they do not achieve what they were intended to achieve. Ironically, many "directional documents" are not fit for purpose: they do not provide direction....

[This was a refreshing POV and must-read ~ Jeff]