You’ve heard it before. Do something for 21 days, and it will become a habit. Have you ever developed a new, good habit in 21 days? Didn’t think so. It hasn’t worked for me and I suspect I’m very much like most people in this regard. Continue reading
My continuing series on Google’s “10 things we know to be true.”
“We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.”
There is a definite theme to the things Google “knows to be true”. No matter how good something is, it can be better. They seem to rejoice in the challenge of improving whatever it is they are working on. Since fast is better than slow, no matter how fast they get, they want to keep getting faster. They 
measure their current performance, attempt improvements then measure again to see if things got better. It’s a formula that works in any endeavour and it’s the foundation of the work I do with my clients. Once they start tracking performance and see the improvement that results from a focused effort, the motivation to continue the improvement grows and grows.
Most improvements we make come in small, incremental steps. If we don’t measure and track performance, it’s very easy to miss the improvement. If we don’t see how our efforts are benefitting us, we miss out on the motivation that results and usually give up on the initiative entirely. What do you want to improve, and how are you measuring your success at doing it?
About Mike Bonn: I offer Business Coaching Services and facilitate the unique LMI process to help individuals and organizations improve performance. If you would like to contact me to discuss any of my blogs, or to learn more about my excellent services, give me a call at 613.743.5642 or send me an email mbonn@lmicanada.ca.
It seems there are more and more people trying to tell us the secret to success. How many “Top 5 tips from successful people” tweets can we take.
Sorry folks, there ain’t no secret. Every successful person is a mixture of their own motivations, skills, habits, behaviours 
You aren’t Jack Welch who isn’t Steve Jobs who wasn’t Winston Churchill who wasn’t Abraham Lincoln.
Figure out what’s in YOUR mixture.
Do the things that get YOU the best results with your mix.
Be successful by being YOU.
If I have to inform you of a problem and I know you will ask me a series of questions about why it happened, I will prepare by coming up with a series of explanations and rationalizations to justify the problem.
If I have to inform you of a problem and I know you will ask me a series of questions about how to fix the problem and prevent it from happening again, I will prepare by coming up with a list of possible solutions.
Are you asking the right questions?
Think about a time when you needed to solve a critical problem and time was of the essence. Did you care whose fault the problem was? Nope. All you cared about was what information you needed to get a solution, and who and what you needed to implement it. In a crisis we filter out irrelevant concerns and focus on the task at hand.
Finger pointers don’t want to focus on solving the problem. Finger pointers rationalize that there is no need to change anything because they NEVER would have made the mistake that caused the problem.
Everyone makes mistakes.
Do people in your business, or personal life expend mental energy finding who to blame for problems, instead of solving the problems and finding ways to prevent them? If so, why would anyone in that environment try a creative new idea that might take a few tries before working properly? If people are afraid to make mistakes, forget about them coming up with a creative solution to a problem. (oh, and financial incentives don’t help either, watch Dan Pink’s TED talk for more on that)
If we want to build a problem solving culture, in which deep thinking on elegant solutions is highly valued, our focus won’t be on who caused the problem. Our focus will be on what needs to change. And critically, what help is needed to change it.
The next time someone tells you about a problem that has occurred and your first instinct is to ask, “who’s responsible?”, catch yourself. Instead, ask, “What do we need to do to fix it?”
Don’t point the finger. Solve the problem.
As a society, we love to talk about turning points.
That single moment in time when the momentum changes.
There is no such thing.
The notion of a turning point, creates an unrealistic expectation that all we have to do is decide to make the change we want and then continue as we were.
Change doesn’t result from one decision to change. It results from a continuous series of decisions and actions that confirm our commitment to the change. It doesn’t end. We decide, act, decide and act again. And we have to decide and act in more ways that support the change than in ways that do not.
What do you want to change? Are you committed to making the necessary decisions, again and again and again? And again? And again?
