details around the edges of Marcia Conner’s life

From @deldino (via Did you ever have one of these days? on Twitpic)

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Bookcase Porn

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In what can be described as Twitter’s equivalent to “Norm” (for the youngins, a boisterous alcohol-related greeting offered a character on the Boston-based TV show Cheers), I recently posted this question:

Within minutes, 10 sets of instructions appeared in my stream. @9to5to9 pointed me to the recipe her husband learned in bartender school. @mrch0mp3rs suggested adding a little egg white to create froth. @espnguyen mentioned a splash of orange juice. @billives pointed me to The Food Network where Emeril Lagassi offers a simple whisky sour recipe. I was even asked questions about the ingredients we had at home because people had seen we weren’t going anywhere that day. And then this, which I adore (and didn’t try) from @rickladd:

In the end, I went with Emeril’s recipe, thanks to its simplicity and for some reason I trust Bill is a good judge of such things. And because Karl was so exhausted after clearing a path down our very long steep driveway, and was running a fever to boot, I postponed making the sour mix for a few days.

Now it’s all ready. Thanks to everyone who contributed. Here’s to sweet holiday cheer.

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from Garys Social Media Count

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by Jim Collin, originally published in USA Today

Each time the New Year rolls around and I sit down to do my annual resolutions, I reflect back to a lesson taught me by a remarkable teacher. In my mid-20s, I took a course on creativity and innovation from Rochelle Myers and Michael Ray at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and I kept in touch with them after I graduated.

One day, Rochelle pointed to my ferocious work pace and said, “I notice, Jim, that you are a rather undisciplined person.”

I was stunned and confused. After all, I was the type of person who carefully laid out my BHAGs (big hairy audacious goals), top three objectives and priority activities at the start of each New Year. I prided myself on the ability to work relentlessly toward those objectives, applying the energy I’d inherited from my prairie- stock grandmother.

“Your genetic energy level enables your lack of discipline,” Rochelle continued. “Instead of leading a disciplined life, you lead a busy life.”

She then gave me what I came to call the 20-10 assignment. It goes like this: Suppose you woke up tomorrow and received two phone calls. The first phone call tells you that you have inherited $20 million, no strings attached. The second tells you that you have an incurable and terminal disease, and you have no more than 10 years to live. What would you do differently, and, in particular, what would you stop doing?

That assignment became a turning point in my life, and the “stop doing” list became an enduring cornerstone of my annual New Year resolutions — a mechanism for disciplined thought about how to allocate the most precious of all resources: time.

Rochelle’s challenge forced me to see that I’d been plenty energetic, but on the wrong things. Indeed, I was on entirely the wrong path. After graduate school, I’d taken a job at Hewlett- Packard. I loved the company, but hated the job. Rochelle’s assignment helped me to see I was cut out to be a professor, a researcher, a teacher — not a businessman — and I needed to make a right-angle turn. I had to stop doing my career, so that I could find my real work. I quit HP, migrated to the Stanford Business School faculty and eventually became — with some remarkable good luck along the way — a self-employed professor, happily toiling away on my research and writing.

Rochelle’s lesson came back to me a number of years later while puzzling over the research data on 11 companies that turned themselves from mediocrity to excellence, from good to great. In cataloguing the key steps that ignited the transformations, my research team and I were struck by how many of the big decisions were not what to do, but what to stop doing.

In perhaps the most famous case, Darwin Smith of Kimberly-Clark — a man who had prevailed over throat cancer — said one day to his wife: “I learned something from my cancer. If you have a cancer in your arm, you’ve got to have the guts to cut off your own arm. I’ve made a decision: We’re going to sell the mills.”

At the time, Kimberly-Clark had the bulk of its revenues in the traditional paper business. But Smith began asking three important questions: Are we passionate about the paper business? Can we be the best in the world at it? Does the paper business best drive our economic engine?

The answers came up: no, no and no.

And so, Smith made the decision to stop doing the paper business — to sell off 100 years of corporate history — and throw all the resulting resources into the consumer business (building brands such as Kleenex), which came up yes, yes and yes to the same questions.

The start of the New Year is a perfect time to start a stop doing list and to make this the cornerstone of your New Year resolutions, be it for your company, your family or yourself. It also is a perfect time to clarify your three circles, mirroring at a personal level the three questions asked by Smith:

1) What are you deeply passionate about?
2) What are you are genetically encoded for — what activities do you feel just “made to do”?
3) What makes economic sense — what can you make a living at?

Those fortunate enough to find or create a practical intersection of the three circles have the basis for a great work life.

Think of the three circles as a personal guidance mechanism. As you navigate the twists and turns of a chaotic world, it acts like a compass. Am I on target? Do I need to adjust left, up, down, right? If you make an inventory of your activities today, what percentage of your time falls outside the three circles?

If it is more than 50%, then the stop doing list might be your most important tool. The question is: Will you accept good as good enough, or do you have the courage to sell the mills?

Looking back, I now see Rochelle Myers as one of the few people I’ve known to lead a great life, while doing truly great work. This stemmed largely from her remarkable simplicity. A simple home. A simple schedule. A simple frame for her work.

Rochelle spoke to me repeatedly about the idea of “making your life a creative work of art.” A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.

Jim Collins is author of Good to Great and co-author of Built to Last.

via jimcollins.com

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If you want to know what we think is important, look at how we spend our time. If you want to know what we value, look at how we spend our money. If you want to know what we believe, look at how we live.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poems, Robert Hass makes a similar point in the title poem, which he calls “Time and Materials.” Hass observes that life is a slow and gradual accretion of experiences. The goal, he writes, is..

To make layers,
As if they were a steadiness of days:

It snowed; I did errands at a desk;
A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue
Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

On this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,
Nothing stirring in the icy air.

On this day a blur of color moving at the gym
Where the heat from bodies
Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

Made love, made curry, talked on the phone
To friends, the one whose brother died
Was crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.

The implied question to which this poem responds is “What are you doing?” The answer is: falling down and getting up and running and falling and getting up. Making love, making curry, and talking on the phone to friends. Lives are not created in a dramatic instant or even over a spectacular week, like the world according to the book of Genesis. Rather, lives are laid down in layers, a gradual accumulation of actions.

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“Performance reviews and training programs define the firm’s expectations. Financial reward systems reinforce them. Memos and communications highlight what’s important. And senior leadership actions — promotions for people who toe the line and a dead end career for those who don’t — emphasize the firm’s priorities.”

— Peter Bregman (A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture, HarvardBusiness.org (via johntropea)

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Companies that value learning outperform those that don’t. A study by independent research firm McBassi & Company shows that it pays to invest in people-focused practices including building learning capacity, knowledge accessibility, and professional development. Institutions that demonstrate the greatest commitment to their human capital seem to enjoy the greatest financial rewards…

Read the full article, by Marcia Conner June 2005, on the Fast Company website.

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Trying to convince your Learning & Development department there’s a place for Twitter (or enterprise-weight counterparts) in your plans? Here are a few articles that address this growing trend.

If you know of pieces I haven’t included here, please add them with a link to the comments section or contact me directly. I’ve begun writing about this specifically and will include new articles in the coming months.

“Enterprise Micro-Learning” by Marcia Conner. Fast Company. October 12, 2008

“Learn More With Less: Corporate Education in the Current Economy” by Marcia Conner. Fast Company. November 30, 2008

“Twitter As a Learning Tool. Really.” by Pat Galagan. ASTD T+D. March 2009.

“The Truth About Twitter” by Dave Wilkins. The Social Enterprise Blog. May 11, 2009

“65 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your e-Learning Budget (ebook)” edited by Marcia Conner. The eLearning Guild. May 26, 2009.

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For real-time learning about how microsharing is working inside corporate training, learning, and development, consider joining #lrnchat each Thursday night.

[Note: I’m certain I’ve missed some gems and I will add them as I find them. There are several articles in the works for big magazines and as I said before, I have a few in draft form that will be published this summer. There are also ample blog posts about social media in corporate L&D and Twitter in education. Let’s consider this the beginning of a terrific conversation and place for all of us to learn.]

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