A number of things coalesced for me this evening – so I can’t help myself- I should have been in bed twenty minutes ago. I got home a few hours ago, after a great presentation to about 250 parents at a school – my mind was buzzing, and as part of the relaxation technique I decided to have a long soaking bath and read a good book. Couldn’t choose which book to read, so picked up Tom Peters’s Re-Imagine! (but it at Amazon.com or Kalahari.net) . I have been avoiding this book for awhile – it just looked a bit ADD to me (but that’s how I look to others, so no disrespect meant). (PS – also check out Tom’s blog site: http://www.tompeters.com (hey, Tom, get trackbacks!).
I’m not sure what the rest of the book is like, but the first 50 pages were excellent. By then my bath was lukewarm. As I got out, I noticed a large A3 poster on my bed – it turns out it’s my six-year-old daughter Amy’s first school project. Amy is in Grade 0 – a singularly badly named school year, though not as bad as her sister Hannah who is in Grade 000 (triple nought) – so this is a milestone for her, and one she obviously wants me to be involved in.
In his book, Tom Peters calls for a new vision. He imagines:
How can I help my daughter to become one of these beings? One of the ways is to heighten the entrepreneurial instinct – may be getting her to ask the question, “how can I make money out of this?” But even as I had better thought, I realised that that type of thinking is part of the old contract. To help my daughter be part of the new one, I need to get her to ask an entirely different type of question. A question I can embed in her consciousness – a question she will ask of everything she ever does. WOW!
What will the question be?
Right now, a few moments before switching off and going to bed (and possibly a few moments after my brain has switched off), I am leaning towards, “how is this adding value to other people?” So, we went to Cape Town, we took photos, we stuck them on cardboard, we’re showing you – but what value have we added? How have we improved other people’s lives? How is this adding value to the people?
I think I like that…
Firstly, I found Tom Peters book one of the greatest books I have read in a long time. It challenges us out of our old paradigm of what a business book should look like. We need to throw away the old ideas – turn them on their head!!!!. In his book he states that words were the medium in the 20th century and pictures will be the medium that tell the story in the 21st century.
So what does the picure of Cape Town tell us. Your daughter experienced a great holiday. She is able to communicate using pictures to let you know how she feels. How can we use this in the office???? Sometimes we can express ourselves better using another medium. When will this become accepted practice?Stories also fill this gap.
Despite not having read Tom Peters book, I can see how the questions he raises are highly relevant in the fluid labour market. Currently, we are in a position of tension – employers are torn between traditional ways of viewing an employment contract and as something that represente where employees are more aptly.
The traditional contract inhibits and promotes a fear associated with anything entrepeneurial. This is a problem for someone like me who is young and itching to be more entrepenuerial. Labour mobility is something that management finds daunting, but for me it is what will make my contribution more worthy.
I remember healping a small team of 3 people get on better using pictures (well sort of) Basically you had 3 people, critical to the success of the business who couldn’t work out their issues. Couldn’t communicate was what it came down to. Much of it seemed personality driven. Definate feelings, but unable, and not skilled enough to tell each other when to back off, and when not to.
So I built them a chart that had from top to bottom a range of feelings they told me they felt from time to time. I stuck it up behind their office door and gave each one of them a different colour peg (clothes varity, but fairly large) Each day as they walked in they literally pegged their feeling or emotion. This helped the other 2 work out how to deal with them.
It worked for a long while Visual, picture like, simple, yet effective.
Pictures, so simple, so full of information. so able to add value.