Soup
January 2nd, 2007One of my significant failures last year was sporadic, insufficient, over-promised and under-delivered blog posting. I spent a good deal of time thinking about this in the past month, and have determined that a big part of that was my desire to be a (very) good writer. I would see something from which I could easily project a post idea, but then kill the idea with “perfect writing” concerns.
ONE solution to that problem is simply to write more, with less concerns about the tightness and elegance of my writing. Thus, this is a “soup post” - I’ve just thrown everything in, and tried to avoid making a perfect little bisque.
I read an article recently in a magazine while traveling; I think it was on the final page, a golf magazine. It was an interview with Seth Waugh, who is the Deutsche Bank Americas CEO. The FIRST thing that caught my eye about the interview was that the interviewer was Tom Friedman, who wrote The World is Flat, one of our all-time favorite books here at Manager Tools. (I cannot tell you how hard it is to include that tidbit, insofar as it doesn’t illuminate my larger point. See? Soup.)
What I really liked about the interview was the point he made about Tiger Woods, and how it relates to us as managers. Mr. Waugh said that Tiger has “the most bizarre life, where everyone is constantly screaming and yelling his name.”
That hit me as QUITE like most managers I know, believe it or not. No, nobody’s “screaming your name”, but you do have hundreds of things (email, anyone?) jostling for your attention.
Mr. Waugh shared that when he talks with Tiger, despite all the noise, Tiger focuses like a lighthouse on him. He shuts out the noise, and really pays attention. Rather than being “thin and wide”, Tiger is, “a mile deep and an inch wide.”
I’m going to come back to this topic plenty of times in the years ahead, but for now, here’s my point. Managers who aspire to greatness better learn to narrow their focus and deepen their knowledge. It is not enough - worse, it is inefficient and ineffective and therefore wrong - to try to do everything. And this is nothing new: Peter Drucker said this 30-40 years ago.
PS: I realize now that this post’s theme and title might more precisely be “potpourri”, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. “Soup post” sounds better… and besides, that’s the point: last year, I wouldn’t have written it. I even thought about making it about New Year’s Resolutions, tying the whole “narrowing” concept to weight loss. But I didn’t.
It’s all because of Tom Friedman.
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January 2nd, 2007 at 7:11 am
Great blog. It sounds and feels like you Mark. Please keep this up. I’m certainly not looking for a “perfectly” constructed piece where there is no tangents. Your tangents (in your podcasts) add a lot to the discussion, so do it in your blogs as well.
January 2nd, 2007 at 11:19 am
“… Soup for the Manager’s Soul”? —
Thanks for the soup, it proved to be good, I had a good chuckle at the references. I look forward to another year of learning and participating at Manager Tools.
Happy New Year!
Jonathan
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:30 pm
I can’t agree more with you. Focus. I am wondering whether I can prepare a ‘focus plan’ for the year. But, where do I put the focus on? On what my boss requires for me? On what I know I can do better? On what my day-to-day claims of me? As you see, I have lost the focus.
January 2nd, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Two things slow me down more than any other: the desire to do things “perfectly” (or to not fail) and a propensity to get distracted. The perfectionist in me is slow to get things started for fear of being off the mark and when a distraction comes along (always), I may end up in the ditch for who knows how long. I like the idea of focus and being “a mile deep and an inch wide”. In fact, it sounds rather freeing!
Al
January 2nd, 2007 at 6:23 pm
Proud of you, mark. Way to just let it go and let the posts fly. Good to see.
None of us expect perfection from you. So why should you try to give it to us?
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Examples of ways to focus:
1. When someone walks in to your office to talk business, turn off the phone and any other music in your office. If you don’t turn off the phone, and it rings, resist the temptation to look at the display to see “if it’s more important than the person I’m talking with.”
2. Don’t pull out your Treo or BB and check e-mail during a meeting
3. Look at the person talking.
4. Don’t check your e-mails or surf the net during a conference call, pay attention.
Regards,
Glenn
January 2nd, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Mark,
I’ve been a paid professional writer for a long time. If it is less than 3,000 words, it’s brief. I find your writings exceptionally brief. Often they are excessively so.
I think if you consider your writing not only as achieving your goals, but rather as a service to others, then it makes perfect sense to write what for you seems like a long entry.
You place no such artificial controls on your audio entries and regularly repeat points, reiterate, or tell side stories and make jokes. It’s what makes the podcasts so invaluable. As others have said, your tangents sometimes are unintentionally more poignant than the topic of the podcast itself.
For your writings here to be as valuable as the podcasts, I suggest you set yourself a word limit, and as long as you are under it and get across your main point, leave everything in. Currently, imo, the podcasts are far superior to the writings on MT because the articles are too brief for a reader to ever build any momentum reading.
MT is a brilliant contribution to the web - it has changed my entire career outlook. Because of you, I have read Drucker’s “The Practice of Management” and “The Effective Executive” and produced about 22 pages of notes from them collectively I study daily. I cannot believe how long I have been managing essentially as a blind man trying to teach photography. Your work has opened my eyes to huge potential for excitement on a job that I believed to be dead end, boring, and unchallenging. You’ve taken 66% of my life and given me the tools I needed to turn it around.
See? That was a tangent? I bet you’re happy I left it in!
Forgive me the smiley, Mike. I have some I to go with my D and every now and then it accidentally escapes like a dog running out the door between the owner’s legs.
January 4th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Soup is great… and Happy New Year to you guys!
To focus on the person in front of me I force myself to square my shoulders toward them, it forces the eye contact and allows me to easily block out distraction.