Managing Ourselves - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

Why Managing Ourselves Well Matters

  1. The better we manage ourselves, the better our businesses will be
  • Business is a mirror. They reflect our beliefs, attitudes, and fears. They manifest the ways we feel about ourselves.
  • The buck starts with the leader
  • Respected leaders respect themselves, creative leaders make creative teams, etc.
  1. Successful self-management is about living your dream
  • You need to know what you want out of life
  • Design a job that makes you feel fulfilled
  1. Successful self-management puts anarchism in action
  • Honor every individual for who they are and help them get the greatness they desire
  • Build healthy, respectful workplaces where we honor and benefit from our differences in pursuit of a shared vision
  1. Caring self-management could lead to a creative revolution
  • You can't change the world- the most you can hope for is to get some people thinking. The best way to do this is to start with yourself

Inside Out Insights That Can Change Your Life

  1. Get to know yourself
  • You can only start trusting your gut when you have awareness about what inspires you, shuts you down, or triggers your anger.
  • It's worth investing time in this
  • Monitoring techniques
    • 360 reviews
    • Decision logs (tracking the long-term effectiveness of your choices)
    • Schedule regular sessions of reflection to track your emotional swings
    • Monitor your mental state throughout the day, try to find triggers
    • Go to counseling
    • Check the relevant data
  1. Honor your emotions
  • Emotional data is data
  • You can't selectively turn off your emotions
  • Don't make decisions as responses to emotions ("When you're drunk and near a cliff, sit down")
  • When you get angry, just watch your anger- don't repress it or encourage it. "Just as night becomes day if you can wait a little, in the same way anger becomes compassion."
  • The same way people manipulate the boss and know what you mood to look for when pitching a new idea, you should develop that same level of awareness about yourself
  • In (touch with how you're feeling)/out (express your feelings)/up (engage with your emotions)/down (own and manage your emotions)
  • Many emotions demand no action at all
  1. Start with Self-Respect
  • If you talked to other people the way you talk to yourself, you'd expect yourself to quit
  • People absorb your internal attitudes to yourself
  • "I have to", "I can't", and "I should" are phrases that surrender your freedom
  1. Live Your Values
  • Burnout comes from working for an organization that doesn't share your values
  1. Skillfully Schedule Time and Resources
  • Success means you get better problems, like having to choose between more awesome things than you have time to do
  • Balance your time between working on yourself, working on the business and working in the business
  • Teach self-management to others
  1. Write a Vision
  • "What will it look like and feel like when we're doing a great job as leaders?"
  • Law of attraction
  1. Get In Touch With Your Gut
  • If you don't act on your insights, you'll stop having them
  • Journaling will help you separate unhelpful gut reactions from instructive ones
  1. Manage Your Energy
  • If you're not managing your own energy, who will?
  • Staying positive encourages positivity from others
  • 3 types of energy: Physical, mental/emotional, "vibrational" (what other people perceive)
  • When your energy starts going negative, compliment 3 people
  1. Ask For Help
  • Asking for help makes you vulnerable, which is why you don't want to do it
  • It balances the insights of others with your own
  1. Get Around The Right People (Don't Stay Down With The Joneses)
  • When you move up, your friends sometimes want to keep you down. This is because they value your relationship, and know that it will change if you're not the same anymore.
  • A good idea is a network- they don't magically conjure themselves out of nowhere
  1. Be Willing To Work Harder Than You Have To Just To Get By
  • Putting in a little extra to polish your craft is what makes the difference
  1. Be Willing To Embrace The Uncomfortable
  • If you're truly strong, there's no need to emphasize that to yourself or others. If you're strong, direct your attention to where you fear most to look.
  • You'll never be "ready"- just dive in
What I used to say to myself What I say to myself now
"That is so stupid! How could you have done that?" "Wow, that didn't work out that well. You did your best though. It's gonna be OK."
"Man, what an idiot. Why did you shoot your mouth off like that?" "Man, that wasn't very productive thing to say. Get centered and see if you can't get back on course. It takes time to master the way you manage yourself."
"I can't believe you did it again. You're never gonna get it, are you?" "Well, I didn't get it right this time. Take a couple deep breaths. You're gonna be fine. You're gonna figure this out."

It's All About Free Choice

Learn to choose choice. No one can make you do anything. You don't have to go to parties, or meetings, or work. You choose to. You will feel more fulfilled and less stressed if you accept this. The traditional work world has always been based on making people forget this-- follow orders. Your choices have consequences, but you get to own those too.

What I Used To Say What I say now
"I have to" "I'm going to", "I will"
"I should" "I'm going to", "I'm thinking about"
"I can't" "I'm not going to", "I hear you that this is important, but given my other obligations right now I'm going to turn down the offer."
"I need to" "I want to", "I'm going to"

Mindfulness Matters

Mindfulness is the practice of observing your inner experiences in a way that is fully aware but non-judgmental. You stand outside your own mind, observing the spontaneous thoughts and feelings that the brain throws up, observing all this as if it were happening to someone else.

  • Start with deep breaths
  • Tune in to tiny details- they enrich your life and bring joy out of even mundane tasks
  • Take a few minutes every morning to get centered, then just try to hold onto it throughout the day
  • Viktor Frankl: "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom." Mindfulness is spending as much time in that space as possible.
  • Try to imagine what it must be like for the people around you, tune in to what they're experiencing, fearing, anticipating. Neglecting this allows anger and rage to take over as you imagine others being out to get you.

Mindfulness Techniques:

  1. Being mindful of myself- Try to monitor your own mood, energy, etc. around the clock
  2. Being in the moment- Fully feel your feelings
  3. Paying attention to positive details- the more you focus on good things, the more they tend to happen. Compliment others. Write down your blessings.
  4. Actively seeking balance- own the pain and the positives, don't block out your emotions.
  • Freedom from the tyranny of your emotions without losing track of them
  • Your emotions will swing more extremely than reality
  1. Breathing deeply
  • A dozen breaths will recenter you
  • Ask yourself how you're feeling, listen to the answer, and respond kindly
  1. Exercising
  • "When middle-aged men begin a program of jogging, th ey become more emotionally stable, calm, self-sufficient, and imaginative."
  • Gives you deep breaths
  • Gives you time without external mental inputs to be alone with your thoughts
  1. Appreciating solitude
  • Jogging can give you solitude
  • "In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."
  1. Journaling
  • 3 "morning pages" daily
  • The format doesn't matter. It dumps your thoughts, gives you some insight into how you're feeling, generates ideas.
  • It helps stave off reactive decision-making
  1. Debriefing with friends
  • Build deep relationships with friends. Be a good listener and a good talker.
  1. Cooking and calming
  • Could be anything sensory- a hobby or task that helps you reconnect with your senses
  1. Knowing your history and your vision
  • You have a lot to learn from knowing who you have been
  • Having a vision is calming, because you don't have to spend moment-to-moment energy deciding where you're going
  1. Always remember the vase
  • Appreciate something's present beauty, and also look at it as already broken so that you can't be hurt by losing it.

Schein On, You Crazy Diamond

You need to adapt leadership styles to stages of an organization. This is also true of managing ourselves.

Stage 1: Creating

Lots of chaos. Requires:

  • Huge amounts of positive energy
  • Very high stamina
  • A willingness to shoulder a huge share of work and stress
  • An ability to make good intuitive decisions (even/especially when receiving conflicting feedback)

Leaders are the personality of the organization at this point. Their strengths/weaknesses will become the organizations.

Signs it's time for stage 2:

  • You're in business after a year
  • You take time to breathe
  • You realize just how incredibly drained you are
  • Everyone's actually getting paid, including you
  • You start to think about what might come next
  • You're increasingly frustrated with everyone around you for not seeing what's so incredibly obvious to you

If you're not clear on what to do next, you may have achieved a vision and need a new one.

Stage 2: Building

Focus shifts from the leader to the team, and the leader's focus shifts to developing people.

  • Staff needs to share the vision, and be OK with not having much spotlight. The people who need that are better suited to starting their own thing, or going to a bigger organization that can carve out a bigger space for them to own.
  • Lots of artisan shops can happily stop at this stage of growth

Signs it's time for stage 3:

  • You're arguing about having too many meetings
  • It's getting harder to make big decisions because the leader is bottlenecking them
  • It's piling up on the boss's back
  • You cycle through flavor-of-the-day management
  • Effort is high, but results fall short
    • Leaders can no longer score enough points on their own, but they also don't have enough highly skilled performers to carry the day
  • You're increasingly annoyed with others' inability to see what's obvious to you

Stage 3: Maturing/Operating In Prime

Systems development and effective & consistent processes.

  • Organization is more important the founder
  • Less need for leadership heroics
  • You need to bring in outside experts, and it takes 6 months+ to find out whether or not they're any good
    • Sometimes they just want to be on the winning team, and will immediately start working to sabotage the idea that they claimed to be interested in originally
    • "Like bringing an abused dog into a happy home"
    • Without a lot of upfront support, they'll come in and turn your culture into the ones they're used to
    • "Before we move forward, if things aren't going well, how would you like to me to tell you about my concerns?"
  • You need to delegate ownership instead of tasks
  • The change needs to be worked into your culture, which may take many years

Signs it's time for stage 4:

  • Sales are up, but profits are down (often from finally paying people appropriately)
  • There's no longer an inspiring, strategically sound vision that shows the business becoming something special
  • 12 natural laws of business fall from the forefront
  • Systems subvert creativity instead of supporting it- People still work, but their passions moves outside the business

Stage 4: Changing

Taking the company in a new direction. It's like stage 1, except you have burned out people who liked the old ways and want stability. The things that made you successful in the past have gotten stale or aren't competitive anymore.

Keys For Success At Any Level

  • Acceptance. The stages exist whether you want them to or not, and your leadership needs to match the needs of the stage.
  • Vision, both for yourself and for the organization.
  • Commitment to learning new skills.

Empower different people at different times, and let emergent leadership rise.

The Power of Personal Visioning

Law #1: An inspiring, strategically sound vision leads the way to greatness (especially if you write it down!)

The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. His simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both. -Lao Tzu

  • Zingerman's vision is 7 pages long
  • Visioning isn't about locking down, it's about letting our desires out
  • Go really wild and aggressive in your first draft
  • If you get stuck, you can start figuring out what you don't want
  • Divine it, don't try to build it intellectually
  • The struggle is to dream, but stay present enough to write down your insights
  • Write narrative prose, not bullet points

Abraham Maslow was asking his students what they would do to become great psychologists. They were uncomfortable with the question.

You must have wanted to be a first-class psychologist, meaning the best, the very best you are capable of. If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your capacities, your own possibilities.

Ingredients for effective visioning

  • Belief in the process
  • Your gut
  • Some time (~half an hour?)
  • Willingness to make yourself vulnerable
  • Readiness to do something great
  • You've gotta wanna
  • The willingness to stick with the process

Process

  1. You're writing about your life
  2. Pick a timeframe- 3-10 years out from now
  3. Put together a list of "prouds" to get yourself in a positive mindset. This can include facts and feelings.
  4. Write a first draft.
  • Go big, from the heart, with passion
  • Get in the future- write these things as if they've already happened
  • Go quickly, don't edit
  • Use a "hot pen"- don't stop for 30 minutes
  • Get personal- use adjectives, names, places, tastes, smells that mean something to you
  • Open with the format, "It's (target date), and my life has become exactly what I want it to be."
  1. Review and redraft. Set it aside for a few days and come back to it.
  2. Get input from people you respect
  3. Start living the vision

Making the Most of Our Lives

Open book finance is based on the belief that most of the people playing the game of business don't know the rules of the game, rarely know the "score", have no understanding of how their "team" is doing, and even if their team wins have little idea what they might have personally done to affect the outcome. They come up with bad stories for why things happen, and measure success incorrectly.

The system makes its morons, and then despises them for their ineptitude.

  1. Successful people engage in compelling activities. They are passionate about what they do, they do unusual things, and that makes other people feel interested in engaging in them too. They have a grounded, calming energy that others want to emulate. You're continually trying to re-earn trust and respect. When you compete against others, no one wants to help you; when you compete against yourself, everyone wants to help you. Your values will ground against conflicting advice.
  2. Without good finances, you fail. Generate enough money for the things you want to do. Define what financial success means to you.
  3. People do their best work when they're part of a really great organization. Our thoughts shape our spaces, and our spaces return the favor. Surround yourself with great people, and you'll find it much easier to be great yourself. Positive energy will help you stay positive
  4. If you want to be successful, start with a service mindset. Giving makes you feel better. The courtesy and respect with which we treat ourselves and those around us is the cap on our ability to lead and succeed. Internal rudeness translates to others through vibrational energy as disrespect and dissonance.
  5. Be clear about expectations and give yourself the tools to help meet them. Learning helps you recreate yourself. Learn how you are, learn how to get where you want to go. Manage your energy effectively.
  6. Successful people do the things that others know they should... but generally don't. Practice more. Develop internal discipline. Picking up stray napkins won't guarantee you success, but every successful person does something like that.
  7. To get to greatness you've got to keep getting better all the time. Continuous improvement. Everyone else is getting better; if you aren't, you're getting worse by contrast.
  8. Success means you get better problems. Problems never go away; successful, rich, whatever people still have problems. They've just put themselves in a position where they have problems they like more. Some of this is a matter of perspective, too. Good problems energize, bad problems enervate.
  9. Whatever your strengths are, they will likely lead straight to your weaknesses. Virtues carried to extremes become vices. High standards lead to impatience. Your dark shadow is what you hate in yourself.
  10. It generally takes a lot longer to make something great happen than people think. For a business, 2 years to equillibrium, 4 years to be good, 6 years to start going for greatness, 8 years to have a shot at getting there. 10,000 hours theory.
  11. Successful people are appreciative, laugh more, and have more fun. Assholes can be successful by strip-mining their spirit and those of others, but it's surface-level and never sustainable. Purpose and laughter go together. Optimists believe their problems are temporary, changeable, and local. Try to get what you want in life, but make sure to also enjoy it.

Five Characteristics of Constructive, Sustainable Systems Design

  • Assist people in becoming and being themselves
  • Ensure that everyone who's supposed to be on the same page is clear on what that page looks like
  • Constructively push each of us to be creative and think for ourselves within an agreed-upon framework of vision and values
  • Allow the people who are doing the work to influence and help design the process of which they're a part
  • Encourage great results for all involved in a sustainasble and supportive way

Three Steps to Great Service

  1. Find out what the customer wants
  • Eye contact and smile at 10 feet, greet at 4
  1. Get it for them accurately, politely, and enthusiastically
  2. Go the extra mile

In your personal life:

  1. Have a vision, smile when you see yourself, live mindfully.
  2. Follow through on your commitments and treat yourself with dignity.
  3. Find small, unexpected ways to enhace the quality of your days. List things that you love doing. Try to reward yourself with them on a regular schedule.

Five Steps to Effectively Handling a Complaint

  1. Acknowledge what the customer is saying
  2. Apologize
  3. Make things right
  4. Thank them for complaining
  5. Write down the experience

In your personal life:

  1. Accept yourself as you are and own your feelings
  2. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt instead of berating yourself
  3. While still living in the moment, do what you need to do to be at peace in an ethically sound way
  4. Accept that the problems the world presents you with come for a reason and provide opportunities to learn
  5. Journal to transcribe what you've learned

Time Management for Lapsed Anarchists

Historical Perspective on Time

  • For most of history, all that mattered was days and the rough position of the sun. People had a general sense of morning and evening, moon cycles, harvesting cycles, etc. There was little use for tracking minutes.
  • Clocks appear in the middle east in the 8th and 9th centuries. China had water clocks in the 11th century, and Arabs developed mercury clocks in the 13th. All clocks were highly inaccurate until the pendulum clock in the 17th century.
  • Minutes showed up in the 16th century
  • "Afternoon" didn't show up until the 19th century
  • School started at sunrise
  • Peasants today will still measure distance with time (2 cigarettes, 3 rice cookings)
  • The concept of selling one's time came out of industrialization. Wristwatches made it easy to measure time, factory managers traded whips and weapons for clocks. As slaves worldwide were freed, they sold their time to make ends meet.
  • This was exacerbated by 19th century morality and the sin of "wasting time." Punctuality became exalted as the highest virtue in schools.
  • Time is neutral, but we charge it with assumptions- 9-5 jobs, day shift vs. night shift, working Sunday is worse than working Monday, which days are holidays. This is another form of control.

Machines reduce unnecessary labor, mechanical time makes it easier to coordinate. Neither should dominate men's lives as they have. We can't change time, but time is very constant and we can change our expectations of it. Don't complain about getting older, be grateful you get to.

Three Kinds of Time

  • Cosmic Time: A circle, sun rising and setting, seasons coming and going.
  • Historical Time: A line, years coming and going. Unique and unrepeatable, visitable only in memory.
  • Existential Time: A point, moments that feel like eternities. It can't be externally measured. Creative acts take place in existential time.

A rich life means creating and maximizing your existential time. Mindfulness helps you stay there longer, by being present.

Devote Meaningful Time to Time

If you just treat your relationship with time as unimportant, it probably won't be good. Take time to reflect on what your actions have attained. Have you been spending your time well? What do you need to erase from your to-do list to give yourself a good shot at what you still need want to do? Is there anything you need to add to the list?

Draft a Positive Vision of the Future

When your relationship to time is as close to ideal as possible, what will it look like?

  1. Write down all the positive supports you have in your life that will help make your relationship with time a rewarding one.
  2. Pick a time frameframe (a year or two in the future). Write with a hot pen in the present tense.

Talk about where you feel tension with time. Acknowledge your limitations with it. Talk about what you want your time to get you. What do you not want to spend time doing? Take ownership of your choices with time- watch your language about what you "have" to do. Demonstrate your respect for time, not your dominance over it.

Try doing this for a day, or a week.

Make the Most of Every Minute

This doesn't mean cram every minute as full as possible- just that you should be happy with how you spend your time. Time is a non-renewable resource. Misappropriating a little here and there won't hurt too much, but you can do better than spend years on things you don't care about.

How much time (proportionally) do you spend each week working in your department, on your department, and on yourself? Most people shortchange themselves. Try to find ways to do all 3 at the same time.

Be Appreciative-- Make Every Day a Holiday

Treat every day as special, and try to bring out the best in it. How can you be a kid on Christmas morning? Appreciate your people every day.

  • End meetings with appreciations
  • 4 parts praise to 1 part criticism
  • Say thanks whenever you can
  • Write thank you notes
  • When in doubt or distress, Stop, Breathe, Appreciate

15 Tips for making better use of your time

  1. Get organized
  • When you write stuff down, you can let it go.
  • See where you stand, where you've been, where you're going
  • Be careful of thinking that things that look organized are efficient
  1. Budget your time
  • Make sure you're spending your time the way you want to
  1. Write effective to-do lists
  • Separate long from short term. Break long-term stuff into tasks that you can do today
  • Keep "follow up" lists to remind you to follow up on stuff you passed to other people
  • Note things that have lingered for a long time
  1. Just do it- the quicker you get to something, the less time it takes
  2. Tackle the tough stuff first
  • Free your mind for more interesting things
  1. Move forward mindfully, not carelessly
  • Keep your pace steady and sustainable
  • Be mindful of your feelings
  1. Make it easy to maximize your time
  • Keep things with you that you can work on in off minutes (books, notebooks)
  1. Make your meetings as effective as possible
  • Agendas in advance
  • Get clear on objectives up front
  • Assign homework in advance
  • Clarify roles
  • Document specific commitments made during the meeting (so you don't waste time trying to remember them later)
    • Follow up on these
  • End with appreciations
  • If the meeting is with a fair number of people, it should have an hour of planning in it
  1. Don't let perfectionism slow you down
  • Drive for long-term perfectionism
  • Perfectionism isn't a quest for the best- it's a pursuit of the worst in yourself, that you're not good enough
  1. Remember that poor quality will cost you
  • 55/05 rule- open 5 minutes early, close 5 minutes late. In service, it's not actual accuracy that matters, it's the customer's perception. Their clocks might not match yours.
  1. Honor your commitments
  • Keep track of your own commitment success rate (similar to "on-time deliveries", etc.)
  1. Hold others--courteously and considerately--to their commitments
  • Don't enable
  1. Learn to say no
  • But don't be an obstructionist
  1. Avoid time-wasters
  • Find productive reasons to get away from them
  1. Finish up by putting things in writing
  • It helps clear up misunderstandings
  1. Plan for the unexpected
  • Have lots of padding in your day for headroom

Live every day as if you have a couple of years left to live.

Hourly pay is awful, but enshrined in law. The law says you need to pay people for anything "work-related", but in a holistic approach everything is work-related. You're also not allowed to pay line-level folks salary.

Thinking About Thinking

  • Writing quickly without filtering engages your creativity. Writing isn't transcribing your existing thoughts, it is a way to think. You stumble across previously unrecognized connections and patterns.
  • Capitalism and anarchism don't seem related, but they're both fundamentally about the same kind of freedom. You only stumble across this connection with a sincere interest in both. Reengaging with old favorites with a new context allows you to see different things.
  • If you want to create an anarcho-capitalist organization, you need to manage your brain in an anarcho-capitalist way as well. How positive or critical you are permeates all your interactions and becomes the character of yourself and your organization. Your thoughts, actions, and desires need to be congruent. Being "half here, half there" will kill you after a while.
  • Write out what you want your organizational culture to be, and see how those qualities do or don't relate to the way you think or operate in other ways.
  • It's not enough to set a goal, you need to craft a vision and bond with it, create an identity with it.
  • Transformation takes a lot of time and practice
  • You can also create a negative identity
  • How can you build more opportunities to be positive in your life?
  • The "Losada ratio": Businesses with a > 2.9:1 ratio for positive:negative statements do well, those with lower ratios do poorly. 5:1 is needed for a loving relationship. (disputed)
  • Welcome new ideas openly- you might be leaving intellectual money on the table
  • You can indulge in a weird intellectual fantasy without being committed to action
  • "If you've been out of contact with your imagination, you will have to be patient and clever to lure it back." It's a frightened child that's been told no too many times.
  • It's easy to impose a hierarchy on things that don't require them. The 4 levels of the conscious/competent grid aren't better or worse- consciously competent puts you in a better place to actively learn new things, unconsciously competent frees you up to do other things. But it's easy to think of them as a hierarchy. They all have a positive place in the process.
  • Individual thinking in a group setting is not the same as groupthink- you're creating a fertile ground for your ideas to flourish. Build a constructive community to grow with.
  • If you get a good idea from someone else (or them from you), that doesn't diminish you. It's not zero-sum.
  • "The most effective people are those who can 'hold' their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly."
  • Diversity exposes you to more ideas- aim for shared values
  • If you never act on your intuition, you have no data with which to evaluate which intuitions are good or not
  • Before someone's work or words can inspire you, you have to be ready to be inspired

"Anarchism's goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual, which is only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist-- the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force." --Emma Goldman

^^ Swap out "Anarchism" for "Capitalism", and it still works.

Creating Creativity

  • Creativity can come from finding the common theme between two seemingly unrelated things
  • It's not about having a formula, or setting aside time to be creative, or teaching classes about it, or having a specialist.
  • Doing a "good job" means following orders correctly. Doing "good work" is enjoying what you do and feeling fulfilled and rewarded by it. You can't help but do good work in this environment.
  • Everyone starts creative and then gets the creativity trained out of them.
  • "Anarchism is the spirit of youth against outworn tradition."

Traditional business the opposite of creative

  • The stages of competency operate in reverse with creativity- you start unconsciously competent and grow into being unconsciously uncompetent.
  • Old-school organizations tend to isolate creativity to departments, and expect everyone else to implement the ideas the elites come up with. These kinds of organizations filter out a lot of experience and insights from the front-lines, so they work with pretty limited real-world data.
  • The role of a creative leader isn't to have all the ideas, it's to create an environment where everyone can have ideas and feel like they're valued
  • If ideas are your business, you can't afford to condemn the people in your organization to be machines programmed by someone else
  • You can't play it safe for a decade and then suddenly demand creativity out of everyone
  • The creative muscle atrophies if not used

How to be creative

  1. Get around creative people, be a part of a creative ecosystem
  2. Live the natural laws of business and life- living in sync makes you h happier, and happier people are more creative
  3. Share lots of information within your organization
  • Most organizations safeguard information- walls, patents, DRM, silos
  • Sharing encourages insight
  • Encourage everyone to pick up a "+1"- an extra area of responsibility in the organization
  1. Bring in lots of information from the outside
  • Industry benchmarking
  • Traveling
  • Reading
  1. Systemically and culturally support connection
  • You need the capacity to make new connections with as many elements as possible, and promote a randomizing element to encourage collisions with as many elements in the system as possible
  • A meeting with the general manager and the new kid is more likely to yield creative output than a meeting of the same 6 managers who talk to each other every week
  • Everything new is usually just an added layer on top of the last innovation
  1. Think differently
  • You can't just do what someone else is doing
  • Be first or last in a market, but don't get stranded in the middle
  1. Cultivate the "Crazy"-- Think like an anarchist
  • The extreme thing is generally the true thing
  • Whether something is practical has to do with whether it can sustain itself, not whether it can sustain the old guard
  1. Make solitude part of your routine
  • Groups help you work out thoughts, get new insights, and revise
  • Solitude helps you generate ideas
  • Alternate between the two
  1. Act really confident (or constructively crazy)
  • You probably won't get the support you need right away, especially if you're on-track
  • Cultivate self-esteem and confidence to get you through this part
  • Impassioned energy dies out of us young because we replace it with dry obligation
  1. Take notes
  • "Commonplacing" is the practice of writing down all your ideas in the moment so that you can later examine them fresh and possibly connect them to something else
  1. Sound systems and structure yield creativity
  • Anarchists are opposed to externally imposed structures
  • Build structures that encourage people to bring their creative selves to the fore- and empower those people to change those structures as needed
  • Systems (like "5 steps to handling a complaint") never give you an answer, and they require you to think. They just tap into tried-and-true wisdom and get you in the ballpark.
  • Come up with these structures for yourself in your life
  1. Consider problem swaps
  • It's often easier to tell what someone else should be doing than to solve your own problems, so trade places with them
  1. Get in, and out, of context- put yourself in different roles and circumstances
  2. Quit worrying! - You create stress and pressure to make dumb decisions prematurely to end the stress
  3. Pairing the productive use of stress with high performance
  • Pinching the garden hose
  • Stay in the zone of proximal development
  1. Open your mind to connection- Innovation is really recombination
  2. Don't focus (too much)
  • Deep focus reduces the odds of making creative connections
  • Take long showers, walks, running, rowing, etc. to let your mind wander
  1. Get emotional- People get creative when they're feeling emotionally charged (positive or negative)
  2. Be patient: Intuitive insights and ideas take time to play out
  3. Do it: From insight to implementation
  • Unimplemented ideas have little value, don't just be a day-dreamer
  • Where in the process of bringing a new idea to life do you get the most and least energy from? Be mindful of that, and partner with people who can help boost you in low periods
  1. Go wild-- Fill in your own way to get creative!

Transforming the Ecosystem of Business?

  • Because of the theory of relevantivity, when you change yourself, you change your ecosystem too
  • There are good ideas, and ideas that make it easier to have more good ideas
  • Creativity isn't profit-driven, it comes straight from your soul
  • Collaborative innovations created for communities have been more impactful than any other type
  • People with learned helplessness just take pain and make no attempt to escape

List of things to do to increase creativity

  • Brainstorm
  • Read something new
  • Read something old
  • Run, walk, row
  • Listen to new music, go to a poetry reading, admire amazing art
  • Travel, either in person or online
  • Open up your meetings
  • Move
  • Reflect

Why startups are so conducive to creativity

  • It's only as we gain success and grow and then start to separate staff into areas of specialty where people become bonded to the status quo that creativity so often starts to erode.

Creative acts and innovation-- Forward, sideways, and back

  • Creativity that moves forward (eg. technology)
  • Creativity that shifts sideway (eg. insights from other cultures and industries)
  • Creativity in reverse (eg. rediscovering old methods)
  • Figure out something that might work for your organization, and adapt it to your circumstances

Teaching staff to break the rules

Zingerman's has 4 exceptions:

  • Don't come to work in a chemically altered state
  • Never be rude to a coworker or guest
  • Don't steal
  • Don't be rude to the food

Outside of that, staff is encouraged to break the rules.

The theory of relevantivity

  • Everything is connected to everything else

Brainstorming, Zingerman's style

Brainstorming isn't supposed to generate solutions. It's supposed to:

  • Get people engaged
  • Get people's brains moving

Rules:

  • Initiator picks a topic
  • Pick a time-frame (3-15 minutes)
  • Quantity counts more than quality
  • Get someone to transcribe the storm
  • No judging
  • Work silently for a couple of minutes before working out loud
  • Piggybacking and repetition are encouraged
  • Spelling doesn't count
  • The time-keeper announces when time is up
  • The finished list is given to the initiator to do whatever they want with it

Two reasons why we had no recipe for creativity, and one reason why I don't want one

  • You can't force it, you can only increase the odds of it happening
  • The more often you make something, the less you need a recipe
    • How often something shows up in a cookbook is inversely related to how common it was in kitchens of the era
    • In highly-regulated controlled environments wild mushrooms are likely to be plowed under before they ruin the cash crop
  • Plus, even if you had a recipe, it won't really work- the more you focus on a problem and whether or not you're creative, the lower your creativity is going to be