Here is a terrific article from a guy named Phil Johnson about surrounding yourself with a team of people smarter than yourself. This is hard for the typical leader to do, but it probably is the biggest factor in taking you beyond where you are.
Here’s one of the things Phil says in the article:
“Look for people who have accomplished a goal, or solved a problem, that you personally aspired to achieve and couldn’t. Make them tell you how they did it. Put your own convictions and beliefs on the table. Ask them to convince you of something new or, better yet, to change your perspective. Find out their sources. What do they read? Who do they admire? Where do they look for inspiration? I like to see people making connections that would never cross my mind.”
Here is a great add on from my post yesterday. It is a video of Daniel Pink explaining the concept of his book in a super creative format. Profound content + creative presentation = potential for change.
I recently finished Daniel Pink’s book called Drive along with a handful of the leadership team at Central. I absolutely loved the counter-intuitive nature of the content and how much it reminded me of a good Malcolm Gladwell book. If you lead anybody, employees or kids or anyone else to who you have influence, this book is a must read. Here are some of the quotes that stood out to me:
“Harlow offered a novel theory–what amounted to a third drive: ‘The performance of the task,’ he said, ‘provided intrinsic reward.'”
“Companies that typically rely on external rewards to manage their employees run some of their most important systems with products created by nonemployees who don’t seem to need such rewards.”
“Partly because work has become more creative and less routine, it has also become more enjoyable. That, too, scrambles Motivation 2.0’s assumptions. This operating system rests on the belief that work is not inherently enjoyable–which is precisely why we must coax people with external rewards and threaten them with outside punishment.”
“Human beings have a innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”
“In a ROWE [Results Only Work Environment] workplace, people don’t have schedules. They show up when they want. They don’t have to be in the office at a certain time–or any time, for that matter. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, and where they do it is up to them.”
“We forget sometimes that ‘management’ does not emanate from nature. It’s not like a tree or a river. It’s like a television or a bicycle. It’s something that humans invented.”
“The opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the behavioral compass, they point us toward different destinations. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.”
Here are some of my favorite quotes from chapter 3 of Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy:
“Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.”
“The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.”
“We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right.”
“As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.”
