What you say, how you say it, and the medium you choose to communicate your message matter as much today as they did last century
Today’s post is by Luke Sheppard, Founder and Principle of Sheppard & Company, and author of Driving Great Results (CLICK HERE to get your copy).
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He made this comment at a time when text messaging, FaceTime, and Zoom calls were but fragments of imagination in the pages of a Robert Heinlein novel.
There were far fewer communication mediums in the 1960s than today, though McLuhan’s phrase still has merit.
What you say, how you say it, and the medium you choose to communicate your message matter as much today as they did in the middle of the last century. In this post are the three factors you need to consider when selecting a medium for your message if you want to have the desired impact. Read more
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Why core values are a necessary ingredient for success in your business or career, and the steps you can take right now discover your personal core values.
One of the greatest frustrations in life is the realization that we have spent, or are currently spending, significant time and energy doing something that doesn’t fulfill us. How we respond to this feeling can become the turning point for our entire career.
Maybe you have worked in a job that made you feel bored, or even demoralized. Maybe you’ve been in a professional environment dictated by principles and standards that just felt wrong to you, even if you couldn’t articulate why. You may have even found yourself in a leadership role where you were unable to be yourself and struggled to hold your team accountable as a result.
I’ve experienced all of this in my own career. In 2005, I was working at a startup where the company’s leadership left people demotivated. I realized I could never be happy in that type of environment and made the choice to Read more
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Communication makes vision visible and attractive to others. It can inspire the visionary’s passion in others or drive people away. A poorly communicated vision is dead if not successfully shared with others.
Communication is the essential property of vision and visionary leadership whose primary role is to make vision a collective property, giving it away so others can participate in it. A vision’s strength is determined by how well it is communicated to others.
In practical terms, attracting investors is critical. Attracting as many supporters as possible is even more critical and far more difficult. Only by communicating as broadly and actively as possible does vision gain its full viability and functionality.
Three core elements define effective communication of a vision— Read more
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Zebras are horse-like creatures with beautifully striped coats that fascinate children and adults alike. Zebras have a distinct advantage over humans in one particularly important area of life: how they manage stress. To understand this phenomenon, we need to begin with the concept of interference. In my book, Unleash the Peak Performer Within You, I share the Performance Formula.Simply stated, it reads:
Performance = Skill – Interference
What is Interference?
Interference is a term representing anything that prevents your skills from taking over to produce a high level of productivity and performance. A short list of potential interference includes anxiety, ADD, emotional control problems, and poor sleep. There are many more sources of interference, and they all get in the way of good performance. Eliminating or reducing your interference represents a direct path to improved performance.
As you begin the journey of learning how to reduce interference and change your health trajectory, understanding and strengthening your autonomic nervous system is vital.
The Autonomic Nervous System
What is the autonomic nervous system (ANS)? The ANS is a branch of your nervous system that regulates involuntary functions and is constantly assessing the environment around you and sending information to the brain. This ongoing process keeps you healthy and safe and goes unnoticed as you go about your day. Its goal is to balance your body to its environment.
Functions such as heart rate, salivary secretions, eye dilation, digestion, and adrenaline release are governed by your ANS.
Your ANS has two branches, each at one extreme of functioning. These branches are called parasympathetic (rest and digest) and sympathetic (fright, fight, or flight).
An example from animals is in order…
Stress Responses: Humans vs. Animals
When a zebra is being chased by a lion, its blood flow concentrates to core life-sustaining organs. Digestion slows and heart rate increases. When you face a stressful situation, your body will do the same thing.
Once a zebra has eluded the lion, it returns to a “rest and digest” state or parasympathetic response. This is when the body returns to balance with its environment.
Animals are always one-to-one with their environment. This is where the difference between humans and animals becomes evident. Animals live on instinct. We are different; we are capable of conscious thought.
When you experience stress, your sympathetic branch of the ANS is activated. It’s what’s commonly referred to as a “fight-or-flight” response. It’s okay when a mortal danger presents itself. It’s not okay when you chronically respond to everyday life this way.
In fact, when you unproductively manage stress in this way, it leads to common and preventable disease such as type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure to name a few.
Because we are self-aware and have the power of creating theater of the mind, humans can and do ruminate about past events and worry about future concerns. We can literally invent stress in our minds by looking back or ahead.
The fascinating thing about this is that your body doesn’t differentiate between real events playing out in front of you, such as a stranger threatening you, and an event playing out in your mind. Either way, you end up with a stress response. When the conversations you are having with yourself are chronically stressful, you are putting yourself into chronic stress.
The research is settled: chronic stress and chronic debilitating disease are highly correlated. Learning to manage stress properly is one thing you can do to significantly improve your health today and tomorrow.
So now you know why zebras don’t get ulcers, but people do! Our habit of unwittingly placing ourselves in a state where our bodies think a lion is chasing us drives a cascade of reactions in our brains and bodies that make us physically and mentally sick. Our ability to perform at a high level is then severely compromised.
Chronic stress, and all its negative consequences, represents serious interference. Learning to manage stress well will reduce your interference and improve your performance.
How to Reduce Interference
Strategies to improve your autonomic nervous system balance include heart rate variability training, deep diaphragm breathing, optimizing sleep, daily movement, and practicing gratitude. Additionally, learning how to properly process thoughts and not hang onto them, leading to endless ruminations, is key.
The next best step is to assess imbalances in your autonomic nervous system, then seek training from a qualified organization and provider to help you regain control. The goal is to become your own best coach and learn to self-regulate your responses to life’s events. In doing so, your nervous system will then work for you rather than against you. When it does, you will live healthier and become a peak performer based on your definition of success and performance!
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It seems like a ridiculous question to ask, somewhat like wondering whether cars really need drivers. Just imagine all the things a driver does every second in order to reach a specific destination: taking in vast amounts of inputs about current conditions of the vehicle’s motion, receiving thousands of changing data points from all the visual clues about lanes, traffic, signs, pedestrians, and all the other moving vehicles in the vicinity, then comparing all this information to a previously set route, and making all the complex choices necessary to arrive safely.
You could almost think about that driver as being on the receiving end of a firehose of data, sorting out the most important patterns and then turning all of that into a best course of action — the very definition of intelligence. And that’s why we’ve come so close to going from data that one human can process, to Big Data, which requires dozens of sensors to process.
With increasingly vast bodies of knowledge about experiences, one can see how business intelligence, with enough computing power, became artificial intelligence. And so, before too long, the taxi you’re about to hail in Phoenix shows up; Poof! No driver necessary.
Which brings us back to those folks in the corporate driver’s seat — the CEO. Doesn’t much of a CEO’s job consist of being on the receiving end of ever-increasing floods of data that can now be gleaned in real time from inputs around the globe? The tick of every sale quickly contributes to a pattern revealing how the marketplace is receiving our products at every given moment. Supply chains are linked to these inputs, as is every other variable the CEO needs to be concerned about, from available corporate resources to stock price.
And as AI begins to make choices based on mining Big Data, the role of the CEO as patchcord between data input and decision output seems destined to become smaller and smaller until, at some point, an organization is going to run autonomously. As futurist Ray Kurzweil observed in 2005, in the near future, machine intelligence is going to exceed human intelligence. He named that moment “the Singularity.” Will there be a moment when the Singularity arrives in the C-suite? It seems inevitable.
AI or Human Agency?
Or maybe not. Maybe great organizations are not really machines, like some automobiles or even spacecraft, that can complete their journeys without human intervention. To find out, it may be worthwhile to make some sharp distinctions between what Big Data driving AI can do and what it cannot. BDAI (for short) is excellent at making sense out of the current state. It’s also pretty good at making predictions about trajectories, given no black swan or other unforeseen circumstances. So BDAI is pretty useful for management to be able to see where we are and where we might be headed.
But what about agency, intentionality, or what today we generally call strategy? If we have enough past information of competitive successes and failures, BDAI is capable of helping leaders develop options. In some instances, in a large consumer products organization, for example, it is not difficult to imagine letting BDAI decide the optimal number of versions of a toothpaste brand, which will maximize performance in the marketplace, and even continue to optimize those decisions over time.
Yet what happens when there is a genuine disruption in a marketplace, when new inventions shuffle the whole deck? If BDAI had been in place at Olympus Camera on the day that Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, would the company’s management information system have warned leadership that the pocket camera industry, at that moment, was entering an irreversible swoon?
The CEO’s Role – Wisdom and Innovation
Finally, we come to the two basic responsibilities that a CEO can perform that, as yet, BD and AI together cannot. The first is to make wise decisions over time that express a coherent vision. The second is to lead innovation. Famously, Steve Jobs had no interest in market research when imagining where Apple needed to go next. He thought in broad terms about what human beings might do with powerful new tools and went about creating them. Sometimes it took a while for people to get what Jobs was giving them, but eventually, he re-ordered the world.
Same for Elon Musk. Musk’s long arc in guiding Tesla from highly-ignored sports car, which financed the luxury Model S, which, in turn, made possible the Model 3, is now crushing an entire global industry. And underneath it all, still not widely-perceived, is that Musk is also transforming the global electrical grid with a complete infrastructure of vast battery capacity.
Jobs, Musk, and other disruptive founders built their organizations to maximize the value-creating potential of their visions. Those organizations are no less than the living, breathing manifestations of their founders’ identities and are as unique as the founders themselves.
After the Founder
Once the founders have departed, subsequent leaders, in order to maximize the quality of their decision-making, will always need to be aware of the identity that still pulses at the heart of their organizations. Without this essential understanding, the dangers are ever-present that the easy persuasiveness of Big Data, married to the seemingly incontrovertible direction supplied by artificial intelligence will, eventually, lead even the most successful organization astray.
So are CEOs really necessary anymore? Yes, if they realize that their main job is to ensure that the identity of their institutions provides the center of gravity around which Big Data and AI are reliably deployed. Otherwise, companies are in peril of becoming driverless, autonomous vehicles, subject to an uncertain future fraught with potentially lethal hazards.
Gerald Sindell is a partner of The Identity Dynamics Institute. He was the CEO of two New York publishing companies, Tudor and Knightsbridge. He has been instrumental in developing enterprise operating systems for EOS Worldwide, Accenture, and The Balanced Scorecard Institute.
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One common struggle entrepreneurs face is that they spend too much of their day putting out fires. That leaves them less time to do the most important work in their business. It also stretches them thin from a personal perspective, so they end up overworked, stressed out, and unfulfilled.
Are you spending all day putting out fires?
Do you struggle to get ahead with your workload because there’s so much on your to-do list?
Have you spent years telling yourself that you need to better train team members but haven’t had a break long enough to do so because you are putting out so many fires?
If you answer yes to any of these questions, congratulations. You’re your company’s best firefighter. This role is important because it can keep a company going for a long time. Fires come up in every business. These businesses need firefighters on the inside to prevent those fires from spreading.
So many business owners I coach complain to me that they spend all their days “putting out fires.” I get it. That’s how I felt for my entire first decade at Diversified Industrial Staffing, too. I spent every day putting out fire after fire, keeping the business open for nearly a decade before the flames got too big for me to control any longer. Every day, it was fire after fire. I’d swoop in and save the day and then move onto the next fire. That was my Groundhog Day. I’d head to the office, put out fires all day, and head home. The next day, I’d head to the office, put out more fires, and head home. I’d do that day after day until everything collapsed.
The first step to getting out of that stressful routine is to shift your mindset. Sure, you will likely remain your company’s best firefighter. That’s not an issue. Fires will pop up in entrepreneurship. But if you’re going to be your company’s best firefighter, you can’t just put out fires and then move on. Firefighters do much more than that. You need to complete the work of a firefighter.
Firefighters don’t just put out the flames of a burning structure and then head back to the station. They also take time to research the cause of the fire and, if there are signs of arson, work with law enforcement to prosecute the arsonists.
If we know we are our companies’ best firefighters, we must shift our mindset and complete the work to identify the cause of the fire. When Greg worked with me to continue the job at Diversified Industrial Staffing, I learned that my fires were all caused by arson. We had someone inside the company who kept starting fires. Thus, the solution was to either get rid of the arsonist or prevent them from being able to start fires in the future.
Unfortunately, I learned that the arsonist at Diversified Industrial Staffing was me. If not for me, I wouldn’t have had so many fires to put out. When I realized that, everything changed. Instead of seeing myself as the hero who swept in and put out fires to keep the company going, I visualized myself starting a bunch of fires and then running around putting them out until the fires grew too big for me to handle. I loved the jolt of adrenaline solving the problems. I felt like I had accomplished something that day. It was a fool’s dream.
It’s not just me, either. When I work with leaders who are overwhelmed by putting out fires all day, I ask them to shift their mindset from putting out fires to completing the job. Virtually every time, my clients realize they were their company’s chief arsonists too. Some of them identified other arsonists as well, but every single one of them realized they could quickly improve their company if they just stopped starting fires themselves.
You don’t have to find yourself crumpled on the pavement (or worse) to recognize that something has to change in your business, either. Sure, a setback could be as large as bankruptcy, or it could be as small as a mishandled meeting. What they have in common is a gut-wrenching, hair-raising feeling of regret, fear, and self-doubt that stops us in our tracks and stunts our growth. But many times, we feel overwhelmed by putting out fires all day because we don’t do the work it takes to prevent fires in the first place.
As leaders, we can be the best firefighters—while also being the chief arsonists. Think about it: the scary but joyous feeling we, as entrepreneurs, get from putting out a fire can be very visceral, like a spike of dopamine. Often, we lack self-awareness around the “rush” it gives us. So we will be subversive and act as an arsonist, which is self-sabotaging long term, in exchange for the rush of putting out the fire and being seen as the savior, the only one who can put out the fire. But we can make the complex simple by merely doing something different.
As straightforward as it might sound to identify the source of fires before moving on, you won’t be able to do it if you don’t shift your mindset. It takes awareness, discipline, and continuous practice to do so. Otherwise, the stress and relief of fighting and extinguishing fires will send us right back into our own versions of Groundhog Day.
Todd Palmer is a highly sought-after speaker, executive coach, and longtime CEO of Diversified Industrial Staffing. With the mindset shifts and business techniques shared in his new book From Suck to Success: A Guide to Extraordinary Entrepreneurship, he transformed his company into one of the fastest growing companies in America, landing it onto the INC 5000 list an impressive six times.
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