Here’s the link: Chapter 1: A New Practice for a New Reality

We missed a few sessions because of various commitments but are hoping to gain momentum during the summer months.

I mentioned in my last post that we were all excited about The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference – which was going to be our next book.  However, after reading the book (twice!) I decided that it was not a great platform for our “action-focused” book club.  Malcolm Gladwell sprinkled the book with extremely elitist insights but it is just not the right outlet for the participants of the club.

We met couple of weeks ago informally and decided to pick “Getting Things Done (The Art of Stress-Free Productivity)” book instead as our learning template.  Many thanks to Rajeev for leading us in the right direction.  Most of the participants already have a copy of the book (brand new copies this time! – I found the best deal on Barnes&Noble and couldn’t resist the smell of a new book).

I am personally very excited about this topic since I like to think of myself as an amateur cult follower of David Allen and his highly actionable ideas.

I will post the Mindmap in a separate post soon…

We discussed the last few pages of the chapter on Self-Discipline during this session.  We covered the topics surrounding “Accepting Accountability”, “Pay Now; play later” and “becoming character-driven instead of emotion-driven”.

As we were summing up the chapter several interesting ideas came to fruition.  One of them was “forced self-discipline”.  Some of the participants shared how their force the self-discipline needed through alarms, reminders and spending money.  The classic example is paying for a gym membership automatically in order to force yourself to go to the gym regularly.  Another example is forcing to work-out by reminding yourself that you could become decrepit by the time your son is ready to play ball

I also shared my way of following through with commitment.  I call it “Self-discipline through association”.  I associate unpleasant tasks (e.g. walking, workout etc.) with something I like (e.g. music, podcasts etc.) so that I don’t get discouraged on an ongoing basis.  You could use your imagination to the extent in this area.  Some examples floated were:

• walking/jogging (or going to the gym) together with other like-minded people so you can talk about things you love.

This session marked the end of the chapter and the end of the book as well (we decided to skip the next chapter on Staff Development because of its very specific focus on managers)

We planned to use the upcoming session to decide on what book to work on next…

While reading the book "Strengths based Leadership" which builds on the StrengthsFinder assessment, I came across this very intriguing and applicable section titled "What strong teams have in common".  The topic is very close to my heart, so I had to blog about it and obviously create a mindmap!

Mind Map: What strong teams have in common?

Here’s the link: Chapter 9 : Self-Discipline

After our unsuccessful attempt to talk about, understand, and create vision, we decided to move on to the next chapter "Self-Discipline" at this condensed meeting.

We were mostly fixed on one very insightful statement by Mr. Maxwell - "I define discipline as the choice of achieving what you really want by doing things you don’t really want to do."  Most of us agreed with this statement and some of us even confessed that we did things we only liked without considering what we wanted to achieve.  I also raised the issue of some acquaintances who continue to focus on the short-term yet keep achieving spectacular results (at least according to popular notion).  We all agreed that focusing on the long-term will definitely yield better long-term results.  Only time will tell if that is true

I did not have the mind map ready for this session so we wandered a bit but promised to create one before the next session on September 17th.  So, please look out for a brand new mind map on Self-Discipline over the next few days.

Believe it or not we finally concluded chapter 6 - People!  We continued our discussion on John’s various principles of people development.  The two major topics we discussed were "Care for people before you can develop them" and "Look for opportunities to build up people".  Many of John’s ideas were again common sense but very often overlooked. 

We went into great detail (again) about when is it appropriate to "add value" to your subordinate’s ideas.  According to Marshall Goldsmith, adding value almost always never makes sense.  The perceived increase value is always more than offset by the subordinate’s sense of losing the ownership.  We strongly felt this was an important discovery and decided to add it as a learning

Next time we will discussing the next chapter on Vision.  Stand by for a brand new mind map!

We discussed two topics under "Principles of People development" this week:

• It takes time
• People skills are essential for success

We focused mostly on some of the characteristics of great leaders including: they admit mistakes, they are able to get along with a wide variety of people, and they possess sensitivity & tact.

We dwelled in great detail on one specific area - "being able to get along with a wide variety of people".  We agreed that this skill is a necessary evil, especially in the workplace if one wants to grow in a leadership role.  We talked about some mutual friends who adamantly resist socializing with new people (or even with people from their existing social networks) because many people they come across do not share the same values or interests as their own.  This is a genuine and understandable concern.  We wavered for a long time whether the same justification holds good in a workplace as well?  We never came to a definitive conclusion but agreed that everyone, especially "leaders" have to make some compromises/sacrifices for the greater good and getting along with a variety of people is one of them (even though not everyone might share the same values, principles, interests etc.)

For more details about this chapter, please review the mindmap at: Chapter 7: People

As usual we had an exciting discussion around people and how the relationships factor into leadership.  We concentrated on the topic "Giving the right assistance to people"

We analyzed how our department rated on various areas of "people empowerment " including working on your peoples’ strengths/weaknesses, give them your entire self, giving them undivided attention, giving them complete ownership and giving them a great chance at success.

We delved deeper into the issue of giving unconditional ownership to the people around you.  We agreed that it is very hard for analytical and technical people to give up control/ownership and acknowledge the success of others.  I referred to a recent BusinessWeek podcast I was listening to titled "When should you keep your ideas to yourself?" where the legendary Marshall Goldsmith discusses how it is not always the best idea to "improve on" or "add value to" some body else’s idea.  Although that may add 5-10% quality/efficiency to the outcome, in all probability the other person might lose 50% or more commitment to execution of that idea.  This is very relevant to Mr. Maxwell’s theory of giving ownership to others.  100% means 100%  You do not want to claim any part of the idea, execution or the outcome of your team member’s plan.  You should not have to share the spotlight with him/her.

While discussing the need for having a vision and relating that to our own department’s vision/goals, we also brainstormed on a long-standing goals of ours.  I am very excited that we have a concrete plan of action to accomplish that goal in a methodical manner and we committed to the action plan as a team.  To learn more about that goal and other critical ideas we generate at these book club meetings, please join us next time.  We meet the 1st and 3rd Wednesday of every month!  Also, be sure to check out our new website section called "Learning" where we are trying to catalog all the actionable lessons we learn during the course of our conversations.

We had an extended discussion on “asking the right questions” during our first-ever afternoon meeting of Bizbookclub. We focused most of our discussion on confronting people when a leader needs to.

Mr. Maxwell recommends that a leader should try to substitute “confront” with “clarify” if it is threatening to others. However, we agreed that some people and situations actually yield better results if confrontation is used tactically.

We then moved to an interesting sub-section on confrontation called “10 commandments of confrontation”. We had some very exciting segues into vital behaviors, core characteristics and other psychological aspects of humans. We generated a very exciting idea about vital behaviors during this side-conversation and I will dwell on that in future posts. As it is becoming a trend with our meetings, we could hardly get past 1 section of 1 chapter, albeit for a good reason. We concluded the meeting at the 8th of the 10 commandments.

For more details about this chapter, please review the mindmap at: Chapter 7: People