We had an auspicious beginning for the new book “Getting Things Done”.  As we went over the problem, promise and principles behind GTD, we talked about several personal examples including a reminder for hair-cut

We spent quite a bit of time on the concept of “Mind like water” (although most of us did not understand it 100%)

Here’s the learning from this session’s discussions: http://www.bizbookclub.net/?page_id=41

See next time in person…

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 did nothing but decide on the prop (i.e. management book) for the next several sessions.  I pulled out my running list of books to read and we cross-referenced that with the top 100 business & investment books on amazon.com.

And so the book we narrowed down to was…

…

…

Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point!

I will try and get copies of this book for all the regular attendees.  If you are not a regular attendee but want the free book, the easy solution is to become a regular attendee

I plan to create a mind-map for the first chapter from the book before the next scheduled session on May 6th.  See you then.

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!

Recently we had a fantastic opportunity to improve our health and hone our team skills at the same time.  Our employer, Fiserv sponsored a fitness competition called "FiservFit".  As part of the competition, employees formed teams of 4 (nearly 1000 teams globally) and competed against other teams to log the most number of steps (Fiserv also provided the pedometers to all participants)

At the start of the competition, we had no idea what a wonderful experience the 8-week period would turn out to be.  We formed team "FastPace" with 4 moderately motivated and utterly non-athletic colleagues!  As the weeks progressed though, we learned tons of lessons in team building and leadership. 

In hindsight, here is a list of things that helped us finish this journey successfully together:

• Do everything together: Of the 3.1 million steps we logged as a team, we walked more than 60% of those steps together, while adjusting to each other’s schedules and motivating each other in the process.  If we hadn’t done that, we would have not even reached the 50th percentile, let alone 95th percentile.
• Sacrifice a little on the personal-level to reap rich rewards as a team: One of our team members had tight family obligations on weekends and after-work-hours.  So, the rest of us adjusted our schedules to walk together early on Saturday mornings.  (I never woke up before 7am in my life, but for 8 straight Saturdays, I woke up by 5:30am so I could join the other teammates by 6:30!)
• Do not judge/undermine other team members:  We quickly realized not all of us had the same threshold or capacity to walk longer/faster.  However, we silently made a pact not to judge those individuals or undermine their contributions.  We slowed down for them or just went out for longer walks when those team members did not join in.
• Challenge smartly and realistically:
• We challenged each to beat the step counts at the individual level…. "if anyone on the team can beat my step count this week, that person will get a surprise gift!".  Although no one took this too seriously, we nevertheless had a healthy competition that week as everyone stretched themselves just for the bragging rights.
• At the team-level, every time we went out together on weekends, I challenged the team to complete 50K steps (together) and that I would buy them breakfast as a reward.  Again, we never reached that goal but we came pretty darn close several times.
• Reward team successes: The first time we moved up 26 positions into the top-70 group, I got every one on the team a sport water bottle.  That was a very tiny gesture but I am sure we will remember that in relation to our accomplishment for a long time to come…
• Focus on giving your best rather than to win: Right from the beginning we knew we had no chance of reaching into the top 20, but we nevertheless kept trying; our best performance was the 44th spot and ultimately ended up at position number 59.
• Outperform yourself, not others: We never compared our performance to others.  Our individual and team goal was to beat the previous week’s step count by 10% or more.

Oh, by the way, all of us lost tons of weight as a direct result of this exercise and feel a whole lot fitter.  We promised each other (during our victory lunch celebration) that we would keep up with the healthful walking, albeit at a scaled down level