From Seth Godin's Blog.
One way to approach your work: "I come in on time, even a little early. I do what the boss asks, a bit faster than she expects. I stay on time and on budget, and I'm hardworking and loyal."
The other way: "What aren't they asking me to do that I can do, learn from, make an impact, and possibly fail (yet survive)? What's not on my agenda that I can fight to put there? Who can I frighten, what can I learn, how can I go faster, what sort of legacy am I creating?"
You might very well be doing a good job. But that doesn't mean you're a linchpin, the one we'll miss. For that, you have to stop thinking about the job and start thinking about your platform, your point of view and your mission.
It's entirely possible you work somewhere that gives you no option but to merely do a job. If that's actually true, I wonder why someone with your potential would stay...
In the post-industrial revolution, the very nature of a job is outmoded. Doing a good job is no guarantee of security, advancement or delight.
I'm always excited about paradigm shifts, especially those that apply to education. The education system has for some time fallen into the "It's always been done that way" category. I recently read an article about an new Canadian University called Quest University that is flipping the script. Quest offers an alternative to big school, big class and bulimic learning. Quest is competing with other canadian universities, not by trying to be like their competitors but by creating and presenting a new version of the Post Secondary educational experience. No surprise that the school wants to attract “iconoclasts, convention-challengers, pioneers, risktakers, edge seekers, creators . . . ”. Block courses, small classroom sizes, etc is the recipe Quest is using. This recipe has secured them one of the highest student satisfaction ratings in the country in MacLeans recent "On Campus Student Survey" edition.
On Campus Student Survey results:
Question: (First Year Students) Are you happy with your University Education? MacLeans Rank #1
Question: (First Year Students) Would you go back to school at your university? MacLeans Rank #2
Read below to learn the Quest University recipe for success and how they are changing the way University education is being delivered. Thank you to MacCleans Magazine for the article below.
Quest, a private, not-for-profit undergraduate liberal arts and sciences university, is not for the faint of heart. Its promotional literature welcomes “iconoclasts, convention-challengers, pioneers, risktakers, edge seekers, creators . . . ” The same criteria apply to its faculty, and certainly its outgoing president, David J. Helfand, who divides his time between two coasts. He’s a teacher and administrator at Quest, and he chairs the astronomy department at New York’s Ivy League Columbia University.
What’s different about Quest is pretty much everything. Classes are capped at 20 students and average about 15. There being no place to hide, Quest has an astonishing level of student participation. Helfand points with pride to the new results of the 2010 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), revealed in this issue of Maclean’s. Quest’s first-year students (there were no senior students yet to survey) recorded student involvement and satisfaction far beyond larger, older universities. It finished top among Canadian universities in five key outcomes: academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, supportive campus environment, active and collaborative learning, and enriching educational experience. “That’s the one bit of truly independent evidence that we have that what we’re doing is really quite special,” Helfand says of the NSSE scores.
One of the greatest contributors to engagement is Quest’s block program, unique in Canada. Subjects are taught one at a time in 3½-week blocks: three hours a day of class time, and hours more of research, reading, group work and writing. For instance, students are immersed in the works of Homer, Plato and Thucydides for one month, then move on, to visual mathematics or ecology or political economy. By third year, students have picked “the Question,” an intellectual inquiry of their choosing that they’ll spend the next two years exploring from every conceivable angle. Cook’s is: “Why do we care?”—a look at what motivates empathy versus apathy. Julian Seemann-Sterling, a third-year student from Berlin, is exploring: “Is world government possible and desirable?” Carmen Petrick, a third-year student aiming for medical school, asks: “What are the social practices that lead to the spread of pandemics?”
Students also do up to four experiential learning blocks, such as a work term, internship or study abroad. Cook put her question to the test by working 2½ months in a Cambodian orphanage for children with physical and mental disabilities. One student worked for a computer security firm. Another went to a Buddhist ashram.
In all cases, the block system is key. It gave tutor Maï Yasué the freedom to camp with her “ecological self ” class on a remote west Vancouver Island beach for 13 days, something that would have been impossible with students juggling four other courses. Helfand admits he was skeptical about the idea when he was brought in by Quest founder (and former University of British Columbia president) David Strangway to consult in Quest’s planning. By the time the school opened, he was so smitten with the program he took a leave from Columbia to teach four course blocks—a “transformative experience,” he says. “I’ve been at Columbia for 34 years teaching in the standard semester format with lectures.” It is, he says now, “a totally ineffective way of teaching.”
A rare few other academics are coming to a similar conclusion. Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie cancelled classes in late January to look at a shift to a block system. Algoma president Richard Myers is an enthusiastic proponent, noting the system would enhance off-site learning, attract foreign students and stop that “end-of-term panic that grips students in late November and late March” as all course requirements come due at once. The issue, after further study, will be determined by Algoma’s senate. Helfand has also consulted at the University of Northern British Columbia where, too, there is some interest, and much skepticism, about block teaching.
For students who make the grade, the experience is almost unparalleled. Everyone knows your name, from the professors (called tutors to emphasis the commitment to teaching) to the cafeteria staff. When life sciences tutor Annie Prud’homme Généreux was asked to write a reference for a senior applying to grad school, she knew the student so well she rattled off a five-page letter. How many undergrads get that from their professors?
Seth Godin's most recent blog post challenges those who are leaders and want to lead, but don't want to step on any toes. He frames information in typical Seth Godin fashion. Please share with a co-inspirer.
Every morning, the line of cars waiting to get onto the Hutchinson River Parkway exceeds 40. Of course, you don't have to patiently wait, you can drive down the center lane, passing all the civilized suckers and then, at the last moment, cut over.
Drivers hate this, and for good reason. The road is narrow, and your aggressive act didn't help anyone but you. You slowed down the cars in the lane behind you, and your selfish behavior merely made 40 other people wait.
This is a different act than the contribution someone makes when she sees that everyone is patiently waiting to enter a building through a single door. She walks past everyone and opens a second door. Now, with two doors open, things start moving again and she's certainly earned her place at the front of that second entrance.
Too often, we're persuaded that initiative and innovation and bypassing the status quo is some sort of line jumping, a selfish gaming of the zero sum game. Most of the time it's not. In fact, what you do when you solve an interesting problem is that you open a new door. Not only is that okay, I think it's actually a moral act.
Don't wait your turn if waiting your turn is leaving doors unopened.
Thank you to Sefu Bernard for sharing this bit of critical inspiration via awesome blog thellabb.
It's about the choice we all have the ability to make. Do things the right way or do things the way they've always been done. Organization and people who chose the former are the one driven by strong leadership.
Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it.
Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards to the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the other monkeys with cold water.
After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result – all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, put away the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one.
The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.
Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.
Likewise, replace a third monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then a fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs, he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the new monkey.
After replacing all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana?
Why not? Because as far as they know that’s the way it’s always been done around here.
And that, my friends, is how company policy begins.
The most damaging phrase in the language is, “It’s always been done that way.”
(Admiral Grace Hopper, 1906-1992)
Have you ever been in an environment where things are done a certain way only because "...it's always been done that way"...? Or, perhaps, are you leading that environment?
The thought that we coach the way we were coached has been one that I wrestle with quite a bit. And then, recently, a close friend took it a step further when he said to me, "We coach the way we were parented."
Don't just do things because that's the way it was done before you; or, because you had success with that approach 10 years ago. Continually assess and find new ways to engage the people you work with.
