Of Love, Life, Happiness … and Teams?

Source: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

What better way to learn about how to live your life than from a dying cancer patient that loved his life and continued to love his life despite cancer. Due to this blog, I’ve started taking notes every time I read a book. This book has a lot of important lessons! I was categorizing them under love, life, communication and a category that came to my surprise was teams. However, its really no surprise that he did this in his book because so much of what we do involves working with others and effective communication.

Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and he had his students work in teams in his classes but what made him special was that he really taught them how to work in a team. He made students rate their teammates on how easy it was to work with them and made these results public. He always found that the students that were hard to work with never knew that about themselves until this data was made available to them. Of course they were also defensive and hard to convince that the data was indeed accurate. More on how he dealt with that later.

Randy had the following to say about working in a team:

1. Have something to bring to the table because that will make you more welcome.
2. Start by sitting together in class
3. Meet people properly – learn to pronounce names
4. Find things you have in common
5. Try for optimal meeting conditions – during meals
6. Let everyone talk – don’t finish sentences for others
7. Check egos at the door – Give names to ideas that are representative of the idea and not the person
8. Praise each other
9. Phrase alternatives as questions – use the word instead 

These are useful instructions but what struck me was how lucky his students were to have a professor that was willing to be an unbiased enforcer. He taught and showed them proactively the advantages of working together.

Do all teams need an enforcer to function properly and be productive? Should each team have an assigned enforcer from the beginning? How do we ensure the enforcer isn’t biased? The government uses checks and balances but we also know what happens when the enforcers become biased. Things come to a standstill and teams become dysfunctional. How we do we fix this? How do we move forward and get back to productivity? History shows us that a leader has to rise. A person that rises to change the status quo is on his way to be a great leader. When this person doesn’t let the confines of their position limit their ability to make a difference, that’s when there will be growth. Friction causes leaders to emerge. Friction shows us each teammate’s true commitment to the end goal. Enforcers should be put back in their place and the team needs to get back on track with the vision.

When a student on Randy’s research team was particularly difficult to work with, this is what Randy had to say. “I know you are smart. Everyone here is smart. Smart isn’t enough. The kind of people I want on my research team are those who will help everyone else feel happy to be here.”

Are you willing to check your ego at the door? Are you willing to help others feel happy to be a part of the team? Are you ready to be a teammate first? Will you stand up in conflict and make a contribution? Have you in the past? If not, are you willing to change?

How you choose to react in situations defines the type of person you are and I hope you will react in a way that will shape you in to a great leader.

Let me know what you think. 

All About Money

Source: Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki

Leadership books often talk about the importance of management of people or personal time. They offer up best practices or give anecdotes into why gratitude or other virtuous characteristics are important to be a great leader. The book Rich Dad, Poor Dad does some of that but it mostly talks about money. The author recognizes that management/leadership comprises of three things:

• Management of cashflow

• Management of people

• Management of personal time 

There are managers that focus solely on results and there are those that focus on people but managers that are able to focus on both people and results are the successful ones. This book while teaching you about money gives you insight into people's attitudes towards money.

Leaders/managers are so close to the details of the problem/challenge faced that they are at risk of developing tunnel vision. When you look to solve the problem related to money, facts surrounding the solution are just as important as those surrounding the challenge. Insight into people's behavior about money helps us predict their actions and with practice this skill becomes a valuable tool in our arsenal to face any problem successfully.

I was raised to believe that hard work will pay off and eventually will get me to a point in life when I don’t have to worry about money. After having worked for a few years, I started to see a few glitches in this system. Taxes always come first, salary comes later. So mathematically for me to get to point A (Point A being a certain amount of money where I don’t have to worry about money), I really need to be at point B which is 1.5*A. This is disconcerting.

Money is a very real thing but we are all shy to talk about it. Money is a real thing for leaders at organizations and managers at corporations. When we gain knowledge on how money works and there by have control of it in our personal life, we will have a better grasp on how to make decisions at organizations and corporations. I can speak from personal experience that insight into people's attitudes towards money helps you fundraise, draw budgets, and get results!

This book talks about being financially intelligent. The leadership/management quality we don’t hear about often.

Before we get into what financial intelligence is, let’s actually open our minds to it.

Attitude:

Do you wake up every morning for work and return every day feeling unhappy about your salary, your work or your raise? Have you thought of changing this routine?

Albert Einstein says the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This doesn’t mean you quit your job but I hope you ponder whether this is the lifestyle you want. where happiness related to money is always in the control of your boss or government policy. 

Action:

How do you take back control? Robert says first recognize that you want to change your routine and take steps each day to take back control. Invest in education to become financially intelligent.

Financial Intelligence:

1. Financial literacy – ability to read numbers or accounting. 

What are assets? What are liabilities? Assets make money. Liabilities don’t.

2. Investment strategies – science of money making money.

Knowledge about stocks, entrepreneurship and real estate. Good investments give you income without your involvement and even when you are not putting money. Good investments help during retirement.

3. Market – supply and demand.

Knowledge on how to manage investments that you have acquired.

4. Law – tax advantages and protection from lawsuits.

How to keep taxes low legally.

It is easy to dismiss all this talk about money with the pretense of taking the moral high ground that money isn't important but pause and reflect on how many times money has affected your decisions. 

Finally it is important to note that Robert Kiyosaki is a "best-selling author" not a best-writing author or the best accountant. Credibility and success is often measured by money that is backing up the idea or the corporation.