Category Archives: All Because of Books

Long Lists Don’t Get Done

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Start making smaller to-do lists. Long lists collect dust.

When’s the last time you finished a long list of things? You might have knocked off the first few, but chances are you eventually abandoned it (or blindly checked off items that weren’t really done properly).

Long lists are guilt trips. The longer the list of unfinished items, the worse you feel about it. And at a certain point, you just stop looking at it because it makes you feel bad. Then you stress out and the whole thing turns into a big mess.

There’s a better way. Break that long list down into a bunch of smaller lists. For example, break a single list of a hundred items into ten lists of ten items. That means when you finish an item on a list, you’ve completed 10 percent of that list, instead of 1 percent.

Yes, you still have the same amount of stuff left to do. But know you can look at the small picture and find satisfactions, motivation, and progress. That’s a lot better than staring at the huge picture and being terrified and demoralized.

Whenever you can, divide problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you’re able to deal with them completely and quickly. Simply rearranging your tasks this way can have an amazing impact on your productivity and motivation.

And a quick suggestion about prioritization: Don’t prioritize with numbers or labels. Avoid saying, “This is high priority, this is low priority.” Likewise, don’t say, “This is a three, this is a two, this is a one, this is a three,” etc. Do that and you’ll almost always end up with a ton of really high-priority things. That’s not really prioritizing.

Instead, prioritize visually. Put the most important thing at the top. When you’re done with that, the next thing on the list becomes the next most important thing. That way you’ll only have a single next most important thing to do at one time.

And that’s enough.

 

The inspirational words above come from the book “Rework,” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of 37signals.

                           If you don’t own it, you should. 

The artwork is by illustrator Mike Rohde.

11 Best Books of 2011

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Continuing an annual tradition, the final posts of the year are devoted to the importance of reading (covered in yesterday’s post) and my best book list for the year.

Making a “Best of” list is always hard – it’s a very subjective process, driven by my personal tastes, professional needs, and plain curiosity. It’s also hard to narrow it down: in 2011, I checked out 107 books from my local library, purchased 91 print books, and downloaded 37 on my Kindle. I also perused dozens of bookstores on my travels, writing down 77 titles for future acquisition. There were also a lot of late releases that I just didn’t have time to take a look at. Be that as it may, here is my list of favorite books published in 2011.

The Zappos Experience, Joseph Michelli

Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, Howard Schultz

Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen

Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service, 2nd Edition, Disney Institute

Brilliance by Design: Creating Learning Experiences that Connect, Inspire, and Engage,

Vicki Halsey

The Orange Revolution, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton

 

The Experience Economy, 2nd Ed, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore

Blah, Blah, Blah, Dan Roam


Missional Communities: The Rise of the Post-Congregational Church, Reggie McNeal

For the City: Proclaiming and Living Out the Gospel, Matt Carter and Darrin Patrick

Practically Radical, William C. Taylor

That’s my list for 2011 – if you are unfamiliar with any of the books listed above, I encourage you to check them out.

The new year is just around the corner, and the book releases are lining up already – I wonder what the Best of 2012 list will look like a year from now?

Speed Reading Week, Day 5

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Creative Thinkering, Michael Michalko

Have you ever asked yourself “Why didn’t I think of that?”

 If so, this book is for you. Bestselling creativity expert Michael Michalko shows that in every field of endeavor – from business and science to government, the arts, and even day-to-day life – our natural creativity is limited by the prejudices of logic and the structure of accepted categories and concepts. Through step-by-step exercises, illustrated strategies, and inspiring real-world examples, Creative Thinkering will show you how to synthesize dissimilar subjects, think paradoxically, and enlist the help of your subconscious mind. You will liberate your thinking and literally expand your imagination.

Creative Thinkering is filled with innovative exercises to strengthen your intuition. With every chapter you will learn something new – often from a situation or setting that you encounter every day. The book also contains fascinating stories and examples of how people use the power of creative thinkering. One of my favorites is about Walt Disney:

Using his imagination, Walt Disney uncritically explored fantastical ideas. Afterward, he would engineer these fantasies into feasible ideas and then evaluate them. He would shift his perspective three times by playing three separate and distinct roles in relation to them: those of the dreamer, the realist, and the critic.

On the first day, he would play the dreamer and dream up fantasies and wishful visions. He would let his imagination soar without worrying about how to implement his conceptions. The next day, he would bring his fantasies down to earth by playing the realist. As a realist, he would look for ways to work his conceptions into something practical. On the third day, he would play the part of the critic and poke holes in his ideas, asking, “Is this feasible?”

Got an idea or project coming up? Put the power of creative thinkering to work and you will be amazed at the results.

 

Speed Reading Week, Day 4

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The Amazement Revolution, Shep Hyken

Customer service isn’t a department – it’s a philosophy that includes every person and aspect of the best and brightest organizations.

Shep Hyken delivers seven powerful strategies that any organization can implement to create greater customer and employee loyalty:

  • Membership: What if you treated the people you serve like members instead of customers?
  • Serious FUN: What if your team felt a sense of fulfillment and enjoyment that made them loyal to you and your customers?
  • Partnership: What if you customers thought of you as a partner rather than just another organization?
  • Hiring: What if you could implement innovative hiring processes to support your customer-service mission?
  • The After-Experience: What if you could create a memorable, positive experience after someone did business with you?
  • Community: What if you could create a community of evangelists – loyal customers who brag about you to their friends and associates?
  • Walking the Walk: What if every person in your company didn’t just deliver, but also lived and breathed your vision for amazing customer service?

Throughout the book, Hyken shares more than one hundred insightful examples from fifty role-model organizations that prove these strategies can and should be implemented immediately – by any organization, large or small.

I first heard Shep Hyken speak on a video talking about an extraordinary cab experience he had on a trip to Dallas. I was hooked – and I think you will be, too.

The Amazement Revolution is not just stories and examples – at the end of the book, Hyken has condensed the seven strategies down into “brainstorm worksheets” that your organization can use to put ideas into action.

How will you amaze your customers today?

Speed Reading Week, Day 3

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The Zappos Experience: 5 Principles to Inspire, Engage, and WOW, by Joseph Michelli

Zappos – the name has come to stand for a new standard of customer experience, and amazing online shopping experience, and the most impressive transformational business success story of our time. Simply put, Zappos is revolutionizing business and changing lives.

 CEO Tony Hsieh documented the Zappos story in his excellent book Delivering Happiness. I encourage you to read it to get Hsieh’s personal insights on the evolution of Zappos.

Michelli’s book The Zappos Experience takes you through – and beyond – the playful, off-beat company culture Zappos has become famous for. Michelli reveals what occurs behind the scenes at Zappos, showing how employees at all levels operate on a day-to-day basis while providing the “big picture” leadership methods.

Michelli breaks the approach down into five key elements:

Serve a Perfect Fit – create bedrock company values

Make it Effortlessly Swift – deliver a customer experience with ease

Step into the Personal – connect with customers authentically

S T R E T C H – grow people and products

Play to Win – play hard, work harder

When you enhance the customer experience, increase employee engagement, and create an energetic culture, you can’t help but succeed. Zappos has woven these five key components into a seamless strategy that’s the envy of business leaders.

The Zappos Experience is much too detailed to adequately treat in this short post.  Applications for ChurchWorld abound. Here’s one example for you to think about:

Zappos’ customer service is legendary for how it handles the huge volume of merchandise shipments. Members of the Customer Loyalty Team take a huge amount of pride in their customer interactions.

Could you apply the same principles in the Guest Services Team at your church?

  • What are the small and epic acts that make up your service story?
  • What do people remember about the way contact with your organization made them feel?
  • What are the stories circulating about your organization’s guest services practices?
  • How are you capturing and retelling large and small WOWS delivered by your team?

It works for Zappos; it can work at your church, too.

Speed Reading Week, Day 2

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The Power of foursquare, Carmine Gallo

Author Carmine Gallo has discovered seven big ideas that will help you CHECK IN to the power of foursquare to unlock your brand’s potential:

Connect Your Brand – Align your foursquare strategy with your brand’s value proposition and your brand story.

Harness New Fans – Use foursquare to attract new customers who otherwise might not know about your business or who don’t keep it top of mind.

Engage Your Followers – Add insights and information to keep your brand in front of your customers and fans wherever they are.

Create Rewards – Leverage foursquare’s powerful and free tools to learn more about your best customers and to create rewards for their loyalty.

Knock Out the Competition – Outsmart your competitors by being a leader in this new space and develop creative campaign. Don’t wait for case studies – be the case study.

Incentivize Your Customers – Give your customers a reason to check in, again and again.

Never Stop Entertaining – Foursquare is a playful platform. Always have fun.

If someone asked you what foursquare is, you would be entirely correct to use any of the following answers:

  • It’s a social, local, and mobile networking tool
  • It’s a location-based social network
  • It’s a geolocation app
  • It’s a game
  • It’s a communications tool
  • It’s a new social-media marketing platform

That’s the business world of foursquare – what about ChurchWorld?

Speed Reading Week, Day 1

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Here’s the deal: a book a day, with a few nuggets pulled out for your consideration. Ready?

The End of Business as Usual, Brian Solis

Some of today’s biggest trends – the mobile web, social media, gamification, real-time – have forced us to rewire the way we think about and run our organizations. Consumers are creating a new digital culture, and as they connect with one another, a vast and efficient information network is taking shape and is beginning to steer experiences, decisions, and markets.

The End of Business as Usual will change the way you view the world of business, from sales and marketing to customer service and product development to leadership and culture. Its critical insights include:

  • Shared experiences are redefining brands in digital consumer landscapes, and astute brands can now also create and steer these experiences
  • Consumer influence is growing, and businesses can use this to their advantage
  • Connect with a rising audience (and with audiences of audiences) through new touch points between consumers, brands, and new influencers
  • Create a culture to earn trust, influence, and significance among connected customers

Solis has written a powerful book, deep with implications. Here’s a couple of samples:

The nextwork sends and receives information at blinding speeds, creating an efficient human switchboard and network that in theory and in practice, outperforms telephone, terrestrial, cell, emergency, and web networks for the speed and precision at which relevant experiences are shared and re-shared. News no longer breaks – it tweets. (pp 54-55)

An Audience with an Audience of Audiences

This picture serves as both a time capsule immortalizing this important transition and evidence of the emergence of new information nextworks, a series of audiences with extended audiences. Every single one of these students is a representation of the connected customer. They are each connected to others in the room and around the world, figuratively and literally. They are nodes in the human network, playing an instrumental role in the dissemination of information and also the experiences that unite us online and in real life. Your job is to now influence what they share. (p 61)

Questions for ChurchWorld

  • How has the explosion of social media impacted your ministry – personally or corporately?
  • How are your “consumers” influencing your organization differently today than 3 years ago?
  • How are you harnessing the power and influence of social media technologies to connect with your audience?
  • Is the rate of change greater today than it was a year ago? How comfortable are you with that?
  • On a sliding scale, do you view your organization as rigid, social, connected, adaptive, or predictive?

This is your time to lead, not follow; your time to make a difference.

The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

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Continuing our Thinking Week, let’s move from the structure of Morgan Jones to the adaptive unconscious of the mind as depicted in Malcolm Gladwell’s classic book “blink“.

Gladwell weaves compelling stories as diverse as the uncovering of a fraud in ancient statuary to that of a classical trombonist auditioning for the lead chair in a world-class orchestra. The power of these and other stories in the book is that our mind has an uncanny ability to quickly make decisions that can be every bit as good as decisions made curiously and deliberately. So much for structure and analysis!

 

The problem is that our unconscious is a powerful force. But it can be fallible. It can be thrown off, distracted, and disabled. Our instinctive reactions often have to compete with all kinds of other interests and emotions and sentiments. Are we then not to trust our instincts?
 
Gladwell does an amazing job of laying out the case that the mind can be educated and controlled when it comes to making snap judgements and first impressions. Gladwell captivates the reader with stories that help us understand the power of instantaneous impressions and conclusions that spontaneously arise whenever we meet a new persons or confront a complex situation or have to make a decision under conditions of stress.
 
What do you think? Can there be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis?
 

The Airplane Effect

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Yesterday during a flight to Arlington, TX, I finally put my finger on something that had been bugging me: flights  really turn my brain loose. I read parts of three different books (love that Kindle!); took an innovation quiz that measures my innovation aptitude; and completed some editing on a writing project I’m working on.

On a 2 1/2 hour flight.

What’s up? I will be posting more on this topic, but here’s a visual to get you started:

Where does this take your thought process?

Reading Right Now…

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I’ve always believed that active and diverse reading is a necessity for creative leaders. Really putting in practice this week…

On Optimist’s Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer “What’s Next, by Mark Stevenson

Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Foundation of the U.S. Navy, by Ian Toll

Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Societies, Art, Poetry, and Technology, edited by John Brockman

Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, by Cathy Davidson

Missional Communities: The Rise of the Post-Congregational Church, by Reggie McNeal

To Transform a City: Whole Church, Whole Gospel, Whole City, by Eric Swanson and Sam Williams

AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church, by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay

The Case for Antioch: A Biblical Model for a Transformational Church, but Jeff Iorg

Democratizing Innovation, by Eric von Hippel

Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas, by Dan Zarrella

The Elements of Cooking, by Michael Rhulman

I’m trying to emulate Thomas Edison, who believed that voracious reading was the key to self-improvement. He read books on a remarkable range of subjects to address his endless queries. As Edison noted, “I didn’t read a few books, I read the library.”

I prefer to think of it as creating innovation literacy.