Fans – Knowledge ATMs

March 28, 2023

S2 E101 — The Story of Strange Bedfellows Saving the Day

If the slow moving, status quo loving cruise ship falls into desperate straits the captain needs new strategic steering and a new sense of urgency to keep from running aground.

“5” Steve Howey, 42: “Human perception (and indeed, survival) depends on filtering out more than what we let into our awareness. You may be noticing a lot more than the others. Try not to hold it against them.” Cancer

Hi and welcome to Saturday’s Episode 101 in Season 2 of “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 2nd day of August in the summer of 2020.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E100 — Live, Love, Work, Play, Invest and Leave a Legacy; S2 E99 — Why Pay Over $100,000 When You Don’t Have To? ; S2 E98 — Why Your Company Simply Won’t Make It Out of Puberty

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E101 — From Saint to Soul Mate and Trusted Friend; S1 E100 — Running out of Determination and Grit by the 100th Day ; S1 E99 — What’s in a Name? Baby Boy Names?; S1 E98 — Why Can’t I Leave 26 Orphans for a Well Deserved Vacation?

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

In previous episodes we described Start Up, Emerging Growth, Rapid Growth, Sustained Growth and Maturity stages. But, each with the emphasis on how a specific stage provides another better fit opportunity for one or more of 16 Talent Profiles

Consequences of Not Mastering Growth Crises

We described two mini case studies of what it was like working behind the scenes at a mature companies in a financial, in a consumer industries and in another century-old university system — Part One and Two.

Decline

Strange bedfellow feel attracted to declining organizations. One drawn to the crisis from the “Blue Box” of Systematic-Professionals and the other from the “Red Box” of Paradoxy-Morons. You’ll see an interesting partnership formed by 113 Idea Packagers (Blue) and 102 Thought Leaders (Red).

16 Talent Profiles by Organization Type

Why?

A company or any organization that has been successfully operating for over 40 years, and especially those that have been around for a century or longer, like our last three examples, over extend their prevailing business model and the systems required to operate in the status quo.

You could say, and you wouldn’t be wrong, they fall victim to maturity “group think” that collectively filters out information from the margins — where emerging competition fester.

Set in their ways, mature organizations will do almost anything to repeat the success factors derived from building on what has worked for years and maybe generations.

They recruit, develop and retain, all most unconsciously like-minded people with similar backgrounds and education.

They build layer upon layer of complex organizational structures and operating systems which divorce them from director customer contact, which start ups and growth companies build strong relationships with.

Their expertise becomes highly specialized, but their research and development functions don’t really benefit from direct market feedback and shifting customer requirements.

A mature culture resists any threat to their status quo until it is too late and they become victim to their own Red-Tape Crisis.

In short, reversing the risk adverse, red tape-poisoned culture requires outside intervention with a newer perspective while the company restructures, downsizes and outsources costly internal operations.

The outside partnership blends combinations high degrees of independence with medium degrees of disruptive innovation, speed, embedded knowledge, improvement and mastery.

The 113 Idea Packagers work well in settings that require outside-the-system perspective when information filtering contributes to decline. They provide the conceptual framework by which manuals, organizational procedures, and even work assignments are translated and put into action.

They also tend to be impatient with the bureaucracy, rigid hierarchies, and politics prevalent in many professions, preferring to work informally with others as equals. But, 113 Idea Packagers use cleverness and independent thinking to problem-solve and reinvent, and in an easygoing, unassuming manner prod organizational change and improvement towards restructuring, downsizing, outsourcing and other relevant solutions to the red tape crisis.

Why a partnership with talent from a Paradoxy-Moron culture? While 102 Thought Leaders share a high degree of independence with 113 Idea Packagers they’re attracted to medium degrees of speed and disruptive innovation. If the slow moving, status quo loving cruise ship falls into desperate straights the captain needs new strategic steering and a new sense of urgency to keep from running aground.

Evidence

“4” Steve Zahn, 51: “The remedy to get past fear and discomfort is to do the very thing you would most want to avoid. You don’t have to do it a lot though because once or twice will get you over things quite nicely today.”Scorpio

Almost every effort to change a mature organization is met with overwhelming resistance, fear and discomfort. Also FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt. That’s why the new direction provided in collaboration with thought leader requires an idea packager to cement a tangible future the remaining employees can believe in.

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

Today’s Holiday Birthday:

Your projects do not have to be lucrative for you to consider them a success, and yet you’ll have the pleasure of many different beneficial outcomes flowing from your work, including financial gain. Young and inexperienced people will follow your lead and be better for it. New relationships start the year off with style.

How awesome is that? Too bad this ain’t my birthday so I can claim it. If it’s yours, please be my guest!

“3” Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “You already know what you like, so do something else. Better to find out that you have a great range of likes than to narrow your scope and be stuck trying to satisfy niche preferences.” Aries

One of the lessons I learned over a 5 year employment in a declining company is you need to quickly volunteer for projects to add value in the downsizing, and then during the rightsizing and then back to innovation in the reinvention upsizing.

As in groupthink in a declining organization that may not realize it yet?

“4” Steve Carrell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “It’s going well. It doesn’t mean that all the lights are green or that the journey is comfortable, cool and frustration-free. It just means that you are actually getting somewhere.” Leo

I once was told that Start Ups don’t realize they are out of business until 6 months afterwards. He never told me how long it took for Mature companies to realize they peaked and were on the downside of their incredible run. I’m sure a thought leader could reveal how much time was left.

“3” Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61: “When you know where you want to go but not how to get there, don’t worry. You’ll figure it out. If you don’t know where to go, then wait until you get an idea. Better to sit and conserve your energy than to aimlessly wander.” Virgo

In mature organizations on the decline require thought leaders to help provide the “where” and idea packagers to help select which wave of change to embrace and how to surf it to shore.

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4733 to 4807.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

- Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

March 27, 2023

S3 E45 — Tacit Heuristics Blinding Fast-Track Teams

I’ve learned that I am really susceptible to the downsides. But, I’m a sucker for that aha! experience, so naturally I’d latch on to a word (heuristic) that comes from the same root as eureka.

“5” Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “You’ll discover that a belief you held was wrong or incomplete — oh, sweet liberation! This levels the mental ground where you’ll be building something sturdier and more beautiful to dwell inside.” Aries

Hi and welcome to Friday’s Episode 45 in Season 3 of “My Paradoxically Normal Year” on this 14th day of May in the spring of 2021 — which is a three-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic year and then in the pandemic year, and now months after.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Previously from Season Three, the Paradoxically Normal Year

S3 E44 — Make It Rhyme To Work Each Time; S3 E43 — Add a Little Foresight to My Misdemeanor Tab; S3 E42 — Greta, Juliette and the Partridge Family at Trestles

Related from Season Two, The Pandemic Year

S2 E45 — Wildcard What Ifs and Doobie Bros Bias; S2 E44 — Celebrating Emma the Baroness Tribal Quarantine Style; S2 E43 — See What You’ve Been Missing …; S2 E42 — It Was Short and Sweet, but Heart-Felt

Related from Season One, The Normal Year

S1 E45 — Day 45 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E44 — Google Me Some Chopped Liver; S1 E43 — Desperation on Such a Summer’s Day; S1 E42 — Love on the Run

Context

When knowledge management gained purchase as an emerging profession I attended a week-long online conference with early practitioners and discussed “distinctions” of what it was all about.

It was too soon to define it with hard boundaries.

One of the pioneers advocated heuristics as a practice for sharing and refining knowledge that wasn’t already explicitly in use.

I’d never heard of heuristics before, but I caught a flavor of his meaning for what he called tacit knowledge — what people on a team knew and shared intuitively with each other.

Team members learn something by bringing products to market like the one they’re up against the looming release date.

The team is stumped.

Someone pitches a solution based on a similar product she engineered in the recent past and it works. Crisis averted. That solution is passed on again and again.

More formally a heuristic is like a rule of thumb — a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind.

I’ve learned that I am really susceptible to the downsides. I’m a sucker for that aha! experience, so naturally I’d latch on to a word (heuristic) that comes from the same root as eureka.

If you knew me you’d know I always look for a simple procedure that helps me find answers to difficult questions — adequate, but often imperfect as they may be to move forward.

But, now I’ve come to learn what I’m most likely guilty of is some kind of mental trick, a kind of a bait and switch without noticing.

I sometimes automatically substitute an easier question for a difficult one, answer it and congratulate myself on my brilliance.

As Daniel Kahneman says, “(A) lazy System 2 often follows the path of least effort and endorses a heuristic answer without much scrutiny of whether it is truly appropriate.”

How does it work?

While l’m engaged in searching for an answer to one question, my “System 1” simultaneously generates the answers to related questions.

Often it may substitute a response that more easily comes to my mind for the one that was requested and more complicated.

“The heuristic answer is not necessarily simpler or more frugal than the original question, but it is accessible, computed more quickly and easily.”

The answers are not random. They are often approximately correct and frequently that’s all you need.

As in technology heuristic of inserting a good enough product into the customers hands and get them to tell you about all the flaws so you can iterate and release new versions.

But, sometimes they are quite wrong. Which can come back and bite you in your own life if you’ve got a lot on the line.

Evidence

But, Zahnny, am I wrong in assuming focus and concentration won’t short circuit my intuitive self no matter how flawed?

“3” Steve Zahn, 51: “The work worth doing centers around your energy, perception and ability. Focus there, and so much else will naturally come together. Focusing elsewhere will be ineffective.” Scorpio

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

You know, Steve sometimes your Holiday Tau hits the nail on the head. It wasn’t until these last weeks while working on the Conclusions section of my Report that I discovered heuristics, good as they may be in general, weren’t the end all and be all of knowledge management. In fact they may have accounted for blinding fast-track teams under pressure to deliver tech products at a faster and faster pace. Mea culpa.

Eureka G&G. Here’s my take on this passion project at 5:45 am this morning. Looking back through the report I grow tired and weary because of the disconnects and disjointed sections. My plan was to write the end and then go back to the beginning and clean up portions as I made progress towards the conclusion.

“5” Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61: “The interaction of opposing forces in your mind creates friction, hot moods and frustrating mental traffic jams. Alignment changes everything. Thoughts flowing in the same direction create momentous forward movement.” Virgo

Did someone say, aha! or eureka? Count me in. Anything to distract me, like a squirrel does for a dog, from this ongoing national political disgrace.

“4” Steve Jobs, (1955 – 2011): “Heavy topics and serious matters just don’t have appeal to you now, though you’re quite excited by novelty and the lighter side of life. This mood is perfect for building rapport with others.” Pisces

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @KnowLabs suite of 36 digital magazines jumps from 8138 to 8193 organically grown followers

Foresight

- Nikola May Snag Order For 100 Battery, Hydrogen Big Rigs From Los Angeles Ports Trucker
- A New Brain Implant Translates Thoughts of Writing Into Text

Quality-of-Life

- Dumpsites off the California Coast Are Worse Than Originally Thought – Sunset
- 70% of California is officially in a drought. Here’s household tips for saving water

Long-Form

- “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler, a classic I feel which still holds up. As the pace of change quickens we experience self-doubt, anxiety and fear. We become tense and tire easily, until we are overwhelmed, face-to-face with a crisis situation. Without a clear grasp of relevant reality or beginning with clearly defined values and priorities, we feel a deepening sense of confusion and uncertainty. Our intellectual bewilderment leads to disorientation at the level of personal values. Decision stress results from acceleration, novelty and diversity conflicts. Acceleration pressures us to make quick decisions. Novelty increases the difficulty and length of time while diversity intensifies the anxiety with an increase in the number of options and the amount of information needed to process. The result is a slower reaction time.
- Daniel Kahneman’s, “Thinking Fast and Slow”describes two different ways the brain forms thoughts: “System 1” which is meant as a fictional shorthand — not as a brain system or structure: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, unconscious. “System 2”: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious. I’m learning a lot about my energy levels first described from within an introversion frame now, from within differences between System 1 and the harder working, energy depletion System 2. Self-control, for instance is hard and takes a lot of energy to accomplish. When I write the concentration requires effort until I can find the “flow.” Implications for True Belief — it’s easy to stay in System 1 vs. critical thinking — System 2. Set some marketing and working on the business goals — System 2 and then ignore them by following the lateral thinking and associative thinking which Leo da V invites me to do — System 1.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

March 24, 2023

S2 E100 — Live, Love, Work, Play, Invest and Leave a Legacy

Not all my Executive MBA students hailed from large, mature healthcare organizations. If they did, they weren’t confident that they could crack the glass ceiling, nor did many physicians really want to.

“5” Steve Zahn, 51: “You’re an excellent student of life because of your genuine curiosity. You are interested in more than just memorizing what you need to know for life’s various tests. Your longing for deep knowledge will be sated.” Scorpio

Hi and welcome to Friday’s Episode 100 in Season 2 of “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 21st day of August in the summer of 2020.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E99 — Why Pay Over $100,000 When You Don’t Have To? ; S2 E98 — Why Your Company Simply Won’t Make It Out of Puberty ; S2 E97 — Frame Blindness and Decision Traps

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E100 — Running out of Determination and Grit by the 100th Day ; S1 E99 — What’s in a Name? Baby Boy Names?; S1 E98 — Why Can’t I Leave 26 Orphans for a Well Deserved Vacation? ; S1 E97 — My Top 19 Reasons for Failing

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

We described two mini case studies of what it was like working behind the scenes at a mature companies in a financial, in a consumer industries and in another century-old university system.

33. Advisor — Executive and Healthcare MBA Program

Part Two

The business school recognized it had to compete more aggressively for students and slowly shifted emphasis to digital leadership. The heart of their marketing told prospective Executive MBA students they’d be able to think creatively and strategically about business challenges of the future.

Separately the University launched “The Cove” to fill the Orange County start up vacuum. More of the Executive Students I advised, even in Healthcare, felt its magnetic pull particularly to commercialize ideas flowing from medical device, biotechnology and other research laboratories. I felt it too and developed relationships with its leaders.

Here’s what we were up against. Most residents in Orange County with college bound young adults, if their ambitions were to turn your ideas into a business you didn’t want to attend a campus in the UC System In fact, your best fit would be the Cal State System. You don’t want research and theories, but you need tools, tips and practical guidance.

The business school’s pitch went something like this: We have a long tradition of training professionals to succeed at the executive level. Are you prepared to lead transformation and embrace opportunities for innovation in your industry?

Four Talent Profiles Attracted to Systematic-Professional Organizations

Clearly pitched at Systematic-Professionals like ourselves, the value proposition promised … you will build a general management foundation complemented by opportunities to further explore the healthcare space, enabling you to apply your understanding of business to the changing healthcare industry.

Our program maximizes your return on investment by:

- Delivering relevant knowledge and skills,
- Valuable connections with peers in other industries and
- Prestigious credentials to accelerate your career and organization.

That’s where our group came in.

My project was so different than what my colleagues were providing that I could independently create a unique suite of services customized for executives. Their “customers” were students who just graduated with little or no work experience.

For the first five years as a Systematic-Professional 113 Idea Packager I flourished reporting directly to the Executive Director working autonomously while establishing services from the ground up as an intrapreneur:

- Launched the Executive to Executive mentoring program by recruiting and maintaining a core of 45 to 50 VP and C-Suite Executives
- Matched 35 to 45 executive students with mentors each quarter based on type of organization and stage of growth.
- Included 5 to 7 industry contacts.
- Hosted quarterly mentoring breakfast meetings.
- Held panel discussion with alumni and industry leaders for students.
- Recruited entrepreneurs and alumni for frank Q&A exchanges with students considering a startup.

Not all Executive MBA students hailed from large, mature healthcare organizations. If they did, they weren’t confident that they would crack the glass ceiling, nor did many physicians really want to.

They wanted to figure out why certain decisions had been made for business reasons that had impacted them. Or, they had well researched ideas they wanted to advance, but needed a better understanding of how top executives prioritized their decisions. Still others felt certain their start up ideas could be winners.

In a way the Healthcare Executive MBA students wanted the same payoffs as did the majority number of students in the Executive MBA program.

As I met with each one individually before matching them with the best mentor I could find we pinpointed where they found themselves in their current situation.

We’d determine how they rated themselves in terms of high degrees of:

- Independence or Affiliation
- Speed or Mastery
- Disruptive Innovation or Sustained Improvement
- Emerging Knowledge or Embedded Knowledge

Four Organization Types

Using myself for example I preferred higher degrees of Embedded Knowledge, Independence and Mastery. So on face value the blue box (Systematic-Professionals) would be a better fit for me.

But, not all Executive and Healthcare EMBA students were currently in the “color box” they preferred. One decision they could make was to switch for a better fit — say, “Blue” (Systematic-Professionals) to “Green” (Emerging-Entrepreneurs). The right mentor-match could prove to be helpful.

Next we’d explore curriculum choices:

Work For Themselves

- Start a Business
- Buy a Business or Franchise
- Launch a Consulting Practice

Work for an Organization

- Create an Intrapreneurial Position
- Advance in Your Career
- Change Your Career
- Master a Career Disruption

For Executive EMBA students who worked at the same employer for several years which seemed to be plateaued compared to their competitors we would discuss reasons starting with their assessment of which growth stage they’ve stalled in.

Recognizing we haven’t profiled what works and doesn’t work in decline and reinvention stages yet my advice was to ask questions about how to address the crisis most likely constraining their employer and their career in each of the classes and from other students.

Consequences of Not Mastering Growth Crises

Of course another source would be matched to a mentor who had met those challenges successfully.

180 – Degree Shift in Success by Stages

Growth Stage	Key Success Factor	Leading to a Crisis	New Success Key
Start Up	Loosen	Leadership	Tighten
Emerging	Tighten	Functional	Loosen
Rapid	Loosen	Autonomy	Tighten
Sustained	Tighten	Repetition	Loosen
Maturity	Loosen	Control	Tighten

Unless those students were career junkies like me who worked in each of those growth stages or consulted with clients confronted with artificial barriers to their organization’s growth, most only needed to focus on the edge of one box and determine what was necessary to jump into the next box for a few years.

Managing 180 Degree Shifts Required for Each Stage

Those students encountering the most difficulty when it came to changing their careers had spent decades in a Systematic-Professional Organization Type or a long-term company in the Maturity phase.

Returning to Organization Types, we’ve already covered 10 of 16 Talent Profiles. If you think about a company’s culture, it is made up of more of a mix of talent profiles (4) and as people come and go each organization tends to recruit the same type.

16 Talent Profiles by Organization Type

Let’s say you value high degrees of Embedded Knowledge, Independence and Mastery aka the talent culture you’d find at a university in the “Blue Box.”

As one of my Executive MBA students, say a researcher on campus in biotechnology, you most likely would not flourish in the opposite “Green Box” known as Emerging-Entrepreneurs.

Of course you could make it work, but it may feel too fluid with its focus on higher degrees of speed, emerging knowledge and affiliation.

Speaking of affiliation, the four talent profiles defining a “Tan Box” Sustaining-Associate Organization favoring higher degrees of mastery and sustained improvement in addition to affiliation would struggle fitting into the “Red Box” of Paradoxy-Morons.

So if you want to find a better fit, stay away from opposite color boxes. If you’ve had it with your “box color” as in a career change, try probing an adjacent box to a medium degree of career satisfaction.

If you can’t handle the high speed, disruptive innovation “Red Box” culture, you might like the working in “Blue Box” Systematic-Professionals or the “GreenBox” Emerging-Entrepreneurs.

Two Systematic-Professionals Attracted to Maturity Growth Stage

Summary

But, wait there’s more. As in more options.

As you grow from start up to maturity as an organization my Executive MBA students the talent profiles can “break out” and add value to a specific state. Two “red” profiles, 101 Breakpoint Investors and 103 Commercial Innovators are joined by “green” 105 Marketing Athletes.

If that Start Up jumps successfully into the first of two growth stages — Emerging Growth — two additional “green” profiles, 107 Resilient Product Teams and 108 Core Business Group, fuel further growth.

But as Emerging flips int Rapid Growth the first two of three Sustaining-Associate “tan” profiles, 111 Agile Tiger Teams and 112 Loyal Survivalists keep the wheels on the bus at higher speeds. As Rapid Growth shifts into Sustained Growth the third “tan” profile joins the other two, 110 Analytical Specialists.

And, as we’ve already illustrated in these three mini case studies, as the company peaks and maintains their growth at the Maturity level, two “blue” profiles are required to keep the airplane routes synchronized, on schedule and systematically maintained — 114 Brand-as-Experts and 116 Institutional Traditionalists.

Where to Find the Best Fit

Talent Profile	Growth Stage	Organization Type
101 Breakpoint Inventors	Start Up	Paradoxy-Morons
103 Commercial Innovators	Start Up	Paradoxy-Morons
105 Marketing Athletes	Start Up	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
107 Resilient Product Teams	Emerging Growth	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
108 Core Business Group	Emerging Growth	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
111 Agile Tiger Teams	Rapid Growth	Sustaining-Associates
112 Loyal Survivalists	Rapid Growth	Sustaining-Associates
110 Analytical Specialists	Sustained Growth	Sustaining-Associates
114 Brand-as-Experts	Maturity	Systematic-Professionals
116 Institutional Traditionalists	Maturity	Systematic-Professionals

Next up: we leave organizations at the Maturity Growth and describe two talent profiles who specialize and helping “pilots” pull up from their premature Decline.

Evidence

Maybe this is why I’ve been drawn to figuring things out, what makes things work when it comes to accumulating knowledge and passing it on. How to live, love, work, play, invest and leave a legacy.

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

“5” Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “Thinking counts as effort, but nothing comes into being through thought alone. Air must be moved, words spoken, written or sung, action and work of any kind completed. The more air that’s moved, the more real a thing becomes.” Aries

So that’s what this is all about? Describing the air bending actions necessary to maneuver in Mature organizations?

“4” Steve Howey, 42: “It’s one of those days when you’ll do what’s good for you even though you don’t feel like it. It’s the sort of discipline that makes future decisions easier for you. Soon these things will require no discipline at all.” Cancer

Promises, promises. Let’s hope so…

“4” Steve Carrell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “Giving love the same way as usual is nice enough. But people get desensitized to typical experiences. When you give more and differently, it’s like stretching the elastic of your heart to a greater capacity for love and joy.” Leo

Now that’s what I’m talking about for this Friday night near the end of summer!

“3” Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61: “You can be sweet, but too much sweetness is no fun. Sometimes, your playfulness can come out in swipes. Knowing how far to go with mischief is the essence of intimacy.” Virgo

During this pandemic don’t I get a pass or does it only serve to heighten the tension?

“3”. Steve Aoki, 41: “A whole new level of adulthood kicks in with the realization that others measure the world and themselves differently from the way you do. Accepting this nonstandard system is its own badge of maturity.” Sagittarius

Ok, riddle me this. Of what do you speak, this maturity badge? Unique talent magnetized to this organizational growth stage, eh?

“4” Steve Harvey, 62: “You know an excellent suggestion when you hear it. You’ll follow up and soon be onto an interesting project, one that seems to create its own momentum.” Capricorn

Yeah, well that’s exactly what intrigued me over the years and is now unfolding with a life of its own. Or during this pandemic I can complete that jigsaw puzzle sitting on our dining room table.

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4733 to 4807.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

- Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

March 21, 2023

S2 E99 — Why Pay Over $100,000 When You Don’t Have To?

It was planned as a magnet for attracting the talent base to support growing financial, real estate and technology companies setting up shop on the former Irvine Ranch envisioned in the Irvine Company’s master plan.

“5” Steve Howey, 42: “You thought a thing ran its course. You thought you were done and wouldn’t return to it, but this business is, apparently, unfinished. Otherwise, it wouldn’t keep calling you back.” Cancer

Hi and welcome to Thursday’s Episode 99 in Season 2 of “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 20th day of August in the summer of 2020.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E98 — Why Your Company Simply Won’t Make It Out of Puberty; S2 E97 — Frame Blindness and Decision Traps; S2 E96 — Two Kindred Spirits Drawn to Mature Complications

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E99 — What’s in a Name? Baby Boy Names?; S1 E98 — Why Can’t I Leave 26 Orphans for a Well Deserved Vacation? ; S1 E97 — My Top 19 Reasons for Failing; S1 E96 — Old Rabbits Die Hard

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

We described two mini case studies of what it was like working behind the scenes at a mature companies in a financial and in a consumer industries.

33. Advisor — Executive and Healthcare MBA Program

Part One.

The University of California opened its doors in 1869 with just 10 faculty members and 40 students. Today, the UC system has more than 280,000 students and 227,000 faculty and staff, with 2.0 million alumni living and working around the world.

One of 10 campuses in the UC System

UC’s academic health centers provide broad access to top-ranked specialized care, support clinical teaching programs and develop new therapies. For news about UC breakthroughs and health initiatives.

Nine years before I moved to Orange County, UCI became the youngest campus in the system. It was planned as a magnet for attracting the talent base to support growing financial, real estate and technology companies setting up shop on the former Irvine Ranch envisioned in the Irvine Company’s master plan..

When I worked at Fairview State Hospital, one of the psychologists, a 115 Professional Practitioner, hailed from the School of Social Ecology. Co-workers felt he had been skating from his responsibilities at the hospital while he built up his private practice and taught at the university.

No-one I knew understood what Social Ecology meant. In a way, as a half-time intern working in the morning in the residence hall and then in the afternoon at the Behavior Modification Institute in Newport Center, I might have been half-skating.

Later I befriended the University’s Veterans Advisor seeking his assistance as I transitioned from one career into another. I ended up helping him as he came to the end of his employment while a student in the School of Social Ecology.

Four Talent Profiles Attracted to Systematic-Professional Organizations

The campus and its library and its influence economically as Orange County’s second-largest employer (contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide) made it a hub for researching potential careers and jobs.

In fact, I interviewed professors, 114 Brand-as-Experts and 116 Institutional Traditionalists, who’s research matched my interests. It what became the business school years later, I interviewed the dean who specialized in Organizational and Management Development to assess my chances at transitioning into that career.

The more important side benefit came in the form of a list of business graduates identified by their Orange Count employers to conduct further interviews.

One in particular led to an offer a few months later to join an internal consulting, management development and training team in a mature, large engineering and construction company located in a cluster of mirror-glass buildings and a corporate tower.

Two Systematic-Professionals Attracted to Maturity Growth Stage

Too academic, we echoed the conclusion of the client from the century-old consumer goods who hired my former boss and me. But we leveled it at an interdisciplinary team of professors we engaged to survey the implication of brand new technology at the engineering and construction company.

S2 E98 — Why Your Company Simply Won’t Make It Out of Puberty

If you consider the lifespan of an organization that has any sort of history — say over two generations or 40 years — you can see which tribes come in and out of favor. You’ll witness it as it evolves and leaps forward in predictable stages from infancy start-up through growth to maturity and decline and from simple to complex over time.

“5’’ Steve Carrell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “You will remember things differently than the other people around you. Write down your impressions to preserve the details because, later, you’ll be glad for these notes.” Leo

Hi and welcome to Sunday’s Episode 98 in Season 2 of “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 16th day of August in the summer of 2020.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E97 — Frame Blindness and Decision Traps; S2 E96 — Two Kindred Spirits Drawn to Mature Complications; S2 E95 — The Founder’s Curse Unleashed by the Edifice Complex

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E98 — Why Can’t I Leave 26 Orphans for a Well Deserved Vacation? ; S1 E97 — My Top 19 Reasons for Failing; S1 E96 — Old Rabbits Die Hard; S1 E95 — No Back to Work Days or Hump Days Allowed

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

In our last episode I described a mini case study of what it was like behind the scenes working at a mature company that was a century old. Now, a second, but in a different industry.

Multinational Food and Consumer Goods Corporation

A Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate founded in mid-1800s, headquartered Switzerland, grew to the largest publicly held food company in the world.

My former boss and now client, a 110 Analytical Specialist, brought me in to create a curriculum for his client a 109 Internal Change Agent (more on that in upcoming episodes) who headed up their internal University at their USA Headquarters Glendale division. Broadly, he wanted us to help him inject strategic learning capabilities into their leadership talent pool.

He wanted to expand their executive management’s perspective to include what could happen over their company’s lifespan moving forward. In organization learning circles research had’t really focused on companies which had been in business for over a century.

In fact, the lifespan of huge, solid companies is only 40 years.

Not all organizations even make it that far. The infant mortality rate is a decade. Arie De Geus says 40% of all newly created companies don’t last that long . Regardless of size, the average in Japan and Europe is 12.5 years.

So, our client became immediately attracted to us —my former boss and I had direct experience with the challenges unique to 100+ year old mature companies.

For instance, by functioning in the same mature stage for years and decades, current leaders (112 Loyal Survivalists) hadn’t experienced any other way of operating.

To combat that in his company, he wanted us to research and develop a curriculum during a two-year engagement based upon the latest models and best practices for:

- Inspiring a Shared Vision,
- Thinking Strategically,
- Leading Change,
- Building Alignment,
- Pursuing Excellence and
- Sharing Best Practices.

Mature organizations require four kinds of talented people – 112 Loyal Survivalists, 111 Agile Tiger Teams, 109 Internal Change Agents and 110 Analytical Specialists — who thrive in high affiliation and slower paced cultures.

Four Talent Profiles Attracted to Sustaining-Associates Organizations

You’ll find some filling roles in Human Resources as a Chief People Officer, Business Partners and Corporate Trainers. Others in Financial Analysis. Still others in Brand Management or in Inventory Control, Supply Chain and Procurement.

They manage the system of people, technologies, processes, and organizational structures to sustain the innovation they’ve already mastered years ago.

But, two “tribes” usually manage the political agenda to the exclusion of others. They are the talent clusters whose members represent the 20% who produce 80% of the results. And we know the mix of the two tribes changes at each growth transition. In any growth period there is a certain amount of resistance to new ways from the status-quo advocates.

In mature companies more Systematic-Professional talent profiles produce 80% of the results — 114 Brand-as-Experts and 116 Institutional Traditionalists. And, you’ll find fewer Paradoxy-Morons or Emerging-Entrepreneurs still employed.

Two Systematic-Professionals Attracted to Maturity Growth Stage

Ironically, our engagement formed out of a chance encounter in Monterey, California at a conference promoting 114 Brand-as-Experts, the sort you’d find in major universities or think tanks.

My former boss had been engaged in a business divorce from one of those experts in which his role was to convert purely just-in-case education into more targeted and practical training workshops.

Over drinks in the bar between conference seminars, our new client for our 2-year engagement bemoaned how presenters seemed just too academic for his needs, although they seemed to be in high demand.

Years later, in January 2017, after our 2-year engagement, the multinational corporation announced that it was relocating its US headquarters from Glendale, California to Virginia.

Summary

The resulting divisional structure eventually outlasts its usefulness when it triggers the “Control Crisis” that Systematic-Professionals help bridge by tightening and centralizing operations in a complicated matrix structure featuring data-driven methods and systems.

180 – Degree Shift in Success by Stage

Growth Stage	Key Success Factor	Leading to a Crisis	New Success Key
Start Up	Loosen	Leadership	Tighten
Emerging	Tighten	Functional	Loosen
Rapid	Loosen	Autonomy	Tighten
Sustained	Tighten	Repetition	Loosen
Maturity	Loosen	Control	Tighten

As more functional departments proliferate the Paradoxy-Morons disappear, not fitting into cultures built to reward affiliation and mastery.

And, the days of the maverick, do-what-ever-it-takes team loyalty — highly rewarded for fire-fighting heroics become numbered.

Where to Find the Best Fit

Talent Profile	Growth Stage	Organization Type
101 Breakpoint Inventors	Start Up	Paradoxy-Morons
103 Commercial Innovators	Start Up	Paradoxy-Morons
105 Marketing Athletes	Start Up	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
107 Resilient Product Teams	Emerging Growth	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
108 Core Business Group	Emerging Growth	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
111 Agile Tiger Teams	Rapid Growth	Sustaining-Associates
112 Loyal Survivalists	Rapid Growth	Sustaining-Associates
110 Analytical Specialists	Sustained Growth	Sustaining-Associates
114 Brand-as-Experts	Maturity	Systematic-Professionals
116 Institutional Traditionalists	Maturity	Systematic-Professionals

At this stage of development most of the focus by the organization is on inside operations and not enough on customers – their care and feeding. It’s as if the customers – frequently in large numbers – are taken for granted. And that sets up yet another opportunity to bonk.

Mature organizations have vested interests in the way things were. While not overtly describing themselves as status quo advocates, many long-time Sustaining-Associates and Systematic-Professionals resist disruptive changes required to “jump paths” out of a declining trajectory.

If the organization continues to extend what they’ve always done, they fall victim to what Joel Barker calls paradigm blindness. An over-extended strength becomes a fatal flaw. The organization can’t see what is necessary to pull out of its decline. And the longer it takes for leaders of the organization to recognize that they are on the path to disaster, the more disruptive the solution becomes.

It’s a classic pattern.

Evidence

“3” Steve Zahn, 51: “Good fortune follows socially astute moves, such as including everyone, making introductions and lobbing the conversational ball in excellent, interesting and positive directions.” Scorpio

Before the pandemic I was all over this advice. Now, not so much. Will this pandemic end? Will we return to normal?

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

Today’s Holiday Birthday:

Your superpower is your incredible imagination. Direct it to create relationships you want, pursue far-flung interests and pull together scenes that others wouldn’t have thought possible. Team this amazing sense of vision with great faith and it will be as though you have harnessed the winds of fortune to do your bidding.

Some of you know I’ve progressed from letters, to steno notebooks and 3X5 cards to Hypercard to do just that. The problem I found was two-fold. The first taking the time to write everything down and second, later finding the kernel of wisdom I could use.

“4” Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61: “The key to success is three-pronged: know what you want; make a plan; stick with it. This sounds simple, but if it really were, everyone would be doing it all of the time.” Virgo

Why am I following the Tau of Steves as interpreted from the Holiday Tau if I wasn’t searching for a magical shortcut?

“3” Steve Nash, 45: “It’s not every day that you come across an endeavor that can capture and hold your full attention. Once you give yourself over to it, there is no going back.” Aquarius

Boy, in some ways I wish the reverse is true. For in the beginning of every endeavor that speaks to you, you’re filled with passion. But, in the middle the drudgeries stack up. Can you tell that’s exactly where I am with “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit”?

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4733 to 4807.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

- Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

March 15, 2023

S4 E36 — Big Rigs, Skull Valley and Yarnell Hotshots

“Why are there so many trucks on the road?” Emma the Baroness asked rhetorically. And, then I glanced in my rearview mirror and spotted a white hatchback riding the right shoulder, “Like he was frustrated by the slow pace and wanted to cheat.”

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

Knowledge ATMs

A peak behind the scenes of self-publishing, crowdfunding, and working for yourself

Table of Contents

Hi and welcome to Saturday’s 36th Episode in Season 4 of “Our Disruptively Resilient Year” on this 7th day of May in the spring of 2022.

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @KnowLabs suite of 36 digital magazines, according to my analytics, grew from 12817 this week to 12880 organically grown followers.
- Orange County Beach Towns 220 viewers stopped by the week before.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Context

I felt much better after sleeping in on Saturday morning. Jay made coffee and waited for us to emerge from their guest room. Elle exercised and stretched upstairs.

While Jay and Elle claimed nobody was in a hurry to do something I could tell Jay itched to take us on a tour.

But, our conversations continued about how when we transitioned to the 10 freeway our CarPlay Apple Maps cautioned us that all lanes were block up ahead. Emma the Baroness and I exchanged anxious glances not knowing what to do while Siri assured us we were still on the fastest route.

A few hours later we saw no sign of blocked lanes. Sure the traffic flow slowed, but the lane blockage cleared as far as we could tell.

A couple of times Siri would announce a traffic slowdown and gave us an option to exit. We declined. “We followed your advice not to take alternative routes, Jay.”

Emma the Baroness and I took turns telling the story about the portion an hour or two west of Blythe and Quartzite while in the middle of nowhere and climbing two lanes our progress again slowed by back-to-back big rigs ever so slowly passing each other.

“Why are there so many trucks on the road?” Emma the Baroness asked rhetorically.

And, then I glanced in my rearview mirror and spotted a white hatchback riding the right shoulder, “Like he was frustrated by the slow pace and wanted to cheat.”

“One CHP with siren and lights flashing from the opposite direction, drives down the median embankment to turn and speed in our direction,” I add.

They wanted to know if we ever found out what was going on. Emma the Baroness told them we were dead stopped in traffic, a tanker had pulled over into the shoulder, but when all four CHP cars finally began waving everybody through we saw the white car catty-cornered with its hatchback open.

The last time we slowed behind a huge bulldozer as we headed downhill after we passed through Skull Valley and Kirkland following Jay’s texted directions as we approached Prescott.

Skull Valley, Arizona Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Jay added, “You noticed the basecamp for firefighters on your way in, right?” He told us Elle had raised money to donate food for them, as they’re on high alert for fires in this part of the West — Prescott National Forest.

“Yeah,” I said. And, we crested on a hill where a memorial honors those hotshot firefighters who lost their lives a few years ago when surrounded by flames and they couldn’t make their way out.

Yarnell Hill Fire Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Emma the Baroness wanted to know why the haze seemed more than usual for the part of I-10 which cut through the Coachella Valley, even when we passed exits for Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage and La Quinta.

“Where are the fires?” she asked. Here in California, in Arizona where we’re headed or is smoke blowing west from New Mexico we both wanted to know.

And with that, he said he had to check on their property which was closing escrow and invited me along while our wives talked about us and got ready for adventure.

His realtor who represented him and the buyer had tempted him to sell it when she told him how much he could get for it and, oh by the way, she had a buyer for it.

The only sticking point that Jay felt the builder should fix and the new buyer should be responsible for was a flaw in the guest bathroom bathtub.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

“5” Steve Smith, 30, Stevie Nicks, 72: “You’ll sort the puzzle, decipher the meaning of the code, or discover the intention. This ability to sense what’s really going on will serve you well and help a friend too.” Gemini

We concluded the three-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed — during the “normal” pre-pandemic year compared to the pandemic year, and more recently to the paradoxically normal year.

Season Four continues now within domestic and global chaos.

Previously in Season Four, The Disruptively Resilient Year

S4 E35 — Prescott Pitstop Knocks Me Off Balance; S4 E34 — Preconceived Notions Hit the Road for Prescott; S4 E33 — When Was The Last Time Honesty and Character Counted?

Related from Season Three, the Paradoxically Normal Year

S3 E36 — Placebo, Meaningful Coincidence or Just Feeling Lucky; S3 E35 — This Ain’t No Zemblanity; S3 E34 — Why You’re Susceptible to Subliminal Suggestions Like …; S3 E33 — Do Meaningful Coincidences Really Exist?

Related from Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E36 — Turning Lemons into Margaritas; S2 E35 — Was this Pandemic Year a 1-Off or New Way of Life?; S2 E34 — Why Is This Kicking Off the 4th Industrial Revolution?; S2 E33 — What Happens When Your Business Collapses?

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E36 — Day 36 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E35 — Day 35 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E34 — Day 34 of My 1-Year Experiment; S1 E33 — Day 33 of My 1-Year Experiment;

Evidence

Today’s Holiday Birthday:

Though inspiration has been known to strike you, in the months ahead it occurs with a gentler and more constant touch. You’ll absorb the wisdom of great minds. Acting on the pulse of creativity, you’ll bring into form: events, teams, systems, presentations and more. Key relationships will bring sweetness and surprise to your days.

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

“4” Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “It’s scary to go from what you know and love to what you don’t know and aren’t sure you’re going to like. But this is also the way to find out who you are, so it’s worth it.” Taurus

I guess so. Wait, I know so based on how many career transitions I negotiated in my life so far. What’s that old marketing and startup saying, “Fake it until you make it?” I’m re-rating your TauBit, because it just dawned on me that I’m following the full cycle aspect of this roadtrip into a different website I administer. How will that work out?

“5” Steve Smith, 30, Stevie Nicks, 72: “You’ll sort the puzzle, decipher the meaning of the code, or discover the intention. This ability to sense what’s really going on will serve you well and help a friend too.” Gemini

Is this all about the sheer number of “Patriot” flags flying in Arizona and specifically in Jay and Elle’s neighborhood including at their home?

“4” Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61; Stephen King, 72: “To the outsider watching you mingle, it looks like you’re having a good time, but inwardly it feels like work. Rightly so. Building relationships is the essential labor of success.” Virgo

Negotiating these encounters make me seem like and ENTP — the emphasis on extrovert. But, the shear energy depletion I feel at the end of engagement clearly signals I’m a card-carrying introvert, INTP.

“4” Steve Nash, 45: “You’ll get carried away with a project and you may forget about various responsibilities and healthful necessities. But your complete involvement is warranted — you’re about to make a breakthrough.” Aquarius

Did I pick this TauBit because it was true, or because it is just wishful thinking like many others over four seasons?

“5” Steve Jobs, (1955 – 2011): “While understanding what everyone stands to gain or lose from a situation may be key to achieving your goals, you mostly study people for the fun of it.” Pisces

Yup, that’s me. I’m a quick read of intentions and motivations and incentives before leading the way forward. And, yes it is shear fun!

Long-Form

- “Here, Right Matters: An American Story” by Alexander Vindman. “We’d long been confused by the president’s policy of accommodation and appeasement of Russia, the United States’ most pressing major adversary. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, seizing the Crimean Peninsula, attacking its industrial heartland, the Donbass, from the capital, Kyiv. By 2019, little had changed, Russian military and security forces and their proxy separatists continued to occupy the Donbass. The biggest change was to Ukraine’s importance as a bulwark against Russian aggression weeks earlier, the White House had abruptly put a hold on nearly four hundred million dollars.”
- David Enrich begins his book with a suicide in “Deutsche Bank Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction” and then meticulously details the bank’s Russian money laundering operations. Deutsche’s Russian business surged after revenues had fallen 50% due to the 2008 financial crisis. Putin’s Russia, poured in to Deutsche from deals it did with VTB Bank, linked to the Kremlin’s intelligence apparatus. Deutsche positioned itself as a crucial cog in “The Laundromat” by doing what couldn’t be done — processing cross-border transactions for banks that were too small and didn’t have offices outside their home countries.
- “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy” by Jamie Raskin recalls one tragedy no parent should endure — the suicide of his son — and then a second tragedy at almost the same time — the insurrection on January 6th 2021, that terrified he and his congressional peers who were tasked by the Constitution to routinely oversee the orderly transfer of power from one former president to the duly elected new President.
- “A Warning” by Anonymous (Miles Taylor) written prior to the January 6th Insurrection as an insider’s account documenting how frequently the former President’s behavior and rage without any “guard rails” showed just how far he would go to win the next election at any cost while spinning lies and misinformation on top of each other.
- “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa provides anecdotes, stories and inside reporting documenting the controversial last days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as well as the presidential transition and early presidency of Joe Biden.
- “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising,” by Joshua Green tracks the money behind the scenes leading up to the 2016 presidential election and the growing influence of Steve Bannon’s network of extreme nationalists.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

March 14, 2023March 14, 2023

S2 E97 — Frame Blindness and Decision Traps

These are the experts who love their profession instead of a specific organization like Sustaining-Associates do. They’re attracted to the challenges that come with large, complicated systems found in most organizations at the Mature stage of growth.

“5” Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “Stay away from the ‘I did it, and so can you’ type of messaging today because it’s overly simplistic and does not account for the myriad of ways that people are so different from one another.” Aries

Hi and welcome to Saturday’s Episode 97 in Season 2 of “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 15th day of August in the summer of 2020.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E96 — Two Kindred Spirits Drawn to Mature Complications; S2 E95 — The Founder’s Curse Unleashed by the Edifice Complex; S2 E94 — Sustained Growth: Slicing Turnover and Grooming Experts

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E97 — My Top 19 Reasons for Failing; S1 E96 — Old Rabbits Die Hard; S1 E95 — No Back to Work Days or Hump Days Allowed; S1 E94 — Wasn’t There a Movie about the Tau of Steve?

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

9. Consultant Life and Mutual Fund Company

It was founded in the late 1800s by a former governor in the state capitol of California. Roughly a century later the executives decided to move to Newport Beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean so families could enjoy a higher standard of living.

It was the kind of mature organization that employed maintenance workers just to polish its brick entry way. It was the kind of mature organization that hired and groomed knowledge workers before the term was coined.

116 Institutional Traditionalists

They included 116 Institutional Traditionalists, Systematic-Professionals delivering products and services in heavily regulated markets the company served, such as annuities, and mutual funds, a variety of investment products and services to individuals, businesses, and pension plans.

Four Talent Profiles Attracted to Systematic-Professional Organizations

Why? Because 116 Institutional Traditionalists are adept at managing fact-based complex systems with traditional analytical methods and tools. They’re dedicated to maintaining the institution’s smooth running.

They defend the status quo by believing in preserving the rules and procedures. They are practical, realistic and matter-of-fact. In short 116 Institutional Traditionalists make good administrators because of their talent for organization.

Like other large hospitals, banking and financial institutions it was probable that a supervisor or a manager or even an executive hadn’t encountered a major transition from one growth stage to another over their careers.

Two Systematic-Professionals Attracted to Maturity Growth Stage

The buzzword my client described when he engaged me was this project was a major cultural change.

But, it would unfold over many years, so urgency wasn’t felt, as much as it was anticipated.

I had worked in several large, mature companies and had come face-to-face with immune systems that rejected any type of change.

Maintaining the status quo across product lines and departments and divisions had become a way of life.

My client told me our challenge was — how can you inject innovation into a century’s old mature company?

It was a complex, complicated maneuver requiring tons of new knowledge and new idea packaging.

It reflected the company’s structural change from a mutual ownership to a mutual holding company business model.

114 Brand-as-Experts

They become known for their impartial analysis and an affinity for agreed upon standards. They excel in fact-based work situations in which you advance through continuing education, peer reviews and achieving licenses.

The co-founder served as a model. He grew from being an investment analyst into a fund manager and co-founded their global fixed income investment business with hundreds of billions managed in a Total Return Fund.

He was known as “the nation’s most prominent bond investor”. As a 114 Brand-as-Expert he advised the Treasury during financial crises and was described as a fund manager who made people filthy-wealthy.

In a way, he became the epitome of what my client had in mind for educating supervisors, managers and executives.

The goal as to bottle his ability to identify market inefficiencies and exploit them by adjusting the company’s strategies. He embraced new technologies and exotic derivative products while harassing the power of the internet.

There was a requirement for a special blend of talents and skills across high-yield businesses building better traders and analysts and salespeople.

Rrom a management and executive development strategy it was to cultivate the ability to distill complex ideas into something simple enough to take action.

My client wanted build a hybrid curriculum drawing upon university experts with internal consultants to offer the early stages of a corporate education division.

“Advanced Curriculum for Officers” focused more on managing divisions and new units in anticipation of favoring newer industry niches and technologies, but leading in a strong tradition based on an industry resistant to change.

My first role was to manage external experts, define the curriculum based on executive assessments and development plans, and to provide referrals to seminars and recommended development activities.

Plans were based upon individual assessments. They defined gaps to be closed to qualify for the next advancement step, and admission into the high potential development talent pool.

The curriculum was the first for officers and included new courses I researched and designed, updated management courses they had (Management by Objectives was obsolete) and a curriculum I had developed and Fluor and Unisys.

The plan included an “intrapreneurially shared services approach” I had described as a business model I’d experienced and managed before.

During and after “de-mutalization” breakups, my client’s corporate group would have to sell and customize courses for the new business groups while competing with outside vendors and universities.

Top priorities for my client were how to bring about change, how to prevent frame blindness and avoid decision bias from a long list of decision-making traps plus scenario building tools.

I was all too happy to oblige!

Evidence

“3” Steve Zahn, 51: “You’ve known things to be more work than anticipated, but today’s thing is ridiculous. Devote yourself when it’s adding up to something that will matter. This isn’t. Get out of it.” Scorpio

Wait, what?

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

So, this is really hard to do. Except what I intend to accomplish is not so much copy me, but to choose which talent cultures work for you as a best fit. Ask yourself how many degrees from high to medium do you need: independence, affiliation, speed, mastery, disruptive innovation, improvement, new knowledge creation or embodied knowledge.

“3” Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “The reality of a situation is much better than you’re thinking it is. You just have to ask different questions of it. A person coming from a different place in life will help you frame things another way.” Taurus

How in the world is this unending pandemic much better than I think?

“3” Steve Smith, 30: “Any mistakes in the work will actually be mistakes of planning. The more time you spend thinking ahead and setting yourself up for a win, the better your day will go.” Gemini

Unless, of course, I fall victim to the curse plaguing almost every introvert I know — OBE, overtaken by events!

“3” Steve Howey, 42: “Your natural responses cannot be correct or incorrect. They just are. The behavior you choose after you feel a certain way can be very much wrong or right. You’ll choose carefully tonight.” Cancer

I guess we’ll have to wait for 8 hours or more to find out.

“5” Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61: “It turns out that the period of time when you felt like you were meandering was actually a long and deliberate planning stage for what’s going on with you today.” Virgo

Busted. How long? Almost a year of surviving until I could break the code of jargon my new career spoke in. And then that career transition was repeated and repeated in several industries, types of companies, and at various growth stages.

“3” Steve Kerr, 54: “When you are in an observant, receptive and artistic mood, ‘always,’ ‘never’ and other extremes of language fall away. You revel in life’s many colors and shades beyond black and white.” Libra

As much as I want to own this one, I only picked it for the first part of the first sentence up until the second comma. What was I thinking?

“4” Steve Harvey, 62: “There was a time when you stretched yourself to fit a role. And then, slowly, steadily, you grew to fit the title. You’re about to repeat this process with a new challenge.” Capricorn

Was there ever! I totally talked myself into my first job in a new career in a mature company about to fall into a decline. I learned so much in it and didn’t know it at the time but it fueled this original research I taught at UCI’s Executive MBA program. So, bring on the new challenge! And, now I’m struggling to describe in this “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” work-in-progress

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4636 to 4733.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

- Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

March 6, 2023

S3 E44 — Make It Rhyme To Work Each Time

One remains active and always on 24/7 generating impressions, thoughts, intuitions and is the default basis for how we navigate our lives. We have no conscious clue about how all those feelings and beliefs entered our mind.

“5” Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “Your creative endeavors are like a net you cast into the world. They will bring you some of the things you chase, as well as what just happened to be drifting by, caught in the middle of that pursuit.” Aries

Hi and welcome to Thursday’s Episode 44 in Season 3 of “My Paradoxically Normal Year” on this 13th day of May in the spring of 2021 — which is a three-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic year and then in the pandemic year, and now months after.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Previously from Season Three, the Paradoxically Normal Year

S3 E43 — Add a Little Foresight to My Misdemeanor Tab; S3 E42 — Greta, Juliette and the Partridge Family at Trestles; S3 E41 — What’s Up with Telluride or Humboldt County or Bodega Bay?

Related from Season Two, The Pandemic Year

S2 E44 — Celebrating Emma the Baroness Tribal Quarantine Style; S2 E43 — See What You’ve Been Missing …; S2 E42 — It Was Short and Sweet, but Heart-Felt; S2 E41 — A Pandemic End to Real Estate and Consulting?

Related from Season One, The Normal Year

S1 E44 — Google Me Some Chopped Liver; S1 E43 — Desperation on Such a Summer’s Day; S1 E42 — Love on the Run; S1 E41 — The Dream Was Over, Long Live the Dream

Context

Is it simply ignorance and superstition fighting against intelligence as Ulysses S. Grant once said after the Civil War?

Miles Taylor, Former Chief of Staff of Homeland Security Department and “Anonymous” author believes we are witnessing a newer civil war with constitutional implications and threatening our democratic way of life at stake.

Here’s what I’ve been ruminating about —has the way our brain evolved aided and abetted the gulf between patriotism and domestic terrorism? Between ignorance and intelligence?

A third author joining Miles Taylor and Kurt Andersen may provide more insight, even as I become slightly distracted from my work on the “Conclusion” section of my “1-Year Natural Experiment Report.”

You know the one which simply started with me stealing your horoscope when you weren’t looking.

And, then wrestling with my guilt by asking “why?”

And now, this.

In Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” he reveals two selves residing in all of us.

Kahneman tells us that back in the 1970s he and his colleagues all assumed humans lived their lives as generally rational, reasonable creatures.

Our beliefs, they assumed, were by and large reality-based and arrived at by deliberation, weighing facts, opinions, and running calculations.

If you observed the rationals out in the wild you’d see people who exuded less warmth than others, while they doggedly pursued internally consistent choices, judgements, conclusions and strategies.

The only time we opted out of that state of mind, their theory went, was when our emotions like fear, affection and hatred abruptly pulled us away.

Now we know the reverse is true.

We live our lives as the “experiencing self” who ignores time. It creates a bias in us for short periods of intense joy instead of longer periods of happiness.

Our remembering self is not always accurate, but it keeps our “individual story” alive.

That’s the good news.

The sometimes devastating news is we can fall victim to our pre-programmed errors of judgment and choice when more is at stake.

Most often we just aren’t aware of the errors or how we fell susceptible to them.

Out in the wild you’d recognize the experiencing self by seeing behaviors like impulsivity, excessive emotionality, or stubborn resistance to reasonable arguments.

So what?

So if all of that is true and we add the fact that the rational mind is lazy — most of the time rubber-stamping what the experiencing self serves up — then that’s why we jump to conclusions with only the sketchiest of information.

And, why we spot patterns when none exist in the reality-based world and accept conspiracy theories when they fill in the blanks.

And why we assess the degree of truthiness by how easy we can find something like it from recent memory, or by how widespread the media covers it, especially if celebrities are involved.

And it would explain why authoritarian regimes pressure and discredit independent media from fact checking and investigative reporting.

Oh, and another of our Achilles heels — familiarity — trumps our efforts to search for facts on our own (too hard of an effort) in favor of the easy and familiar.

So, the reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition.
Authoritarians and marketers take advantage of our evolutionary wiring.
They’ll do anything to reduce cognitive strain, by making their message simple and memorable.
Almost anything they communicate in verse repeated over and over will be swallowed as the truth and we won’t even know why we believe it.

If it can rhyme it’ll work every time.

Evidence

So, Zahnny do you agree this is a start?

“5” Steve Zahn, 51: “Everyone has their own private worries. You’re braver about this than most. You realize that hiding can be more energy than it’s worth. You also know that your story cannot inspire other people if you don’t tell it.” Scorpio

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

So if your Holiday Tau is true, Steve, then trolling through the works Miles Taylor, Kurt Andersen, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Alvin Toffler, Marshall McLuhan or listening to Sam Harris’ podcasts will make my creative net work?

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @KnowLabs suite of 36 digital magazines jumps from 8138 to 8193 organically grown followers

Foresight

- Nikola May Snag Order For 100 Battery, Hydrogen Big Rigs From Los Angeles Ports Trucker

Quality-of-Life

- Dumpsites off the California Coast Are Worse Than Originally Thought – Sunset

Long-Form

- “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler, a classic I feel which still holds up. As the pace of change quickens we experience self-doubt, anxiety and fear. We become tense and tire easily, until we are overwhelmed, face-to-face with a crisis situation. Without a clear grasp of relevant reality or beginning with clearly defined values and priorities, we feel a deepening sense of confusion and uncertainty. Our intellectual bewilderment leads to disorientation at the level of personal values. Decision stress results from acceleration, novelty and diversity conflicts. Acceleration pressures us to make quick decisions. Novelty increases the difficulty and length of time while diversity intensifies the anxiety with an increase in the number of options and the amount of information needed to process. The result is a slower reaction time.
- Daniel Kahneman’s, “Thinking Fast and Slow”describes two different ways the brain forms thoughts: “System 1” which is meant as a fictional shorthand — not as a brain system or structure: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, unconscious. “System 2”: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious. I’m learning a lot about my energy levels first described from within an introversion frame now, from within differences between System 1 and the harder working, energy depletion System 2. Self-control, for instance is hard and takes a lot of energy to accomplish. When I write the concentration requires effort until I can find the “flow.” Implications for True Belief — it’s easy to stay in System 1 vs. critical thinking — System 2. Set some marketing and working on the business goals — System 2 and then ignore them by following the lateral thinking and associative thinking which Leo da V invites me to do — System 1.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

March 1, 2023

S2 E96 — Two Kindred Spirits Drawn to Mature Complications

“5” Steve Carell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “You may come across work you did long ago and discover that it makes no sense to you now, or you may be utterly baffled by a decision you made way back when. See how far you’ve come?” Leo

Hi and welcome to Friday’s Episode 96 in Season 2 of “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 14th day of August in the summer of 2020.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E95 — The Founder’s Curse Unleashed by the Edifice Complex; S2 E94 — Sustained Growth: Slicing Turnover and Grooming Experts; S2 E93 — Who It Takes to Keep Growth at It’s Peak

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E96 — Old Rabbits Die Hard; S1 E95 — No Back to Work Days or Hump Days Allowed; S1 E94 — Wasn’t There a Movie about the Tau of Steve?; S1 E93 — Why is it easier to Hate than to Love the other Half?

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

In previous episodes we described Start Up, Emerging Growth, Rapid Growth and Sustained Growth stages. But, each with the emphasis on how a specific stage provides another better fit opportunity for one or more of 16 Talent Profiles.

16 Talent Profiles found in Four Organization Types

Hopefully making it easier to follow by color code, we’ve been building the case for finding another option for a better fit in a stage of growth. We covered 50% of the available opportunities through the Sustained Growth Stage with the addition of the third Sustaining-Associate Talent Profile, 110 Analytical Specialists.

Sustained Growth Stage

The first two Sustaining-Associates, 111 Agile Tiger Teams and 112 Loyal Survivalists, enjoy an attraction to the previous stage as the table shows.

Talent Profile	Growth Stage	Organization Type
101 Breakpoint Inventors	Start Up	Paradoxy-Morons
103 Commercial Innovators	Start Up	Paradoxy-Morons
105 Marketing Athletes	Start Up	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
107 Resilient Product Teams	Emerging Growth	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
108 Core Business Group	Emerging Growth	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
111 Agile Tiger Teams	Rapid Growth	Sustaining-Associates
112 Loyal Survivalists	Rapid Growth	Sustaining-Associates
110 Analytical Specialists	Sustained Growth	Sustaining-Associates

Systematic-Professionals are the experts who love their profession instead of a specific organization like Sustaining-Associates do.

They’re attracted to the challenges that come with large, complicated systems.

Four Talent Profiles Attracted to Systematic-Professional Organizations

Methods and Metrics

On the “right side” of the Systematic-Professionals, 116 Institutional Traditionalists and 114 Brand-as-Experts both prefer to distance themselves to remain objective and follow a well-articulated and tested methodology.

Those affiliated with a professional practice or employed in a corporation as a staff department — specialize in the application of their embodied knowledge.

Two Systematic-Professionals Attracted to Maturity Growth Stage

In our next episodes we’ll explore how the key success factors prevalent in mature organizations favor Systematic-Professionals in some case studies.

Evidence

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

Today’s Holiday Birthday:

Kindred souls abound, and as you put more into the world that speaks to the depths of who you are, they emerge to share with you. You’ll make so many fortuitous choices — some by complete accident — though it’s the decisions you make with mental clarity that will do the most good for you and yours.

“4” Steve Winwood, 71; Stevie Wonder, 69; Stephen Colbert, 56: “People get bored with one another. That’s part of the deal in any relationship. The best way to keep it interesting is to create space while you work on things that make you feel vital and renewed.” Taurus

In relationships and at work, we introverts do need our space and time to recharge our batteries like an iPhone overwhelmed with the photos and messages and

“4” Steve Smith, 30: “Today features an immersive, joyful and satisfying experience. The best part is you know when you’re in it; you note and document what’s going on around you; and later, you can savor this again.” Gemini

In the flow — that professional state — of creativity is truly satisfying. I do know when I’m in it and I’m much more compulsive about documenting where I left off and what I had intended to do.

Utterly baffled rings true for me, and to be honest making sense of it inspired me to write this Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit.

“4” Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61; Stephen King, 72: “Robots can repeat precise maneuvers tirelessly but cannot respond to anything outside of their programming. For you, repetition gets tiresome indeed. You need fresh circumstances to think your way around.” Virgo

Repetition breeds boredom in my being, which may be the reason I favored the mastery and independence of mature organizations but not to the degree that it inhibits my creativity.

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4636 to 4733.

Foresight

Quality-of-Life

Long-Form

- Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION

February 28, 2023

S2 E95 — The Founder’s Curse Unleashed by the Edifice Complex

We used to call it “edifice complex” — you build a monument (new building) to yourself because you made it as an entrepreneur. But, in doing so you take your eye off the market and bad things happen. The disk drive industry was a roller coaster of cut throat cost competition .

“5” Steve Smith, 30: “There are many levels to getting to know a subject. It can be argued that one doesn’t come to a full understanding until having taught the thing a few times. You’ll go deep today.” Gemini

Hi and welcome to Thursday’s Episode 95 in Season 2 of “My Pandemic Year Natural Experiment” on this 13th day of August in the summer of 2020.

“The Tau of Steves: What You Don’t Know Could Fill a Book”

Table of Contents

Season One and Two are a two-year examination of how bits of wisdom changed during the “normal” pre-pandemic and then in this unfolding pandemic year.

Previously in Season Two, the Pandemic Year

S2 E94 — Sustained Growth: Slicing Turnover and Grooming Experts; S2 E93 — Who It Takes to Keep Growth at It’s Peak; S2 E92 — Herding Cats Towards a Tornado

Related from Season One, the Normal Year

S1 E95 — No Back to Work Days or Hump Days Allowed; S1 E94 — Wasn’t There a Movie about the Tau of Steve?; S1 E93 — Why is it easier to Hate than to Love the other Half?; S1 E92 — Shh … Secrets Husbands Keep to Ourselves

Context

This is a continuation of “Volume Two Manuscript — WorkFit” a work-in-progress.

We’ve been exploring what it’s like behind the scenes working in a Sustained Growth company. We broke it down into two parts. Part One described the trials and tribulations working in an electronic distribution company.

Part Two tells a technology story struggling with sustaining all the gains it enjoyed after emerging from Rapid Growth.

Part Two

25. Director Continuous Improvement —

Turbulent Industry

The company competed in a roller coaster, cutthroat industry dependent upon their customer technology product demands. It was a new corporate initiative for customizing quality and process improvement programs to meet their unique needs — how to learn from your success and from your mistakes in some sort of organized way

Corporate Education

It was up to Corporate Education to forecast not too far in the future and determine how supervision and management development training and courses were required for sustaining their business while anticipating what had to be in place for becoming a mature, stable business. In the beginning they relied heavily on consultants to provide the content and teach the courses. I was one of them.

Senior management tasks Corporate Education to spearhead the introduction of continuous improvement . They sourced content from a variety of programs, books, consultants and nearly free content from associations.

But they needed a director to manage facilitators from all functions.

Adding Analytical Specialists to Sustain Growth

Continuous Process Improvement

When engineering companies place a premium on time-to-market for handing out bonuses to their product managers, those manager want to pick their own exceptional players they can trust, and shield them from unnecessary activities like attending an endless seeming stream of meeting.

My take on it for that disk drive technology company was, yes you have to shrink your product development time-to-market, but you have to be able to improve upon what you learn in the process, over and over again.

Manufacturing from Southeast Asia

Since this was a corporate initiative I remember getting the days of the week wrong when we attempted to schedule our first video conference call with our Singapore CPI facilitators. And how difficult it was to present agenda items while moving the camera around to whoever began discussing a specific problem for inviting input from the community of change agents.

Time-to-Money

A senior executive from the San Diego division of Unisys had been recruited to convince and persuade executive management to process run business. He had me assume the meeting facilitation role as we conspired to build a consensus and commitment from the top of the organization.

Edifice Complex

Their headquarters building consolidated California departments into one place having grown from a startup before “making it.” The CEO built a brand new high rise headquarters visible for everyone to see traveling from John Wayne Airport south on the 405 Freeway towards San Diego.

The disk drive industry was a roller coaster of cut throat cost competition. Ups and downs. The reason for continuous improvement was to smooth out the swings — to “rationalize” operations.

Some refer to it as the founder’s curse. You hit a milestone and you build a headquarters to house your sprawling groups of employees dispersed and distributed in local commercial offices.

And, almost a year to the day from when you celebrate with the ribbon cutting dignitaries your market shifts away from you and you free fall into a decline.

During which they either sell or lease their building to other companies on the rise and distribute their workforce to smaller footprint buildings.

Consequences of Not Mastering Growth Crises

Cowboy Product Managers

Product managers from the startup days bristled at all the new processes overlayed on their work. They were “cowboys” and almost all of them were boys, and we took time away from their rapid, get it done at all cost, results the industry demanded from them.

I remember one guy who resisted the implementation saying to the CEO, “Look Roger, let me get this straight. You want me to add more time in my product by insisting I hold these bullshit meetings. You and I both know you don’t bonus me that way.”

What’s more important — driving revenue or scheduling yet another series of non-productive meetings?

And what’s wrong with flying by the seat of our pants and doing whatever it took to meet new time-to-market product introductions?

Nothing.

A Dressing Down and Out

My facilitator and I exchange stunned looks.

I got nailed along with one of my facilitators by the executive vice president, my boss, at the beginning of a Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) team meeting.

The executive “went non-linear,” as one of the other executives fondly explains, and a trait, up until then, hidden from me.

With a phone message scribbled in her hand from the director of human resources saying, “dismissed” she appears abruptly out of nowhere, smoke bellowing out of her nostrils. “I want to see you and you.”

“We don’t dismiss, we want CPI to be a positive experience! Get it!? I don’t care what you two personally think, you two don’t dismiss anyone!”

With that she stormed off.

Finally, I think … since I’m speechless at this point, I get the treatment she is famous for. I flash back to an earlier boss who told me that if I didn’t get into trouble, I wasn’t doing my job. The motto was ” It’s better to beg forgiveness than ask for permission.”

Immune System Rejection

Its corporate immune system and talent culture reflected their preferred seat of the pants high pace flavor of time-to-market product introduction.

An investment with little to show for it because it took more than 18 months to two years before positive results competed with shorter and shorter and faster operating standards.

Cowboys don’t shine when the business grows to a more mature size and run and gun tactics cause more delays. A brand new building signaled it was time to act like grown ups, use data to guide product development and cut down on waste. The cowboys were corralled and they didn’t like it one bit.

Our sponsor, one of the early founders of the company during a downturn sided with to cowboys and jettisoned our implementation.

The company had followed the roller coaster ride of start-up, emerging growth and then reset and then sustainable growth and then reset, so I knew going in it would be a high risk opportunity.

Its corporate immune system and talent culture reflected their preferred seat of the pants high pace flavor of time-to-market product introduction.

Product managers wanted to know which was more important, driving revenue or scheduling yet another series of non-productive meetings requiring them to manage their operations by data?

They won, I Lost

On Tuesday, my first official day back from vacation, the morning phone message from executive secretary to meet with my boss at 1:30 p.m. fit the pattern.

My facilitator had explained that after these flare-ups, the exec always patches things up with an apology. That’s my expectation.

So I show up, kind of rehearsing how I will make it easy for her to make up and she says,

“This won’t be your best meeting.”

Intuitively, it was clear that the ship had hit an iceberg and there were only a few lifeboats available.

Unfortunately, I’d be walking the plank without even so much as a wetsuit for the cold choppy waters.

“You’re in the layoffs, part of our division’s fair share. I didn’t agree with it,” she said, “You’re a super facilitator, especially with my staff … who aren’t the easiest in the world to get to agree on anything!”

The irony of this whole situation lies in the fact that I have been an outplacement consultant on and off over the past 13 years.

Now I was on the receiving end of the services. She kept her meeting brief to only a few minutes, something I had always advised whenever I had been at a client’s “taking out” or “picking up” a new participant for our services.

I noticed a checklist of 5 points to remember tacked to her bulletin board … and I mentally gave her an “A” for her handling of me.

Summary

Don’t be like them or you’ll fall backwards to a previous stage and never grow beyond it to the maturity stage.

Advancing from Sustained Growth to Maturity

You’ll be boxed in until you incorporated processes and base your business decisions on data and improvements.

Five Major Stages of Growth for Organizations

But, remember the core strengths that helped you succeed at the previous stage, when overextended lead to a crisis that must be resolved as the ticket of entry to the next.

Growth Stage	Key Success Factor	Leading to a Crisis	New Success Key
Start Up	Loosen	Leadership	Tighten
Emerging	Tighten	Functional	Loosen
Rapid	Loosen	Autonomy	Tighten
Sustained	Tighten	Repetition	Loosen

And more often that not the third Sustaining-Associate profile helps you meet the challenge and master to move from Sustained Growth to Maturity.

Talent Profile	Growth Stage	Organization Type
101 Breakpoint Inventors	Start Up	Paradoxy-Morons
103 Commercial Innovators	Start Up	Paradoxy-Morons
105 Marketing Athletes	Start Up	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
107 Resilient Product Teams	Emerging Growth	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
108 Core Business Group	Emerging Growth	Emerging-Entrepreneurs
111 Agile Tiger Teams	Rapid Growth	Sustaining-Associates
112 Loyal Survivalists	Rapid Growth	Sustaining-Associates
110 Analytical Specialists	Sustained Growth	Sustaining-Associates

Evidence

“3” Steve Zahn, 51: “Each relationship is its own continent in which the tectonic plates merge and part. Earthquakes are an inevitability. Don’t be alarmed. Think of them as a shift in boundaries.” Scorpio

Wow, I didn’t see that ending well. And, I’m not sure it does, do you?

Random ones that make me want change my sign.

“4” Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980): “You’re being asked for your input because what you say has been known to change how people look at things, or because you’ve been right and/or helpful in the past. Share freely.” Aries

I’m not above a humble brag, because this has been the feedback I’ve received from hundreds of my clients and students. There I said it!

Hence, having taught and experienced and taught this theory as an idea packager this series in Season Two is when I’m finally writing it out in the form of a manuscript.

“4” Steve Howey, 42: “Even though most of you was formed through means beyond your control, you are still, at least partially, your own creator. Feel free to take artistic license with your own persona.” Cancer

Now this is very enlightening. I’m taking it to mean that I can spend more time with and in my experiencing self and then take artistic license as I switch to my narrating, editing self for creative purposes.

“4” Steve Carrell, 57; Steve Martin, 74; Steve Wozniak, 69: “The time limitations you face are the best thing that could happen to your project. You’ll get things done quickly and efficiently and produce twice as much as you would have if given double the time.” Leo

What, are you guys looking over my shoulder? Except in a few high stakes situations throughout my career, I’m missing this strategy for publishing all of my manuscripts so far, except on Patreon.

“3” Steve Greene, 34; Steve Guttenberg, 61; Stephen King, 72: “You’ll have a choice between expensive leisure and investing in something that doesn’t seem nearly as fun but will likely last for years to come, perhaps even become your legacy.” Virgo

As much as I’d like to believe this one, we’re in a pandemic damn it. I’m just not seeing this so-called l leisure of which you speak.

“4” Steve Aoki, 41: “Indifference is boring. Indifference is not invested in what happens. You don’t care what people think about you, but you very much care what happens next and are deeply invested in getting to a certain outcome.” Sagittarius

Sure, as a general rule, I agree. But, is this really that relevant today?

“3” Steve Nash, 45: “You question not only your actions but also your interpretation of those actions, and it is in your honest response to this deeper level of inquiry honesty that you will find freedom.” Aquarius

So true. I learned what I had done to contribute to my dismissal from the disk-drive company and years later realized which stage of growth the organization tried to navigate and why it failed.

What’s Going On …

Literally Bottled and Set Adrift from KnowWhere Atoll

- @knowlabs followers of one or more of my 35 digital magazines organically grew from 4636 to 4733.

Foresight

- AI-powered tool aims to help reduce bias and racially charged language on websites
- The past, present, and future of electric vehicles

Quality-of-Life

- Southwest Colorado Road Trip Offers Mountain Adventures
- Will We Have a 2020-’21 Ski Season? Copper Mountain’s Summer Park Offers Insight

Long-Form

- Saw the movie, didn’t realize that one of my favorite authors, Michael Connelly — his detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch book series and Amazon Prime series — also wrote, “The Lincoln Lawyer” which I just finished. Gotta tell you I can’t not see his lead character (Mickey Haller, Bosch’s half brother) as anyone else but Matthew McConaughey.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Inspired by: Holiday Mathis – Creators Syndicate

CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION